Defending Miracles as Proof of Faith: Mission Impossible

Miracles are far more trouble than they’re worth

When my first book was published in 2016 (Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief) I used its Facebook page for promotion. Many Christians who found the page made blistering comments, pumped with rage and hate— they assured me I’d never been a real believer, and that I was destined for hell. Almost none were interested in engaging with the ideas advanced in the book, but one fellow did; he had intense emotional investment in the Jesus’ resurrection—it was his guarantee for escaping death. I responded that there were other ancient religions that worshipped dying-rising gods, and that promised the same thing. He responded confidently, proudly that his Jesus was the only one who had really done it. It was clear that this belief had been instilled in his brain from a very early age. And how could the Bible be wrong?

 

 

I did not pursue the issue. My impulse had been to ask, “How do you know that? What can you cite as evidence?” But the Bible and faith were all he needed. The magnificent miracle of resurrection was his guarantee that he would survive death. And, of course, the miracles described in the gospels provided additional assurance that Jesus was as powerful as the church claimed. 

 

The church gets away with what it does because it has successfully sold the idea that the gospels are authoritative—absolutely. If these documents were inspired by the Christian god, how could there be any flaws—how could the miracles stories be fraudulent? Once this mindset has taken hold, the devout are not inclined to ask, “Where did this story come from? What were the authors’ sources? Is it perhaps a part of the miracle folklore of the ancient world? It is a mark of common religious fantasy? Does it reflect accepted superstition?”

 

It is beyond the horizon of awareness of most churchgoers that the miracles reported in the gospels do not survive critical examination, even by many New Testament scholars. Of course, it’s a different story for Christian apologists who make their livings defending the gospels. They might grant, here and there, that it’s best to understand that some of the miracles can be treated as metaphors, e.g., the ascension of Jesus to heaven (Acts 1), since that never could have happened. But for them to concede that the gospel miracles didn’t actually happen—well, that just won’t do. Apologists for other religions rise to this challenge was well. 

 

In 2019 John Loftus published his 560-page anthology, The Case Against Miracles, which includes 19 essays (full disclosure: I wrote one of them), plus a Foreword by Michael Shermer, and Appendix by Loftus on Hume. If devout Christians could ever be persuaded to do serious homework on miracles, this anthology is a fine place to start. Especially, the Loftus essays, The Abject Failure of Christian Apologetics and The Resurrection of Jesus Never Took Place. Outstanding as well is Matt McCormick’s God Would Not Perform Miracles.

 

David Corner gets the anthology off to a good start with Essay One, Miracles and the Challenge of Apologetics. He describes three hurdles that apologists face, and states, “My focus will be to argue here that the apologist cannot surmount any of these three hurdles, much less all of them at once, and that the apologetical appeal is doomed to fail” (p. 30).

 

Hurdle One: the quality of the testimony

 

If your neighbor came home from church boasting that the pastor had miraculously healed a paralytic—the paralyzed person was suddenly able to get up, walk and dance—you would be skeptical of such testimony. These days, we’d like to see the cell-phone video. Or we’d like to see the person’s doctor certify that the person really was paralyzed, and that there is no way to account for the sudden restoration of movement. 

 

But what do we do with the story of a paralytic being healed by Jesus?—and he did the trick by forgiving the guy’s sins. (Mark 2:1-12) We have a much bigger problem with the credibility of this testimony. Corner presents the problem:

 

“To determine whether the report of a miracle is credible, we need to consider the reliability of the source. Suppose subject S reports some state of affairs (or event) E. Are S's reports generally true? … if she has any special interest in getting us to believe that E has occurred—if, for example, she stands to benefit financially—this would give us reason for skepticism. It is also possible that S may be reporting a falsehood without intending to do so; she may sincerely believe that E occurred even though it did not, or her report may be subject to unconscious exaggeration or distortion…her report may also be influenced by emotional factors—by her fears, perhaps, or by wishful thinking. We should also consider whether other reliable and independent witnesses are available to corroborate her report” (pp. 33-34).

 

Other reliable and independent witnesses. That’s precisely what we don’t have with this story. Mark didn’t tell his readers how he found out about this event. When Matthew and Luke copied the story, they added details—based on what, we wonder. The professional historian is stumped: there is no way to verify that Jesus did any such thing. As Corner indicates, emotional factors and wishful thinking can contribute to the creation of such stories: the author of Mark’s gospel wanted to promote his holy hero, to attract followers to the new Jesus cult. 

 

Corner here makes reference to David Hume’s analysis of miracles, specifically, Jesus walking on water. We have overwhelming evidence that this wonder—this stunt—is a product of magical thinking. He sums up Hume’s position: “…we have the strongest possible evidence that any object that is placed onto water is one that will sink. Accordingly, we have the best possible reasons for thinking that any report of someone walking on water is false—and this no matter how reliable the witness” (p. 36) Given the amount of sheer fantasy in Mark’s gospel, there is no way he could be considered a reliable witness—whoever the author was, he wrote several decades after Jesus died. 

 

Hurdle Two: the false assumption that miracles prove the supernatural

 

The much-touted miracles might not be what they’re assumed to be. Corner notes: “The occurrence of the purported miracle might be understood as evidence for the existence of God, but it is at least as reasonable to suppose that it is evidence that our understanding of natural law is not complete” (p. 39). Defenders of the spectacular Bible wonders may assume that these supposed events demonstrate that there are realities beyond what we see in the natural world. But that doesn’t work, as Corner points out: 

 

“It would appear that the question of whether miracle reports are credible turns on a larger question, namely, whether we ought to hold the supernaturalistic worldview, or the naturalistic one. One thing seems certain, however, and that is that the apologist cannot depend on miracle reports to establish the supernaturalistic worldview if the credibility of such reports depends on our presumption that the supernaturalistic worldview is correct” (p. 43).

 

“The apologist wishes to appeal to testimony in order to establish the occurrence of a supernaturally caused event. As we have seen, there is no existing scriptural testimony that is strong enough to accomplish this, given the minimal probability that the event really did occur” (p. 48)

 

No existing scriptural testimony that is strong enough. This is a major hurdle indeed. No event depicted in the gospels and Acts can be verified by contemporaneous documentation. This is how authentic history is written, that is, by consulting letters, diaries, transcriptions, and other archival materials that are contemporary with events—or as close to them as possible. Richard Carrier has stated this reality emphatically:

 

“Each author just makes Jesus say or do whatever they want. They change the story as suits them and neglect to mention they did so. They craft literary artifices and symbolic narratives routinely. They frequently rewrite classical and biblical stories and just insert Jesus into them…These are thus not historians. They are mythographers; novelists; propagandists. They are deliberately inventing what they present in their texts...We have to stop thinking we can use them as historical sources” (p. 509, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt)

 

Hurdle Three: showing that a god was responsible for the amazing event

 

There have been hundreds, thousands, of gods imagined by humans. Christians are pretty sure that their god—there can be only one Master of the Universe, right? —must be given credit for miracles. Believers would get into a big mess if they conceded that other gods meddled miraculously in human affairs. But no gods are required. Corner has stated the case well: 

 

“It is possible that nature undergoes spontaneous lapses in its uniformity. Such events would be nonrepeatable counterinstances to natural law, but they would not be miracles. They would fall within the unaided potentialities of nature; the naturalist need not admit the necessity of supernatural intervention to produce such events...the naturalist may argue that simplicity dictates we forgo any appeal to the supernatural, since this would involve the introduction of an additional entity (God) without any corresponding benefit in explanatory power” (p. 52).

 

Without any corresponding benefit. Saying that a god pulled off a miracle is no help at all in understanding the cosmos and how the world works: because theologians have never been able to agree about god(s). Conflicting ideas about the Christian god have been piled high by searching the scriptures, which do not agree about the god they supposedly represent. 

 

Bragging about miracles is not the way to defend and explain god.

 

 

 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

 

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.