‘Dead men don’t rise’
Have you ever heard anyone put forward such an argument? It goes something like this: “It just doesn’t happen. I’ve never seen such a thing. I don’t know anyone who has. Lame people don’t walk. Blind people don’t see. Dead men don’t rise. It can’t happen.”
It is certainly true that such things don’t normally happen. But to say that they therefore cannot happen does not follow. Indeed, the whole point of calling something a miracle is to point out that it is out of the ordinary.
For example, we might observe that kings and queens of England do not have their heads cut off. In fact, no English monarch in the last 300 years has been beheaded. We might, by similar reasoning to that above, conclude that any account of an English king being decapitated must be false. And yet that is exactly what did happen to Charles I in 1648. We must be careful not to make normal human experience universal. (I came across this argument in God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? by John C. Lennox, though he puts it much better than I can).
The application to accounts of miracles, and especially the resurrection, in the Gospels is obvious. The question isn’t whether dead men normally rise from the dead – of course they don’t – but whether this man was raised from the dead then.