Cold Case Christianity: Why do most people believe in miracles? Because they lack critical thinking skills and prefer what feels good to what's most likely

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

Why Almost Everyone Believes in the Miraculous

Posted: 16 Mar 2018 01:00 AM PDT

As an atheist, I considered myself a committed philosophical naturalist, and I rejected supernatural explanations related to scientific or historical inquiry. If I encountered an ancient account describing a supernatural event, I immediately rejected it as “history” and assigned it to the category of “mythology.”

You still do that as a Christian, at least with respect to ancient stories that aren't in the bible.  When you say you are open to the possibility that ancient pagan accounts of miracles are describing something miraculous, you don't do so because you find the account historically compelling, but solely to avoid the criticism that you only believe biblical accounts of miracles.  Telling me that you think miracles happen in ancient pagan religions, but that these were accomplished by use of black arts and demons, merely shows your willful ignorance.  You have no compelling evidence that demons exist, just like you have no compelling evidence that miracles ever happen.  The only reason you don't openly discount all ancient pagan miracle claims is because you know you will be hit with the "you-only-believe-ancient-accounts-of-miracles-when-they-appear-in-the-bible" criticism. Other than that, you couldn't give a fuck less about Caesar's ghost rising to heaven from the funeral pyre, or about a cow giving birth to a lamb as Josephus asserted.

Unfortunately, the fact that you haven't spent near as much time investigating the ancient pagan miracle claims as you have spent investigating Christianity, prevents you from completely covering up your obvious bias against anything that it outside the bible.Your present commitments to Christ as a "bible-believing" Christian would also naturally require that you spend little to no time "investigating" ancient pagan miracle claims and devote most of your time to promoting your own religion.

True history, after all, cannot involve supernatural fictions. As with most atheists, miracles were not part of my worldview, even though many of my Christian co-workers seemed quite comfortable with them.

Did you also, during your atheism, deny the miracle-healings alleged by televangelists and others?

Now, many years later, I’ve come to realize I also believed in miracles, even when I was a philosophical naturalist. Dictionary.com provides the following definition of a “miracle”:

1. An effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

Given this definition, nearly everyone believes in one kind of miracle or another, including those who reject the existence of a supernatural God.

Then you were an incredibly stupid atheist. No wonder you write incredibly stupid apologetics books and obsessively mistake promotion of yourself as promotion of Jesus.

Even as an atheist, I accepted the reasonable reality of at least one supernatural event. The Standard Cosmological Model (SCM) of naturalism is still the “Big Bang Theory,” a hypothesis that proposes that all space, time, and matter (the attributes of the natural universe) had a beginning (at a point of “cosmological singularity”).

I was right, you were an incredibly stupid atheist, given how many scientific and metaphysical problems there are in standard big bang cosmology, and which could have been found through reasonable study even back before the 90's.

I accepted the SCM wholeheartedly as an atheist, even though the model presented a problem for my naturalistic worldview. If the SCM is true, we are living in a caused universe (whatever begins to exist must be caused; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe must be caused).

No, your appeal to the kalam cosmological argument is unavailing.  The only reason "whatever begins to exist must be caused" sounds reasonable, is because we often say something "came into existence" when in reality it was just a new reconfiguration of previously existing atoms.

If by "whatever begins to exist must be caused", you mean "any new configuration of preexisting atoms must be caused", there is no problem, we see that happening all day every day.  The metal that makes up a car once existed only as ore in the earth.  Of course that metal ore taking the new shape of the car, or the car "coming into existence" had to be "caused".

But...if by "whatever begins to exist must be caused", you mean there are some things that were formed from new atomic substructures that didn't previously exist in any way, shape or form, then you have no evidence that this particular type of "creation" has ever occurred, which means that first premise of your Kalam argument is bullshit, which means your Kalam argument, built upon bullshit premises as it is, fails.

Which means you don't have an argument that anything was ever created by new unprecedented matter, and that means you kiss goodbye your "Creation Ex Nihilo" interpretation of Genesis 1:1.

Which means you fail to overcome the implications of the 1st law of thermodynamics, namely, matter and energy have always existed, the only "begin to exist" that ever happens is when preexisting materials are reconfigured to make a different form. Sure, that book on your coffee table "didn't exist" 15 years ago, but the paper it is made out of did, in the form of a tree or other preexisting object.

You have ZERO evidence that any such thing as brand new creation or creation "ex nihilo" has ever occurred.

The cause of this universe, however, could not have been spatial, temporal, or material (because these attributes of the natural realm came into existence as a result of the cause).

There is no compelling evidence that the universe was created or once didn't exist.  Quite the contrary, the Hubble Deep Field shows exactly what we'd expect if space were infinite...as far as our best telescopes can peer into space, there appear little more than an endless field of stars, galaxies and supervoids.  There is literally no end to it.  You might have to deprogram yourself of some prior bad thinking habits before you can appreciate that the limitations normally applicable to earthly things we ponder about, would not apply to the entire cosmos.

As Thomas Aquinas first argued, something cannot cause itself to come into existence because it would have to exist before it could bring itself into being, and this is clearly absurd.

Sure, but since you have no evidence that your specific type of "come into existence" has ever occurred in the first place, Aquinas' trifle doesn't benefit you here.

So, even as an atheist, I believed there was a non-spatial, a-temporal, immaterial first cause of the universe.

I was right, you were an incredibly stupid atheist.

Let’s return to our definitions for a moment to examine the meaning of “supernatural”:

1. Of, pertaining to, or being above or beyond what is natural; unexplainable by natural law or phenomena; abnormal.

Our non-spatial, a-temporal, immaterial first cause clearly fits within this definition of “supernatural,” doesn’t it?

If you give credence to things supported by zero evidence, then yes.

The cause of the universe is, by definition, “above or beyond what is natural” in that it does not possess the attributes of the natural realm (it is not spatial, temporal, or material) and cannot be explained “by natural law.”

One atheist argument is the argument from the incoherence of religious language. You people are always talking about what is "above or beyond what is natural", when in fact anything that exists thus qualifies to be called "natural". God is no less natural than trees, IF she exists.  Therefore, the whole "natural/supernatural" debate is a classic case of deceptive semantics.  That dichotomy doesn't actually exist, it was invented so as to keep God separate from the "world" and to be thus more "biblical", but from a purely metaphysical perspective, there's no more reason to say God is "above" nature than there is to say that fish are. And certain biblical passages, by crediting God as the basis for all material things, tends to support a pantheism you don't believe it, even if the biblical authors themselves fallaciously refused to go what their own logic led.

As it turns out, the most spectacular and impressive miracle recorded in the Bible is actually found in the opening line of Genesis Chapter 1: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

It's a wonderful story, I'll grant you that.  But we also grant a floating sleighs when speaking to children and people who need to grow the fuck up.  Then again, if you can find a bunch of people to oooo and ahhh at you because they also believe the fairy tale, then by all means, engage in the herd-mentality that macro evolution conditioned you to engage in.  You survive better when you believe your social support structure approves of you.  It's how the Mormonism grew by leaps and bounds in the last 150 years, despite the fact that their Book of Mormon is an obvious fraud.

Christians believe the beginning of the universe to be a supernatural miracle. Atheists agree.

Go fuck yourself, count me out.  I am an atheist who denies the traditional big bang model, and by crediting the evidence that the universe is infinite in size and extent, there is no "beginning" to it that needs to be trifled about. And you apparently are still blissfully unaware of the many atheists who cite to the traditional Big Bang model as evidence against God.

You also say nothing about the obvious discord there is between a primal cosmic explosion, and the purposeful divine artistry that the Genesis 1 author ascribes to God.  the originally intended and mostly illiterate readers or hearers of Genesis 1 would never have construed that account of creation to have involved some gigantic explosion and millions of years of time. Yet, how the text was likely understood by its originally intended audience is a normative rule of hermeneutics.  You need to worry more about what Genesis 1 is teaching, and less about how to "reconcile" what it says with modern cosmology.

As a skeptic investigating the claims of Christianity, I eventually had to admit I also accepted at least one supernatural, miraculous event, and if I was willing to accept there might be a force capable of accomplishing something this remarkable, the lesser miracles described in the New Testament seemed much less implausible.

I was right, you were an incredibly stupid atheist, given that academic and scientific opposition to the traditional Big Bang model existed even back in the days when you were an atheist. Apparently, something other than concern to investigate thoroughly was driving you toward Christianity.

As an atheist, my “reasonable” account of the history of the universe included a miraculous event. How could I then reject the Christian accounts of the Jesus’ life and ministry just because they also included miraculous events?

Easy; because the gospel stories contain obvious embellishments from pre-Christian pagan religious concepts, like virgin birth, going to the underworld, coming back to life, etc, etc.  

Gee, Wallace, if the "miracle" of the creation of the universe stopped you from classifying the gospel stories as fiction, did it also stop you from classifying other non-biblical ancient miracle stories as fiction?

Did you do as much research into Herodotus' miracle claims as you did into biblical claims?

Or did you predict that your results from researching ancient pagan authors probably wouldn't sell very well?

To be consistent, all of us (theists and atheists included) need to suspend our presuppositional biases against the supernatural to assess the claims of Christianity fairly.

That's right, if somebody comes to us saying they can prove that the things that went bump in the night in the Amityville Horror House were actually demons, we should forget all the evidence indicating the story was total bullshit and allow this ignoramus to make their case first.  FUCK YOU.

Do you suspend your Christian beliefs when an atheist gives you an argument you haven't heard before?

If so, you aren't being very biblical, the bible's comments on investigating things NEVER express or imply that you should be open to Christianity being false.

If you don't suspend your Christian presuppositions when listening to atheist arguments you haven't heard before, you are a hypocrite to expect atheists to suspend their atheist presuppositions when dealing with a Christian argument they haven't heard before, for then you expect your adversaries to be more objective than you expect yourself to be.

The truly biblical Christian doesn't say "I'll go wherever the evidence leads."

The truly biblical Christian will instead bring every thought captive to Christ:

 3 For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh,
 4 for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.
 5 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ, (2 Cor. 10:3-5 NAU)

 The truly biblical Christian dons a tinfoil hat and talks to himself like we talk to children:

 8 Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. (1 Pet. 5:8 NAU)

You Christians have thus adopted a view that inhibits you from being as objective as you could be.

Contrariwise, atheists have no creed or magical book requiring them to take every thought captive to naturalism, or that some invisible enemy is responsible for causing them to doubt their atheism.  FUCK YOU.