The Reasonableness of Belief in Miracles

In the first part of this series, I argued that there is no good reason to believe that miracles are impossible.  In the second part, I presented a brief synopsis of the evidence that miracles happen.  In this post, I will respond to some of the common objections to accepting eyewitness testimony to miracles.

Hume on Miracles

The classic work arguing that it is unreasonable to accept eyewitness testimony to miracles is the section “On Miracles” in David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.  Hume’s basic argument is that “a firm and unalterable experience” tells us that there are fixed laws of nature, and since miraculous events by definition deviate from these laws of nature, our “uniform experience” tells us that miracles do not happen.^[1]David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Various Subjects, Volume 2 (Edinburgh: George Caw, 1800), 120-21.  If someone tells us that they witnessed a miraculous event, then, we never have good reason to believe it, since our experience tells us that miracles do not happen, but people do sometimes lie or are mistaken.

While pretending to be based in empirical evidence, Hume’s argument is actually an exercise in circular reasoning.  He rejects all claims of miracles because of a supposed “uniform experience” that miracles do not happen.  But in order to claim that the “uniform experience” of human beings is that miracles do not happen, he has to reject all miracle claims a priori.  As we saw in our examination of the evidence for miracles in my last post, there are, in fact, hundreds of millions of miracle claims made by people living today.  This is hardly consistent with the idea that the “uniform experience” of human beings is that miracles do not happen.

Hume claims that there is no case where multiple sensible, educated people of good character and reliability have made a miracle claim in a case where the facts are open to public examination.^[2]Hume, 122.  However, this is simply not true.  One example among others is the miraculous healing of Barbara from multiple sclerosis which I discussed in my last post; I have personally met multiple sensible, educated eyewitnesses to this miracle of good character and reliability, and there is medical documentation.

Hume argues that our uniform experience of the laws of nature cancels out the weight of any eyewitness testimony to a miracle, such “that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle.”^[3]Hume, 134  Even if all historians agreed that a miracle took place, he writes, “I would still reply that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence” rather than from a genuine miracle.^[4]Hume, 135  These statements show what a narrow-minded, closed-minded person Hume is.  He openly admits that he will not believe something, no matter how strong the evidence is.  It is true that “the knavery and folly of men” sometimes lead to people making false miracle claims, but it could be just as true that “the knavery and folly of men” could lead people to refuse to believe a miracle took place in spite of strong proof that it did.

A second argument Hume makes is that we should be suspicious of all miracle claims because people are naturally inclined to spread tales of miracles and believe in them, and there are many false stories of miracles.^[5]Hume, 123-5.  In response, some people may be naturally inclined to spread tales of miracles, but other people (e.g. Hume) may be prejudiced against believing in or talking about miraculous events, even when there is good evidence.  It is true that there are many false claims of miracles.  However, there are also many false claims of natural events.  It is arbitrary to reject all claims of miraculous events a priori because some miracle claims are false, just as it would be arbitrary to reject all claims of, say, political events because some political claims are false.  If we want to be reasonable, we must examine each claim of an event with an open mind on a case-by-case basis.

A third argument Hume makes is that alleged miracles do not seem to happen today, or if they do “they are observed to abound chiefly among ignorant and barbarous nations.”^[6]Hume, 125.  This argument smacks of racism, and at the very least is culturally arrogant and elitist.  Just because someone lacks a modern Western education, this does not mean that they are not a reliable eyewitness.  In any case, while most miracle claims made today do come from the Global South, there are, as we saw in my last post, a significant number of miracle claims made today by reliable eyewitnesses in modern Western societies.

A final argument Hume makes is that the miracle claims of various rival religions cancel each other out.  If one religion and its miracles is true, Hume argues, then all its rival religions, along with all of their miracles, must be false.  Therefore, whenever a witness of one religion claims to have seen a miracle, they are directly contradicting the witnesses to miracles of all other religions.  Therefore, Hume, concludes, every witness to a miracle is contradicted by many other witnesses, seriously calling into question their reliability.^[7]Hume, 127-128

Hume’s argument assumes that the evidence for the miracles of various religions is equally strong, which is simply not true.  However, even if we grant this assumption, his argument still fails.  This is because Hume’s first premise (that if one religion is true then all the miracle claims of adherents of other religions are necessarily false) is unsound.  

If Christianity is true, that does not necessarily mean that all the miracle claims of nonChristians are false.  Christians have always believed that there are demons who can cause miraculous, supernatural events among unbelievers.  And just because Christians believe that faith in Jesus and membership in the Church is the only way to be saved and reconciled to God, this does not mean that they must believe that God never performs miracles among nonChristians.  God could, for example, sometimes hear prayers for healing from Jews and Muslims, and mercifully miraculously heal them, even though they do not (yet) have a saving relationship with Him.  So, all of Hume’s arguments against the reasonableness of accepting eyewitness testimony to miracles fail.

Studies that “Prove” Miracles Don’t Happen

There have been a number of studies done on the effectiveness of prayer on medical health.  These studies have compared the condition of ill patients who had people praying for them compared to patients who did not have people praying for them.  Some of these studies found no difference in the health of patients who were prayed for compared to those who were not.  These studies, many have argued, scientifically “prove” that prayer does not work and that God does not miraculously heal.

However, some of these studies have found that patients who were prayed for had better health than those who were not.  And the studies that found no difference in the health of patients who were prayed for can be criticized for including prayers who were not orthodox Christians and did not even believe in miracles.^[8]See discussion in The Case for Miracles: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Supernatural by Lee Strobel (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), pages 121-138.

Perhaps further studies will be done which will reinforce the conclusion that prayer does or does not have an effect on patients’ health.  In either case, this will not really tell us much about whether it is reasonable to believe in miracles, since this entire approach of “scientifically” examining the effectiveness of prayer is fundamentally flawed.

Let’s say you want to know whether someone (let’s call him Bob) is a good friend.  You decide to answer this question by following him around all day with a camera in his face, and having various people who claim to be Bob’s friends come up to him and ask him for favors.  You then take note of how many of these favors Bob does for his “friends,” and on that basis reach a conclusion about whether Bob is a good friend.

Would this be a good method for determining whether Bob is a good friend?  Of course not.  You cannot answer a question like this using a scientific experiment, and there is no way that Bob would act naturally in this situation.  If you want to know whether Bob is a good friend, you must ask Bob’s actual friends and listen to their testimony.

It is the same with God and miracles.  You cannot answer the question of whether prayer works or God does miracles with a scientific experiment.  God is not an impersonal force who mechanically dispenses miracles of healing a fixed percentage of the time He is asked.  God is a personal agent who freely chooses to act miraculously, according to His will, in certain circumstances.  If you want to know whether God works miracles, you must ask those who know Him and listen to their testimony.

It is no use criticizing belief in miracles because it cannot be proven scientifically.  The overwhelming majority of our beliefs are not based on scientific evidence, but on testimony.  If an eyewitness tells us that a miracle occurred, and we know the eyewitness is reliable, we should believe them, just as we believe the testimony of reliable eyewitnesses to every other sort of event.

Stubborn Naturalism

When faced with strong evidence for a miraculous event, a disbeliever in miracles may acknowledge that something extraordinary has occurred, but stubbornly refuse to believe that what happened was genuinely miraculous.  They may insist that, although it seems there is no naturalistic explanation for it, scientific progress will one day be able to provide a naturalistic explanation.  For example, if there is a miraculous, instantaneous healing, they could claim that it could have been caused by a technologically advanced alien with a cloaking device and extremely advanced medical technology who just happened to heal the person at the same moment that someone prayed for them in the Name of Jesus.

It is always possible to come up with an alternative explanation for any event.  Anything is possible.  It is possible that dinosaurs never existed and that earth’s fossil record is an elaborate hoax created by time-traveling mad scientists from the future.  But a possible explanation is not the same thing as a reasonable explanation.  

At some point, believing that there must be a naturalistic explanation for every miraculous event is just unreasonable, blind faith.  We have no evidence at all that there are invisible outer space aliens with advanced medical technology sneaking around Earth.  But there are millions of people who testify to having powerful encounters with the living God.  Anything is possible.  But it is unreasonable to posit fanciful naturalistic explanations that are not based on anything we know when there is a much more simple and readily available supernatural explanation.   No belief exists in a vacuum.  What a person considers to be a reasonable explanation for an event is determined by their network of other beliefs.  There is no such thing as purely objective evidence.  All evidence must be interpreted according to what a person considers to be a reasonable explanation for it.  So if someone thinks they have good reasons for believing that God does not exist, it makes sense that they would be resistant to acknowledging that a miraculous event was indeed a Divine miracle.  If someone is really convinced that a miracle-working God cannot possibly exist, they may first need to be convinced that this is not true before they will be willing to accept the evidence for miracles.  But for those who think it is at least possible that a miracle-working God could exist, the evidence for miracles provides a powerful argument that there is a God who is real and who is at work in the world.

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