Can you believe in Miracles?

One of the central reasons why people doubt the Christian story has to do with all of the weird, supernatural claims. For secular people, the story about a giant fish eating Jonah can be seriously hard to swallow. And even for lifelong believers some of the miracle stories can seem unbelievable. Am I really meant to rationally accept that Jesus could dance on the sea of Galilee, or solve world hunger with a single bread roll?

When Richard Dawkins debated John Lennox, two Oxford professors going head to head on the God question, Dawkins found it utterly inconceivable that Lennox could affirm something so seemingly miraculous like the virgin birth. Exasperated, Dawkins questioned:

“How can a man of science believe such a thing?”

Now Dawkins may not be the poster child for a philosophically robust atheism, but his question nonetheless resonates with a huge number of people, believers and doubters alike, who have imbibed the common notion that science has disproved miracles. And were you to trace back the origins of this belief, historically speaking, the case against miracles finds its strongest voice in the 18th century philosopher and sceptic, David Hume. So given that the Christian story falls apart if Jesus did not rise from the dead, what are we to make of scientific objections to the supernatural?

The truth is there are some serious problems with Hume’s problem of miracles. Take Hume’s logical version of the problem, where he argues that miracles, by definition, are impossible. The syllogism would go something like this:

The laws of nature are inviolable.

Miracles violate the laws of nature.

Therefore, miracles are impossible.

For you cannot violate the inviolable.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes what it is trying to prove, because it paints our universe as a closed system. Now if God doesn’t exist, then sure, the universe is a closed system, for there is no one to ever reach in from the outside. But if God does exist, then the universe is not a closed system, meaning the laws of nature merely describe how God normally governs the universe, and do nothing to stop Him from doing something special by feeding in a new creative event. 

C.S. Lewis responded to Hume’s argument with a clever analogy:

Say yesterday, when you went to bed, you put $10 in your nightstand, and then tonight you put in another $10, only to wake up tomorrow and find $5 in the drawer, what would you assume? That the laws of arithmetic had been broken, or that the laws of Australia had been broken? That an outside agent had meddled with the contents of the drawer?

Just like how the laws of arithmetic don’t stop the thief from meddling in the drawer, but rather expose him, so too the laws of nature don’t constrain God, they reveal him. So science does nothing to disprove miracles. Rather science and supernaturalism walk hand in hand, with science painting the backdrop of nature’s regularity against which God’s special message, a miracle, can be received. So the logical problem of miracles falls down, for if you simply grant Genesis 1:1, that in the beginning God created everything, then anything is possible!

Hume’s second version of the argument was more of an evidential one, though, where he argued that even if miracles were possible, you should never believe in them. Because, in Hume’s language, a wise person proportions their beliefs to the evidence. But, he argued, since miracles are singularities, unrepeatable, and rare, and since they are only ever attested to by human witnesses, well this testimonial evidence can never outweigh our universal scientific observation of the regularity of nature. And so, wise people should reject miracle claims. In other words, because dead people universally stay dead, Jesus’ disciples should not be believed when they claim he was resurrected. The historical evidence for the miracle can simply never be good enough.

This is basically the line of reasoning you’ll find in Carl Sagan’s infamous dictum:

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This has become a kind of mantra on the internet used by atheists to shut down supernatural claims. Of course no one ever defines what they mean by extraordinary or supernatural evidence, but usually what it amounts to is that no matter how much evidence you muster, it is rejected out of hand as simply not extraordinary enough. But even secular philosophers today, like Hume’s own contemporaries, point out a number of serious errors with this approach to assessing probability.

For starters, what makes something an extraordinary claim? If all you mean by extraordinary are singularities that are unrepeatable and rare, then the Big Bang, or me winning the lottery, are by definition, extraordinary. Yet when these things have happened, we don’t demand extraordinary evidence (whatever that means), we just demand sufficient evidence, or the kind of evidence you would expect that anomaly to leave behind. For the big bang, it’s cosmological evidence. For the lottery? Maybe a bigger bank account and maybe some news coverage. And this is the Achilles heel of Hume’s evidential critique of miracles: the probability of an event has to take into account the specific facts and not just the abstract odds. Extraordinary things happen all the time, and we don’t discount something we have good evidence to believe simply because the odds of past observation are stacked against it.

Now you could try and attack the testimony of eyewitnesses in the case for miracles. After all, people are capable of deceit, being deceived, or falsely inferring a miracle out of scientific ignorance. But the people in the Bible were not prescientific ignoramuses. When the angel Gabriel approaches the virgin Mary and says she is to be with child, she does not blindly accept his claim as normal everyday stuff. She asks the obvious biological question:

“How can this be since I am a virgin?”

(Luke 1:34)

It is on the basis of what she did know about the birds and the bees, not scientific ignorance, that she inferred that something special, something miraculous, must be taking place. So when critics assume that Jesus’ contemporaries had no knowledge of the natural order, that tends to be nothing more than an egregious example of chronological snobbery. And the character of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, whose lives were catapulted by this miraculous encounter onto a path of virtue, when coupled together with their willingness to suffer for those claims; these things mitigate against them being deceivers.

To give good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, there are only two things Jesus’ friends need to be able to competently testify to in court: that they were sure he was dead, and that they are certain to have afterwards spent time with him alive. This isn’t complex stuff. You don’t need a masters degree in biology to play that eyewitness role. Which is why it seems to me that in the case of Christianity the problem of miracles has struck out.

So can you believe in miracles? That depends entirely on the evidence.

Wisdom dictates we shouldn’t blindly embrace all miracle claims, nor should we exclude them out of hand. But since truth invites questioning, if there are good reasons to believe in God as part of the background evidence of our universe, and if the miracle is set against a religiously significant backdrop to send a clear message like with the resurrection of Jesus, and if the quality of the specific evidence for this historical anomaly is strong in the eyewitness accounts, then the calculus dramatically tilts in favour of the resurrection.

There is no rational reason for you not to believe in miracles.