In These Days of Modern Science, Can We Really Believe in Miracles?

When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Faith. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.

Any belief in miracles is flat contradictory not just to the facts of science but to the spirit of science.... [Miracles] are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children.

- Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist

It is not just a provocative rumor that God has acted in history, but a fact worthy of our intellectual conviction. The miracles of Christianity are not an embarrassment to the Christian worldview. Rather, they are testimony to the compassion of God for human beings benighted by sin and circumstance.

- Gary Habermas, Christian Philosopher & Apologist

Miracle - the word is often misused: "It's a miracle I got to work on time today." Perhaps it'd be a good idea to agree to a common definition so that we are clear from this point forward. A miracle is an event which is not producible by the natural causes that are operative at the time and place that the event occurs.

Miracles lie outside the providence of natural science, but that is not to say they contradict science. Ethics, for example, lie outside the province of science; science makes no ethical judgments. The goal of science is to seek natural explanations, and therefore miracles lie outside of the scientific realm.

David Hume said that miracles violate the laws of nature. That’s inaccurate - natural laws assume that no other natural or supernatural factors are interfering with the operation that the law describes. For example, it’s a natural law that oxygen and potassium combust when combined, but I have oxygen and potassium in my body. Is it a miracle, and I’m violating the laws of nature? No, there are other factors interfering with the combustion and so it doesn’t take place. Natural laws explain what happens under idealized conditions.

Similarly, when a supernatural agent is working in the natural world, then the idealized conditions described by the law are no longer in effect. The law isn’t violated because the law has the implicit provision that nothing is messing around with the conditions. When an apple falls from a tree, catching the apple doesn’t overturn the law of gravity or require the formulation of a new law. It’s merely the intervention of a person with free will that overrides the natural causes operative in that particular circumstance. That is essentially what God does when He causes a miracle to occur.

David Hume also said the evidence for the uniformity of nature is so conclusive that any evidence for miracles would never be able to overcome it. We have thousands of years of uniform evidence that people do not return from the dead. But there is no contradiction between believing that men generally stay in their graves and that Jesus rose from the dead. In fact, Christians believe both of these. The opposite of Jesus rose from the dead is not that all other men remained in their graves; it’s that Jesus of Nazareth remained in his grave.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I actually ran across this statement just the other day in an apologetic forum. Sounds like common sense but is demonstrably false. The evening news reports that yesterday’s lottery numbers were 4, 2, 9, 8, 7 and 3. Odds are millions and millions to one against; therefore, you shouldn’t believe it. Yet we believe we’re rational in concluding it’s true. Extraordinary claims require the same level of proof an any other. Qualifying the claim with the adjective "extraordinary" is merely word play and intended to raise the threshold of required evidence to the point it can't be met.

Probability theorists say that you must weigh the improbability of the event’s occurring against the probability that the evidence would be just as it is if the event had not taken place. For example, any improbability you might find in the resurrection is counterbalanced by the improbability of the empty tomb, Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, and the sudden change in the disciples. As improbable as the resurrection might seem, it has to be weighed against how improbable it would be to have all the evidence for it’s occurrence if it never actually took place.

Some skeptics won’t allow supernatural explanations even to be in the pool of live options, but apart from some proof of atheism, there’s no warrant for excluding them. An open, honest investigator must see which is the best explanation for any given event.

Context is also important. For instance, if the queen died and historians agreed that a month later she reappeared alive, we would be highly skeptical. Her revivification would lack any religious context and would basically be a bald and unexplained anomaly. Jesus’ supernatural feats took place in a context charged with religious significance because he performed his miracles and exorcisms as signs of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God into human history, and they served as an authentication of his message. Even skeptics say miracles and exorcisms belong to the historical Jesus - they now believe his role as miracle-worker must be understood against the backdrop of first century Palestinian Judaism, where it fits right in.

Okay then, what about the miracles of Muhammad? There are none in the Koran. He never claimed any for himself. It it not until the Hadith - a book of Islamic Tradition - that miracles are attributed to Muhammad. It comes hundreds of years after Muhammad’s life, plenty of time for legendary growth, perhaps to compare with Jesus.

If immediacy is the issue, what about Joseph Smith and Mormonism? Simply put, Joseph Smith was a charlatan. It is interesting that he and his father, while living in New York, were obsessed with finding Captain Kidd’s buried gold. Then what does he later claim he finds? Gold plates from the angel Maroni, then they disappear, supposedly taken to heaven.

One must be able to discern between an elaborate hoax vs. the sincerity of the gospel writers. One the one hand, the gospel writers were men who had nothing to gain but everything to lose. They died excruciating deaths proclaiming the the risen Christ. On the other hand, we have the unreliability of Joseph Smith and the lack of any corroboration. While archaeological dis-coveries have greatly enhanced the credibility of the gospels, they have repeatedly failed to substantiate the Book of Mormon.