Aliens, Bigfoot, & Jesus Oh My!

Heidi Zarlack says, why does he believe, I suppose you or maybe someone in the chat, why does he believe in the resurrection of Christ when it's unscientific and without physical proof only though there's so much baked into why does he believe in the resurrection of Christ when it's unscientific and without physical proof, only testimony, which alien abduction or Bigfoot testimony would then be valid?

Oh boy. Why don't you address that there, Dr. Lyle? What? By the way, let's make this a teaching moment, okay?

Teaching other Christians how to evaluate questions like this, and by the way, my desire, I appreciate this question.

I'm not putting this up there to kind of poke fun or anything, but the way you ask the question provides an awesome opportunity to kind of point certain things out that I think are important for yourself and for other people to recognize.

What are some of the words, Dr. Lyle, that should stick out to us when reading a question like this?

Unscientific, by what standard? Because science is about the current, the present operation of the universe, how it normally functions, and so it's not equipped really to deal with past events, especially ones that are claimed to be supernatural.

I mean, the Bible claims to be a supernatural book. It claims that God occasionally does things that are not according to natural law, and to say, well, that's unscientific.

Not really. It just goes beyond what science is equipped to study, and so now you could say, but everything that happens is within natural law, but now you've gone beyond science.

That's an untestable philosophical conjecture, right, because you don't know that. That's an assumption.

How would you prove that logically? I don't think you can. Physical proof. Well, when you talk about physical proof of a past event, that's really tricky.

What would we look for for that? Normally, past events, the way we validate them, the evidence for them is historical, right?

And so it's a little different with things like Bigfoot and alien abduction, which allegedly are still occurring today, and so those theoretically could be tested by science because they're repeating events that happen in the present, and so you should be able to test them scientifically, and they don't purport to be supernatural, so there'd be no problem testing them scientifically.

The resurrection of Christ was a past event. It claims to be unusual in that the Bible says that normally dead people stay dead, but there have been a few exceptions, and God can do that if he wants to.

God's not bound by natural law. They merely reflect the normal way that he accomplishes his will, so I would say that it's not illogical to believe in the resurrection, and in fact, it is illogical to reject the resurrection because we do have eyewitness testimony, and it's not just a single witness.

It's multiple eyewitnesses, and that is a biblical criterion. You're supposed to have multiple eyewitnesses to an event. A lot of people saw the resurrected

Christ after he was resurrected. A lot of people saw him die on the cross. People saw him buried, and then they saw the resurrected

Christ afterwards, and they wrote a bill. Outside a major city, I might add. That's important because you mentioned a Bigfoot here.

Bigfoot's out there in the woods somewhere. People may or may not have seen something. Jesus was crucified outside a major city at a time when the city was bursting at the seams with lots of people because of what was going on there, so that puts it in a unique situation.

You know, Islam, Muhammad got the angel Gabriel came to him in a cave somewhere,

Joseph Smith's out in the woods in upstate New York. You got these people by themselves claiming a revelation. Jesus was raised outside a major city.