Cold Case Christianity: Answering Wallace on miracles

This is my reply to questions asked by J. Warner Wallace.

Are There Any Good Reasons to Believe in Miracles? (Video)

Posted: 19 Jun 2020 06:15 AM PDT

Why are we so resistant to the notion of miracles?

First, given you are talking to Christians, it's funny you should ask that.   Are many Christians infected with the disease of miracle-skepticism?  Or is miracle-skepticism more aligned with reality and common sense than you are willing to admit?

Second, it doesn't matter if God exists and performed miracles through Jesus.   Deuteronomy 13 justifies a skeptic's suspicion toward Jesus even if the skeptic feels comfortable admitting Jesus rose from the dead:

 1 "If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder,
 2 and the sign or the wonder comes true, concerning which he spoke to you, saying, 'Let us go after other gods (whom you have not known) and let us serve them,'
 3 you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. (Deut. 13:1-3 NAU)

What problem does Deuteronomy 13 create for Christians?  Easy:  God's approval of Jesus cannot be automatically deduced from the mere fact that Jesus performed genuinely supernatural miracles, he could still possibly be a false prophet whom God has empowered in order to "test" Israel.

I don't see how the Christian could convincingly solve that problem, as the question is "How can we know which workers of genuinely supernatural miracles are approved of by God, and which workers of genuinely supernatural miracles are merely false prophets God is using to test us?"

The natural answer of somebody like Wallace would be "if the wonder-worker teaches in harmony with the bible, then he is approved by God."

But in practical life, "teaching in harmony with the bible" is really "teaching in harmony with my interpretation of the bible" (don't pretend the subjectivity is non-problematic, google "New perspective on Paul" and discover how easily the Protestants can be misled for hundreds of years.  Google Arminianism and Calvinism.  Consider Norman Geisler's criticism of other inerantist evangelical Christian scholars in "Vital Issues in the Inerrancy Debate".  Christians who say the bible's teachings are "clear" are high on crack).

So, naturally, apologists like Wallace would blindly assume that if the wonder-worker taught the Trinity, salvation by grace alone, Jesus' full deity and humanity, Wallace would assume such wonder-worker was approved by God.

But that makes things impossibly complex for the skeptic.  Wallace is not god.  His belief that the bible teaches the Trinity is not infallible, but subject to revision.  Norman Geisler left the inerrantist Evangelical Theological Society for their progressively growing more and more liberal.  Wallace cannot seriously say any of the doctrines he currently views as biblical, he will continue viewing as biblical in the future.  The point is that there is no serious hope if "theology" is the only way we can tell whether a worker of genuine miracles is approved of by God, or merely a false prophet god is using to "test" us.

What presuppositions keep us from inferring the miraculous?

The same presuppositions that keep J. Warner Wallace skeptical of somebody's story that god causes their goldfish to speak audibly and teach them theology whenever nobody else is around.  We already know that fish don't talk, and we already know that god will never cause a fish to talk. Agreed, my fellow David Hume disciple?

If not, then perhaps you'd like to go on record as the most gullible idiot in creation, and insist that you wouldn't make any positive or negative judgments about talking-fish miracle claims until you could examine the evidence?  

What presuppositions keep us from inferring the miraculous?

The uniformity of nature is not merely what skeptics use to justify miracle-skepticism, its also what lay behind any and ALL skepticism toward ANY claim.  The only way you could justify suspicion toward anybody's testimony is if you thought some of their testimony ran contrary to the uniformity of nature that YOU personally experience.  If you leave little Johnny at home alone and tell him not to eat the cookies, then you come home and find several cookies missing, what is the reason you suspect Johnny's profession of ignorance is a lie?  Easy:  in your uniform experience, the child's disobedience is far more likely than some other theory, like fairies, gremlins or burgers with unexpectedly excellent timing.

Suppose Johnny has cookie crumbs all around his mouth.  Why do you interpret that evidence to mean that Johnny's claim of ignorance is false?  Because in your uniform experience, crumbs are more likely to get on our mouth due to our conscious choice to eat something, not because the God empowered the devil to manufacture fraudulent crumbs to make us suffer unjustly and thus build up our faith.  The trifle that crumbs can possibly get on your mouth by means other than your conscious choice to eat, does precisely nothing to make you back off and take more time to investigate Johnny's excuse.  The crumbs around his mouth are only capable of one reasonable interpretation despite the possibility that the devil made him do it.

If there is a possibility that god views the Catholic church as theologically correct, there is a possibility that God is angry with those who reject the Catholic church, so, shouldn't non-Catholic Christians prioritize investigation of Catholic miracles, the way the skeptic's possible punishment from God should motivate them to prioritize investigation of Jesus' resurrection?  Yet no doubt Wallace and most other Protestants became comfortable to confidently conclude the Catholic church was heretical, and in most cases before they even knew that "apology" meant "defense".  Yet these lovers of limited research will hypocritically condemn skeptics who similarly draw negative conclusions about Jesus after conducting similarly limited investigation.

If you are satisfied based on your own limited investigation that Catholicism is false form of Christianity, then you cannot fault skeptics who similarly do a limited investigation into apostle Paul's religion, and conclude it is a false form of Christianity.  If you don't have to bat out of the ballpark every last trifle a Catholic theologian could conjure up, neither do skeptics have to bat out of the ballpark every last trifle a Christian apologist could conjure up. I've been investigating Jesus' resurrection for 35 years.  How long have you been investigating Catholicism?  I've learned enough to smash any Christian apologist in any debate right now.  How well do you think you'd do, Wallace, if forced to debate a Roman Catholic apologist right now?

What “miraculous” aspects of the universe are commonly accepted even by people who reject the miraculous?

I believe the universe has always existed, it did not "begin".  I have excellent rebuttal to Aquinas' Five Ways, i have scientific reasons to deny the Big Bang theory, and even some inerrantist Christian groups deny the Big Bang, such as AiG and ICR.  Philosophical attempts to show that the universe once didn't exist, are completely absurd.