Triablogue's Steve Hays posts a
link to a discussion with a Christian author James N. Anderson, who wrote a book called "David Hume", wherein he argues the standard Christian apologist party line that Hume's famous argument against the credibility of miracle-reports involves fallacious reasoning, therefore, skeptics lose, and there cannot be any reasonableness to one's
a pirori dismissal of any particular miracle claim.
John Frame's Amazon.com review of the book boasts:
But James Anderson's book shows that it is the followers of Hume who should be frightened. Anderson presents an account of Hume that is accurate and comprehensive, yet concise. It is easy to follow. And it shows clearly where Hume went wrong, and how his errors illumine the biblical alternative. Hume fell into skepticism because he failed to think God's thoughts after him." --John M. Frame
See
here
Before we even start, the whole "hume-bashing" thing is irrational for Christian apologists, because their own bible leaves the distinct impression that the unbelievers go to eternal conscious misery at death. So since unbelievers cannot know when they will die, and the stakes are ostensibly this high, the bible appears intended to foster the belief that the unbeliever does
not have 5 minutes from now or 5 weeks from now to 'get saved'. If they are always one mere heartbeat away from the gates of hell, such extremely urgent danger means the only possible
rational choice is to "get saved" now,
right now.
But getting saved as quickly as possible necessarily means getting saved upon the basis of the limited biblical knowledge the sinner has at the point of decision, thus increasing the risk that "getting saved" might end up causing the new Christian to join the wrong denomination or hold the wrong theology, leading to a risk that they will go the rest of their natural lives never appreciating that they just heaped even more divine curse on themselves than they did as unbelievers (Galatians 1:8-9).
If the same bible counsels that unbelievers
take the time to study, that is no more significant than the Christian apologist of today who encourages the same: If the unbeliever really is in such horrifically urgent danger of eternal damnation, then the reasonableness of speeding oneself toward salvation is going to remain, whether or not the bible elsewhere counsels any amount of prepartory "study". If you really are hanging over the edge of a cliff by a thread, how could "take your time to think about it to make sure you make an informed decision!" coming from the person offering help, possibly "prove" that you can
safely delay accepting that help?
So if the bible teaches both the terrible urgent danger that unbelievers are in, but elsewhere teaches that it is reasonable for the unbeliever to take the time to study up on the subject, then the bible is simply contradicting its own message of urgent danger.
The point is that the apologist's own bible would make it "reasonable" for the skeptic to scream in horror at his own spiritual peril and "get saved"
in the quickest manner possible...which means the bible is making a person reasonable to engage in an impulsive sort of conduct that is decidedly anti-intellectual, not to mention spiritually dangerous given that the act occurs without any serious prior study, thus increasing the risk the unbeliever will join the wrong church and forever be blinded to their own ensuring perdition.
So because the bible's pretense that the unbeliever is in horrifically urgent danger, is likely to set the unbeliever on the very course of hell the bible allegedly wants the unbeliever to be rescued from, this is such a colossal violation of common sense and self-consistency as to
alone justify the skeptic who chooses to use the bible for little more than practicing kicking 80-yard field goals.
Furthermore, I have already extensively examined the pro-resurrection arguments of Licona, Habermas, and William Lane Craig, and have forceful reasons to disagree with their conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead. Thereore, even assuming some miracles are real and atheism is false, so what? that's not going to render resurrection-skepticism the least bit unreasonable, and if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, the mere basic existence of 'god' will always be insufficient to pretend that this god is angry at those who deny his existence.
Finally, Triablogue will inevitably default to the OT YHWH in case Jesus didn't rise from the dead, but in light of Deut. 13's requirement that the false prophet who works true miracles be put to death, the OT is clearer about YHWH's anger at those who misrepresent him, than toward those who simply deny his basic existence. So not even the reality of miracles and god can do what Triablogue wants, and render one's apathy toward Christian claims unreasonable.
So let's get started with the more specific rebuttals:
(I attack mostly the hypercalvinist Steve Hays in this post, since he pipes up so much about the fallaciousness of naturalism and how atheists cannot account for some miracle claims. So the Christian reader should remember that I have tapered my attack here to Hays' CALVINISM. That is, I often use Hays' Calvinism against him in the rest of this article. I'm quite aware that Arminians would not feel threatened by an attack on Calvinism, but it is the plight of every atheist that Christians contradict each other so much, that a rebuttal to one style of Christianity does nothing to affect the others. Don't take this article to mean I can only demolish miracle claims by bashing Calvinism. That might indicate you don't know how to read English. The vast majority of my miracle research criticisms herein are reasonable and epistemically warranted regardless of which exact form of Christianity is true).
First, no Christian apologist has ever asserted how long or intensively a person confronted with a miracle claim "should" investigate it before they became reasonable to start drawing ultimate conclusions about its truth or falsity. Would the reasonable person surely always spend more than one day researching any particular miracle claim? Might the possible danger in joining the wrong church (Galatians 1:8-9) make it reasonable to avoid drawing conclusions about the miracle of Jesus resurrection
until one has studied the matter for at least 25 years? What's 25 years compared to eternity, right? So apologists have no moral or intellectual justification to condemn skeptics who don't spend as much time bothering with miracle claims as the apologists subjectively wish.
Second, rejecting miracle claims
a pirori can certainly be justified by appeal to past experience, just like the Christian Trinitarian at Triablogue do not automatically go into objective-robot-mode whenever they meet a Jehovah Witness. They have already determined that the Trinity is a real thing and truely biblical doctrine hence, when the JW says "the trinity is unbiblical", Triablogue dismisses the criticism
a priori. Deciding that you already know enough to know that another claim is false, is otherwise called "learning". You'd never learn, if you forbade yourself from automatically dismissing claims. What good does it do to learn? After all, if somebody else comes down the pike and argues in favor of something you deny, you wont' be objevtive unless you respond to their contentions on the merits.
The problem here is that the bible does not allow apologists to be that objective. You are supposed to be
beyond any possibility of changing your mind when you become a Christian:
39 But we are not of those who shrink back to destruction, but of those who have faith to the preserving of the soul. (Heb. 10:39 NAU)
19 They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us. (1 Jn. 2:19 NAU)
38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38-39 NAU)
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. 10:5 NAU)
21 and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. (Rom. 4:21 NAU)
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb. 11:1 NAU)
Therefore, Christian apologists are hypocrites for characterizing the skeptic's similarly confident certitude as fallacious.
If the girlfriend knows from prior experience that her boyfriend is abusive, you cannot really blame her if she
a priori dismisses his latest claim to have changed for the better. Common sense does not always counsel that you objectively examine the merits of every possibly true claim that comes down the pike.
And
a priori does not apply to my own skepticism, since I do not dismiss anything without analysis. So if other skeptics committ this error, the apologist errs by broadbrushing these amateurs as if they represent what all skeptics do. Count me out. If you are honest. The vast majority of us are willing to review any miracle-claim you pretend is the most convincing, so we can no more be lumped in with the few stupid skeptics than
you can be lumped in with Pentecostal snake-handlers.
Third, Hume's allegedly "abject failure" is irrelevant, I myself have been challenging Christian apologists for years to produce the one single biblical or non-biblical miracle claim that they believe is the most impervious to falsification, including direct requests to Craig Keener (i.e., author of the two-volume work "Miracles", which does little more than merely catalog thousands of reported miracle claims). See
here. I issued the same challenge to Steve Hays of Triablogue, who constantly rants and raves about the alleged fallacies of miracle-skepticism, who also thinks Keener's "Miracles" work is a "game-changer". See
here. As expected,
in both cases, I've gotten zero response.
So skeptics like me lose precisely NOTHING even if we admit Hume's particular argument against the credibility of third-party miracle claims was less than perfect.
Fourth, Anderson falsely charges Hume with arguing that
no amount of evidence could possibly be good enough:
Anderson:I think it is, and I think most commentators on Hume’s argument say that it does stack the deck in advance. Hume acts like it doesn’t; he acts like he is just applying general principles of evidence to the particular case of miracles, but when you look closely at it, what it means is that no amount of evidence could possibly weigh in favor of a miracle. This is, in a sense, how absurd it gets: even if you witnessed a miracle with your own eyes, right in front of you, you shouldn’t believe your own eyes, according to Hume’s argument.
Zaspel:It’s just gratuitous.
Anderson:You can’t win. When it’s set up like that, you can’t win.
That's false, because Hume was talking about what basis we have to believe miracle reports
from other people.
He was not talking about what one should conclude if one witnesses the miracle with their own eyes. He in fact made clear that he was prioritizing how much a person should trust their own senses:
Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater; and it is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the immediate object of his senses.
...To apply these principles to a particular instance; we may observe, that there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators.
Third, Christian apologists have never supplied sufficiently indisputable criteria for evaluating miracle claims. Mike Licona says the claim must occur in a context charged with religious significance (
here), but he only demands this because he knows that the miracle of Jesus' resurrection is charged with religious significance. What he is doing to trying to give the reader a reason to avoid any paranormal claims made in absence of a religious context, so that the reader will be more likely to narrow their focus to just "religious" miracles. But if mircales be concluded to occur in non-religious contexts, that opens the possibility that miracles can be real for purely naturalistic reasons. You run the risk of discovering an explanation for miracles that needs no "god" or "Jesus". That's contrary to the purposes of Christian apologetics, of course.
Fourth, Christian apologists routinely remind us that Jesus' miracle of resurrection, if true, automatically justifies concluding that the debate is over and Christianity is true. Starting with Licona:
However, if Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true and Islam is false.
If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he alone must know what is on the other side.
WHAT IF JESUS REALLY DID RISE FROM THE DEAD?This would have profound implications for our understanding of the universe, existence, morality, God, and everything else
If Jesus rose from the dead, Christianity is true and any worldview or religion that contradicts Christianity is false.
But the bible says some prophets who work genuinely supernatural miracles deserve the death penalty:
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.
4 "You shall follow the LORD your God and fear Him; and you shall keep His commandments, listen to His voice, serve Him, and cling to Him.
5 "But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has counseled rebellion against the LORD your God (Deut. 13:1-5 NAU)
Paul apparently believed it was a real possibility for an angel from heaven to give somebody a false gospel:
6 I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel;
7 which is really not another; only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
8 But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!
9 As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed! (Gal. 1:6-9 NAU)
Indeed, the boys at Triablogue are all about "The catholic miracles at Fatima can be genuinely supernatural but also performed by demonic power", which is the absurd trifle they are forced to make, since otherwise they are proven hypocrites by automatially discounting non-Protestant miracle claims.
When Steve Hays pretends that Catholic miracles don't validate the Catholic faith, what he forgets to do is tell the reader how they can tell which cases of genuinely supernatural miracles are "from god" and which are "from the devil", if that distinction even means anything to such a hyperCalvinist as Steve. See
here.
He also fails to answer the same concern in his similar article
here. Steve will trifle that he was only dealing with cessationist objections, but if that be the case, then why hasn't Steve Hays
ever provided the world with a biblical criteria for knowing when real miracles come from "god" and which come from "the devil"?
Did he write an article somewhere that says "If the person doing the miracle insists that Calvinism is biblical, you can be sure the miracle is being done by holy power"?
Or maybe Steve is open to the possibility that god does miracles for non-Calvinists in contexts that do not motivate people to worry about 'biblical theology' probably because God doesn't find theological accuracy to be as important as Triablogue does? Gee, dogmatic, asshole know-it-all Christian sinners have never misunderstood god's will or the bible, have they? Gee, when you learn to mistake your blog for an actual life, all you can do is discover more and more divine truth, amen?
So us skeptics are smart to reject the knee-jerk conclusions of Christian apologists. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, that does not justify an automatic inference that he correctly represented YHWH.
But if so, then what more must a person do to help decide whether the miracle came from god or satan?
Would it be smart for the unbeliever who recognizes the legitimacy of that question, to put it on a back shelf until some Christian apologist answers it? After all, Steve Hays thinks unbelievers are incapable of understanding spiritual truth, therefore, he can do nothing but support me as I wait for a spiritual person to figure it out.
What if the miracle doesn't provide any guidance as to what theology is true? Might we justifiably infer the supernatural entity doing the miracle fails to provide such answers because it thinks simple obedience to what one already knows is more important than "orthodoxy"? Oh, of course not. Isn't it clear that when Jesus preached to Gentiles, he drew up a clear list of 'essential' doctrines and warned that failure to understand the Trinity and salvation by grace was a sign of the anti-Christ?
And in light of orthodox Jews condemning the NT and Jesus for the last 2,000 years, skeptics have more than sufficient justification to first study the Jewish objections to Jesus and the Christian responses, before making a decision on which person has the more robust position. Unfortunately, that could take months or years...while the unbeliever is also supposed to believe that the longer they delay accepting Jesus, the more they put themselves at risk of eternal damnation. LOL.
For me personally, I've already read Justin's Dialogue with Trypho and have evaluated the arguments of Dr. Michael Brown and found them wanting, along with about 20 years of responding to Christian attempts to extract Jesus out of Micah 5:2, Daniel 9, Isaiah 53 and Psalms 16 and 22. I just haven't set forth my criticisms of such matters in this blog very systematically. Steve Hays cannot really say whether I need to do "more", so he has no moral basis to condemn me or any other skeptic for thinking the paucity of Brown's arguments justifies concluding that getting Jesus out of the OT requires wild stretches. I'll take the NT methods of exegesis of the OT as my first case in point. There's a very good reason Gleason Archer spent significant time trying to warn Christians away from adopting the methods of exegesis used by the NT authors: you do that, and you wind up in stupidville real quick, and mistaking mere typology for actual substance.
Fifth, Hume's argument was basically sound even if one could trifle that he overstated a few things or otherwise erred. Nothing in the New Testament qualifies as meeting Hume's common sense test:
The undeniable truth is that
- It violates common sense to believe every miracle report you hear
- If you are going to avoid being gullible, you have to already have in place criteria to distinguish likely true from likely false miracle claims
- According to Steve Hays, the miracle investigator msut also have criteria for being able to distinguish genuinely supernatural miracles done by god, and genuinely supernatural miracles done by demonic power. Yet Hays is a presuppositionalist and Calvinist, and thinks the unbeliever cannot possibly understand such spiritual things...yet he pretends as if they are under some type of intellectual obligation to go research something he says they cannot possibly understand.
- Hays is stupid because hsi logic would require that unbelievers first become spiritual (born again) so they can understand spiritual things enough to figure out which mriacles are godly and which are satanic, but if that happens, no miracle investigation will be necessary, DUH
- Hays never say how we can recognize the point where we can be justified to start drawing ultimate conclusions about such criteria and move on to evaluating actual claims? 5 minutes? 3 weeks?
- No Christian apologist can provide usefully specific criteria for how long one must study miracle claims before being justified to start drawing ultimate conclusions. Will one day of 8 hours of googling be sufficient? They simply ask you to "check it out", as if you should just cover your eyes, reach into the bag, and begin your research in all the intenteional blindness of the way people win the lottery. Well gee, with so many dogshit miracle claims in history and in the present world, where shall I start? Fatima? Benny Hinn? Mel Tari and his "Like a Mighty Wind" book? Or must I hold back and first develop criteria for knowing when a certain alleged miracle worker is too likely unreliable to deserve any serious consideration?
- Does the fact that god also does miracles through non-believers complicate the process?
- No apologist, including the fools at Triablogue, has any criteria by which a person can tell how much time, money and resources they "should" (DING! moral claim!) expend in researching miracle claims. If an internet search shows a potentially viable claim, but no further information is available, how much intellectual obligation does god think is upon the unbeliever to pursue that lead with his own money?
- If the bible doesn't say, isn't it true there is a substantial risk your own recommendation might disagree with god's own personal opinion? you are a sinner, correct? Your recommendations don't carry canonical authority, correct? And yet what do you tell yourself about drawing conclusions about god that can possibly be true, but which cannot be supported from the bible?
- If the skeptic locates contact information for one alleged miracle witness, how much should he pursue contacting them? Is shooting off one email to their last known email address sufficient? or must he followup any silence with a paper letter to their last known mailing address? If Calvinism is true, wouldn't that mean that whatever degree of laziness the unbeliever exudes in any miracle investigation, this was infallibly predestined by God, so that the unbeliever never had the ability to do more than what he ended up actually doing? What then, will you fault a person for fulfilling God's secret will exactly as God intended? "Shame on you: you obeyed me in the exact way I expected!" LOL
- Suppose an internet search yields a website of miracle claims that provides working links to downloads of testimony and medical files, is it enough to read all such material and then start drawing conclusions about likely truth/falsehood? Or is the skeptic being too skeptical by delaying belief until they can authenticate such downloaded testimonies and medical files? Gee, are courts of law just stupid for demanding "authentication"? Of course they are, isn't it obvious that miracle-frauds never happen, so that automatically trusting anything from the internet claiming to be testimony or medical evidence is the more objective way to proceed?
- I kicked Steve Hays' theological ass all over hell and back in a debate years ago on the precise topic of how the skeptic is supposed to know when the evidence they uncovered has become sufficient to justify drawing ultimate conclusions, or even whether there is any intellectual obligation upon them to give one holy fuck about any such claims in the first place. See here. The smartest Calvinist in the world wisely refused to engage after posting his one single criticism, for reasons that will be obvious to anybody who reads the debate.
- Christian apologists cannot agree on where to "start" the miracle investigation (i.e., the resurrection of Jesus? Or the fallacies of empiricism? Would Steve Hays suggest that the methodological errors in naturalism make it reasonable for the naturalist to focus first on Christain critiques of naturalism? What about the non-Calvinist Christians who take the parable of the Sower seriously, and conclude that there's more "magic in the air" by hitting the unbeliever with the straight gospel dope, as opposed to reading presuppositionalist rebuttals to certain philosophical beliefs?
- If both should be pursued, which one should be first, how do you know, and how long should the unbeliever put forth effort to see whether or not your recommendation is sufficiently robust as to likely lead to useful conclusions? Therefore Christian apologists have no moral or intellectual ground to chide a skeptic who makes their own subjective decision about precisely what subtopic of miracle investigation they should look into first, if any. If the skeptic thinks seeing rebuttals to naturalism is the logical place to start since it will kick out their naturalistic foundation and motivate them to be more open to a supernaturalist foundation, there won't be any way to "prove" that he "should" have started with the resurrection of Jesus.
- After Steve Hays makes all of his presuppositionalist Van Tilian-esque recommendations, how long should the skeptic compare this with the recommendations of other Christians who oppose presuppositionalism, before he can be rationally warranted to draw ultimate conclusions about whether Hays's recommendations were a prudent and smart starting point? How long must i listen to the presuppositionalist Steve Hays and the evidentialist William Lane Craig give me contradictory advice on the "best" place to start, before i become justified to start drawing my own conclusions about the matter? Must I first become a scholar of John Calvin and memorize all the ways that John Frame and Van Til disagree with each other before I dare make a judgment call? After all, if I don't do that level of research, there will be enough questionable holes for Hays to come back in a blog article and say "he didn't cover this subject, he avoided that topic, he overlooked that over there..." But if Hays is not god, then eventually he has to admit that common sense is going to require I reach a point at which I start making my own decisions.
- If you try to research some miracle claim, whether healings at Fatima or Jesus' resurrection, you are just choosing to do something else with your time than actually repent and believe the gospel. If you are still an unbeliever as you go to the library to check out a book Steve Hays recommended, and you die in a car crash along the way, you go to a hell of eternal misery even if not "flames, according to Hays, because Hays does not believe the bible teaches there is any third option in the afterworld for "sincere" unbelievers who died while in the process of checking out apologetics claims, but before arriving at actual faith. So, how long "should" the unbeliever "check out" why Lydia McGrew believes there is a special third place for just such people despite the obvious lack of biblical justification? Should the unbeliever consider that McGrew has a Holy Spirit witness that must be as seriously considered as the bible? If so, how long should that investigation take place? Isn't it true that for every second the unbeliever spends investigating some Christian bullshit, the more they delay the day of their repentance, and therefore, the more they risk dying before repentance and ending up in hell?
- Hopefully neither Hays nor any Christian thinks unbelievers need to give up their spouse, kids, job and home and just sit on the internet all day homeless in a coffee shop googling miracle claims like crazy, all worried that the longer they delay repenting, the more they risk going to hell 9while yet knowing that to hurry up and repent requires them to limit their study, and possibly repent in a way that is not sufficient, or believe in a false Jesus which will then blind them the rest of their lives to the fact that they remain unsaved). Yet Christians are forced to insist that the more you ignore Christ and pay attention to anything else (job, family, life) the more you DO increase the risk you'll die before getting saved (and thus go to hell). Perhaps Jesus in Matthew 19:29 was being just a bit more consistent with his fanatical message of salvation-urgency, than are his modern-day defenders?
For all these reasons, skeptics need not have the slightest worry whether or not that Christian apologist over there accused Hume of violating common sense. We have more than sufficient reason and justification to ignore bible and miracle claims until we start seeing biblical-style "miracles". Especially in the mind of Steve Hays, who is a hyperCalvinist, who says every error unbelievers engage in, was infallibly predestined by God, so that the unbeliever could not possibly have done anything other than commit those errors. Yet his god still bitches at human puppets for moving in the same direction this god had pulled their strings. LOL.
Gee, how many miracle-claims did I ignore in the effort to write this blog piece?
How many Arminian YouTube videos did Steve Hays ignore when writing any of his Triablogue bullshit?
