First of a series of essays on the problem of miracles in Christianity
During a conversation with friends on the subject of faith and reason, someone brought up the following objection:
Christian apologetics can only demonstrate that faith in Divine revelation is a reasonable proposition. I would say that the challenges presented by some content in the Holy Scriptures are significant. As you pointed out, “We evaluate scriptures claiming to be revelation with the tools of archeology, linguistics, textual analysis for internal consistency and external verification, to validate, in some measure, the veracity of such claims.” This is all very good, but what of the most difficult propositions hidden in the texts: creation stories, Noah’s Ark, the parting of the Red Sea, a talking ass, sword-wielding angelic messengers, chariots of fire swooping in to carry men to heaven, floating ax heads, the regeneration of limbs, a virgin birth, or Lazarus raised from the dead?
The subject raised here is a challenging and common point in any discussion about faith and reason: what about miracles in Scripture? Events like those mentioned above are not within our experience, and it seems logical and reasonable to dismiss them as fabrications, myths, or, at best, allegorical tales intended for moral teaching. The skeptic often finds it incomprehensible that the religious believe in miracles. Such events are logically and physically impossibilities that are outside the laws of nature and science, and therefore, any rational, intelligent person cannot or should accept such unadulterated nonsense. This aspect of their faith can be difficult for even those with religious convictions. Some will dodge the issue: “The Bible says it, I believe it.” End of discussion — and not satisfying for those seeking more rational evidence for faith than mere assent to the truth of revelation alone.
Those who reject the possibility of miracles do so not because of lack of evidence, as they rarely objectively evaluate it, but because of fundamental presuppositions in their view of the world. If the universe is solely made up of material, is randomly conceived, and without any possibility of divine existence, then miracles must either be mythical or possess other naturalistic explanations. Those who hold beliefs in a divine entity or power, particularly one that is impersonal or abstract, cannot imagine a personal, supernatural Being intervening in the natural world in any demonstrable way. Even for those who may believe in a personal God, the idea that the divine would intervene demonstrably in ways contravening the laws of nature and their daily experience of the world seems both implausible and impossibly remote.
Yet the problem of miracles is central to the integrity of faith. If miracles cannot occur, if they are naught but myths and morality tales, then faith itself must be without substance or certainty and becomes nothing more than a comfortable belief system without any basis in reality, history, or objective truth. We must face the problem of miracles head-on if we are to have faith grounded in reason rather than diaphanous desire.
Not every miracle held by faith needs to be provable — indeed, were such a thing possible, it would destroy the very essence of faith, for we do not believe in what we see, but rather in what is unseen. Once the premise that the divine can intervene, and indeed has intervened in tangible ways superseding the dictates of logic and the constraints of the material universe, the most significant hurdle to accepting their possibility has been bridged. Reason demands that faith be reasonable: the injection of the divine and transcendent into the temporal and material ought not to lie purely within the realm of the easily deceptive determinations born of mere thought or mental theorems. We should expect to see God’s footprints if He has entered history.
At its heart, Christianity is about just such an injection of the timeless into time and the transcendent into the material. The ripples of this event radiate throughout history, with implications unspeakably vast and ever-widening. At the vortex of this widening gyre lies a miracle: the God-man comes to earth, is brutally and unjustly executed, and subsequently raised from the dead. That a man should claim to be God is hardly unique. That a man be unjustly tortured and killed and esteemed afterwards as a martyr is no rare event. That a man should make such claims, meet such an end, and rise thenceforth from the grave recasts preposterous claims as profound certainty and transforms his death into something transcendent and compelling. If this event is but a myth, Christianity becomes little more than platitudes and powerless moralizing; if true, no event in time is more significant, no aspect of life untouched by its enormity and seriousness.
If belief in this miracle is reasonable, if we may trace these long-traveled waves of faith back to their source and find substantial and compelling evidence in the inspection of their origins, then the world becomes a vastly different place from that seen through a myopic focus on superficial pseudo-reality and all-too-comfortable denial of the divine.
By their very nature as supernatural phenomena, one cannot “prove” a miracle as one might prove a math theorem. Nor will mere facts or historical evidence themselves be sufficient to document with unquestioned certainty those things upon which so much rests — for the human mind often proves stubbornly intransigent when new conclusions run counter to cherished beliefs or worldview conviction. Were such a point-by-point argument approach foolproof, there would be no Holocaust deniers or 9/11 conspirators.
If God does indeed exist and intrudes into human history in ways that cannot be explained by mere reason and material experience, then such a manifestation has profound implications for everyone who encounters it. A God who intervenes in time stands face-to-face with us wherever we may stand. We may hate Him or bow down to Him, but we can no longer live comfortably in delusional denial about such a reality.
I hope to lay out such evidence in detail in my following essays. I break no new ground here; this evidence has been garnered and sifted many times over by many others far more qualified to present it than I. But it seems apropos to show it again in some measure at this time, in an age increasingly skeptical and cynical, in a culture dismissive of truth and obsessed with the glorious glitter of vacuous beauty, of knowledge without wisdom, at the pinnacle of civilization yet ignorant of its stories and the substance of its soul.
