What happens when Christianity is put to the scientific test? Has science confirmed that supernatural miracles happen, that resurrection from the dead is possible, that a library written thousands of years ago can be inerrant, that prayer works supernaturally (rather than just by a placebo effect), that we live on after brain death to be judged by the universe’s maker?
In so far as those theological claims are translated into testable, empirical ones, they don’t fare well in applications of the scientific method. Thus, it doesn’t help your case to speak of “putting Jesus to the test.” The test you’re speaking of would be grossly pseudoscientific.
Are you familiar with Orphism, with the ancient myth of the individual spirit as an alienated spark of divine stuff from a higher realm, and of how we long to return to “Heaven,” to the abode of the gods because we’re trapped in a flawed, lower realm? Orphism was celebrated in Mystery cults that symbolized that alienation with myths of saviour gods who help us shed our lower nature to enable us to return home. Those cults became enormously popular in the Hellenistic period because they used psychedelic drugs to generate powerful religious experiences that reinforced the Orphic message.
And that’s where the Pauline theology of salvation from original sin comes from. Paul’s letters are proto-Gnostic, which is why Gnostics like Valentinus saw Paul as one of them. But the orthodox church tamed Gnosticism by assimilating Pauline theology, just as it would go on to assimilate all manner of pagan folklores (the saints), holidays (Christmas), and rituals (the Eucharist from the Mystery cults), right up until Christianity’s gross secularization in Roman Catholicism and in the US (just war theory, Trumpism, the prosperity gospel, etc).
I agree that modern secular, liberal culture (capitalism, democracy, individualism, consumerism, runaway technological progress) is problematic and possibly unsustainable. I agree that a worthy religious perspective would be helpful in reforming or guiding secular society. But the secular world emasculated Christianity in the modern period, so Christianity’s no longer of much help in that regard. The pressure proved too great, when the corrupt (secularized) Catholic Church imploded in the Protestant Revolution, making Christianity all-too compatible with secular individualism and thus with capitalism, democracy, and so on.
The Muslim world is the standout, as it resists modernization in service to an archaic, patriarchal mindset. What we need is a late-modern religious mindset, and Christianity’s not it.
