Why We Can't Prove the Resurrection

(But can still believe in it)

When, as a teenager, I was introduced to Christian apologetics, I became intoxicated by the prospect that my beliefs were in some sense demonstrable.

I felt deeply that my Christian worldview was true. Yet apologetics – particularly historical apologetics – promised me the opportunity to show that it was so.

Now that I am older, my faith still remains the deepest source of truth and meaning in my life. Yet as I have studied the historical origins of Christianity, I have become persuaded that the Resurrection is not demonstrable, as my younger self thought.

By this, I do not mean only that we cannot demonstrate the Resurrection in the same way as we might follow a set of mathematical proofs. That is generally true of history. Rather, I mean that sensible, intelligent people can look at the same evidence and come away with plausible yet competing explanations of that data.

I realise that this piece has the potential to disturb two sorts of people: the first will think that if history does not overwhelmingly support the Resurrection, then one might as well not believe it. The other will think that the evidence for the Resurrection is so good that any informed person would be absurd not to believe.

I think both of these positions are not quite correct. As I will try to show in this post – which will touch on issues of both history and theology – the evidence for the resurrection is much more (appropriately!) mysterious than apologists and polemicists might assume. We cannot prove the Resurrection – but we can still believe in it.