This is my reply to an article by William Dembski and Alex Thomas, entitled
The Faces of Miracles is an eBook written by Bill Dembski
and Alex Thomas. It will be presented on this blog, BillDembski.com, over the
next four months (November 2019 thru February 2020), with new installments
typically appearing on Mondays.
Table of Contents
0 Introduction [below]
1 Christopher Gunderson: The Face of Documented Medical
Miracles [to be posted 11/11/19]
2 Benny Hinn: The Face of High-Octane Faith Healers [to be
posted 11/18/19]
3 Thurman Scrivner: The Face of Bible Extremism [to be
posted 11/25/19]
4 Eben Alexander: The Face of Near-Death Experiences [to be
posted 12/2/19]
etc.
***
Introduction
Most books on miracles reach one of three conclusions:
Miracles happen. Miracles don’t happen. Miracles can’t happen.
This book takes a different tack. Rather than settle the
existence or nonexistence of miracles, we ask why we’re talking about miracles
in the first place. Why do we make such a big deal about them?
I don't know, especially in light of the obvious fact that there is no record of Jesus using hell to threaten the Gentiles, therefore, the blind assumption of today's fundamentalists, that a hell of eternal conscious torment awaits anybody who knowingly rejects the gospel, is not a gospel truth. Since I'm reasonable to reject Paul and the other NT writers, what they have to say doesn't bother me in the least.
I would hazard a guess that people still make a big deal out of miracles because people generally enter adulthood lacking basic critical thinking skills relevant to historical inquiry and criminal investigation, they are quick to believe hearsay (why do you think tabloids sell so well?) and many people have an agenda to attract attention to themselves or their religion, caring more about the fame and money than about actual truth.
What makes them
an endless topic of debate?
The inability of the average person to use critical thinking skills, and the natural love humans have for mystery. What makes soap operas, tabloids and gossip so popular? Stupidity, right?
If miracles do indeed happen, why isn’t the
evidence for them more convincing and obvious?
The way you ask the question, you aren't asking an atheist. But I find telling your admission to miracle-evidence being so unpersuasive as to facilitate endless discussion.
If miracles don’t happen, why
isn’t their absence equally convincing and obvious?
It is, depending on the type of miracle being alleged, but generally, the absence of miracles is not "obvious" because there are simply too many claims for them, and skeptics simply don't have enough time in their lives to provide comprehensive rebuttals to each.
Just like Christians don't have the time in their lives to track down every possible argument for naturalism (and it only takes one to disprove Christianity)...but they've decided that the arguments they do know about, are sufficient to justify their ultimate conclusion that naturalism to be false.
Miracles are neither like horses nor like unicorns. Horses
have made themselves so clearly evident that no one can deny their existence.
Unicorns have hidden themselves so well that no one is justified asserting
their existence
Let's go further: anybody who says they saw a real live unicorn, is either deceived or a deceiver themselves, and this is a reasonable conclusion
even if we skeptics have to admit that we haven't checked every square inch of the universe to be sure unicorns are 100% absent from existence.
Miracles occupy a middle ground that gives reasons to think
that they exist but also raises doubts to question whether they exist.
Correct.
Miracles cannot be dismissed as the ravings of an unhinged
or uneducated or unscientific fringe.
Correct, they can be dismissed as either the ravings of an unhinged or uneducated or unscientific fringe, or, they can be dismissed in the way that
I dismiss them...on the merits of each case. That is, the cases that Christians typically invoke to prove miracles, fall apart at the seams upon investigation.
Many normal, feet-on-the-ground,
well-informed people believe that they or their loved ones have personally
experienced a miracle, that they have good reasons for believing in miracles,
and that miracles play an important role in the world.
So? Many normal, feet-on-the-ground, well-informed people are also often liars or simply mistaken, and many found out later that their paranormal explanation for something was false.
As just one of countless examples, take Nobel laureate
writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s description of his cure from cancer while a
prisoner in the Soviet Gulag:
In autumn 1953 it looked very much as though I had only a
few months to live. In December the doctors—comrades in exile—confirmed that I
had only three weeks left… I did not die, however. With a hopelessly neglected
and acutely malignant tumor, this was a divine miracle. I could see no other
explanation. Since then, all the life that has been given back to me has not
been mine in the full sense: it is built around a purpose. [Solzhenitsyn 1975,
pp. 3-4]
Solzhenitsyn lived another fifty-five years.
This provides nothing intellectually compelling the atheist to "go check it out". I would have to see his medical files to further check out this claim, and a search of google makes it reasonably certain these aren't going to be found. See
here. But for now, he doesn't appear in this quotation to say that his doctors were baffled by this "cure", he only says that
he himself "could see no other explanation".
Solzhenitsyn also was extremely controversial where he wished to publish, and he had an incentive to do what lots of people have done, and tell a miracle-cure story to increase interest in his writings. After all, it only makes sense that if God cured him of cancer, God must have wanted him to publish his writings.
And you probably don't need to be told that because the suspect had a possible motive, that counts as legitimate circumstantial evidence, and if the jury chooses to believe it, that can be sufficient to justify declaring him guilty. Nobody likes verdicts premised entirely on circumstantial evidence, but the reality of the world is that things would only get worse if we tried to fix the problem by forbidding any and all circumstantial evidence. That would just motivate criminals to do an extra careful job of destroying the evidence directly linking them to a crime. So unfortunately, circumstantial evidence is legitimately probative, and it isn't up to you to decide whether a person should or shouldn't credit such evidence. It's up to the individual fact-finder.
Despite such widespread accounts of miracles, many people
remain skeptical about miracles, thinking that most, or even all, miracle
claims fall apart on closer examination. Who’s to say that Solzhenitsyn’s
cancer was as advanced or serious as he claims?
EXACTLY.
Medical care in the Soviet
Gulag was minimal at best. No official medical records of his cancer survive,
to say nothing of X-rays or hard evidence.
EXACTLY.
Too often, the credibility of
miracles depends entirely on human testimony, with its biases, and lacks
scientific evidence, with its rigor.
EXACTLY.
Yet even scientific evidence of miracles, when it exists,
can fail to convince. James Randi, for instance, is a noted skeptic and
debunker of the paranormal. He has offered cash prizes to anyone who can prove
a miracle. Yet no supposed miracle to cross his path has ever, in his view,
merited a cash prize. Randi is aware of “spontaneous remissions” of diseases,
in which people experience remarkable recoveries unexplained by medical
science. But they cut no ice with Randi.
But because "spontaneous remission" is known to occur naturalistically (i.e., lacking the "context of religious significance" that Christian scholar Mike Licona thinks is required before one can call some event a "miracle"), those who pitch for the prize-money need to allege something more than the fact that they had real cancer, and then it really went into remission. To my knowledge Randi has never maintained unreasonable skepticism toward purported evidence satisfying his challenge.
Such occurrences, rare though they are, provide good
scientific evidence that certain people have been suddenly and inexplicably
cured of their diseases.
But "inexplicable" doesn't equal "miracle", otherwise, we'd have to invoke "god" each and every time something happened for which we lacked a naturalistic explanation. That would manifest a lack of critical thinking skills, since science has helped us determine the purely naturalistic cause for many things ancient people thought were supernatural (i.e., thunder, lightning, epilepsy, the body's ability to cure itself of most common ailments, germ-theory, etc).
Randi will readily admit that such cures have
occurred. But he then denies that they are miracles. As he puts it, “one by one
… these spontaneous remissions from things like cancer will be explained
eventually. We just don’t have the explanation at this point. But that doesn’t
mean they are miraculous.” [2011 interview with James Randi at
Superscholar.org] In other words, an ordinary explanation acceptable to the
most hard-nosed skeptic is sure to exist for every supposed miracle, but for
now we just don’t know enough to say what it is.
If you lived in 800 a.d., would you rather the atheist living in the village with the Vikings acquiesce to "Thor" when they hear thunder? Or would you suggest the atheist maintain confidence that a purely naturalistic explanation will become known someday?
To talk about being either convinced of miracles or
skeptical about them presupposes a prior question: what do we even mean by
miracles?
That would be
your problem, as "miracles" are entirely the creation of theology, of which atheists have no burden. If therefore the term you prefer to use in dialogue with atheists depends on assumptions the atheist doesn't share, that is not their problem. You either find common terminonlogy ground, or you risk the atheist being intellectually justified to dismiss the discussion as nothing but smoke and mirrors about invisible nothings inside black holes that never existed.
Work on this book started when the authors contacted a well-known
survey company to conduct a scientific poll of people’s attitudes toward
miracles. We were prepared to spend a significant amount of cash to conduct
such a poll.
Money that could have been better spent helping the poor or doing something Jesus obviously required, as opposed to engaging in ventures whose biblical justification remains debatable.
We wanted to understand not so much whether people believe
miracles happen but the significance of miracles in their lives and thought.
Even professional skeptics who debunk miracles for a living find them important
(the empty set can nonetheless be an interesting set!).
Yes, one can find legitimate purpose in life by simply choosing to correct popular errors. Ask any Christian "apologist".
After going round and round with the survey company, we did
converge on a list of questions on which we could all agree (included as a
chapter in this book, along with a discussion of its significance). But we
could never agree on the definition of miracles.
A plight noticed by every other apologist, including Mike Licona. Again, a problem of your own creation.
The definition that we, the
authors of this book, thought best focused not just on the extraordinariness of
miracles but also on their supposed supernatural source: “a miracle is an event
or act that defies ordinary explanation and whose occurrence seems to require
some influence or power outside nature.”
Except that "outside nature" is nothing but sophistry and absurdity (like "north of the number 4"), and as such, it is certain that the person who accepts that definition, doesn't even know what exactly it refers to. Meaning the definition isn't going to facilitate meaningful dialogue with anybody who insists that terms be defined coherently and correctly. Again, your choice to push an issue that you cannot represent with normative language is not the problem of the atheist...
unless you think it absurd to demand that key terms be clearly defined?
The survey company insisted that we limit the definition of
miracle to events without ordinary explanation, omitting any reference to the
supernatural. This, it seemed to us, missed the point of miracles, namely, that
they are not just wildly unexpected events, but also experienced by people as a
sign of divine or supernatural influence (like Solzhenitsyn above), pointing
beyond a material world otherwise ruled by unbroken natural law.
Again, "beyond a material world" is mere sophistry, it speaks of no identifiable place, which means atheists are reasonable to reject that part of the definition.
To understand
miracles as we proposed and to accept that they exist then means that the
natural world cannot be a closed system of natural causes but rather must be an
open system that can accommodate causes beyond nature.
Again, "beyond nature" is like "emotional dust particle". I'm suspicious that the only way you can attempt a definition is to play these silly word games. Seems to me this "other dimension" stuff you believe in is just a pack of lies and wishful thinking. The issue is not whether miracles are real, but whether
the evidence for any of them is so compelling as to do what fundamentalists wish, and render skeptics unreasonable to maintain denial. The answer is, unequivocally, "no".
Miracles, if real, can
therefore never be explained in ordinary naturalistic terms or duplicated by
scientific experiments that rely on natural law.
Which might give you a clue as to how successful you'll be in trying to "prove" them to people who don't share your supernatural presuppositions. But since words were invented to describe phenomena, feel free to try convincing a naturalist that miracles occur often enough to justify the invention of the word. Then the naturalist will simply bite back with "fairy". We also invented that word, but it never referred to anything real.
In the end, we decided to conduct our own “unscientific”
poll of people’s attitudes toward miracles using the survey we had constructed
in discussions with the survey company. Who knows, we may yet conduct a scientific
poll with this company (we parted on friendly terms), but our findings from the
unscientific poll, which we uploaded onto a popular educational website, were
nonetheless revealing. Supplementing these poll results with extensive research
and interviews has given us a wealth of insights into the range of attitudes
toward miracles that people entertain.
The Faces of Miracles is a work of clarification rather than
persuasion.
May I presume you stopped thinking "persuasion" was a realistic goal after you made your own evaluation of some alleged miracle-evidences?
If at the end of this book readers better understand the impact of
miracles on people’s lives, we will consider this book a success.
Amen. If you translate it into Hindi, yo might convince a skeptical person living in India to take more seriously the claims of weeping statues and therefore the claims of some of those religions. Nice going. I'm sure your book made the devil happy.
We have tried
to provide a representative cross-section of views on miracles. But we have
made no attempt to be encyclopedic. The people whose views on miracles we
examine are almost exclusively from the English-speaking world, contemporary or
fairly recent, and either Christian or reacting to Christianity (as when a
skeptic debunks Christianity for its reliance on miracles). And even within
Christianity, we’ve tended to focus on that segment of Christianity we know
best, namely, Protestant and Evangelical.
Of course, miracles are not limited to Christians or
Christianity. Indeed, accounts of miracles have been reported across the world
and across faiths. But a book like this could easily have mushroomed if we also
considered miracles outside the Christian context. Yes, it would have been
interesting to cast the net wider to include such miracle workers as Brazil’s John of God and India’s late
Sai Baba. But the supernatural power ascribed to them takes many of the same
forms, at least in outward expression, as seen with the Christian faith healers
we consider, even if the ultimate source of the healing power is understood
differently. Accounts of miracles show common patterns, and those patterns are
exemplified in this book. We therefore didn’t think we lost much by focusing on
the Christian context.
Except that if you want Christian miracles to prove Christianity, you have to be willing to let Hindu miracles prove Hinduism.
To put our cards on the table, both authors are Christians
and believe in miracles. But we also think that belief in miracles is never
mandated: one can always find reasons, and not just spurious reasons, to deny
that an event is a miracle, and thus to refuse to attribute the event to a
supernatural cause.
That was rather shocking: your Christian "apologist" friends on the internet would mightily disagree and say the evidence for miracles is "overwhelming". But since you are smart guys, your revealing admission here will work wonders in getting some of your more foolish impulsive endlessly trifling babies on the internet to shut the fuck up. Read Acts 18:26 to find out what god thinks about zeal that exceeds knowledge. It isn't good. Another example is 1st Cor. 14:23, where Paul concludes that the stupidity of the Corinthians would motivate unbelievers to call them insane, something that Paul "fears", and tries to "correct", which means he feared that the Corinthian errors would
rationally justify such criticism.
The atheist philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson, for
instance, declared that he would be converted to theism if he experienced the
following miracle:
The heavens open, and the clouds pull apart, revealing an
unbelievably radiant and immense Zeus-like figure towering over us like a
hundred Everests. He frowns darkly as lightning plays over the features of his
Michelangeloid face, and then he points down, at me, and explains for every
man, woman and child to hear: “I’ve had quite enough of your too-clever logic
chopping and word-watching in matters of theology. Be assured Norwood Russell
Hanson, that I do most certainly exist!” [Hanson 1971, pp. 313–14]
But would the occurrence of such an extraordinary event
truly have convinced Hanson that God exists? No doubt, Hanson would consider
the experience of such an event remarkable. But alternative naturalistic explanations,
such as aliens or hallucinations, would also occur to him, especially given his
atheist presuppositions. Remarking on the importance of prior background
beliefs in determining whether we accept or reject miracles, C. S. Lewis noted
that he knew one, and only one, person who was convinced that she had seen a
ghost, and yet this person didn’t believe in ghosts, not even after the
experience. [Lewis, p. 1]
The French skeptic Anatole France, in his book The Garden of
Epicurus, described his visit to Lourdes,
the French shrine where many people claim they were miraculously healed (see
chapter 10). He notes that visitors to Lourdes
left behind many crutches, thus testifying that they had experienced miraculous
healing in their legs. But he then asked why no wooden legs were left behind.
Is God unable to heal amputees? Indeed, no amputees are known to have been
healed at Lourdes.
But even if an amputee had been healed at Lourdes,
Anatole France
would refuse to admit that a miracle had occurred. As he put it:
Speaking philosophically, the wooden leg would be no whit
more convincing than a crutch. If an observer of a genuinely scientific spirit
were called upon to verify that a man’s leg, after amputation, had suddenly
grown again as before, whether in a miraculous pool or anywhere else, he would
not cry : “Lo! a miracle.” He would say this: “An observation, so far unique,
points us to a presumption that under conditions still undetermined, the
tissues of a human leg have the property of reorganizing themselves like a
crab’s or lobster’s claws and a lizard’s tail, but much more rapidly.” [France 1908,
pp. 176–177]
Let this statement sink in. It shows that no evidence could
ever induce a thorough-going skeptic, like Anatole France, to admit that a miracle had
indeed occurred.
Then allow me to provide the atheist world with the definitive solution: We would all convert to Christianity if the Christian god simply did in our hearts, what he did in the heart of idolatrous King Cyrus (Ezra 1:1). If God has the ability to make people believe whatever he wants, then this "evidence" shit is just a waste of time for everybody.
Your 5-Point Calvinist friends will insist that God saves a person by that process known as regeneration before faith. We all follow our hearts anyway, as must logically be the case. So let god stir up our hearts, and we will be saved with no need to trudge through the epistemological muck of "evidence".
Or maybe asking God to do today, that which he allegedly did in the bible, is asking too much? Yeah, let's watch Christians fight each other to death on whether
that's true. No thanks.
In every case, skeptics can cite the possibility of
alternative naturalistic explanations. Accordingly, even if no clearly defined
naturalistic explanation is on hand, skeptics can rationalize that no actual
miracle has occurred, preferring instead simply to believe that we are for now
ignorant of the underlying naturalistic causes. James Randi’s remarks earlier
on spontaneous remissions took exactly the same skeptical approach to miracles.
By presupposing that miracles cannot happen, such skeptics are unlikely to
change their views about miracles no matter what the evidence.
Which is precisely why my Ezra 1:1 challenge,
supra, is superior. It causes genuinely saving belief, and if god can do that, fucking around with "evidence" is just a waste of time. Of course the problem of the Ezra 1:1 god choosing to let sinners screw around with "evidence" is entirely on the Christian's head. As an atheist, I say the god of the bible often sounds inconsistent because he is nothing more than a reflection of the inconsistent authors that created the biblical books.
Conveniently, Anatole France did not have to deal with
anything so flamboyant as amputees being healed but instead with tamer
purported miracles, like people simply being able to put away their crutches.
Even in the Bible, no case is recorded of an amputee receiving back a lost
limb. The case of the high priest’s servant, whose ear Peter cut off in the
Garden of Gethsemane, comes closest to Jesus healing an amputee (see Luke
22:50–51). But even here, Jesus did not make a new ear grow from scratch, but
rather reattached the old ear (which is what doctors do today with severed body
parts).
But Jesus allegedly healed a man's withered hand (Mark 3:5), to say nothing of the resurrection of Lazarus, whose dead body had already undergone decomposition of some degree, John 11). So God is "capable" of causing existing tissue to produce whatever is needed to be "restored", or he is capable of magically causing needed tissue to appear ex nihilo. So the lack of reports of
amputee-healings in history continues to blight zealous apologists as they try to pretend that perhaps a god of infinite ability might not "want" to engage in healing amputees. And Jesus promised his followers would do "greater" miracles than he did (John 14:12), so its not biblical to say that god never promised to heal amputees. This would be something "greater" than the healings of "sickness" that Jesus did. But of course, this is all bullshit, since Christians cannot even do the lesser "healings" that Jesus is alleged to have done, let alone raising anybody from the dead. There's a reason for the strict dichotomy between today's banal reality and the magical wonderland produced by the biblical authors.
The only widely discussed case of an amputee regaining a
severed limb is the famous seventeenth century Miracle of Calanda, in which a
Spanish peasant named Miguel-Juan Pellicer had his leg amputated in 1637 and
then, while sleeping, is said to have miraculously recovered it in 1640.
Interestingly, the new leg seemed identical to the one lost, having the same
scars. Moreover, the place in the hospital cemetery where the old leg had been
buried was found empty. So was this a case of a completely new leg growing back
or of an old leg being resurrected and reattached? Was this a true miracle at
all? [For an account of the Miracle of Calanda, see Clairval.com. For a
skeptical response, see Skeptoid.com.]
You Protestants will be pleased to know that this was a specifically "Roman Catholic" miracle, so that under your own Protestant reasoning, this is not just proof of "god", but proof that the Catholic version of Christianity is acceptable to god. How long must we study the Protestant v. Catholic debate, before we'll know enough to be able to tell whether this ancient miracle was holy or demonic? Is there some rule of epistemology or historiography that puts the independent observer under any degree of intellectual compulsion to give two shits about ancient accounts of miracles? NO.
Even to raise such questions is to raise doubts about this
miracle. And indeed, doubts can be raised about any purported miracle. Miracles,
should they happen, tend not to be over-obvious.
Another reason to suppose the god who parted the Red Sea is not at work in any of the more modern 'miracles'. You can trifle all day long that asking God to act today consistently with the way he allegedly did in the bible, is asking too much, but this is obviously stupid and doesn't deserve significant "rebuttal".
If they are believed, it is
often for personal rather than purely rational reasons, because the miraculous
event fits meaningfully with a person’s life and not because it would convince
any and all comers. Solzhenitsyn again: “Since then [i.e., since his miraculous
healing from cancer], all the life that has been given back to me has not been
mine in the full sense: it is built around a purpose.”
Ah, so there WAS a motive on the part of Solzhenitsyn to fabricate: to give his writings an air of divine approval. You know as well as I do that having a motive to lie is sufficient to permit the jury to decide for themselves whether the witness's uncorroborated claims are believable...and the jury won't be unreasonable merely because they didn't find the witness as compelling as
you do. The very fact that mature educated people can disagree on a witness's reliability more than likely means there are no definitive criteria for credibility judgments, and therefore, morality (here, you "should" believe the witness or you "shouldn't" believe the witness) is ultimately relative.
The jury verdict in the O.J. Simpson case is no exception; documentaries made after that verdict quoted the jurors as saying that freeing Simpson was the way they wished to respond to L.A. police racism, so this is not pitting once sincere juror against another, but pitting the more objective reader against biased jurors more interested in using a trial for larger political purposes and less interested in delivering a fair and just verdict.
One of us (BD) recalls visiting a large charismatic church in
Korea.
The church owned a property by a lake, and I was told the head pastor was
preparing himself spiritually in order to walk on that lake so that, with
television crews on hand, this miracle could be covered on national television
and provide proof positive of God’s power on earth.
This church was headed by a first-rate liar, too.
That was almost two decades
ago, and the miracle has yet to happen.
EXACTLY.
Perhaps if CNN had film crews out in
Jesus’ day, they could have captured slam-dunk evidence of his miracles. But in
our day slam-dunk miracles never quite seem to materialize.
EXACTLY.
***
Despite the absence of incontrovertible miracles that would
convince all comers, remarkable events that defy ordinary explanation and lead
people to see a supernatural hand are widely reported and believed.
Such events also convince them that the Catholic church is the one true church, which by logical extension means the Protestant church is heretical. Are Protestant apologists quite sure they want skeptics "investigating" catholic miracle claims? How they fuck do the apologists know how the skeptic is going to react? They don't.
Even
skeptics will admit an uncanniness to the coincidental timing of certain
events, rendering miracles plausible even if the skeptics themselves remain
personally reluctant to embrace a supernatural worldview.
Yes, skeptics believe coincidences happen. I'm not seeing your point...unless it was that coincidences would never happen
unless they caused by god?
Take skeptic Michael
Shermer’s article in Scientific American about an unusual event that took place
on his wedding day. Shermer titled the article “Anomalous Events That Can Shake
One’s Skepticism to the Core,” and subtitled it “I just witnessed an event so
mysterious that it shook my skepticism.”
What was the event? On Shermer’s wedding day to Jennifer
Graf in 2014, the two of them witnessed her dead grandfather Walter’s 1978
Philips 070 transistor radio suddenly came to life, after not working for many
years. Jennifer desperately missed Walter, who was closest to a father figure
when she was growing up. On their wedding day, sounds of music in Michael and
Jennifer’s home led them to a desk drawer where Jennifer “pulled out her
grandfather’s transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We
sat in stunned silence for minutes. ‘My grandfather is here with us,’ Jennifer
said, tearfully. ‘I’m not alone.’” After the wedding day, the radio never
worked again.
Shermer then asks how to make sense of this event.
Well, I'm a skeptic, so I think Shermer, or his wife, or both, are just making this up, as such a critical thinking skills prank sounds like something they would love to pull to mark a special occasion as their marriage.
He starts
by half-heartedly invoking the high probability of anomalous coincidences when
considered in light of the vastly many events people experience. But then he
adds, “Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and
supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative
events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that
the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my
heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience
more than the explanation.” [Quoted from his Scientific American article.]
Shermer, nonetheless, continues to affirm his skepticism and
refuses to ascribe this event to a supernatural cause.
Probably because "supernatural" is like "north of the number 4", we have no intellectual obligation to attribute occurrences to concepts that are incoherent. By the way, one sure method to get people to believe in a higher power? Make sure they win the lottery.
He therefore denies that
it is a miracle in the sense defined in this book. And yet, given how this
event shook his skepticism, Shermer would be hard pressed to deny that others
might legitimately interpret this event as a miracle. That’s what his wife
Jennifer did, at least initially, when she ascribed the event to her departed
grandfather’s presence.
Instead of causing the Shermers to believe with his Ezra 1:1 power, "god" simply causes a radio to begin playing. To interpret this as a miracle of the Christian god is to therefore sweep all systematic theology off the table and into the toilet: the "god" making
this kind of stuff happen cares more about our feelings than whether we hold to propositionally correct doctrine.
By the way, you can cause a radio to play music if it is near enough to a cb transmitting that music. So that's a perfectly valid naturalistic explanation for why the speaker on a non-working radio will still transmit sounds.
Regardless, we are forced to take the word of a person who has an interest in debunking miracles, Shermer and his wife, who therefore might find it irresistible to mark off their wedding day with a clever prank that either both of them knew about or only one of them knew about. Not enough here to foist an intellectual obligation on a skeptic, to the chagrin of most "apologists".
A common objection by skeptics against miracles is that
strange connections among events, such as the one that shook Shermer’s
skepticism, are in fact highly probable once we factor in all the events that
happen that don’t draw our attention. The late skeptic Martin Gardner put it
this way: “The number of events in which you participate for a month, or even a
week, is so huge that the probability of noticing a startling correlation is
quite high, especially if you keep a sharp outlook.” [Gardner, work cited in references below]
But in fact, we often have no way to calculate the
probability or improbability of startling correlations.
You don't need to. You don't believe every coincidence is manufactured by god (unless you are a Calvinist), so your own realization that coincidences are often purely naturalistic, combined with the impossibility of giving anybody a reliable criteria for knowing when events are coincidental or caused by god, justifies skepticism.
Moreover, some
improbabilities might be so extreme that no number of events in which humans
have participated throughout history could raise the probability enough to make
certain events seem plausible. Take 100 heads in a row with a fair coin, an
event of probability one in a million trillion trillion (by comparison, there
are fewer than a billion billion grains of sand on the earth). If all humans
throughout history spent their time on nothing but flipping coins, it would
still be vastly improbable that any one of them would ever witness 100 heads in
a row.
How improbable does a coincidence have to be before it
becomes a miracle?
That's not the skeptic's problem, it's yours, since you choose to use the incoherent word "miracle". No, you don't make a word "coherent" by simply noting that it has a dictionary definition. Fantasy and religion have one thing in common: the words used to communicate their unique concepts have no demonstrable ties to actually demonstrable reality.
Several decades ago, one of us (BD) experienced a
coincidence even stranger, in his view, than the one recounted by Shermer. As
he puts it, now in the first person: I was taking a year off from school
working in the family business. My late mother was an art dealer who
specialized in 19th and early 20th century American and European oil paintings.
Within a few months, she was offered virtually identical paintings by a famous
Austrian artist (Franz von Defregger). The paintings had the same dimensions,
subject, and price. Both were overpainted prints, and so both were fakes. The
first was offered from Melbourne, Australia, the second from Melbourne, Florida
(the sellers were completely independent). Unfortunately, my mother paid for
the fake from Australia
and lost a lot of money on it (years of litigation failed to recover anything).
My mother did not buy the other fake, but the people in Florida
selling it had another painting by a famous Munich
artist (Heinrich von Zügel), which my mother bought, and on which she more than
recouped the loss to Australia.
More significant than the multiple coincidences in this
story is that it occurred at a crucial point in the life of my family, just as
the mysterious radio coming to life happened at crucial time in the life of
Michael Shermer and Jennifer Graf when they were getting married. Right between
the loss to Melbourne, Australia and the recovery from Melbourne, Florida,
my mother was becoming a Christian, embracing a newfound faith and encouraging
my father and me to do the same (he and I became Christians a few months
later). It was as though in this “miraculous” set of coincidences, God was
providentially telling our family that he holds our lives in his hands and has
the power to turn circumstances around on a dime. My parents (now both dead)
and I always accepted this interpretation, regarding what happened as a
miracle.
Apparently god cares more about our feelings than about systematic theology, so, to take your miracle claim seriously, the Christian 'god' that exists has no interest in the sin of doctrinal word-wrangling (2nd Timothy 2:14), a sin that internet "apologists" greedily and ceaseless engage in.
But if you have enough people on earth and enough people considering become a Christian, eventually you are going to find anomalies.
And I'm sure you have no interest whatsoever in the fact that coincidences happen to skeptics, and that these could also be taken as "proof" that any god that exists, cares more about the
person than their
beliefs, and as such,
accepts them despite their skepticism.
So was it really a miracle? If by “really a miracle” one
means an event that would convince any and all comers of its supernatural
source, obviously no. Skeptics will find plenty with which to cavil in this
story. But skeptics always find something with which to cavil (it’s their job).
Which wouldn't be the case if your god parted the Atlantic oceans so that a "wall of water" (Exodus 14:22) formed to the right and left from New York to Paris. There is no room in physics for water to do anything except seek its own level, so anybody who saw that and concluded god did it would be reasonable, even if a naturalistic explanation might still be possible.
Yet no amount of skeptical cavilling would have convinced my family that this
was not a miracle.
If it helped you feel better without also harming others, more power to you.
We experienced an overwhelming visceral immediacy as this
story unfolded (the loss to Melbourne,
Australia was
particularly painful), which made any after-the-fact naturalistic
rationalizations of what happened seem hollow. The proverb that says “someone
with an experience is never at the mercy of someone with an argument” held true
for us in this case.
***
The danger that skepticism always faces is throwing out the
baby with the bathwater, in this case utterly rejecting miracles even when
there might be good evidence for them.
I don't see your point, Jesus is not recorded to have ever preached hell at Gentiles, and in several specific Gentile interactions recorded in the gospels, he chose to avoid telling them to "get saved", which apparently means that their "faith" in his ability to "heal" was all that was important...or he didn't want them to know enough to "get saved". All this other crap about "bible study" doesn't issue from Jesus but from Protestants whose love of human tradition is equally as strong as Catholics love for it.
Nonetheless, skepticism has an important
place in the discussion of miracles. Even if skepticism cannot disprove all
miracles, it can legitimately disprove some. A lot of supposed miracles are
frauds, and the skeptic does valuable service as a debunker of fraudulent
miracles.
Hopefully god will remember that on judgment day.
Take the case of Peter Popoff, the fraudulent faith healer
that James Randi exposed in the mid 1980s. Popoff was popular at the time,
pulling in millions of dollars annually by convincing gullible people that he
was God’s instrument to bring about their miraculous healing. Popoff’s real
secret? He would send shills into an audience asking questions and gathering
information. Then, come showtime, Popoff would mingle with the audience,
exhibiting an uncanny knowledge about audience member’s lives, proclaiming
their miraculous healing and deliverance.
Randi, attending Popoff’s healing rallies, thought it
unusual that Popoff would be wearing what looked like a hearing aid: why would
a faith healer who touts God’s power to heal advertise being hard of hearing?
So Randi and his team investigated and found that Popoff’s earpiece was in fact
a radio receiver used by his wife, who read to him the names, addresses, and
infirmities of audience members previously pumped for information by Popoff’s shills.
Randi performed a great public service by exposing Popoff, which had the effect
of bankrupting his ministry (for more details about the Popoff case, see the
chapter in this book about James Randi).
The fraud in the Popoff case was extreme. Yet in many
accounts of miracles, fraud can safely be ruled out. In the story of the two Melbournes, the only
fraud was in the fake paintings. With the two Melbournes, my family experienced a deeply
meaningful coincidence (much like Shermer’s wife Jennifer Graf did over the old
radio), and ever after we saw a supernatural or miraculous hand in it. It’s not
that we had to strain to believe a miracle. We believed it, and it didn’t
matter to us whether others interpreted it as a miracle. It was enough that we
were convinced.
Of course, people can be mistaken about miracles for reasons
other than fraud. Another reason is self-deception, prompted perhaps by a
desperate need to believe in a miracle as a last resort. And then there’s
ignorance of underlying natural causes, if indeed there is an underlying
naturalistic explanation. Skeptics like James Randi and Anatole France embrace
a naturalistic worldview that makes miracles impossible and guarantees an
underlying naturalistic explanation must always exist (if we could but know
it).
They may be right that supernatural explanations will in the
end always give way to natural explanations.
That's quite revealing, coming from a smart guy like Dembski.
But if they are right, how can we
know that? And if they are wrong, how can we know that? And what if no side in
this debate is ever able to mount an airtight case one way or the other?
Those are not the problem of the skeptic, but of the Christian, who thinks he can make his case using "evidence".
Because such question show no sign of being resolved, a wide ranging and open
conversation seems the best we can do to attain a genuine understanding of miracles.
The Faces of Miracles is such a conversation.
***
A prime reason that miracles are not universally convincing
is that they tend to reside in a sweet spot or Goldilocks zone: not too little,
not too much, just right. It’s not that a supposed miracle is so ordinary an
event that it doesn’t capture our imagination (i.e., too little). It’s not that
a miracle is so overpowering that it instantly overturns the worldview of
skeptics (i.e., too much). It’s that a miracle is at once extraordinary but
also deeply meaningful to the party directly experiencing it, enough to elicit
faith in an underlying supernatural source, but not to compel faith (i.e., just
right).
Why aren’t miracles more overpoweringly obvious?
Because the god who parted the Red Sea and raised dead people, is nothing but a fiction. This is more likely than the excuse that god has become camera shy.
One reason
may be that humans are amazingly adaptable. What’s an extreme miracle today
won’t seem extreme tomorrow. What was overpowering yesterday quickly becomes
the new normal. Thus raising the baseline for miracles, even to new extreme
levels, won’t convince skeptics any more than the current tamer stock of
miracles. Recall that Anatole France would have regarded amputees receiving new
limbs as unmiraculous. Rather, he would have concluded that “under conditions
still undetermined, the tissues of a human leg have the property of
reorganizing themselves like a crab’s or lobster’s claws and a lizard’s tail.”
Sure, but at that point I'd say the believer in god would also be reasonable to say human tissue simply isn't capable of doing that without outside intervention.
Another reason why miracles may not be more overpoweringly
obvious is that it is in humanity’s best interests to keep them somewhat muted.
The desire for miracles can become addictive, requiring miracles of ever
greater intensity to experience the same “rush” (witness the Israelites under
Moses departing Egypt:
according to the story, they kept witnessing greater and greater miracles, and
yet were never satisfied).
That's a false story, the idiocy of the Israelites is nothing but a literary device to make the story's moral and theological message more glowing and memorable for its originally intended pre-scientific illiterate addressees.
Moreover, the refusal to see something as a miracle
is often less intellectual than moral. We ought to believe what we’ve been
given enough evidence to believe.
Ok, then Catholicism must be true, because the eyewitnesses to the Catholic miracles never report them as demonic, but always as holy. Now then,
should we trust the eyewitness's interpretation of what they saw, yes or no? or will Steve Hays trifle that we should trust the eyewitness's general report but remain skeptical of their own interpretation of it?
But to insist on overwhelming evidence
quickly becomes unreasonable, inviting skeptics to keep raising the bar higher
and higher.
A problem your god escapes by simply waving his magic Ezra 1:1 wand.
The atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell was questioned what
he would say to God if, after dying, he met God and were asked why he hadn’t
believed in God during his time on earth. Russell is said to have answered,
“Not enough evidence.” So, if only God had provided enough evidence in support
of theism, Russell would have been a theist? [This quote is widely available on
the Internet, and Richard Dawkins attributes it to Russell is on page 104 of
his book The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). But neither Dawkins
nor the Internet sources we’ve found that list the quote provide a reference to
Russell’s actual writings. Still, we can well imagine Russell saying just
this.]
But what is enough evidence?
Once again, God's power to turn the heart, seen in Ezra 1:1, makes "evidence" irrelevant. You must face the daunting prospect that the biblical 'god' thinks modern day "apologetics" is a waste of time.
And, at an even more basic
level, what makes something to be evidence, supporting a claim or failing to
support it?
Such a question puts you dangerously close to committing the sin of word-wrangling (2nd Timothy 2:14).
The problem with evidence is that it is not, and indeed cannot be,
decided by evidence. Like the eye that cannot see itself, so evidence cannot
see itself as evidence. Indeed, what determines whether something counts as
evidence depends on what we, as human inquirers, are predisposed to take as
evidence. And what if we, because of our naturalistic worldview, are
predisposed to take nothing as evidence for miracles, like James Randi and
Anatole France?
Then that would be a problem you'd have to confront them with, but count me out. I'm willing to consider evidence for miracles, unfortunately, since you cannot even coherently define a miracle except in a question-begging way, that might pose a reasonably justified hurdle to the whole enterprise. Just like a failure to coherently define key terms in any
other debate precludes the possibility of reasonably certain resolution.
Or what if we employ a double standard for evidence,
accepting some things on minimal grounds but then, when it comes to miracles,
raising the bar so high that nothing can count as evidence?
There are several justifications for raising the bar higher when it comes to miracles:
First, under your own reasoning, the most reasonable thing a person can do when unable to explain away a Christian miracle, is to repent and believe the gospel. Unfortunately, Christianity is divided about what salvation actually is (no, not just Paul v. Judaizers, or Mormons v. Protestants, but Protestant v. Protestant, i.e., John MacArthur's Lordship salvation v. Zane C. Hodges' Free Grace). Miracles done in the context of Christianity usually don't enable the viewer to figure out which
specific way of salvation is true, hence, miracles do precisely nothing to prevent interested skeptics from selecting the wrong version of Christianity and giving god yet another reason to be mad at them. So the fact that a miracle would show that "Christianity is true" doesn't answer the question "which version?"...
unless you are going to automatically assume that the miracle vindicates whatever way of salvation is taught in the specific church where the miracle occurred (in which case the miracles at Fatima and Mudjugogie prove the
Catholic way of salvation is the right one)?
Second, Christians have fraudulently claimed miracles in history and in the world at present. Refusing to raise the bar high would likely force the skeptic to conclude that miracles occurring across a broad spectrum of theologically contradictory versions of Christianity all come from god...but then leaving the skeptic no way to figure out which of these reveals the "right" way of salvation. So without something more theologically specific, God doing a miracle to make you think "Christianity is true" is about as smart as making sure you will run out of gas halfway to your destination. If God is not going to perform miracles that specify which Christian method of salvation is the "right" one, then merely concluding "Christianity is true" does little more than land a shitload of endless theological back and forth bickering into the lap of a skeptic...who probably has enough unresolved issues in her life already and doesn't need several extra train cars full of it. So "miracles" that don't point out the "right" way of salvation, can be safely dismissed as time wasting at best, and doors to demonic heresy at worst.
Third, refusing to raise the bar higher might cause the skeptic to think miracles claimed by several theologically contradictory Christian churches have equal likelihood of being genuinely from god, significantly increasing the odds that she will assume the "god" doing these miracles approves of many contradictory methods of salvation...inducing her to thus become a "liberal" Christian. You wouldn't want
that, would you?
Fourth, refusing to raise the bar higher for miracle claims might cause the skeptic, who has concluded a few miracles in theologically contradictory versions of Christianity were true, to just "flip a coin" and make a haphazard decision as which church was teaching the correct way of salvation...which puts her at unreasonable risk of picking the wrong way and ending up enduring the nasty surprise that Jesus said many would endure on judgment day (Matthew 7:21 ff). And since the bible indicates that even the apostles sometimes tried to figure out god's will by a method nearly identical to "flipping a coin" (Acts 1:26), the skeptic might be inclined to further conclude that "flipping a coin" in order to help reveal god's will about the most important matters, is "biblical".
Fifth, refusing to raise the bar higher for miracle claims would only be something that a
Christian would complain about, when in fact raising the bar of evidence higher than normal is not, per se, an intellectually objectionable or unreasonable action. On the contrary, raising the bar of evidence higher only makes good common sense when the matters that need to be decided are extremely debatable points of philosophy, theology, and hermeneutics, points that not even the Christian scholars can agree on. I suppose a Mormon could complain that my rejection of the book of Mormon is premised on a standard they deem "too high" , but they cannot demonstrate that such a complaint deserves a hearing unless they can show that I am being hypocritical in employing the higher standard.
Sixth, the Calvinist sense of cause and effect would counsel that God does some miracles today to 'harden' skeptics even more in their unbelief, in which case the apologists who berate a skeptic for refusing to believe in god in light of an undeniable miracle, are berating god's purpose in doing that miracle. In other words, certain Christian doctrines would justify condemning skeptics for obeying god's will. Only in Christianity does such stupid contradictory nonsense sound the least bit plausible.
So it only makes sense, in light of Christianity's internal contradictions, both within the bible and among its many denominations, to insist that, before we get ready to embark upon an investigation that has potential to tear our families apart (Matthew 10:35) and convince us to give up custody of our kids and go homeless and jobless solely for religious reasons (Matthew 19:29), we set the bar just a bit higher than we set it for purely naturalistic claims.
This was
philosopher David Hume’s objection to miracles, arguing that we should always
discount the testimony of miracles in the face of the low prior probability of
miracles. But where did he get that low prior probability?
His own experience in life. You may say that pool of experience is too small to justify dogmatizing that miracle claims are false since the skeptic cannot claim to know that other people haven't experienced miracles. But Hume's argument is not one of factual certainty, but of reasonable certainty. No, we cannot know for certain that nobody else has experienced miracles. But we are quite aware that a) every miracle claim we have ever chosen to investigate had strong earmarks of being fraudulent, and b) not even most Christians claim to experience miracles, and b) within Christianity there are "cessationists", or Christians who insist that the bible teaches the age of miracles died out before the end of the 1st century, which if true, justifies a ore intensely skeptical attitude toward modern day "miracles". Thomas Schreiner is the James Buchanan Harrison professor of New Testament interpretation and associate dean for Scripture and interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Such a conservative as this makes several assertions that skeptics happily applaud:
I doubt the gift of miracles and healings exists today, for it isn’t evident that men and women in our churches have such gifts. Certainly God can and does heal at times, but where are the people with these gifts? Claims for miracles and healings must be verified, just as the people verified the blind man’s healing in John 9. There is a kind of biblically warranted skepticism.
See
here.
These problems with miracles make skeptics reasonable to maintain skepticism toward all "miracle" claims, and that reasonableness is not going to disappear merely because you can find a baffled doctor or two.
Philosopher John
Earman, himself an atheist, has debunked Hume’s argument, showing it to depend
on a faulty conception of probability. [See Earman book cited below.]
Except that what Earman is opposing is the same exact mindset that all people have toward claims that substantially depart from their own experience of reality: skepticism. Winning the lottery, getting a hole in one, abduction by space aliens, miracles performed by heretics, etc. What Earman never touches is whether a skeptic can be "reasoanble" to dismiss miracle claims
a priori (i.e., immediately, with no intent to perform the slightest investigation). Yes, they can. My research on the bible indicates that the doctrine of eternal conscious torment in flames (the standard southern baptist view of "hell") is not what Jesus taught, and therefore, even if Christianity is "true", the fact that it doesn't threaten a fate worse the the consciousness-extinction which atheists like me already accept and embrace, makes us reasonable to deem Christianity's alleged "truth" as irrelevant. Just because something is "true" doesn't automatically obligate the investigator to conclude that it is relevant.
But the
animating impulse behind Hume’s objection, which is to deny that miracles can
have any legitimate evidence in their favor, remains.
He could possibly be wrong, but then again, we are only talking about whether taking the Humean viewpoint is "reasonable", not whether it is "accurate". Indeed, whether miracles happen or don't happen is largely decided by principles of historiography, and historiography is an art, not a science, so you can only answer such questions in degrees of probability, a notion that all of Christianity's premier resurrection scholars (Licona, Habermas, Craig) would agree with..
If the common man often uses absolute terms of assurance when speaking of ancient events, that's why he is a "common" man and not a "scholar" or "historian". Inaccurate colloquialisms do not determine historical truth, any more than "i watched the sun set" determines cosmological truth.
If God is the ultimate source behind miracles, and if
through miracles God attempts to communicate with humans, then God’s job is not
to regale us with a freak show of spectacular sights but rather to get our
attention and focus it in ways that make the world a better place (a world that
desperately needs improvement because it is filled with moral and natural
evil).
Then your god is stupid because whatever miracles he allegedly does, are not distinguishable from fake miracles. Under Ezra 1:1, your god could just
make me desire to obey his will, negating any need for miracles whatsoever (cf. Daniel 4:33, god will also take away a person's rational senses whenever he wishes, a stupid bit of intertestamental fiction that unfortunately binds "bible believing" Christians).
Why does your god want me to make my own subjective decision about when to cut off the miracle-investigation and start drawing ultimate conclusions, if he fears that my unbelief will cause me to make such decision too hastily and I'll end up concluding miracles are fake? Maybe God is a Calvinist, and doesn't infallibly guide me into truth because I'm not one of the elect? Gee, how long must an unbeliever, a Calvinist and an Arminian debate that before the unbeliever will become reasonable to start drawing conclusions? 5 minutes? 6 days? 10 years?
You also forget Calvinism: if God truly wants to save me, I'm definitely
going to get saved, no doubts about it. What do you do with a skeptic who says Calvinism is the more biblically justified view, and therefore, his current skepticism wasn't his choice, he was instead infallibly predestined to be this skeptical at this point in his life? Answer: you try to convince him that he has an intellectual "obligation" to wrangle with you about the alleged errors of Calvinism...while you personally believe that with every passing second, he could die and end up in hell...
and yet you want him to waste his time wrangling words with you about non-essentials?
In particular, humans do not become better humans, and thus do not make
the world a better place, because God provides such overwhelming evidence of
miracles that they feel compelled to be good.
Then your god is irrational to bitch at them. His magic wand is capable of turning the heart of pagan idolaters far more vile than today's atheists (Ezra 1:1) and turn the heart of believers so horrifically steeped in pagan sexual sins that their heart is turned away from God (Deut. 17:17, 1st Kings 11:3, Proverbs 21:1). When you have the ability and opportunity to prevent a problem without causing further probelms, and you just sit around doing nothing, you deprive yourself of the right to bitch about the fact that the problem continues to exist.
Thus, even Judas did not feel
compelled to be good, instead thinking he could betray Jesus with impunity, the
very Jesus he had seen daily and who is regarded as the greatest miracle-worker
in history.
Sorry, I don't believe every gospel story and I see no reason to worry about any such "truth". I teach bible skepticism purely as a hobby.
The potentially dizzying effect of miracles on the miracle
worker may impose another limitation on miracles: perhaps God is protecting us
from the hubris that thinks we mere humans can produce miracles at will.
Miracle workers can easily get full of themselves; after all, a supernatural
source appears to be using them as a channel for miracles. That’s heady stuff,
and it tends to go to their heads.
A psychological reality that god can easily control with a wave of his magic wand. See Ezra 1:1.
I (BD) recall in 1979 being at miracle rally of the late
R.W. Schambach. I personally did not witness any notable miracle at this rally.
Yet at the rally, Schambach claimed, without offering details about time and
place, that he had gone to a hospital wing in some developing country
...and I won the lottery, but the records have been erased by the CIA.
and
cleared out from that wing all its sick patients by successfully praying for
their healing. Even for those whose worldview allows for miracles, Schambach’s
claim to have cleared out a hospital wing will seem farfetched.
Yup. And I don't personally see any difference between "clearing out a hospital wing" and "he healed them
all" (Matthew 4:24).
It’s worth putting such grandiose claims (and faith healers
are notorious for grandiose claims) in perspective. Jesus himself didn’t perform
miracles indiscriminately.
Yes, he did, Matthew 4:24 is only one such report.
For instance, the fifth chapter of John’s Gospel
describes the Pool of Bethesda where a “great multitude” of sick people lay,
waiting for a miraculous stirring of the water by an angel, so that the first
person to enter the pool, once stirred, got healed.
Except that Bruce Metzger tell us the part about the angel (John 5:4) is most certainly a late interpolation:
5.4 omit verse {A}
Ver. 4 is a
gloss, whose secondary character is clear from (1) its absence from the earliest
and best witnesses (î66,
75 a B C* D Wsupp
33 itd, l, q the true text of the Latin Vulgate syrc
copsa, bomss, ach2 geo Nonnus), (2) the
presence of asterisks or obeli to mark the words as spurious in more than twenty
Greek witnesses (including S L
P 047 1079 2174), (3) the presence
of non-Johannine words or expressions (kata. kairo,n, evmbai,nw [of going into the water], evkde,comai, kate,comai, ki,nhsij, tarach,, dh,pote, and no,shma – the last four words only here in the New
Testament), and (4) the rather wide diversity of variant forms in which the
verse was transmitted.
TCGNT, p. 107
Jesus, visiting the pool,
chose one person to heal, and he did it on the Sabbath, getting himself in
trouble with the authorities. Why didn’t Jesus clear everyone out at the Pool
of Bethesda, healing all the sick people there, as Schambach claims to have
done at that undisclosed hospital wing?
Well since he is often reported to have healed "all" the sick and lame in the large crowds that allegedly followed him (Matthew 4:24, 8:16, 12:15, etc), and since even conservative Christian scholars admit John might be presenting as history something Jesus didn't actually say or do (see my challenge to Triablogue
here), I would say you need to first establish the historical reliability of John before your question about Jesus' apparent inconsistency would become relevant to me.
Or consider the healing of the lame man by Peter described
in Acts 3. Jesus had by this time been crucified and resurrected, so he was no
longer physically present. It was therefore up to his disciple Peter to heal
this man. Who was this man? According to Acts 3:2, he “was lame from his
mother’s womb” and needed to be “laid daily at the gate of the temple which is
called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple.” But think
what this means. Jesus had for years been going to the Jerusalem temple. He must surely have seen
this man, and not once but repeatedly. Why, then, didn’t Jesus heal him when he
had the chance?
You are assuming this part of Acts is historically accurate. I don't. Acts is a romantic fiction, and if any of its statements about the apostles were historically accurate, this would probably be a miracle. Acts is little more than a fiction intended to convince newbies that apostle Paul's gospel really is divinely sanctioned. For example, Paul never quotes Jesus to establish essential doctrine, and neither did the apostles in how they resolved the Judaizer controversy in Acts 15.
Paradox and puzzlement often accompany miracles.
And since the average skeptic has a life and not much money, choosing to avoid issues in the world that a) don't directly affect her, and b) are found paradoxal and puzzling by many others, are actions that are reasonable. You cannot say exactly how much time I should spend between dinner and going to bed, on "investigating miracle claims", or whether doing so through
books would be better or worse than doing so through
Google, or whether such investigation should involve my kids, etc, etc. There are so many unknowns you freely admit to, you'll have to admit that you don't really know at what point the "miracle" crap becomes an intellectual
obligation on the skeptic (and therefore the point wherein she becomes a "fool" to turn away from miracle-evidence), strongly suggesting that morality is ultimately relative.
Not only do
purported miracles tend not to be overobvious,
Being done by a god who allegedly thinks the stain of sin has corrupted the mind of the miracle-gazing sinner, increasing the chances that they will exploit any trifle they can to get away from admitting the miracle is genuinely supernatural. What else does god do? Allow 3 year old kids to babysit infants unsupervised? Maybe he knows that the ensuring disaster will create Frank Turek's "ripple effect" and this evil will somehow cause some homeless militia member of the Congo to let his wife go to church in the year 2050?
but their timing and connection
to other related events often makes little logical sense.
Making it obvious that skeptics are fools to turn away from miracle reports.
If miracle A happens,
we might expect miracle B to happen. But such correlations are often absent.
Take Demos Shakarian, a well known charismatic leader from a generation back.
He saw his mother die of an inoperable cancer but his sister healed from a
horrendous car accident. It’s more satisfying to the mind, which yearns for
consistency, to see neither miraculously healed or both miraculously healed.
But why one and not the other? Miracles seem to occur selectively, and often
with no rhyme or reason.
Meaning the intellectual obligation that requires skeptics to investigate miracles also requires them to do scholarly level research on fairies...after all, how do
you know all those allegedly eyewitness accounts collected by the Fairy Investigation Society were false? See
here. If you say the truth about fairies doesn't affect you one way or the other, you are correct, and I similarly state that the truth of Christianity poses no danger to me either.
Will you say most fairy-accounts were proven false, therefore, it is reasonable to assume
all of then were false?
Wow, I didn't know you were an atheist who commits the fallacy of hasty generalization.
[See Shakarian reference below.]
Miracles can also seem inappropriate and unfair. Why does
one person receive a needed miracle but not someone with an even greater need?
The alleged 'god' behind these miracles "delights" to inflict misery on people whenever he feels like it, see Deut. 28:63.
And why do some miracles seem so trivial, especially against the backdrop of
horrendous evil in the world?
Maybe the god doing these things is just a very powerful idiot?
Sure, Solzhenitsyn getting cured of stage-four
cancer in the Soviet Gulag seems like a worthy miracle. But miracles can do
better than that. What about the miraculous deliverance of untold torture
victims from the hands of their tormentors, to say nothing of the miraculous
alleviation of a famine by manna from heaven?
Ironically, most Christians don't "get" that the place where Moses had Israel live for 40 years was a barren place where vegetation and water were scarce, therefore, the only way to make plausible the story of hundreds of thousands of Israelites continuing to live in such land for 40 years, is tell about food-miracles like "manna". Apparently including miracles to "explain" how they never ran out of clothing (Deut. 29:5).
You'll excuse me if I find the tale of the 40-year sojourn on the wilderness as mostly fiction.
Yet miracles, at least in our
day, don’t seem to reach quite that far.
Science has a habit of shoving superstition into the dark more and more as knowledge grows.
On the other hand, what are we to make of Michael Shermer
and his wife hearing romantic music from a defunct radio?
publicity stunt, especially since the "miracle" had nothing specifically "Christian" about it and could very well have led them to adopt a non-Christian view of the paranormal. Desperate Christian apologists will trifle that the radio miracle was done by Satan, but that doesn't become an intellectual obligation upon the skeptic until the bible's view about the devil is proven to be more reasonable than the non-biblical view. That's never going to happen. Next?
Or my (BD’s) family
losing money on one art deal only to regain it, by strange coincidence and with
interest, on another?
Was the Christian god also behind the coincidence of the Titanic sinking some years after publication of a book about a sinking ship named "Titan"? Was the Christian god behind the coincidences between Lincoln and Kennedy? If so, then apparently the Christian god, by trying to get our attention in an indirect way, disapproves of the direct way that today's Christian 'apologists' try to do so. Another justification to reason from 'miracle' to 'god' to "Christianity is false".
The god who causes miracles in the world apparently doesn't find it necessary to use those occasions to warn the skeptical watchers about the perils of hell, perhaps making reasonable the skeptical assumption that any such god doesn't think skeptics are in any danger of any "hell". When you add this to the fact that even "orthodox" Christians either deny literal eternal conscious torment version of hell (7th Day Adventists) or else allow that people not as bad as Hitler will get a second chance in the afterworld (Catholics, purgatory), it should be clear that the skeptic is reasonable to laugh at the "threat" of "hell".
Against the grand scheme of things, such miracles seem
hardly momentous. From my present vantage, I (BD) would much prefer to swap
miracles, seeing a complete loss of money in those past art deals, but seeing
my severely autistic son (now 16 years into his disability) miraculously cured.
That comes from your sense of morality, and according to Frank Turek and most Christian apologists, your morality comes from god. So putting 2 and 2 together, you get "I wish to experience these miracles because God wants me to", getting god in trouble for then failing to do what he promised. If those wishes
aren't from god, that means some of your morality doesn't come from god, leading to stupid questions about how you can know which of your moral sentiments come from god and which don't, a subject I'm sure will divide Christians.
Alas, miracle swaps like this are not an option. The inequities that surround miracles may be there to remind
us that the ultimate source behind miracles (God, for most of us) cedes little
if any control over them to us.
"may be"...
that is your argument?
One sees this lack of human control over
miracles in the otherwise ordinary lives of many faith healers, who in
themselves and their families exhibit the same frailties, sicknesses, and
tragedies common to humanity. Indeed, those who claim to be channels for
miracles display limited success at resolving their own problems through
miracles.
Excellent point.
For instance, healing missionary John G. Lake, six months after
arriving in Africa, saw his wife die; faith healer Smith Wigglesworth did his
healing crusades assisted by his deaf daughter; Oral Roberts was freed to
pursue his healing ministry once his disabled sister died (he also saw two of
his own children die, one in an airplane crash, the other by suicide).
***
One final point worth pondering before we end this
introduction is how belief in miracles correlates with mental health. We
submit—based on our experience, though without scientific proof—that an
optimistic openness to miracles is good for one’s mental health.
Not for those who are serious about it. Their interest in miracles can do nothing but cause them to involve themselves in a whole new slew of debate and uncertainty known collectively as "biblical theology". You aren't taking into consideration the hundreds of thousands of testimonies of ex-Christians who say their constantly telling themselves the bible is more accurate about reality than their own experiences, drove them mad. Apparently, there are some people who have no problems with mystery and contradiction, and other people who find them unbearable, and there is no way to motivate the former to be more critical minded, nor motivate the latter to be more liberal.
In general,
confidence and optimism tend to be good for people, even if these are not
totally realistic, because they keep us engaged in life and looking for
solutions.
Then you need to watch "The Shawshank Redemption". Hope can be a dangerous thing.
For example, the Protestants most vocal about doctrine and apologetics are quite sure that the "hope" of Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Catholics, etc, is leading them straight to eternal perdition. Perhaps taking such threats seriously might counsel that is it more reasonable to avoid miracles about as often as smart girls avoid hypocritical abusive boyfriends. Avoiding a shitload of depression and misery is as easy as simply staying away and refusing to play with fire.
So too, an openness to miracles can push us outside the box and help
us meet grave challenges in novel ways, even if at the end of the day no
miracle occurs.
For example, investigating miracles might help us solve our financial problems by motivating us to join a prosperity gospel cult. We won't ever actually "get rich", but our feeling the need to line the pockets of insatiably greedy charlatans will help us be more accepting of our lot in life.
Yet if an optimistic openness to miracles is healthy, we
also find another attitude toward miracles that is unhealthy. Call it a
relentless insistence on miracles or an unwillingness to accept life in the
absence of miracles. Some of life’s challenges are so severe and intractable
that barring a miracle, the challenges will persist and profoundly burden, or
even end, people’s lives (think of a stage-four cancer or a chronic
disability). If confronted with such a challenge, it’s one thing to be open to
miracles. But it’s quite another to chase relentlessly after miracles, not
resting content unless a miracle is received, and refusing to make peace with
the challenge otherwise. This is bad. The secret to life is playing the hand
you’re dealt, and when belief in miracles turns into an uncompromising demand
for miracles, you effectively refuse to play the hand you’re dealt.
Thanks for the additional reasons why a skeptic might consider that being open to miracles could turn them into a religious fanatic.
Psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described five stages of
grief that arise when people must deal with a severe challenge. According to
her, these stages occur in the following order: denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and finally acceptance. Anyone who relentlessly insists that the
only way to meet a life challenge is for a miracle to occur stays stuck at the
denial stage.
Then the advice in James 5:14-15 is asking the reader to do things that your expert Ross said will keep a person stuck in denial. cf. Jesus' promises that you could get anything you want by prayer by simply believing seriously you've already received it, Mark 11:24. Go ahead and make the passage inapplicable to sinful requests, it is still a guarantee that any godly thing you want will be given to you if you make yourself believe you have already received it (what Norman Vincent Peale would later call "The Power of Positive Thinking")
Because miracles are rare (if they were common, they would not be
miracles),
False, if you define "miracle" as an "act of god", then god could do a million miracles per hour in the life of each person on earth, and they would not cease being
miracles. You have falsely imported "rare" into the definition of miracle, but the only reason is because you think they don't happen that often, which seems to indicate that you made no room for the possibility of millions of miracles being done for people who end up never reporting them.
and because they seem to become rarer still when people insist on
them, such denial can go on for years and make the challenge doubly
challenging: not only do people deal with a challenge that doesn’t go away, but
by insisting on a miracle to resolve the challenge, they rob themselves of the
peace that acceptance of their situation could bring.
Excellent point.
Another reason to fear that openness to miracles might cause one to become a deluded religious fanatic. You cannot deny the sincerity of Christians who end up in cults, so apparently, sincerely seeking after god's help is
zero guarantee, whatsoever, that god will keep you on the safe path as you investigate miracles.
To sum up, this book dispassionately presents a variety of
perspectives on miracles as they are actually held by real people.
Which means asshole Christian fundamentalists would disagree with you since your failure to call names and "shame" miracle-deniers might operate to make skeptics feel more intellectually justified.
Another fracture in the body of Christ.
Rather than
merely give these perspectives abstract names (e.g., “skeptical debunker” or
“faith healer”), we also provide names and faces. This makes our discussion
personal and memorable, and also avoids shoehorning people into categories that
they don’t precisely fit.
Good idea.
Hence, The Faces of Miracles.
As already noted, this is a work of clarification rather
than persuasion or proof.
So the asshole fundamentalist Christians, whose group I might possibly join if I start becoming more interested in "miracles", would accuse you of wasting god's time on "clarifications that don't try to persuade", which they will say is in direct defiance of Jude 3.
Our aim is to assemble a rich diversity of
perspectives on miracles, presenting them on their own merits and in their own
voice, letting the reader draw comparisons and form conclusions.
A scholarly undertaking that has no parallel in the known actions of anybody in the NT, perhaps suggesting that you veer toward the edge of biblical acceptability because the devil is using you in a clever way, when it could be argued that a "real" Christian spends their time instead doing things that are
undoubtedly "biblical".
Why is such
clarification about miracles important?
It isn't. As I show in my articles and in upcoming publications, there is no threat to skeptics even if we assume Jesus rose from the dead. As I also show, the probability that Jesus stayed dead is far higher than the probability that he resurrected. I say that after comprehensively reviewing the published works of Licona, Habermas and Craig, among others.
We live in an age that craves pat
answers. Miracles happen and anyone who disbelieves in them is a knave.
Miracles don’t happen and anyone who believes in them is a fool. The truth is
more complicated.
Bill Dembski
Alex Thomas
Perhaps your book would be most useful to fundamentalist apologists who constantly put labels on people and refuse to believe that the truth is more complicated.
https://turchisrong.blogspot.com/2019/11/my-general-challenge-to-annoyed-pinoy.html