Outline of a Materialist proof of Christ's Resurrection

Originally written Jan 5, 2020

I had a minor revelation the other day, an idea the that came to me all at once, but the structure and implications of which I haven’t really unfolded until now.

The idea was basically a materialist account of the resurrection of Christ. I’ve been thinking about the resurrection quite a lot lately and what to make of it, I’ve seen it brought up as a watershed doctrine determining if you are really a Christian theist or - if you take it to be a “mere metaphor” - a Christian atheist. My idea was then, that what if we utilize the concept of the Boltzmann brain - spontaneous emergence of the pattern of a human brain, or in this case the complete figure of the Christ, through sheer luck, through matter just “randomly” happening to align that way there and then. Those who saw the resurrected Christ didn’t at first recognize him, so there was supposedly some insignificant inaccuracy in outward appearance. The argument would hang on the supposed infinitude of the Universe and some sort of selection principle, some usage of the anthropological principle, which makes this incredibly rare occurrence necessary for our being here and observing our circumstances in the first place. Well, what about the Fermi paradox? What if Jesus’ death and resurrection actually redeemed humanity and saved us from otherwise inevitable auto-destruction, meaning that for us to be here as observers we necessarily have to exist in a world in which we were redeemed by the Son of God? Now people are likely to question the explanatory power of Christ’s redemption in relation to the Fermi paradox - this whole setup gestures toward a proof of the resurrection through us being here as observers seemingly spared the Great Filter, but the connection between the two isn’t obvious enough that it is a very convincing proof: the thing that took us past the Great Filter might have been one of many other things.. maybe DNA or the spontaneous emergence of similar information encoding replicators is extremely rare, or maybe the Great Filter is still ahead of us.

So this type of argument is unlikely to convince a non-theist scientific rationalist, but it’s an illustration of how even affirmation of divine miracle does not have to mean a breaking of the materialist causal models. It’s an illustration of how open the field really is to hyper-chaos and Black Swan events, because we don’t know what randomness means, we don’t know what the selection principle is. Take it as you will.