Can we believe in Miracles? - Prof. Sir Colin Humphreys, University of Cambridge

Well thank you very much, it's a huge pleasure to be here. I'd like to start by thanking David Watts not only for organising this fantastic event but for putting me up in his house overnight and also thank his wife Wendy for cooking me a lovely dinner last night and just a pleasure to meet them both. So Richard Dawkins has already been mentioned by the Bishop and I think by David as well so almost no talk on science and Christianity is complete without a quotation from Richard Dawkins. This is one on miracles and it comes from Forbes magazine and an article called Snake Oil and Holy Water. So I admire Richard's tremendous facility with language and with words. This is what he says, the resurrection even the old testament miracles are all freely used for religious propaganda and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children. So if you believe in miracles you know what you are. Every one of these miracles amounts to a violation of the normal running of the natural world. If you go to an encyclopedia and this is a very popular one, Wikipedia, a miracle is an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws and if you go to a famous treatise on miracles written by David Hume some years ago it was called Of Miracles, a miracle is a transgression of a law of nature. So I think probably most people in this room would agree with this definition of miracles and what Richard Dawkins says and what David Hume also says is that a miracle is a transgression of a law of nature and we just know from experience that you cannot transgress laws of nature. So for example if I reach into my pocket and pull out a coin, if I release it, I know with certainty that will drop to the floor. I won't let it drop to the floor. So this is the problem which scientists have with miracles because if miracles broke the laws of nature and we know from our experience that laws of nature cannot be broken, then how can we believe in miracles? Of course it's not just a problem for scientists, it's a problem for lots of people as well but a particular problem for scientists. Augustine's been mentioned, this is what Augustine of Hippo said way back in AD 400 or thereabouts, very great Christian scholar and listen to what he said, he said miracles are not contrary to nature but only contrary to what we know about nature. So if he was alive today I think he would say miracles are not contrary to science, only contrary to what we know about science and if our understanding of science was better we would see that the miracles don't contradict science and why did Augustine say this? He said this because his belief in a God, as both the Bishop and David have said, God is the creator and upholder of the universe, he's a consistent God, that's part of his character and if God is consistent will he break the laws he's established and Augustine said no and so what we see is that what Augustine says and what Dawkins and Hume say, they are contradictory, right? Dawkins says all miracles and Hume transgress the law of nature, Augustine says no they don't, if they appear to it's because we don't understand nature well enough and you may well say okay Augustine lived a long time ago and people don't believe what he said today but quite a number of people do, all right the majority will decide with Richard Dawkins but quite a number will adopt this line and just let me mention one, this is Rowan Williams, the previous Archbishop of Canterbury who's a significant scholar himself and I was at dinner in Rowan Williams College, Magdalene College Oxford and I was one of the guests at dinner, a number of guests and before the dinner he was just moving amongst the guests and talking to them briefly and as he approached me I thought oh what will I say to him and I know he's a prolific writer and so I said Rowan are you writing anything at the moment and he said no, he said but I've just written a book about Augustine, so I said do you know what Augustine said about miracles, he said yes I do and I said do you agree with him, he said yes I do and I said do you think the resurrection is consistent with what Augustine said about miracles and he said yes I do and then the gong went for dinner and one of us was saved so this is a digression, an important digression and Jesus was asked by some lawyers amongst the Pharisees I think, what is the greatest commandment and the Gospels indicate that this was a trick question so my assumption is that they expected he would give one of the ten commandments as the greatest commandment and they prepared you know a response to each of his answers to the ten commandments showing him why it wasn't the greatest, that's my guess but Jesus chose not to give an answer that was a ten commandment, he chose something Moses said later and Moses said later to the Israelites, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength and then Jesus says that's the greatest commandment, maybe I'll just digress slightly more it's actually quite interesting, if you go back to Deuteronomy you'll find that what Deuteronomy says is in our Bible, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength, it doesn't say with all your mind so why did Jesus apparently add this in, well obviously for effect but also Jesus was actually quoting from not the Hebrew Bible which was used in the synagogues in the temple but from what's called a Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Bible done by Jewish scholars in about the second century BC and they had this in so in some ancient, they were translating from Hebrew, some ancient manuscripts did include with all your mind the Hebrew text used in our Bible and in the synagogues then didn't have this in and by Jesus putting this in he was giving it real emphasis and what he was saying was you worship God with your heart so you worship God emotionally, with your soul so from your inner being, with your mind and with all your strength both mental and physical, so Jesus says to us if you're thinking about miracles or if you think about anything you switch your mind on and people like Richard Dawkins tend to give the impression if you're a Christian you know your brain dead right and it's not the impression that Jesus, Jesus says we should worship God with all our mind and so we should think seriously about miracles if you're a scientist you should think as seriously and a Christian you think as seriously about miracles as you think about your science or any other aspect of Christianity. Before we move on what are physical laws? So David's spoken about that very well, this is a quotation I like from Richard Feynman's book, he's a Nobel Prize winning physicist, if any of you know about Richard Feynman he's also very famous for playing the bongo drums and this is what he said about physical laws, there is a rhythm and a pattern between the phenomena of nature which is not apparent to the eye but only to the eye of analysis and it is these rhythms and patterns we call physical laws. So what does he mean about not apparent to the eye and not an apparent to the eye of analysis? Well it is because although a lot of things are apparent to the eye with some things our eyes can deceive us and a very simple example has already been quoted is when we look out the window now we see sunshine we look up to see the sun and we see the sun going around the earth and so that's what we think is happening but when Copernicus and Galileo used the eye of analysis they said what was really happening is that the earth is going around the sun and so and when that starts as a theory but when it's really established it's given the status of a law and so that's what a law is, it's looking at rhythms and patterns in nature and just note in passing that physical laws are based upon repeated reproduced events and experiments and a one-off observation cannot constitute a physical law and that's something just to remember perhaps about miracles. So what does the bible say about miracles? The bible calls them signs and wonders, it does not call them supernatural events. The distinction between natural and supernatural is a late development, it started in about the 17th century AD right, so the bible basically all events are due to due to God. So it calls signs and wonders, this is a quotation from the book of Exodus, the Lord said to Moses see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles I put in your power and a later quotation then the Lord said to Moses though I multiply your signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. So the signs and wonders phrase is almost used interchangeably for miracles and then in the New Testament Peter talking on the day of Pentecost says Jesus of Nazareth a man attested to you a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs. So this is the miracles Jesus did called wonders and signs and also the miracles themselves attest that the man doing them is chosen by God. So Moses performed miracles and that's as it were the stamp of God upon Moses saying this is someone I've chosen and this is why the people of Israel gave Moses some respect, not all the time but by and large gave him respect to lead them, lead them out of Egypt and similarly with Jesus of Nazareth Peter is saying he's attested by God because of the miracles he did. This is one reason for believing in God is to look at the miracles. So miracles are really important and we notice if you read the Bible, go through the books in the Bible, miracles are not scattered uniformly through the Bible, they're concentrated at specific times and they're particularly concentrated around the time of Moses, Joshua and Jesus and if there is a God, if there is a God who performs miracles then you might expect God to perform them mainly when there are these climatic events in religious history. So the Exodus is one of these events, the coming of Jesus another of these events and that's what we find, this is when we find the miracles concentrated. So I'm going to now go from the general to the specific and we're talking about two miracles and look at them in detail and one is the Old Testament miracle of crossing the river Jordan where as we will see and many of you will know about this as we will see, the Israelites were on one side of the river Jordan, they've been waiting for about 40 years to get to the other side to their promised land and the Jordan suddenly stops flowing and that's you know one of the really most important Old Testament miracles, it's a climax of the Exodus story and then the other miracle is the resurrection of Jesus where as we know Jesus was raised from the dead or Christians believe he was raised from the dead and after his resurrection then came into locked rooms for example and then you know his body ascended as it were defying gravity at the ascension. So before I go on, for reasons that may become clear, I'd like you just to think in your mind if you're a believer or not a believer, if these events happened as described in the Bible are they both miracles or not and I would hope that all of you would assume say they are miracles even though you may not believe in them, they are miracles because they're such remarkable events and what I want to do is to take an approach what I hope is both biblical, looking through the eyes of someone who believes the Bible's the word of God and also scientific and explore these both these miracles and also ask the question are there different types of miracles and an interesting link, there's a link between these two miracles and this is something I realized only recently, I should have realized it before. If you go to Matthew's gospel before Jesus was born then God spoke to Joseph and God said to Joseph you're to give him the name Jesus and I didn't think much of this, I thought you know okay Jesus was a name who's given by God but I don't just realize quite recently Jesus of course for many of you will know is the Greek for the Hebrew Joshua so God is saying to Joseph and Joseph instantly told Mary God says we could call him Joshua and just think of the effect on Moses, the effect on Mary and on Joseph, the parents of Jesus that their son, there have been all these remarkable sequences of events before his birth and then they're told he's going to be called Joseph, he's going to be called Joshua sorry and of course we don't know the language in which Joseph heard God speaking to him, he may have been speaking to him in Hebrew and there's also a theory that the earliest form of Matthew's gospel was in Hebrew and something called papyrus, a second century Christian says this and if that's the case then we've lost these earliest versions of Matthew's gospel where it would say you're to give him the name Joshua, so why was Joshua important? I mean the parents of Jesus would have thought back why is Joshua important, they would have known of course Joshua led the people of Israel out of their meanderings and wanderings into the promised land and then Jesus they thought may well do the same and of course we believe he has done this, he's led us into the promised land of heaven at the end, so there's this similarity in a sense between these two miracles, okay right this is it's a height adjustment yes right okay if I stand closer to it okay let me stand closer to it right thank you so crossing the river Jordan it's the last miracle of exodus as I've said in a sense it's the climax and so let's ask let's look at this let's read the story through the eyes of a scientist or through the eyes of science and let's ask this question to which Richard Dawkins and Augustine Hippo give them answers, does it so this is the story and it's expressed really very clearly and succinctly in just two verses which will be familiar to some of you now the Jordan is in flood or during harvest yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water's edge the water from upstream stopped flowing it piled up in a heap a great distance away at a town called Adam in the vicinity of Zarethon while the water flowing down to the sea of the Arabah which is now called the Dead Sea was completely cut off so the people crossed over opposite Jericho well let's just picture the scene in their minds so the writer saying that river Jordan was not flowing normally it was in flood so it's a particular barrier difficult barrier to cross the Israelites were on one side they wanted to be on the other side this was their promised land of Canaan ancient Canaan corresponds to modern modern Israel and Palestine they'd waited about 40 years for this they could see the promised land across the river but the situation looked hopeless because the river Jordan was in flood and it's just rushing down so fast the snow melting on Mount Hermon so that's the source of the Jordan and then suddenly the water stopped flowing it was if someone had a giant tap and they turned this tap off water stopped flowing and Israelites crossed the river bend in triumph so what would happen if you went and told this story on the streets of Manchester for example today then I think the reaction you would get would be what a wonderful children's story right great fairy tale and that's a very reasonable reaction because the story sounds so preposterous in a way that this can happen so that's a reasonable reaction and it is true many people I think or some people anyway will have the same reaction and it's a very reasonable reaction but can it be true and can we know when this happened about 3 000 years ago and as we said many people also many biblical scholars believe the story is a legend now there is a strange detail of the story which you may have realized as I was reading and the key question of course is did the writer intend it to be factual or not or was it written as historical fiction that's fiction dressed up in a sort of historical wrapper what the writer intended what does the audience understand and let's just look at this detail in the account of crossing the Jordan and some of you will have noticed this but let me just start reading it again and then I'll stop where the detail is so the Jordan in flood during the harvest as soon as the priests carried the ark reached the Jordan their feet touched the water's edge the water from upstream stopped flowing if this story was invented you were continuing or certainly they would say the water piled up by the feet of the priests but it doesn't say that it says it piled up in a heap a great distance away so the writer's saying this miracle didn't happen where the Israelites were it happened somewhere else which is a fairly remarkable thing to say and then the rise that pains to um to emphasize this because he says where it happened it happened at a place called Adam and if you don't know where it is he told you where it was the district in the vicinity of Zarethon so here's the writer this great miracle the climax of the extra story saying the miracle happened not where the Israelites were it happened somewhere else and to me that has a huge ring of truth about it and it's not the sort of thing you would invent um so this is the curious thing and he says the water stopped flowing mile a long way upstream town called Adam and so certainly if you're a scientist but I think if you're anyone not a scientist you say what stopped the water flowing of Adam and can we possibly find out three thousand years later so let's just look into that so look the writer really does intend this to be factual you know in the text he gives he wants to point to where everything happened he doesn't just say the Israelites crossed the Jordan he says they crossed it opposite Jericho so he's pinpointing where they crossed he then says the water stopped flowing great distance away but he pinpoints where that was a place called Adam he says all these places are upstream from the Dead Sea which is true so he's trying to root this story both in geography and in history so where was Adam so if you look on a modern map which I have done then you'll find no place called Adam on a modern map and that's not surprising because hardly any place that existed three thousand years ago still has the same name today right so either that place has disappeared totally or else the name has been changed a few names have survived Jericho for example to survive for three thousand years and that's you know that's one name that survived but many names haven't all they've changed and it still goes on so I was in India um 18 months ago and uh went to a place called Mumbai which used to be called Bombay many of you will realize and Bombay becomes Mumbai so this keeps going on um but sometimes when names are changed then there's a certain similarity between the changed names so Mumbai and Bombay you know have a certain similarity um we need to know a little about the Hebrew language to understand what's happened so Hebrew language the ancient Hebrew text was just consonants and they had no vowels now of course when you read it you had to put vowel sounds in or if you read it in your mind you put vowel sounds in and it's like modern text messages so use of many of you will use text messages and you'll know if you write the word text on a text message you usually write txt you don't put the e in and then in your mind when you read this text txt you just put in the letter e you know it's text not txt or txt or tax so you put the right that right value and so that's what the Hebrew language is like it was these consonants and uh so if we look at the Hebrew text for the word adam a-d-a-m then the consonantal what's called the consonantal root is just d and m and they would have a breathing sound in front in fact like I don't know how it would be pronounced um and then if um Arabic words replace the ancient Hebrew words as they do in many cases um then as we'll see this place is in in modern Jordan then what happens is the rules are you've dropped the breathing sound and you add an Arabic ending and this is how with a number of ancient place names in the bible replaced by modern Arabic names you can trace back to what the ancient biblical names are so what we need to do is to look on a map of um around around the river Jordan for suitable towns containing these consonants dm which are retained and there is a place sorry and it's called dharmia so there's the dm and sometimes it's spelled d-a-m-i-a and sometimes d-a-m-i-y-a and it's on the east side of the river Jordan and it's about 70 miles north of Jericho and I put here most scholars are agreed ancient adam is modern dharmia and in fact I think all scholars are agreed on this I haven't found one who doesn't say this and let's look at it on the map so here's the map and uh you'll see at the top there is the sea of Galilee and then the river Jordan runs down to the Dead Sea and there's the it's a simplified map it's an accurate but simplified map there's a Mediterranean Sea on the left um and at the end of the Exodus story the Israelites were coming up on the east side of the Dead Sea so they came up through Edom and through Moab and then what the writer says is they crossed the river Jordan opposite Jericho so you can see where they would have crossed and then there's ancient adam uh modern dharmia on the map um something like 20 kilometers higher up so that's the geography of the situation and um I think you'll ask how did the writer of the book object of the book of Joshua how did it know where this event happened and I think he was curious I think the Israelites crossed the river Jordan and he would see that the water hadn't stopped there you see that you know the water stopped somewhere upstream and so he sent some of the Israelites and said go up and find out what's happened right and they found something that happened this place called Adam and so that's how it was recorded in in scripture um let me now put some science into this um the clue of the earthquake so on the 11th of July 1927 there's a very well documented earthquake which shook Jericho buildings collapsed walls collapsed you may be interested to hear it was detected in detected around the world in Europe USA and Russia the magnitude of this earthquake was 6.5 on what's called the Richter scale and just for comparison there was an earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand which I think we'll all remember on February 22nd 2011 which sadly killed over 200 people and this was slightly less strong that was 6.3 on the Richter scale um and why did this earthquake happen in in um in in Jericho it was due to slippage along what's called the Jericho fault and um the fault runs I'll show you a map in a moment the fault runs along the river Jordan and we'll have a look at it but before we do that this is a person called Professor Neur who's made a study he's a great expert on earthquakes he's a professor of geophysics at Stanford University and I wrote to him about this because I knew he made a study of it and I said can I quote your letter he said yes you can so I'm quoting his letter and this is what he wrote to me he said during the 1927 earthquake several ground cracks appeared together with an outpouring of groundwater this soil liquefaction phenomena has been well observed in earthquakes elsewhere during the earthquake mudslides occurred along the river Jordan near Darmier so this was the 1927 earthquake near Darmier ancient Adam about 30 kilometers that's 18 miles north of Jericho these temporarily stopped the river's flow and the next slide shows an earthquake which happened in 1957 which didn't stop the river's flow but it almost did so you really visually see what's happened now so this is near ancient Adam and there was 1957 an earthquake you'll see the mudslide going across the river Jordan and the river Jordan diverts around it and you can see if it was a bigger mudslide and it would just cut it off completely right so we now get a visual impression of what happened in 1957 but something bigger happened in 1927 and then there are historical records of the Jordan stopping previously so this is a letter from professor near again to me Adam is now Darmier the site of the 1927 mudslides which cut off the flow of the Jordan such cut-offs lasting typically one to two days have also been recorded in 1906, 1834, 1546, 1534, 1267 and 1160 and then the records stop you may well think the records are extended back to 3,000 years the stoppage of the Jordan he writes is so typical of earthquakes in this region that little doubt can be left of the reality of such events in Joshua's time so now we ask the question was the crossing a miracle because I think we can say with reasonable certainty that this is how the event occurred in Joshua's time right an earthquake induced mudslide behind which the waters of the Jordan piled up and typically they break through one to two days later they either go around it or they come over the top of this mudslide and that typically takes one to two days so plenty of time for the Israelites to cross and we know that's what happens in modern times in modern times it happens in Darmier we know that modern Darmier was ancient Adam and that's the place the book of Joshua says this miracle happened so we have a very consistent story which science working together with the bible I think can explain the Old Testament describes this as a major miracle of God and before we move on let's just note this is now consistent with Augustine's views and miracles and not with Dawkins view for this miracle so this miracle Augustine says it hasn't we haven't broken any natural laws right we can understand the mechanism of this in terms of natural laws so it's not consistent with the Dawkins view of miracles now the Joshua that the story in the book of Joshua doesn't talk about an earthquake but there are some hints in different places the bible this is one of the hints this psalm 114 when Israel came out of Egypt the Jordan turned back right so he's talking about Jordan the mountains leapt like rams when the bible talks about mountains leaping that normally means an earthquake when the mountain is shaken the hills like lambs and then tremble oh lord at the presence of the tremble oh earth the presence of the lord and I think most people would interpret this tremble of earth as symbolic right but I don't think the psalmist is saying that he's saying there's an earthquake this is what happened is relating it to the Jordan turning back and he's saying the presence of the lord was there at this earthquake so um you know I think that is a hint that that is an earthquake which was the mechanism and appreciated by by the Old Testament writers so now let's have a look at how Israel might have understood this so as I said before Israel not only Israel it was Israel Egypt Babylon and so on they had no words distinguishing between natural and supernatural events all events were controlled by God in Egypt all events were controlled by their gods they had many gods Israel had one god so all the events used God so so the ancient Israelites if an earthquake has stopped it caused the Jordan to stop it was just as much the hand of God as if God had sent an angel or God had come down and snapped his fingers as it were so why was it a miracle it was because the timing if this miracle happened a month before these lights were there it would have been meaningless or a month afterwards so the miracles in the timing just to mention briefly another miracle perhaps the best-known miracle in the Bible of crossing the Red Sea where you remember the Israelites were trapped by Pharaoh as they were leaving Egypt and this is what the Bible says about that miracle then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and all that night so the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land so here the Bible's very explicit it was a natural mechanism no angel came down God used natural force this was a strong east wind that blew the water back and this again it's a known scientific effect if you have that if I had a beaker of water here and blew across the top you'll blow the water out the other side of the beaker and the force of my breath blowing across I won't do it but blowing across blowing across the water forces the water out and if you have a strong wind blowing along a long a long body of water for many hours that water is gradually forced back and in fact in it's what's called a steady state position takes a number of hours and the water can be forced back a long way and if that's watered on the sloping shoreline then earth that then shipwrecks can be exposed for example and lakes some of the great lakes like Lake Erie in America a strong wind blowing along Lake Erie produced a height difference of the water I think the record is 15 feet just huge from one end to the other so these both both miracles I think have natural explanations and the miracle is in the timing so the Jordan stopped just when the Israelites were there the Red Sea driven back just as over the Israelites are going to be trapped by Pharaoh's army this is I think a remarkable passage from this psalm talking about miracles and it just shows this deep understanding of the scientists you are the gods who perform miracles you display your power among the peoples your thunder was heard in the whirlwind notice not thunder it's your thunder it's attributed to God your lightning lit up the world the earth trembled and quaked so there's the earthquake your path led through the sea your way through the mighty waters though your footprints were not seen you led your people like a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron so here's the psalmist talking about miracles he ends the section talking about Moses and Aaron so specifically talking about miracles at the time of Moses and Aaron and he talks about earthquakes and so on and the sentence or the phrase I like the best one which I think is most remarkable in this is though your footprints were not seen right so it's not saying that God came down and pushed the water apart and you know walked pushing walked across the Jordan pushing it apart leaving his footprints leaving his footprints leaving his footprints in the muddy in the muddy riverbank his footprints were not seen God was operating in a subtle way right he didn't leave a visiting card as we might today say if someone's out you say God was here you know postman visited it was subtle right and um uh but uh but but but you look at this event because you believed God is in charge and you know that God was there performing this marvelous miracle of timing so let's picture the scene river Jordan now is not very impressive so many of you will have been and been to Israel and Jordan and seen the river Jordan and I did this and my first reaction was because the river Jordan was basically from where that seat was to this wall and I thought why didn't they swim across right that's my first reaction and what you have to realize is that since 1940 both Israel and Jordan have used huge amounts of the water from the river for irrigation we're told earlier in the book of Joshua that the Israelites crossed in the spring it was a tenth day of their first month called this on the source of the Jordan is the uh Mount Hermon covered with snow the snow melts in the spring and so the river floods and this is a photograph of Jordan in flood in the 19th century before water was withdrawn and you just see it's huge right this is so this was the barrier that was facing them and the uh Britain has an expedition to Jordan in the 19th century and they said it was half a mile wide and even allowing for some exaggeration perhaps this is what the exit expedition report is just a huge barrier and so I think after 3,000 years I think we can know where and how the crossing occurred and the idea of miracles be a miracle of timing is not new but I think it has been largely forgotten about by the Christian church and I think we need to get back to this this is what Aristotle said Aristotle talked about miracles and he talked about the efficient cause and this was a natural agent so in this case an earthquake the final cause was the will of God so he said God is in charge here's a final cause he said how do you know this event's a miracle and he says by the extraordinary timing of the event so what we're saying is God in this case didn't break any laws he worked in with and through the nature he created and upholds to form this great miracle of crossing the Jordan so let me conclude this section we can say that this miracle and I think some other miracles and miracles of timing maybe not all we'll come to that for summer and God is working in with and through the nature he created and God works through the orderly things of life and God may interact with people to achieve these miracles of timing let me just speculate you can say how is this miracle of timing achieved and I don't know but I can speculate that as as Joshua was leading the Israelites through the wilderness God was speaking to him and say Joshua we need to hurry up a bit you know or go a bit too fast or slow up I mean that's one way this miracle of timing could be achieved with God interacting with someone who was just tuned in to the mind of God and I think this is that this is a something for us to realize today because when you realize that God works miracles through natural events and he works through humans to achieve these miracles of timing then that's something that I think we need to be aware of all right and and I think these things are probably achieved through you know Bible reading and prayer and I certainly don't do enough but I think this this is a something that we can be used by God if we're alert to the possibility that these miracles of timing occur today and we can be used in this so people and God working together can make miracles of timing this is a nice quotation I'll just end this section by the scientist even when he's a believer is bound to try as far as possible to reduce miracles to regularities this is what scientists do we're trained to do this reduce everything to regularities so we we don't throw away our science from either by we try and do this the believer even as a scientist discovers miracles in the most familiar things and scientists have to you know realize there are miracles out there and and not not lose their sense of wonder okay what happens if the miracle appears to be a unique event so let's have a look at resurrection and I think if if this is true I really think it is the most incredible event in the whole of history right someone is resurrected from the dead who then goes on to appear in locked in rooms where the door's locked and it has the ascension and so in just amazing event it's either true it's a oh it's a cruel hoax I'm not going to give evidence to resurrect I'll just say one thing here this is one part of evidence that Paul writing to the Corinthians says he appeared to over 500 of the brothers at the same time most of whom are still living and that statement uh most of them are still living is clearly correct because we know that this epistle was written about AD 55 about 20 years after resurrection which I think was the 5th of April AD 33 so it took about just 20 years after the event so let's say 500 people were living in AD 33 by uh you know AD 55 probably 300 were still alive something like that so most were still living and I think Paul is saying you can actually go and speak to these people you can go to Jerusalem you can talk to him you can interrogate them and there's 300 people you can talk to and they'll all tell you that they saw the risen Jesus and I think if one of those people hadn't even one of those people said it was nonsense this is just fake it's fake news to use the latest new word then it would have destroyed the whole idea of the resurrection so these sorts of ideas are really quite powerful that the resurrection really did happen um so can science explain the resurrection so this is this is where I start to disagree now with with Augustine and Hippo because um the question is were natural laws broken at the resurrection and if we knew more science would we see that natural laws weren't broken and I think um natural laws if I look at it dispassionately really were broken um and we have to remember that the resurrection wasn't only the resurrection I mean Jesus raised Lazarus and Lazarus we all presume went on to die again and uh and he would be sick and then suffer uh something if he fell over he broke his leg for example he would he would um Jesus uh after the resurrection appeared to his disciples in a locked room and this is emphasized in the gospels um and uh then there was the ascension when Jesus appeared bodily to to go up into the sky again defying gravity um so there were so many strange things which happened to Jesus after the resurrection I think physical laws were broken I don't think there's any way around that so I actually think Augustine is wrong when he said that and I think um I think Dawkins is right you know if you believe in the resurrection then physical laws were broken um so what can science say about this so as I said it is a problem not only for scientists but for theologians because the argument Augustine is a good argument he said would God break his own laws so if God is a consistent law consistent God would he break his own laws I'm now going to give you a picture which I call the music analogy which I find quite helpful and that and this is this picture so let's imagine there's a piano in that corner of the room and someone's playing the piano and you come into the room and you're going to stand beside them and you that you see they're not playing with any music at all you just watch their fingers on the keys and every so often you'll find they don't play the note F they play F sharp and they keep repeating this and if you're a musician if I remember my music right then they will deduce that they're playing a piece in the key of G minor because a piece of music the composer is using instructions to the person who's playing it how to play the music and at the start of each line of music there's what's called a key signature and if he wants something to be played in the key of G minor then he puts an F sharp in at the time and you know you don't play a white note for the F you play a black note and so um a person watching doing experiments if you like watching the person play he can deduce the key signature and that's what scientists are trying to do with the universe they're trying to look at these repeatable events like playing a black note instead of a white note and saying you know this is how the universe operates it's a scientific law now the person continues watching the pianist and he seems every so often quite rarely he doesn't play uh F sharp he plays F and occasionally puts in an A flat or C sharp and the person's not surprised he says that's an accidental and the composer's put it in and if it's a great composer then it's not a capricious thing to do it actually makes better music and if you doubt this and I've tried this myself if you're a pianist or a violinist or something take a take a great piece of music which got accidentals in and play it with or without the accidentals and it just sounds so much better with the accidentals in it's what makes that passage really great and so basically the composer is the composer and he is free to break his own rules right and that's important he's free to do that but if he's a great composer it will make better music not worse music and every so often in a piece of music the composer uh has a whole bunch of accidentals just for a few bars and this is a change of key signature so in a piece of middle piece of music you'll find suddenly there's a change of keys just for one or two bars and then you turn back to the original key signature and and that's for something which is a really dramatic change of um of the key signature so how do the um how do the gospels present the resurrection and is it presented as God acting appropriately and this is what Peter says on Pentecost just seven weeks after the crucifixion God raised Jesus from the dead because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him I mean the argument is if Jesus really was a son of God then death cannot keep its hold on him so the resurrection was not incredible it was inevitable and so the resurrection Peter is saying is consistent with a consistent God so um I'll shortly be finished right I know I'm keeping you from your lunch I'm here between you and your lunch um let's just have a little bit a bit more of a look at the resurrection and uh Paul devotes a chapter in Corinthians to discussing the resurrection and this is the first thing he says about it Christ has indeed been raised from the dead the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep so what does he mean by this expression first fruits well let me just uh say what he means quite quickly because it's referring to a first fruits festival um I think we know in the days of crucifixion was um the Passover lambs in the book of Exodus they were sacrificed on the first Jewish month of the year the 14th day it's called Nisan 14 um and in the first century AD there are so many lambs to be slaughtered that the book of Exodus says between the evenings um that that's probably between uh well probably between sunset and the first stars appearing um the the uh first century uh Jewish historian Josephus have so many Passover lambs to be slaughtered they actually start at 3 p.m. in the afternoon to get through them on Nisan 14 um here's Matthew's gospel saying that Jesus died at the ninth hour and it's measured from sunrise which is about 6 a.m. so Jesus died at 3 p.m. so here's a remarkable coincidence that Jesus died at the same time as the first Passover lambs were slain and um we can also deduce very clearly I think from John's gospel Jesus died on Nisan 14 which was a Friday so and I've done some work as you some may know that Jesus died at 3 p.m. on Friday 3rd of April 1833 um and uh Paul writing about the crucifixion says Christ died Passover lamb was in sacrifice there's an analogy between Jesus dying in the Passover lamb and it's an exact uh historical analogy in that uh this happened on at 3 p.m. on Nisan 14 um so this chronology is exact that underlies symbolism um and just just to say in passing uh you know unless someone commits suicide it's very hard for anyone to control the date of their own death and so this remarkable timing is a pointer to God it's it's like the other miracle I think it is a pointer to God that uh that uh it's evidence if you like for God um so let's come now move on to meeting the first fruits if you go to the Old Testament book of Leviticus then there was a first fruits festival of Bali on the 16th of Nisan it's specified in the book of Leviticus what happened was the priest would go into the fields and they would cut some barley from the fields and they come back to the temple they waved this in the temple it's called a waving the sheaf and until that happened the barley harvest barley could not be harvested the priest had to do that it inaugurated and enabled the harvesting the barley if the if the crucifixion was on Nisan 14 and the resurrection was on Nisan 16 so when Christ when Paul says um Christ been raised from the dead the first fruits those that fall asleep we have another exact analogy that Jesus resurrected on Nisan 16 the precise day when the priests would go into the barley fields harvest the barley and then inaugurate their barley harvest so the chronology of course symbolism is again exact and just as the waving the first sheaf of barley enabled this harvest to start so the resurrection of Christ enables those who have died to be resurrected so it's a very nice analogy but then Paul goes on to say questions which we ourselves may ask perhaps not so much when you're younger but when you get a bit older you may start asking this or when a relative dies you may ask this um when someone dies how are the dead raised in what kind of body will they come and Paul says the resurrection of the dead the body that is stone is perishable it is raised imperishable to stone a natural body is raised a spiritual body the spirit for the perishable disclose itself with the imperishable so it is a different body it is it is a what he calls a spiritual body not a natural body and it's imperishable so um okay I think one or two slides are missing never mind that's uh but I think it's okay right they're not missing um so it's a spiritual body um and I think it's like probably that just just let me say this so so so um let me just check all the slides missing yeah okay right those slides have not come through um so so basically and this is speculation and you know scientists speculate and then Christians can as well so I think um if Christ could come through locked doors his resurrected body was clearly different but it was recognizable but maybe not instantly so Mary did not instantly recognize she thought he was the gardener the people on roads to mayors did not instantly recognize him although they probably knew him so his body looked slightly different but it was recognizable so um we know our body which had been a dna body carbon-based um uh that is subject to decay and and and death and suffering and so if you think of a different body then uh it is like a change of key signature so the resurrection of Jesus let's go here um it was like a change of key signature and so this means I think different physical laws operate it's a body to which different physical laws operate and ah the slides weren't missing so our old body was dna carbon-based a new body I suggest I resurrected body it's very tentative was probably not carbon-based person still recognizable no more and um scientists a lot of scientists believe in the multiverse which a lot of Christians worry about and perhaps not so worried the bible talks about a new heaven a new earth and maybe you know this is another universe multiverse in which there are different laws of science and the resurrected body of Jesus and us will be there with different laws of physics um operating according to a different key signature so this is really the last slide I think um so I think there are at least probably three types of miracles type one is a miracle of timing when no natural laws are broken and scientists have no problem with that type two some miracles like an accidental music score maybe when Jesus and Peter walked on water you can think of God providing an uplifting force to counter the force of gravity uplifting them as they go across that's like an accidental a one-off event again science cannot comment on this it doesn't break any laws because laws are for repeated events then the resurrection like a temporary local changing key signature a glimpse of new and different physical laws for the risen Jesus and for us indeed after death and again science cannot comment on this because again these this is like like another universe with different laws um existing so can a scientist believe in miracles and my answer is yes thank you very much