the biophysics of resurrection

[music]

Jesus might have been the first one to resurrect from the dead and came back with new flesh and bones, we don't know. Its not impossible.

 

 

I suspect that you and I use the word "impossible" in different ways, but I need some help from experts to figure it out.

 

For instance, what would have been the condition of Jesus' brain after three days of death, even if they'd stored the body in the best possible conditions available to them? As far as I can tell (here is one area where some knowledgeable person could help us), the neurons of his brain would have lost their connections, even if they would survive.

 

Just in case that's true, let's posit that the neurons of his brain reconnected themselves - this would seem to be a necessary but not sufficient cause for resurrection, and we can put off for now the question of what would cause the neurons of a corpse to behave in this way, though before we finish we'll have to consider that.

 

What I want to figure out is, what approximately would be the odds of them reconnecting themselves in so precisely the same configuration that when he comes back to life, he knows who he is, knows how to walk and talk, recognizes his friends, etc.?

 

That seems to me to be the first thing we have to figure. I'd bet the odds are already astronomically low - as in, we would need a fair portion of the universe full of 3-day old corpse brains reconnecting before we could expect any to know who they were upon revival.

 

Next, we need to calculate the odds of a single neuron being preserved in a corpse for three days (under the best conditions a cave in first-century Palestine could offer), and multiply that by the number of neurons... and figure out the number of neurons that would not be preserved. Then we need to calculate the possibility of the molecules that had composed those neurons spontaneously reassembling themselves into neurons. (Of course the molecules don't have to be in precisely the same neuron or precisely the place in each neuron - the odds will be low enough anyway. It's the same as the odds that a number of molecules would just fall together forming a neuron - multiplied by all the neurons that would have burst after three days.) If any of the molecules would have been broken down, we'll have to calculate the chances of their component parts spontaneously reassembling.

 

We might have to perform similar calculations for muscle decay - rigor mortis would have set in, right? We could try to calculate the odds of the muscle cells doing whatever they would need to do to recover from that.

 

We'll have to figure out something like the odds of the multiplying gut bacteria spontaneously dying off in a way that would enable the resurrected body to resume digestive functions in a timely fashion.

 

Etc.

 

In the end of course what we'll find is that there is no way that a 3-day old corpse spontaneously revives. Of course some supernatural agent could blatantly interfere, violating the laws of nature, but our goal is to establish the naturalistic plausibility of a resurrection from the dead, so that we can evaluate things like how strong we need the historical evidence to be - in order to rationally conclude that the resurrection is a plausible interpretation of the historical evidence, the odds of the historical evidence being wrong need to be greater than the odds of a 3-day old corpse resurrecting.

 

I know this is more that a little quixotic - most of these calculations could only be at best very rough estimates - but still, it could be an interesting intellectual challenge. I mean, trying to think of way to figure this out is going to involve figuring out - this is fun - something like the odds of a thousand hurricanes assembling a kajillion jumbo jets - but I think with some creativity we (especially those among us who know a lot about cell biology, biophysics, decomposition, etc.) can come up with a way of giving a rough mathematical expression to how physically impossible a resurrection would be.

 

At the low end, if it's easier, I think we could figure out the odds of a human body spontaneously emerging from a soup of biochemicals - figure out the odds of various common proteins self-assembling (we'll have to assume the soup is being warmed so that we can get the energy for these reactions; if anyone knows how to figure the odds of the right amount of heat being in the right place at the right time, that'd be great) - figure out the odds of those proteins happening to fall together as a human cell - and figure out the odds of a bunch of human cells happening to fall together as a human body (we can assume they're all next to each other anyway, but you've got to get the right cells in roughly the right places - no good to have liver cells distributed randomly throughout the body, all the liver cells by chance have to happen to be right in the right place to form a liver). This might be nice for the Christian side - after all, the odds of a resurrection must be better than this!

 

And even if we ultimately can't put a numerical estimate on many of those things, at least we would be able to easily show how good the odds of abiogenesis (a single tiny cell forming) look compared to the odds of resurrection.

 

For practice, an analogy I've used in debate with Christian friends is the odds of tomato soup reassembling itself into a tomato. Maybe that's an unnecessary diversion, but still, it's a good illustration.

 

Of course all along we can make just about any assumptions necessary to enable us to proceed with calculations...

[Moontanman]

I once read a story about a guy who was being punished by the use of nanobot type technology that kept him from dying. He was set down on a planet similar to Cretaceous Earth and left with no technology but the nanobots inside him. Every time he was eaten by a predator he would rise up again out of the predators excrement, resurrected by the nanobots with his memories intact, especially the memories of being eaten alive... he had sex with his nemesis's daughter and the guy decided to get rid of him in a particularly horrific manner... but one death was not enough for the mans revenge so he punished him with being immortal...