Athenagoras, On the Resurrection of the Dead 2

We consider the matter this way. If unbelief does not arise rashly or from some unexamined opinion, but from a strong reason and the certainty that comes from truth, then it preserves a reasonable account—specifically when the thing disbelieved actually appears to be incredible. For it is the act of people who do not exercise sound judgment about truth to disbelieve things that are not genuinely unbelievable. Therefore, those who disbelieve or doubt the resurrection must not put forward their opinion about it rashly and without examination, as if it were something pleasing to the intemperate. Instead, they must either attribute the cause of human generation to no reason at all—which is very much open to refutation—or attribute the cause of existing things to God, look to the hypothesis of this doctrine, and through it demonstrate that the resurrection has no trustworthy basis whatsoever.

They will accomplish this if they can show that it is either impossible for God or contrary to his will to reunite and gather again the bodies that have died, or even those that have completely dissolved, and restore them to the composition of the same human beings. But if they cannot do this, let them cease this ungodly unbelief and stop blaspheming what is not lawful to blaspheme. For it will become clear from what follows that they speak the truth neither about the impossible nor about the unwilling.

The impossible is truly known to someone in two ways: either from not knowing what will happen, or from not having sufficient power to do well what is known. For one who is ignorant of some of the things that must happen would not be able to undertake or accomplish at all what he is ignorant of. And one who knows well what is to be done, and from where and how it will happen, but has either no power at all or insufficient power to do the known thing, would not undertake the beginning if he were sane and examined his own power; and if he undertook it without examination, he would not complete the thing as expected.

But God cannot be ignorant of the nature of the bodies to be resurrected, whether in whole or in part. Nor can he be ignorant of where each of the dissolved things goes, and what part of the elements has received the dissolved thing and gone to its kindred element—even if it seems to men to be completely indistinguishable what is fittingly reunited and joined again to the whole. For before the creation of each thing, it was not unknown to God either the nature of the elements from which human bodies would be formed, or the parts of these from which the human body would receive its form. It is clear, therefore, that even after the whole is dissolved, it will not be unknown where each of the things taken for the completion of each body has gone.

For as far as the present order of things among us and our judgment about others are concerned, it is greater to know things that have not yet happened. But as far as the worth of God and his wisdom are concerned, both are according to nature and equally easy: to know the things that have not yet happened and to know the things that have been dissolved.