The Week in Blog: Duck and Cover (Bill Scher & Kristen Soltis)

[tom]

Originally Posted by Sulla the Dictator

There is no substantial difference between this and Resurrection. It isn't as though biology isn't as much a science as geology. People don't rise from the dead according to medical science. The human body isn't capable of it. Nor is it a specific instance; Jesus had previously brought someone back from the dead.
...Modern medicine is pretty clear on the impossibility of a virgin birth before IV fertilization.
...Science has a lot to say about mortality. And water walking, wine transformation, virgin births, healing touches, the spontaneous generation of fish and bread, and foretelling the future.

Here's what I see as the difference:

On the questions of specific miracles (resurrection, water-walking, water-"wine-ing"), religious people accept the relevant science, and claim that the scientific laws were, on some occasions, suspended.

On creationism, though, an entire field of science is rejected. They don't merely believe that while evolutionists have the right story (i.e. have a theory that properly identifies the laws governing speciation), God intervened on specific occasions in violation of those laws. Creationists make specific disputatious claims about natural laws in a way that "resurrectionists" do not.

Even Intelligent Design, a significantly less radical view, says that evolutionary biology is wrong; indeed the whole argument is premised on the position that the current scientific consensus can't possibly be right.


I'm not really interested in wading too far into the original debate over what either of these positions say about a politicians who hold them, but the distinction is relevant there:

People who flat out deny the scientific consensus on an issue like evolution are (almost always) people who believe that mainstream science is involved in a mass conspiracy to mendaciously push a false position on the rest of us. This is almost literally insane. (Even people who don't believe there's a conspiracy show a disregard, if not contempt, for evidence and the consensus of experts. Either way, this is cause for concern from someone making policy choices.)

People who believe in the miracles of Jesus have no conflict with any work that is being done in science today: yes, a virgin birth is impossible, yes, rising from the dead is impossible, etc., and "impossible" just means "in violation of natural laws". But God, by definition, can act in violation of these laws, and when he does, nothing in science is undermined.