Rebuttal to Craig Blomberg's defense of miracles

This is my reply to a North American Missions Board article by Dr. Craig Blomberg entitled

The Credibility of Jesus' Miracles

03.30.16, Craig Blomberg

Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary

For some people, the miracles in the Gospels form the most incredible part of the New Testament accounts.

 That's because what the gospels allege is not only not part of our life-experience, but contradictory to what is possible (i.e., the same criteria by which we judge the tooth-fairy to be wholly imaginary).  Contrary to popular belief, the existence of a "god" doesn't automatically make walking on water any more possible than an ant's acknowledging the existence of superpowerful human beings would justify the ant to believe humans can walk on water.  Even if a super-powerful intelligence existed, this doesn't automatically get rid of the impossibility-objection.   You leap, far too quickly, from "god exists" over to "miracles are possible".  How powerful this god is, whether he created the universe or is a mere advanced life form, are questions that are not answered.  But since your own bible credits your god with imperfection in places that decidedly are NOT "anthropomorphic" (Genesis 6:6-7), we can make an educated guess that if such god exists, he probably isn't eternal, otherwise he'd have learned the error of his ways long before the days of Noah. 

Modern science, they say, has demonstrated that the universe is a closed continuum of cause and effect.

You cannot fault somebody for learning by experience.  If a child learns to avoid playing with matches because he got burned the last time, you can hardly fault him for drawing the conclusion that there is no miraculous power that might possibly allow him to put his hand in fire without causing pain.  If God didn't want us to draw such empirical assumptions, maybe his shouldn't have limited our ability to learn solely to our five physical senses.   If you wish to prove that god can give people telephathic powers, feel free to waste your time.

The ancients may have believed in the possibility of supernatural forces in the world but we know better today.

Indeed:  thunder is not Thor rumbling across the sky or hitting the other side of the sky with his hammer.  People who go comatose and froth at the mouth and flail about on the ground do not have a demon, etc.

In fact, this cluster of opinions proved more common a half-century ago than today. Philosophers of science have stressed that by definition all science can adjudicate is that what is repeatable under controlled conditions.

 Irrelevant, we don't have to absolutely disprove the possibility of miracles, all we have to do is show that "miracle" is incapable of coherent definition, and/or that no "miracle" has sufficient documentation so as to render the skeptic unreasonable.  1st century people didn't know that the human body's survival depends on bacteria and a good immune system.  There's plenty of rational room to posit the possibility that future studies into human-kind might reveal truths that remained previously undetected.  But I don't depend on such speculations, the gospels are historical unreliable on the merits.  Justifying skepticism toward them is about as difficult as justifying skepticism toward the dancing sun miracle alleged by thousands of eyewitnesses in Fatima.

If there is a God of the kind in which Jews, Christians and Muslims have historically believed, then we would expect him occasionally to bypass the laws of nature.

 And if there isn't, we wouldn't.  Your point?

The real question becomes whether there is good reason to believe in God in the first place.

That's one way to start, and the answer must necessarily be "no" because the traditional religious concept of "god" constitutes an incoherent concept.  You can hardly fault somebody for choosing to walk away after they find out that the subject of discussion is an incoherent concept.  You wish to "reason" about 'god' with skeptics.  You cry victory when human reason makes some biblical description of God appear morally justified, but you automatically invoke god's "mysterious ways" whenever human reasoning about him would tend to show him to be an idiot, a sadist, or non-existent.  What is the point of "reasoning" about god, if you've already decided that only the reasoning that supports your hypothesis, is the reasoning that actually counts?

One of the most exciting and encouraging developments in recent years in this respect is the intelligent design movement.1

 Wrong.  They've been clobbered too often in the past.  See here.  Furthermore, refuting atheism does precisely nothing to make it 'easier' to 'prove' one specific religion (Christianity) to be true.  The evidence for and against Christianity is very great, so if you don't wish to be a fool by telling unbelievers they are under an intellectual obligation to mire themselves in the tedious back-and-forth discussion we seen in scholarly Christian publications such JETS, to say nothing of the countless books for and against Christianity, you are going to have to acknowledge that the average dad on the street can be reasonable to put down the apologetics book long enough to go to work, purchase clothes for the kids, have sex with his wife and all the other stuff dads reasonably do, which doesn't involve gluing their noses to your recommended reading lists.

But under your fundie view of salvation and damnation, the more such a dad does things in life beyond bible study and prayer, the more chance he takes of dying on the way to the library to check out your books, in which case he would die before coming to faith, leading him straight to hell, in which case your fundie attitude requires that you stop "recommending books" and "making arguments in articles" and respond to unbelievers the way you'd respond to a fellow hiker who just fell over a cliff and is hanging on by a weed.  If you would seriously react in an extreme way to people who are in obvious urgent danger, why don't you react that way to their spiritual danger?  What, do you think the reliability of the gospels is so obvious that only willfully ignorant people would challenge them?  What, do you think most Christian bible scholars are willfully ignorant merely because they don't happen to be fundamentalists?

Finally, since the traits of carnivores would, under ID, be intended by god and not merely the way Adam and Eve's sin caused the molars of lions to degrade into flesh-ripping fangs, you are forced, under ID, to admit that god intended, for reasons apart from sin, that carnivores should inflict the misery to other life that they do.  Then you are going to call your god "loving"?  Sure, if you allow that Hitler was also "loving".  But then such reckless word-games would reasonably justify the skeptic to walk away from you concluding that you are completely beyond reasoning with.  What's next?  Maybe a pedophile rapes a little girl because he truly "loved" her? How do you know what stupid sadistic lunacies can be committed out of a genuine "love".

Pointing to numerous examples of fundamental entities in the natural and biological worlds that display irreducible complexity, even some scientists who are not Christians at all have acknowledged that there must be an intelligent being behind this creation.

 But since we have steadily knocked down one after another of the alleged proofs of intelligent design, its reasonable to suppose we'll keep doing so.  you are like the stupid atheist among the Vikings on a ship at sea in 800 a.d., who decides believing in Thor is better than atheism, because you cannot, in 800 a.d., provide a fully naturalistic explanation for thunder.

Behe's irreducible complexity crap is always being responded to by equally qualified scientists. See here.  To say nothing about how he was humiliated as an expert witness in the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case.  See here and here.   The only people that find his arguments compelling are those who don't wish to give up their faith.

The entire "big-bang" theory for the beginnings of the universe leads to the question of what or who produced that "bang."

Which poses no threat whatsoever to those of us who say the big bang is false scientifically and biblically.  A list of such persons would include myself, everybody at the creationist propaganda mills Institute for Creation Research, and every similar person at the similar propaganda mill Answers in Genesis, etc.

Finally, the fact that competent Christian scholars disagree with each other about whether Genesis supports young-earth or old-earth creationism would make reasonable the outsider who chooses to avoid the entire mess completely, concluding that the data involved are too contradictory and ambiguous to justify thinking conclusions of any degree of reasonable certainty could be meaningfully drawn.  Such debates are little more than an endless circle of trying to squeeze certainty out of uncertain sources.

For others, philosophical arguments like those of the famous seventeenth-century Scotsman, David Hume, turn out to be more persuasive. While not alleging that miracles are impossible, the claim now is that the probability of a natural explanation will always be greater than that of a supernatural one.

And since you Christians have never come up with any evidence for a miracle that made its truth more probable than its falsity... (Dr. Keener never answered my challenge, see here).

Phenomena could mislead, witnesses could be mistaken and, besides, explanations of events must have analogies to what has happened in the past.

 As skeptics we usually do better than simply allege that the witnesses could possibly be lying or mistaken.  We usually make a reasonable showing that one of these two possibilities has greater probability than the "they saw a real miracle!" possibility.

But it is not at all clear that any of these arguments mean that the evidence could never be unambiguous and the witnesses unassailable.

Quit trifling about what's "possible" and set forth the one miracle that you believe is the most impervious to falsification already.  Or would you recommend I first spend a few years researching the in-house Chrisitian disagreement between charismatics, who say miracles still happen to day,  and cessationists, who say the age of miracles ceased hundreds of years ago?

And if every event must have a known analogy, then people in the tropics before modern technology could never have accepted that ice exists!

They would have been reasonable to deny ice if they never saw it, and always lived in a place where water never takes that form.  Just like Dr. Craig has never seen bricks float of their own accord, therefore, it doesn't matter if they have done so in absence of Dr. Craig, you cannot blame him for being skeptical of any such claim.

Today, perhaps the most common scholarly objection to the credibility of Jesus' miracles is that stories and myths from other religions that competed with Christianity in the first-century Roman Empire are similar enough that it makes best sense to assume that the Christian miracles stories likewise teach theological truth through fictional narrative. It is curious how often laypeople and even some scholars repeat the charge that the Gospel miracles sound just like the legends of other ancient religions without having carefully studied the competing accounts.

 Then count me out.  Stories of women getting pregnant by the gods by means other than normal intercourse can be reliability dated hundreds of years before the 1st century.  The concept was nothing unique.  Pindar wrote around 450  b.c. that Zeus took the form of a golden mist at the time he got the virgin Danae pregnant.
The story goes on to say that she was accurately characterized as "virgin goddess" at the time she gave birth to Perseus, so she apparently got pregnant in a way leaving her hymen intact.

Of course that story is fiction, but we don't need to show that other real virgin conceptions occurred before Jesus was born, we only need to show that the concept of "virgin birth" was common before the 1st century.  It was. Therefore, you are forbidden from leaping from "unique!" over to "must be historically true!".

For example, it is often alleged that there were virgin births and resurrection stories all over the ancient religious landscape. But, in fact, most of the alleged parallels to special births involve ordinary human sexual relations coupled simply with the belief that one of the persons was actually a god or goddess incognito. Or, as with the conception of Alexander the Great, in one legend almost a millennium later than his lifetime, a giant Python intertwined around Alexander's mother on her honeymoon night, keeping his father at a discrete distance and impregnating the young woman.

 Such comments are dismissed, you need to deal with the one pagan case of a virgin birth, the story of which originated hundreds of years before the 1st century.  We are reasonable as skeptics to dismiss the virgin birth of Jesus as nothing but a new fictitious spin upon an older fiction, whether you can trifle about this or that detail or not.

Furthermore, it does no good to pretend the differences between the Christian virgin birth and the pre-Christian stories of the same outweigh their similarities.   What fool would pretend that because the Geo Metro is so different from the Model-T, that therefore, the former must have arose completely independent from the latter?

So what danger do skeptics create for themselves by admitting the Christians took older pagan savior-god myths and gave them a new twist to make Jesus sound "better"?  Gee, Luke and Matthew's nativity stories aren't perfectly identical to similar pre-Christian pagan tales, so all of a sudden, the original nature of the Christian story argues for it's historicity?

Then why don't you believe Medusa was a real biological monster?  After all, her nature of having snakes for hair is an original concept, not a copy from an earlier myth, right?

But if the ability of the pagans to come up with an original spin upon an older motif, doesn't suddenly mean the new spin is describing actual reality, then the ability of 1st century Christians to come up with an original spin upon an older motif , doesn't suddenly mean the new Christian spin is describing actual reality.

Skepticism of the nativity stories is even more justified if we take seriously the patristic accounts that say Matthew the evangelist left behind his written gospel to replace him as he went off to other lands. That is, the tradition is telling us that Matthew seriously intended for unbelieving Jews to find his version of the nativity story to be true...despite the obvious fact that he merely quote-mines Isaiah 7:14, gives no explanation, and quickly scampers off, as if his telling of the story constituted the final proof that should be found acceptable to any reasonable person.

In other words, the original Christians appear to have been horrifically gullible, expecting unbelievers to convert on an especially uncritical basis.

And if Mike Licona's explanation for the zombie resurrection in Matthew 27:52 be reasonable, then we are dealing with at least one author of a nativity story who saw no problems in mixing truth and fiction in ways likely to deceive the reader about which was which. 

In the case of resurrections, there are stories about gods or goddesses who die and rise annually, often corresponding to the seasons and the times of harvesting and planting respectively. Greco-Roman writers use the term metaphorically at times to talk about the restoration to health of someone who was gravely ill or about the restoration to status of someone who was disgraced or deposed for a time from some position. But there are no stories from the ancient world (or the modern world, for that matter) of people known to have been real human beings, which began to circulate during the lifetimes of their followers, in which those individuals died completely, rose bodily to life again, and were declared to have atoned for the sins of the world.

See above.  The originality of the Christian version does precisely nothing to argue for its historicity, lest you insist that Medusa was a real biological Gorgon, all because the concept of a female with snakes for hair has no serious parallel in prior tales.

In fact, the closest parallels to Jesus' miracle-working activity in the ancient Mediterranean world all come from a little after the time during which he lived. Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in the late first century, was said to have worked two or three miracles very similar to Jesus' healings and resurrections.

Then count me out.  I don't falsify the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of Apollonius of Tyana.  I falsify the resurrection of Jesus by showing that the historical evidence in favor of that hypothesis is so utterly weak, contradictory and implausible that skeptics are reasonable to consider the hypothesis false.  Exactly to what degree the original stories were stolen from earlier pagan myths is a fun academic exercise, but does far less to compel skepticism, than the arguments that attack the merits of the gospel stories themselves.

The charismatic Jewish wonder-worker Hanina ben Dosa, whose stories appear in the later rabbinic literature, likewise reportedly worked a couple of miraculous healings similar to Christ's. The second-century Gnostic myth of an ascending and descending redeemer sometimes explicitly inserted Jesus instead of (or as) Sophia or "Wisdom" as its hero. Mithraism began to resemble Christianity only in the late second and early third centuries. But all of these developments are too late to have influence the first Christian writers; if anything, they may have been born out of a desire to make their heroes look more like Jesus and therefore more credible in a world in which Christianity was coming to have ever greater influence.

See previous answer.  Once again, the details of the god-men which can be documented from definitively pre-Christian sources, are quite sufficient to give the gospel authors plenty of ideas to put new spins in their effort to make Jesus sound like what the 1st century pagan mind would naturally expect of such sons of the gods.  Putting new spins on older motifs would be natural if they wished the people to think Jesus "better" than previous god-men such as Perseus.  They'd immediately cry foul if they found that the story of Jesus matched perfectly with the details found in older similar myths, especially given the Christian contention that Jesus is supposed to be the fulfillment of OT types and shadows, a trait the pagan gods never had.

If all the main reasons for not believing in the Gospel miracle stories fail to convince, what are positive reasons for believing in them?

 Are you drunk?  You haven't even STARTED exhausting the naturalistic hypotheses for the gospel miracle stories.  The most historically plausible hypothesis to explain John 7:5 is that Jesus' family saw his miracles and found them about as convincing as you'd find Benny Hinn's "miracles" to be.   It's a rather small leap from "Jesus couldn't work true miracles" over to "God would never premise his second covenant upon the words and works of a deceiver".

To begin with, they are deeply embedded in every layer, source and finished Gospel in the early Christian tradition.

But "multiple attestation" isn't the infallible authority you think it is, as can be seen by the obvious fact that witnesses often conspire to spin the truth.  Furthermore,  if the majority Christian scholarly opinion about Markan priority and the Two-Source hypothesis are correct, the only reason Matthew and Luke tell the same stories found in Mark, is because they are merely borrowing text from Mark.  They are NOT "independently" attesting to the stories.  Multiple attestation turns into garbage if the only reason Witness # 2 tells the same story as Witness # 1, is because Witness # 2 is simply reading from Witness # 1's previously filed declaration.

Jewish sources likewise attest to Jesus' miracles. Faced with the opportunity to deny the Christian claims that Jesus performed such amazing feats, Josephus and the Talmud instead corroborate them, even though they don't believe he was heaven-sent.

Meaning precisely nothing since the the more laudatory form of Josephus' text is clearly a Christian forgery, and regardless, we have to ask how Josephus would have known Jesus was a doer of many wonderful works, if in fact non-Christian Jews found Jesus to be a scoundral.  Since Josephus himself wasn't a Christian, it sounds like he speaks that way about Jesus only because he draws his information from secondhand Christian sources.  The Talmud's accusing Jesus of sorcery testifies to little more than pre-scientific gullibility.  There's a good reason why most authors from the 1st century and before never explain that an alleged miracle-worker's feat was a purely naturalistic trick:  such reporters were caught up in their culture and credited "tricks" to supernatural entities.

The rabbis often made the charge that Jesus was a sorcerer who led Israel astray, much like certain Jewish leaders in the Gospel accounts (Mark 3:20-30) accused Christ of being empowered by the devil.

The trouble being that Jesus' own family called him "insane" (Mark 3:21), which in the first century was the equal of saying Jesus was demon-possessed (John 8:52, lunacy is a mark of the devil).  That is, to take the gospels at face value, Jesus' own family didn't merely disagree with him, they were willing to categorize him in the worst possible terms this culture knew.  In such a collectivist honor/shame culture, they wouldn't likely draw such a negative picture of Jesus unless they perceived what he was doing to count as unforgivable acts of deception and departure from basic Jewish norms.  Since John P. Meier does such a good job of showing how gospel stories about Jesus are often a mix of what the story character actually said, and what the author is putting into their mouth, your blind black and white fundie approach, which simply insists on reading the bible like a modern newspaper, is dismissed, and as such, what Mark reports the gospel enemies as saying, is NOT a settled matter of history.  

In addition, the nature of Jesus' miracles contrasts markedly with most of those from his milieu.

Again, because giving a few innovative twists to the older motif was naturally expected in the race to  prove that one god-man was better than the rest.

There are a fair number of exorcisms and healing accounts from Jewish, Greek and Roman sources but none where a given wonder-worker consistently and successfully works his miracles without the use of magical formulae, paraphernalia, or proper prayer to God or the gods.

 Again, because Christians were innovative, and as already shown, you don't get "it's historically true!" out of "Christians told stories in ways different than the pagan versions were told".

The more spectacular miracles over nature have fewer parallels in the Greco-Roman world; where similar accounts exist there are also often reasons for disbelieving them. For example, the fountain in the temple of Dionysus in Ephesus flowed with wine once a year rather than with water. But Lucian explained that the priests had a secret underground tunnel that enabled them to enter while the building was locked at night and replace the water supply for the fountain with one of wine. This is hardly the background for Christ's miracle of turning water into wine.

Unfortunately for you, we don't know whether and to what extent Jesus conspired with others in trickery.  Any stupid fool at the front lines of a Benny Hinn crusade could go home and truthfully report in their diary that "Benny Hinn healed all the people of whatever ailments they had", because they are honestly recording their true convictions about the event  And yet such a first-hand "eyewitness report" leaves unanswered the critical question of whether the author's perception was accurate.  Thousands watch Benny Hinn smack people with his coat and "heal" various people on the stage, and they all think and report that such healings are genuinely supernatural.  They are also high on crack, as you would quickly agree.  How you could possibly pretend that accounts from 2,000 years ago, of disputed authorship, do a "better" job of reporting "actual reality", appears to have more to do with your a priori commitment to the reliability of the gospels, and less to do with common sense.  You start publicly questioning the gospels, you can look forward to being ousted by many long-time friends and starting over again at some other seminary.  Most people prefer the security of the social comfort they've known for decades, over a "truth" that might require them to be uproot and go somewhere else.

Apocryphal Christian miracles form part of narratives that tend to fill in the gaps of the gospel record. What was Christ like as a boy? How did the virgin birth occur? What happened when Jesus descended to the dead? The answers at times are quite frivolous compared to those in the canonical Gospels—Jesus the child fashioning birds out of mud and water and breathing life into them so that they might fly away, or cursing a playmate who has been mocking him so that he withers up. Indeed, even within Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the primary purpose for Jesus' miracle-working activity is to demonstrate that the kingdom is arriving, that the Messianic age has come (Luke 12:28 par.). But if the kingdom is coming, then the King must be coming. If the Messianic age has arrived, then the Messiah must be present. The miracles are not primarily about what God can do for us.

Irrelevant, the question is whether the miracles were genuinely supernatural, or purely naturalistic tricks.

The closest parallels to the miracles of Jesus are in fact in the Old Testament.

Another reason to say the Jesus of the gospels is not much more than a Moses or Elijah with a few innovative twists.

Feeding the multitudes with miraculously supplied bread, God's sovereignty over wind and waves, Elijah and Elisha raising people from the dead all appear as crucial background for understanding the New Testament texts. If anything, such parallels should inspire confidence in the reliability of the New Testament accounts.

No, such parallels should inspire skepticism toward the historical reliability of the gospels.  Regardless, trifles about how the Jesus story "parallels" something in the OT does more to give fundies something to gaze at, and less to give skeptics anything to worry about.  Modeling Jesus after Moses and Elijah is actually required if the story is supposed to be about how the OT "messiah" manifests himself.

The death of the messiah is not in fulfillment of the criteria of embarrassment.  Jesus really was executed.  This couldn't be denied, so his early followers, mostly Paul, had to think of a lie that would turn this defeat into a 'victory', especially in a culture soaked to the skin with tales of martyrs.  "My strength is made perfect in weakness", and all that bass-ackwards fortune cookie bullshit.  What's next?  Maybe atheism is true because it is easy to falsify?  How many other stupid backward aphorisms should we live by?

At the same time, nothing in Christian theology requires one to argue that only the biblical miracles ever occurred.

That's nothing but a trifle.  You don't spend nearly as much time pouring over the historical problems of ancient pagan miracle accounts, with anywhere near the obsessed way you do the gospel accounts.

Nothing in the Bible requires us to imagine that God uses only his people to work the supernatural, and both demonic inspiration and human manufacture can account for other preternatural works.

That's historically dishonest.  The question is not whether you, the Christian, can come up with a convenient way to "account for" the miracles in ancient pagan literature without sacrificing your own ancient miracle literature.  The question is two-fold:

a) why do you even grant the historicity of ANY ancient pagan miracle story, when you know perfectly well that most of them are shameless lies, and

b) why you don't reason from "true miracle" to "the theological claim must be true" in the case of pagan miracles, but you are quick to make such connection when it's a story about Jesus in the bible.  The patristic stories about Simon's miracles might be true, but the claim they point to (that he was a god) is false.  Why?  How do you know when miracles accurately substantiate a true theological claim, and when they don't?

Nothing requires them to be without parallel in later Christian tradition either. At the same time, historians should not and need not have a more credulous attitude toward biblical miracles than toward extra-biblical ones. When we apply the same criteria of authenticity to both, the biblical miracles simply enjoy more evidential support.

Then apparently you never read the story of Simon Magus and how his purely naturalistic tricks managed to deceive entire cities:

 9 Now there was a man named Simon, who formerly was practicing magic in the city and astonishing the people of Samaria, claiming to be someone great;
 10 and they all, from smallest to greatest, were giving attention to him, saying, "This man is what is called the Great Power of God."
 11 And they were giving him attention because he had for a long time astonished them with his magic arts. (Acts 8:9-11 NAU)

 It is perfectly reasonable to say Simon was employing purely naturalistic tricks, not Satanic power,  to delude gullible pre-scientific people.  The SOLITARY reason you insist he was doing genuinely supernatural feats with the aid of Satan is because if you admitted the naturalistic interpretation was better, you'd be deluged with "then why are you so hesitant to admit Jesus' miracles were purely naturalistic tricks?", and you find that through the artifice of crediting real pagan miracles to Satan, you spare yourself the need to account for your own inconsistency.  

There would be no obligation on the part of the objective historian to presume such deceivers were employing genuinely supernatural means.  Your Christian manner of accounting for pagan miracles might be a trifle, but it does nothing to intellectually obligate skeptics.  So if we have no compelling reason to think Simon was astounding cities with anything more than naturalistic tricks, we also have no compelling reason to think the gospel "eyewitness" authors were telling the truth about what they saw, anymore than we'd get similar truth from Benny Hinn's devotees as they write in their diaries what they "saw" from the front row.

When all is said and done, one of the most meticulous historians among contemporary biblical scholars makes the following significant observation:

    Viewed globally, the tradition of Jesus' miracles is more firmly supported by the criteria of historicity than are a number of other well-known and often readily accepted traditions about his life and ministry. . . . Put dramatically but with not too much exaggeration: if the miracle tradition from Jesus' public ministry were to be rejected in toto as unhistorical, so should every other Gospel tradition about him.6

 Nope, I'm a responsible historian. I have specific reasons for acknowledging that Jesus lived and was executed as a criminal, and I have good reasons for insisting that the miracles attributed to him in the NT constitute little more than fabrications and embellishments intended to make him seem more wonderful than he really was.

But you certainly get an "A" for effort.