{"id":884,"date":"2015-06-04T17:21:56","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T22:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/?p=884"},"modified":"2015-06-04T22:32:57","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T03:32:57","slug":"do-miracles-happen-a-rational-defense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/do-miracles-happen-a-rational-defense\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Miracles Happen? – A Rational Defense"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nobody likes to be treated like an idiot; I certainly don\u2019t, but Christians\u2014and the religiously inclined\u2014are often labeled as stupid, gullible, and \u201c\u2026a barbarous and ignorant people\u201d1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0for believing in miracles. We are often told that \u201cscience\u201d has filled the gaps in our knowledge precluding the need to appeal to the gods to explain natural phenomena. There is no need to believe that Thor creates thunder\u2014we now know through science that a thunder is the crashing noise after lightning due to the expansion of rapidly heated air. This argument may seem to disprove Christianity: if miracles don\u2019t happen then Jesus wasn\u2019t raised from the dead<\/a>.2<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0In this short post\u00a0I will argue that belief in miracles is a rational endeavor.<\/p>\n

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/h3>\n

Let\u2019s first properly understand what we mean by \u201cmiracle.\u201d According to philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), \u201cA miracle is a violation of the laws of nature\u201d3<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0and \u201cA miracle may be accurately defined, a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0For our purposes, we will define a Hume miracle<\/em> as a<\/p>\n

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\u201cviolation of an apparent law of nature, or as Hume later says, of \u2018the most established\u2019 laws of nature.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But to claim that only the stupid and ignorant believe in miracles is nothing but an ad hominem fallacy. The skeptics here assume naturalism a priori<\/em> or that God does not act in nature. They are committed to the idea\u2014as Hume\u2014that even if a miracle did occur, we are not justified to believe it.

To claim that only the stupid and ignorant believe in miracles is nothing but an ad hominem fallacy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\u00a0Since, for example, \u201cdeath occurs over and over and resurrections only on rare occasions, he simply adds up all the deaths against the very few alleged resurrections and rejects the latter.\u201d6<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Here, Normal Geisler correctly points out that the skeptics have committed the consensus gentium7<\/a><\/sup><\/b><\/em>\u00a0fallacy.<\/p>\n

If God exists, then miracles are possible\u2014even if improbable\u2014and the evidence for each has to be analyzed even if the skeptic may, a-priori, discard any miraculous claim as nonsensical purely on philosophical grounds or personal bias. Furthermore, any argument against miracles based on probabilities can only provide \u201ca rule of thumb<\/em> that tells us how the plausibility of one explanation compares with another, it surely cannot provide an absolute guarantee<\/em> of where the truth lies.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Most of the arguments against miracles either assume the nonexistence of God (naturalism) or rely of fallacious and\/or circular logic.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/p>\n

The fact is, most of the arguments against miracles either assume the nonexistence of God (naturalism) or rely of fallacious and\/or circular logic.9<\/a><\/sup> If the skeptic is to assume that God does not exist, he has the burden of proof to show the truth of such inference. Otherwise, we would have to agree with atheist philosopher John Earman when he writes:<\/p>\n

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I acknowledge that the opinion is of the kind whose substantiation requires no philosophical argumentation and pompous solemnities about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proofs, but rather difficult and delicate empirical investigations<\/em>\u2026into the details of particular cases.10<\/a><\/sup><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Events of this kind are better left in the hands of historians. We need to shed philosophical presuppositions and bias to focus on the facts.\u00a0If God exists, he can act if he wants to, and all alleged miracles can be sifted through a historical mesh. Furthermore, legal defeaters can come in handy in miracle-claim analysis.

We need to shed philosophical presuppositions and bias to focus on the facts. \u00a0If God exists, he can act if he wants to, and all alleged miracles can be sifted through a historical mesh.<\/p>\n<\/div>In our legal system, when witnesses provide conflicting testimony, lawyers do not simply throw up their hands and go home. They try to overpower the opponents\u2019 testimony\u2014known as a rebutting defeater<\/em>\u2014or to sabotage and raise doubts on the rival\u2019s evidence\u2014known as undercutting defeater<\/em>. Both of these defeaters are relevant in miracle assessment and can be used actively in historical research.11<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0Ancient documents claiming miracles can also be subjected to textual criticism, dating, archeology and general reliability as potential defeaters.<\/p>\n

If the skeptic wants to show that miracles don\u2019t happen, he needs to mount a compelling case against the existence of God or show that no miracle in the history of mankind could possibly have happened.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/p>\n

Hume\u2019s arguments against miracles are still in use today, but as we have seen they have been refuted even by atheist philosophers like John Earman. Earman called humean arguments not only a failure, but an \u201cabject failure.\u201d If the skeptic wants to show that miracles don\u2019t happen, he needs to mount a compelling case against the existence of God or show that no miracle in the history of mankind could possibly have happened. These are very heavy burdens to bear.<\/p>\n

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  1. \u00a0David Hume. \u201cOf Miracles,\u201d in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, <\/em>of The Philosophical Works of David Hume, <\/em>ed. Adam and Charles Black, vol. IV (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1854), 125. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. \u00a0I Cor. 15:17: \u201c\u2026if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.\u201d All Scripture quotations from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  3. \u00a0Hume, Of Miracles<\/em>, 130. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  4. \u00a0Ibid., 150. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  5. \u00a0David Johnson, Hume, holism and miracles<\/em> (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 17. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  6. \u00a0Normal L. Geisler, Miracles and the Modern Mind: A defense of Biblical Miracles<\/em> (Matthews, NC: Bastion Books, 2012), 24. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  7. \u00a0Something is true because most people believe it. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  8. \u00a0Nicholas Humprey, Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation<\/em> (New York: Copernicus, 1999), 77 (emphasis added). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  9. \u00a0\u201cNow of course we have to agree with Hume that if there is absolutely \u2018uniform experience\u2019 against miracles, if in other words they never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we already know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in circle.\u201d C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001), 162. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  10. \u00a0John Earman, Hume\u2019s Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles<\/em>, (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 61 (emphasis added). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  11. \u00a0Paraphrased from R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas, ed., \u201cMiracles in the World Religions\u201d, In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God\u2019s Action in History<\/em>, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 200. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Nobody likes to be treated like an idiot; I certainly don\u2019t, but Christians\u2014and the religiously inclined\u2014are often labeled as stupid, gullible, and \u201c\u2026a barbarous and ignorant people\u201d1\u00a0for believing in miracles. We are often told that \u201cscience\u201d has filled the gaps in our knowledge precluding the need to appeal to the gods to explain natural phenomena. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[275,278,269,274,267],"tags":[442,441,321,440,322,319,444,619,443],"class_list":["post-884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-apologetics-en","category-evangelism","category-historicity","category-natural-theology-en","category-resurection","tag-agnosticism","tag-atheism","tag-david-hume-en","tag-gullible","tag-hume-en","tag-miracles","tag-of-miracles","tag-resurection","tag-unbelief"],"views":265,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritasfidei.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}