Joseph, I think the externals of the Christmas and Easter stories (virgin birth arranged by God; agony, death, resurrection, again arranged by God) are pretty much equally coherent. (Coherence isn’t their problem.) But the point of each story, for Christians, is something much harder to swallow: Christmas is supposed to be about the Incarnation (with Jesus somehow being entirely human, just as much as we are, and entirely God, etc.) and Easter about the Atonement (where the whole death-and-resurrection thing somehow enables God to forgive the sins of humanity when he couldn’t before). Both seem pretty incoherent to me.
They both make good stories, if you don’t think too hard about how they’re supposed to work. I’m not sure that has much to do with their coherence. (Take a look at the “explanation” in TLTWATW for the Easter-like event. Lewis isn’t even trying to deal with the really doubtfully-coherent bits, but he still resorts to entirely arbitrary stuff about Deep Magic and Deeper Magic.)
It’s quite well established that stories tend to feel more plausible if they include a wealth of details, even though the presence of those details actually makes the story less probable. (It’s more likely that you’ll be abducted by aliens than that you’ll be abducted by aliens so that they can perform weird sexual experiments on you.) So I’d be very hesitant about taking the fact that a story can be told satisfyingly as a sign that it’s less improbable, or more coherent, than a story that can’t be told so satisfyingly.
Joseph, I think the externals of the Christmas and Easter stories (virgin birth arranged by God; agony, death, resurrection, again arranged by God) are pretty much equally coherent. (Coherence isn’t their problem.) But the point of each story, for Christians, is something much harder to swallow: Christmas is supposed to be about the Incarnation (with Jesus somehow being entirely human, just as much as we are, and entirely God, etc.) and Easter about the Atonement (where the whole death-and-resurrection thing somehow enables God to forgive the sins of humanity when he couldn’t before). Both seem pretty incoherent to me.
They both make good stories, if you don’t think too hard about how they’re supposed to work. I’m not sure that has much to do with their coherence. (Take a look at the “explanation” in TLTWATW for the Easter-like event. Lewis isn’t even trying to deal with the really doubtfully-coherent bits, but he still resorts to entirely arbitrary stuff about Deep Magic and Deeper Magic.)
It’s quite well established that stories tend to feel more plausible if they include a wealth of details, even though the presence of those details actually makes the story less probable. (It’s more likely that you’ll be abducted by aliens than that you’ll be abducted by aliens so that they can perform weird sexual experiments on you.) So I’d be very hesitant about taking the fact that a story can be told satisfyingly as a sign that it’s less improbable, or more coherent, than a story that can’t be told so satisfyingly.