Category Archives: Miracles

Miracles, Philosophy, Science and God, Skeptics

Does the Scientific Method Preclude the Existence of Miracles?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This is a familiar theme for long-time readers of the blog.  I am deeply interested in where the scientific method can shed light and where its light begins to fade.  For mankind, to know everything is to know all that really exists.  If you think of everything that exists as falling inside a giant circle, the question that fascinates me is, “How much of the area of that circle can the scientific method enlighten?”  Is it the whole circle?  Is it half?  Is it a tiny fraction of the circle?

The question asks us to take a position on the supernatural and spiritual.  If you believe that there is a vast supernatural world out there, a world where God, angels, and demons exist, then you will probably say that the scientific method can only illuminate a small fraction of the circle of all things that exist.  The scientific method can only tell us about things or events that occur inside the four dimensions of space-time.

If, however, you believe that the four dimensions of space-time are all that exists and that the supernatural is imaginary, then the entire circle of all that exists can eventually be filled out by the scientific method.  In my discussions with skeptics over the years, there are those who fall in this latter group, but there are also those who remain open to the existence of the supernatural.

Those who maintain that the scientific method will eventually fill in the entire circle sometimes go on to make the following claim: “The scientific method forces us to conclude that miracles cannot occur.”  To me, this is a deeply confused statement.  It is true that miracles, in their totality, entail a supernatural element.  It is true that science cannot directly observe that which is supernatural, as the supernatural does not exist in space-time where science can operate.  But to say that the scientific method absolutely precludes miracles from existing is false.

The scientific method is one tool we have to fill in the giant circle of all that exists, but there are other tools (e.g., philosophy, logic, mathematics, spiritual disciplines).  Think of the scientific method as analogous to a screwdriver.  The screwdriver is a truly useful tool that we use all the time in construction.  In fact, any time we need to attach two objects with a screw, we use a screwdriver.  But we would find it very odd if screwdriver enthusiasts one day started running an ad campaign with the following slogan: “If you don’t use a screwdriver, you’re not constructing anything!”

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga has another way to answer those who say that science precludes miracles.

[This] argument…is like the drunk who insisted on looking for his lost car keys only under the streetlight on the grounds that the light was better there. In fact, it would go the drunk one better: it would insist that because the keys would be hard to find in the dark, they must be under the light.

Science is tremendously useful and the benefits of modern technology are hard to overstate, but let us never forget the limits.  There may very well be a supernatural world out there (in fact, most of us believe that).  Those who flatly say there is not are making a statement of faith that is not based on the scientific method, but based on their metaphysical worldview.

Miracles

Do We Believe in Miracles Due to the Evidence or Due to Our Desire to Believe?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

We’re back to the recurring question of the role of faith, the will, and evidence.  Those who believe in miracles frequently will point to evidence of specific miracles and say, “This is why I believe.”  Those who disbelieve miracles will claim that there is no evidence and that they won’t believe until they see irrefutable proof.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his classic The Brothers Karamazov, questions both of these claims.  The narrator in the book argues that for most people, their mind is made up about miracles long before they ever see the evidence.  It is their beliefs and their desires which win out, not a sober look at the evidence.  Here is the passage:

The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognized by him.

Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when he said, “I do not believe till I see.”

There is no doubt that our will, our desire to believe or not believe plays a very strong role in our assessment of the supernatural.  This sword cuts both ways, for neither the believer nor the non-believer can claim a dispassionate and unbiased approach.  As much as we’d like to believe that only the facts should sway our decisions, we are unable to do so.  Our challenge is to be aware of the bias and to minimize it the best we can.  Easier said than done.

Islam, Miracles

What Did Thomas Aquinas Have to Say about Islam?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Between AD 1258 and 1264, Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa contra Gentiles, a book at least partially aimed at arguing for the truth of Christianity against the falsehood of Islam.  Recall that Islam was founded and spread in the seventh century, about 600 years before Thomas wrote.

In an interesting section of book I, Thomas argues that the veracity of the miracle accounts in the Bible are supported by the successful spread of Christianity around the world.  In essence, he is saying, “How else could Christianity be so successful unless the miracle accounts were true?”  Here is Thomas in his own words:

This wonderful conversion of the world to the Christian faith is the clearest witness of the signs given in the past; so that it is not necessary that they should be further repeated, since they appear most clearly in their effect. For it would be truly more wonderful than all signs if the world had been led by simple and humble men to believe such lofty truths, to accomplish such difficult actions, and to have such high hopes. Yet it is also a fact that, even in our own time, God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith.

Thomas points out that given the humble roots of Christianity, it would be more miraculous for the religion to have spread without miracles than with them.  The miracles of Jesus and his apostles provide a reason for the initial spread of Christianity.

Thomas then goes on to differentiate the success of Christianity with the success of Islam.  He argues that Muhammad offered no miracles to prove he was from God, and that his sole appeal was based on the carnal pleasures he offered his followers, including military power.  Here again is Thomas:

On the other hand, those who founded sects committed to erroneous doctrines proceeded in a way that is opposite to this, The point is clear in the case of Muhammad. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth.

On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning, Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms.

Thomas makes some important distinctions between Islam and Christianity based on their respective beginnings.  It is paramount for all of us to understand these differences as we increasingly dialogue with the world about Islam.

Miracles, Science and God

Researchers Show How Wind Could Have Parted the Red Sea

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A study has just been released where researchers have shown how wind could have parted the Red Sea.

Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado have found a location in the Nile River’s ancient delta where an east wind — blowing at 63 mph for 12 hours — could have pushed back the waters and exposed a muddy land bridge.

When the wind died down, the water would have come rushing back, according to NCAR’s Carl Drews, lead author of a paper published today in the journal PLoS ONE.
The article describes how Drews came to his conclusions:
Drews scoured old maps of the way the Nile River delta and the waterways around the Red Sea’s Gulf of Suez may have looked thousands of years ago. Eventually, he found a map that showed an ancient river merging with a coastal lagoon near the Mediterranean, forming a U shape.

“It formed this bend in the body of water facing east,” Drews said. “When the wind blew from the east, the water would split around the bend — you can imagine that peninsula cutting the water like a ship’s prow.”

Ultimately, Drews didn’t know what was possible until he ran a computer simulation. When he did, he found that if a 63 mph wind blew for 12 hours, the 6-foot-deep water in the east-facing bend would have been pushed back, creating a dry passage more than two miles long and three miles wide.

Who knows if this is really what happened.  We’ll probably never find out for certain, but these sorts of historical scientific investigations always fascinate me, as they pull back the curtain to let us see how God may have used nature to perform some of his most spectacular miracles.
Atheism, Evolution, Existence of God, Intelligent Design, Miracles, Skeptics

Can Science Test for the Supernatural?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Christians believe that a supernatural being can be reasoned to by working backward from effect to cause.  We observe ourselves and we observe the world around us (those are the effects) and we reason that a supernatural cause is the best explanation for the things we observe.  This is how almost all arguments for God’s existence work.

Science can shed additional light on what we observe in the world around us, so in that sense science can be employed in arguments for God’s existence.  For example, science seems to have shown that the universe had a beginning and that the physical laws and constants that govern the universe are fine tuned for advanced life.  Both of these scientific finds are often used in arguments for God’s existence.

Those who hold a naturalistic worldview (the natural world is all that exists) seem to be divided on this subject.  Some naturalists deny that science can ever be used to test the existence of God and others affirm that science can test for the supernatural and that those tests have all turned out negative.  Still others, like evolutionary scientist Donald Prothero, appear to hold both views at the same time.  Consider the quotes below from Prothero’s book Evolution.

Prothero first suggests that scientists “cannot consider supernatural events in their hypotheses.”  Why? Because “once you introduce the supernatural to a scientific hypothesis, there is no way to falsify or test it.”  He adds that scientists are not allowed to consider God or miracles (i.e., the supernatural) because they are “completely untestable and outside the realm of science.”  All right, it seems that Prothero is firmly in the camp of those who say that science cannot say anything about the supernatural.

But in the very next paragraph in his book, he completely reverses course.  Prothero explains, “In fact, there have been many scientific tests of supernatural and paranormal explanations of things, including parapsychology, ESP, divination, prophecy, and astrology.  All of these non-scientific ideas have been falsified when subjected to the scrutiny of scientific investigation. . . . Every time the supernatural has been investigated by scientific methods, it has failed the test.”

Huh??  Is your head spinning like mine?  Prothero first claims that science cannot test the supernatural and then he says that science has tested the supernatural.  Which is it?  It can’t be both.

I am not pointing this out to poke fun at Prothero, but because I see some skeptics making this mistake over and over again.  They want to desperately cling to the claim that science can say nothing about the existence of God (so that they can remove science as a tool in the Christian’s evidential toolbox), but they also desperately want to tell people how science has shown that God doesn’t exist (they retain science as a tool for skeptics to nullify the supernatural).  Unfortunately, holding both of these positions at the same time is flatly contradictory.  The skeptic must choose one or the other. Either science can test for the supernatural or it cannot.

I have seen this same mistake made in the intelligent design/evolution debate.  Evolutionists will claim that Michael Behe’s idea of irreducible complexity is non-scientific or scientifically untestable, but these same evolutionists will then produce scientific research they claim scientifically disproves irreducible complexity!  If it’s not scientifically testable, then how are they producing research which scientifically disproves it?

If you’re a Christian talking to a scientific skeptic, watch out for this skeptical two-step.  If you’re a scientific skeptic or naturalist, make up your mind which it is, because you are really confusing me.

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Islam, Miracles, Top Ten Posts of 2009

Why Don’t We See Miracles Today? – #5 Post of 2009

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Many people wonder why we don’t see miracles such as the parting of the sea, the raising of the dead, and people walking on water.  It seems like miracles were pretty common in the Old and New Testaments, but today nothing like that seems to happen.  Why?

First of all, I believe there are indeed miracles being performed by God today, as I have certainly heard many accounts from Christians that I know and trust.  Most of these accounts, however, are hard to verify as true supernatural events, and they are never captured on CNN for the whole world to see.  So even though miracles seem to be occurring today, they still aren’t typically the public displays of supernatural power displayed in the Bible.

I think one reason we don’t see these public miracles is that God is not confirming new revelation today.  You see, the Bible records some 250 miraculous events, but they are concentrated, according to Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, in three time periods: 1) the time of Moses, 2) the time of Elijah and Elisha, and 3) the time of Jesus and his apostles.

According to the Bible, God used miracles as signs to confirm his messengers (prophets)  to skeptical populations.  Read the Gospel of John to see how John records seven miraculous signs performed by Jesus to prove he was from God.  Likewise, consider Elijah on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18).  One of the ways God confirmed his messengers was through miracles.

There were hundreds of years recorded in the Bible with no miracles, so it is false to say that miracles occurred all throughout biblical times.  They did not.  They primarily occurred when God was confirming a new revelation from his prophets.  By the way, this is one reason why Jews and Christians rejected Muhammad as a prophet of God while he was alive.  He did not perform any miracles (Sura 3:181–184).

So, today we do not have new revelation coming from one of God’s prophets, because Jesus and his apostles were the final revelation from God.  Everything God wants us to know about himself, through his prophets, is recorded in the Holy Scriptures.  Since there is no need for new prophets to tell us new things about God, then the need for public displays of supernatural power is absent.

Can God do miracles today?  Of course.  But we should not expect the same kinds and numbers of miracles today as when Moses, Elijah, and Jesus lived.

Miracles, New Testament Reliability, Resurrection, Skeptics

Did First Century Christians Believe in Miracles Because They Were Pre-Scientific?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I just finished reading a wonderful book by New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, called The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.  In his chapter where he discusses the miracles recorded in the Gospels, he had this to say about the scientific objection to miracles.

In short, the scientific objection to the credibility of miracles is that the discovery of the natural, physical laws by which the universe operates has proved them impossible.  Those who hold this view sometimes go on to explain that people used to believe in miracles because they had only a primitive scientific understanding.  The Christian doctrines of the virgin birth and resurrection, for example, could spring from just such a pre-scientific milieu.  Only a moment’s thought is required, however, to realize that people of every age have known that two human parents are needed for conception and that death is irreversible! (emphasis mine)

Well put, Dr. Blomberg.  Well put.

General Apologetics, Miracles, Skeptics

How Would You Respond to a Miracle?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

I just finished a detailed study of the seven miraculous signs Jesus performed in the Gospel of John.  If you don’t recall, they are:

  1. The Miracle of Turning Water Into Wine
  2. The Miracle of Healing the Nobleman’s Son
  3. The Miracle of Healing the Man at the Pool of Bethesda
  4. The Miracle of Feeding Five Thousand
  5. The Miracle of Walking on Water
  6. The Miracle of Healing the Blind Man
  7. The Miracle of Raising Lazarus from the Dead

The fascinating thing about these miracle accounts is how people reacted to them.  There is a wide cross-section of responses.  The way I would summarize the responses is in the following way:

  1. Some people responded by believing in Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God, and dedicating their lives to him, which is exactly the purpose John gives for writing his Gospel (see John 20:30-31).
  2. Some people responded by believing in Jesus, but only in a shallow way.  These people would have eternal life, but their growth as followers of Jesus was static and stunted.  They did not move beyond their initial belief.
  3. Some people responded by believing in Jesus as a political figure who could solve their earthly problems for them.  They did not believe in him as the Messiah and Son of God.
  4. Some people responded in disbelief and outright hatred and rejection.  These people felt threatened by Jesus’ growing popularity and his rejection of their traditions.  Ultimately,  some of these people had Jesus executed.

It is my contention that these miracles act like a mirror for each person that saw them.  The miracles, for those who loved God and were willing, confirmed their hope for a true Messiah.

For those who wanted a political savior, Jesus’ miracles confirmed their hope in him as a “political Messiah.”

For those who wanted to retain their own autonomy and power, Jesus’ miracles did nothing but agitate them.  There was no miracle he could perform that would convince them.

Where the heart is willing,  evidence, such as miracles, can be quite convincing.  Where the heart is not willing, no amount of evidence will do.

As an apologist, this frustrates me to no end.  I have spent years amassing evidence for Christianity, which I think is thoroughly convincing, but many times I present that evidence to people who are completely unwilling to listen.  I’ve just learned to roll with it, though, because I also present evidence to people who are willing to listen, and that always makes my day!

Which kind of person are you?  Which group would you fall in?  If you are someone who no amount of evidence can convince, then why is that?

Just some food for thought.

Atheism, General Apologetics, Miracles, Religion

If Only I Could See a Miracle, I Would Believe

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

If you are a person who says this about Christianity, excuse me for being skeptical.

God performed miracles through Moses, and yet Pharaoh did not believe.

God performed miracles through Elijah, and yet Jezebel did not believe.

Jesus performed numerous miracles that confirmed his power over sickness, weather, and even death.  Ultimately he rose from the dead.  Yet still some who saw these miracles did not believe.

God has provided plenty of evidence that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and rose from the dead.  If you are a person who has heard the gospel message and understood it, but you continue to demand more evidence in the form of miracles, ask yourself if there isn’t another problem.

Is it possible that you just don’t want to believe?  Is it possible that no matter how much evidence you are shown, that no matter how many times God reveals himself to you, that you just will not believe?

If that is the case, search your own heart and figure out why you don’t want to believe.  Where is this barrier of belief coming from?  We can answer your questions about Christianity, but until you deal with your will, our answers will remain unpersuasive.