The resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of those historic events theologians and Christian apologists have worked very hard to "prove."  And rightly so.  No less a biblical authority than the apostle Paul says the faith of all who follow Christ is "futile" if Christ has not been raised from the dead (1 Cor. 15:17).  So it's not enough to believe Jesus is some kind of life force that fills all people, and it's certainly not acceptable to conjecture that God is going to rescue humanity apart from the risen Christ.  Either Jesus is alive today  and the Christian faith is true, or Jesus is still dead and the Christianity is a joke.

The good news is that there is enough historic evidence to reasonably believe the resurrection of Jesus Christ took place as the Bible describes.  There's the proof of the empty tomb, the proof of hundreds of eyewitnesses, and the proof of transformed believers who sacrificed everything for what they knew to be true.

The evidence is disputed by skeptices, of course, and you can't blame anyone for questioning something that happened 2,000 years ago.  If you're dealing with purely objective facts, there's no way to know with absolute certainty that the resurrection happened, just as there's no way we absolutely know that Julius Caesar lived.  Although we have good reason to believe the resurection happened based on the available evidence, you can't subject this miraculous event to a series of scientific experiments because the resurrection is, well, miraculous.  And that means it falls outside the realm of the natural world, and is therefore outside the realm of science and history and objective proof.

Miracles in the Bible—especially the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead—are a problem for many people. To those who operate within a worldview of naturalism, a miracle is a violation of natural law.  They discount the testimony of the “eyewitnesses” because the events happened so long ago during a time when people were more prone to believe myths and fables.  Even some theists would rather not bother with any “proofs” for miracles because they don’t consider them convincing. They would rather accept the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus by faith without any corroborating evidence.

But why relegate the idea of the miraculous to the realm of "faith without evidence" when in fact we can appeal to miracles to argue for the very existence of Jesus?  Doug Geivett, a philosopher who teaches at Talbot School of Theology, has done a lot of work in this area of epistemology, and not only does his argument make sense, but it's also rather brilliant.  Geivett suggests that you start with the probability that God (who is supernatural) exists, and then look for anomalies (another word for miracles) that cannot be explained naturalistically (such as the resurrection of Christ).

If you start with the premise that God exists, you can then proceed to the idea that miracles are not only possible, but exactly what you would expect from a supernatural being.  For if a supernatural being wanted to reveal Himself to His created beings, would He not do so in the form of miracles, which are by definition supernatural events?  When you look at miracles in this way, says Geivett, they act like a kind of “divine signature, confirming God’s actual sponsorship of a particular revelation claim."

What I like about this approach is that it doesn't reduce the resurrection to a strict empirical event.  I believe it is a real space-time event that happened the way the Bible says it did, but I don't need to objectify the resurreciton to believe it. I can also embrace the miraculous, preserving the mystery and wonder of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ