Review of In Defense of Miracles (1999, 2005)
Richard Carrier
1. Summary
2. What's Good and Bad
3. The Philosophical Problem
(a) The Shaky Groundwork of Corduan and Purtill
(b) Nash on Naturalism vs. Christian Theism
(c) Moreland's "Christian Science"
(d) Beck's Argument for God
4. The Historical Problem
(a) Beckwith on Historiography
(b) Geivett's Exercise in Hyperbole
(c) Clark's Survey of Other Religions
(d) Newman on Prophecy as Miracle
(e) Craig's Empty Tomb & Habermas on Visions
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Summary Review of In Defense of Miracles (1999, 2005)
Richard Carrier
[Part 1 of a more comprehensive Review of In Defense of Miracles.]
In 1997, InterVaristy Press published In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God's Action in History (1997), edited by Gary Habermas and R. Douglas Geivett. This is a well-composed defense of miracles which makes arguments that need to be addressed. It is not really a defense of miracles as such, but makes a cumulative case for Christianity, centering on the resurrection and incarnation of Christ, drawing on fourteen different authors and responding to two critics. R. Douglas Geivett, Gary Habermas, Richard Purtill, Norman Geisler, Francis Beckwith, Winfried Corduan, Ronald Nash, J.P. Moreland, W. David Beck, Stephen Davis, David Clark, Robert Newman, John Feinberg, and William Lane Craig, all line up against David Hume and Antony Flew.
However, apart from the usual plethora of faulty arguments typical of all Christian apologetics, this work suffers from two major faults: first, with the exception of the long-dead Hume, who could not benefit from the advances in historical method or the many discoveries of the past two centuries, none of the contributors are historians. Considering how crucial historical method is to the issue, the complete absence of contributions by experienced historians leaves much to be criticized. As a result, the Christians fail to adequately account for the historical context within which ancient Christian literature was written, and show little understanding of proper historical method. Related to this is a lack of serious contact with scientific literature relating to hallucination, delusion, psychosomatic illness and recovery, and other relevant aspects of human psychology.
Second, at no point are actual miracle-accounts from the modern and middle ages ever addressed in any detail. Since this is what I expected the book to include, I was disappointed to find it lacking. I was unable to see how they would apply their methods to miracles that they are not required to believe in order to justify their faith. Can there be any unbiased applications of their own thinking? Although one chapter deals with miracles in other religions, this is cursory and largely avoids the issue of which Christian miracles we are entitled to doubt. An analysis of medieval and modern miracle accounts is needed to prove that their methods can be consistent with their own common sense. After all, if there are well-attested miracles that justify Catholicism, for example, then these authors ought to convert. But this kind of question was avoided like the plague.
A third, but less significant, fault is that the one modern skeptic allowed to have his say (Antony Flew) clearly composed his contribution prior to seeing any of the others, and consequently his chapter wastes a lot of space arguing points which the other contributors already concede. This makes his essay hardly worth including, although he makes a few essential points about epistemology and historical method which did need to be added to Hume's rather outdated argument. Normally, I would not expect them to even include Hume and Flew, but if they are going to go to this length, they really ought to give Flew a better chance to say something useful. Moreover, what I would really expect here is a contribution by a skeptical historian. Although Flew has some skill and experience as an historian, his expertise lies in the biography of Hume, not in ancient history. This book would have been much more interesting had they included a chapter by a skeptic of the ancient Christian miracle accounts who was actually an expert in the relevant history.
Nevertheless, the book contains a virtual treasure of bibliographical notes. Although this device is used by the authors to cite each other's works ad nausium, even this makes the book a valuable reference, for believers and doubters. It is also well written and nicely organized (although I was disappointed to find that it lacks an index). This is the very best that contemporary Christian apologetics can offer on this subject and it martials the works and arguments of all the leading Christian scholars today. Although the book includes two articles by skeptics, there is no skeptical rebuttal of any kind, and the content is almost entirely pro-Christian. It should not be mistaken for anything more than a Christian apologetic work, but we cannot fault it for this, because it does not claim to be anything else.
For a more detailed summary of the virtues and faults of this book, see What's Good and Bad, and for even more in-depth discussion, see my treatment of particular chapters categorized under the Philosophical Problem and the Historical Problem, in this review's Table of Contents. Note that all sections of this review were originally written in 1999 and then updated in 2005.
OTHER REVIEWS: I also looked for reviews in print, but these are mainly laudatory, excessively brief, and are all Christian-oriented. For example, The Expository Times (109.6, p. 188: March, 1998) and The Stone Campbell Journal (1.1: April, 1998). But most recently Evan Fales wrote a critical review, "Successful Defense? A Review of In Defense of Miracles," for Philosophia Christi (3.1, pp. 7-35: 2001), and responses from the authors follow that. If anyone is aware of other reviews that contain any substantial discussion, please let me know of them. There are, of course, several summaries available on the web, which are all found at Christian websites, but most are little more than promo material (e.g. see the Calvin Web, First Things, and the InterVarsity Press promo page).
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What's Good and Bad in In Defense of Miracles (1999, 2005)
Richard Carrier
[Part 2 of a more comprehensive Review of In Defense of Miracles.]
Many of the chapters in the book In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God's Action in History (1997) make arguments that need to be addressed, or at least acknowledged. For instance, Richard Purtill's essay on "Defining Miracles" (61-72) makes a much-needed point. All too often the theist's position is straw-manned by setting forth a definition of miracle that many theists do not really hold, and then arguing for the impossibility or difficulty of that definition. This can no longer be done in response to this book or any miracle claims made by the many authors involved, many of whom still engage in public debates.
These authors have made it their first point to define what they mean by a miracle, and it is not what many critics will expect. In Purtill's words, "a miracle is an event brought about by the power of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history" (72). Though this definition creates certain problems for recognizing a miracle, it should be clear that this is not something that is logically impossible, nor is it something that is unable to be a subject of scientific investigation, two claims usually made by critics.
However, in the process of escaping these two criticisms, the theists have run right into the camp of the empiricists and are forced to defend themselves on another front: how can anyone recognize a miracle even if they see one? Winfried Corduan's chapter aims to address this (99-112), but it is so feeble it's astonishing to me that his essay wasn't dumped altogether. He shows no signs of having read Purtill's chapter, and thus does not address problems specific to Purtill's definition of a miracle. Moreover, his argument, even as stated, is too weak: he only aims to show that it is "possible" that miracles could be recognized. He never attempts to show exactly how we are to recognize them. Certainly, it may be possible to travel faster than light, too, but how exactly would one propose to do that? Corduan thus fails to make any useful point, and his is a major weak link in the book's deliberately "cumulative" argument. I devote a separate chapter to Corduan's Failure.
On the other hand, Geisler's chapter successfully refutes part of Hume's "argument against miracles," which he says is largely responsible for the modern mindset against the miraculous. Geisler rightly notes that Hume's argument was actually against belief in miracles, not against their possibility, but he does miss one nuance of Hume's argument: Hume only addresses miracle stories, and never even touches upon the question of direct observation. On that question Hume is silent. But Hume's argument is still too strong for one important reason: two hundred years have passed in which our understanding of the universe, and our ability to examine it, has magnified a thousand times, thus making possible what Hume in his own time thought impossible. Antony Flew explains how Hume was perfectly justified to hold the position he did at that time, by analogy with a similar case involving Herodotus (51-2). Moreover, so long as the state of the evidence remains as it is, we are still justified in sharing the same conclusion as Hume, even though we can now say it may yet be possible to change this conclusion, if new evidence were to arise, something Hume, unaware of the future, did not concede. This is what Geisler's contribution establishes.
In short, Geisler adequately flushes out the fallacy in the claim that since miracles are unrepeatable but natural laws repeatable, therefore evidence of the latter will always outweigh the former. This is not sound as a logical principle, since it is possible for miraculous events to be common enough that, even should each one be unique, the preponderance of cases would stand as repeatable evidence that miracles, in general, do occur. Likewise, history is filled with the unrepeatable. We shall never be able to repeat Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, but nevertheless we believe we can prove it happened. Although Flew and Hume argue that this sort of claim is believable because we know such an event to be possible, given the natural laws as we know them, this is not the whole story. For example, there was a long time when we could not adequately account for precisely how the pyramids were built, yet we still regarded the evidence that it had in fact been done by human hands as compelling enough to believe it.
The question is thus not just one of mere repeatability, but a combined issue of feasibility and evidence: we disbelieve what we currently regard as unfeasible, and what we lack sufficient evidence to believe in the first place. And since God may yet be proved to exist, it follows that God's action in history, in the form of miracles, would in that case become feasible. Repeatability would come into the picture only when it came time to prove that God can work miracles (by Purtill's Definition). Then all we would need is repeatable proof of his general ability, not the repetition of any specific event--just as all we need to believe that Shakespeare could write Othello is a general proof that men can write plays. Of course, although this makes belief in miracles logically possible, the current state of things might not make such a belief reasonable. But other authors were left to address that issue.
Another essay that was important to read, and yet very typical of contemporary apologetics, is Ronald Nash's chapter on how a worldview is a crucial consideration in any argument about what is possible or impossible or what we can expect (115-131). The upshot is that when the world is seen from a Christian point of view, it is not unreasonable to expect miracles to be possible and recognizable, even if it is justifiably unreasonable from a skeptic's point of view. Of course, the problem here is that the worldview in question must first be justifiable. If it is unreasonable to adopt a Christian point of view, then there is no point in arguing about what is reasonable from that point of view, because it will not be reasonable to expect that point of view to correlate with reality. Nash does not succeed in making this essential case.
Of course, Nash argues that "naturalism" (a particular kind of atheism) is unreasonable (I address this attack in a separate chapter on Nash's Argument), but he does not even attempt a case for the reasonableness of Christian theism. This creates a disconnect between his introduction, where he argues that Christian theism makes miracles plausible, and his conclusion, where he claims that naturalism (which makes miracles implausible) is unreasonable. We are left to wonder, even if naturalism is unreasonable, has he made the case that believing in miracles is reasonable? It might be, if Christian theism were reasonable, but he does not argue that. Of course, the rest of the book is somewhat structured to make that case, but primarily through the argument from miracles, and that cannot even get off the ground if you do not first establish that it is reasonable to believe in miracles in the first place. In other words, Christian theism must be reasonable without appealing to miracles before you can use it as a justification for believing in them. Otherwise, all you have is a circular argument, which is not an argument at all, but a mere assertion. This is not to say that you must show Christian theism to be reasonable before you can be justified believing in miracles, but you cannot use "Christian theism" as the basis for that justification unless you have first justified Christian theism.
A better point is made by J.P. Moreland in his essay on theistic science (132-148), although he drops the ball by leaving most of his argument in other sources which he does not quote, wasting space here to weakly argue for libertarian freewill. Though he uses this approach in a novel way, it is only of doctrinal relevance, since libertarian freewill is not required for miracles to exist or to be studied scientifically (I discuss his argument further in a separate chapter on Moreland's 'Christian Science'). Here I will discuss the underlying, key point--the purpose of this chapter in the book's editorial strategy: miracles can be a subject of scientific investigation. In principle, I agree. But he does not make a good case. There is also something sly about his argument: he chooses the weakest case for the reasonableness of Christian theism, rather than what would amount to the best case if Christian theism were actually true.
For example, Moreland argues that a "god-of-the-gaps" approach is not unscientific, which is a difficult position to defend, although it can be true under certain conditions. But "theistic science" would be better defended the same way all sciences are: by showing the actual positive contributions of that science. For instance, if we could study the attributes of God the same way we can study those of human beings, such as by asking Him to do things and observing His capabilities, and observing His personality as reflected in His choices, moral as well as casual, and so forth, then it would make perfect sense to include theism as a branch of science, since its claims could then be tested experimentally, and that is one key feature of sound science--one of the differences between science on the one hand, and philosophy and theology on the other. It is also the one thing that would actually improve our knowledge about God and the universe. This would also follow for other features of Christian theism, for example the claim that certain people can heal others by the grace of God.
But Moreland can't make this case, because it would betray the fact that there is no way such a science could ever take off, for God does not make himself available to be tested. Neither do faith healers for that matter. There is, to put it bluntly, nothing to study. This makes his case for theistic science look as ridiculous as it really is. No wonder he avoids it. Instead, he argues for his theistic science by only talking about null hypotheses (though he does not use that term, this is in fact what he is talking about), as if that were sufficient to make an investigation a science. After all, a science consisting of nothing but null hypotheses would never make any progress. It is true that it can be a valid scientific endeavor to experimentally refute a claim, but a science which did nothing but refute, which never experimentally tested a positive theory, would not be a very useful science.
Most importantly, however, Moreland seems to assume that debunking naturalist theories is the same thing as proving theism. But his "theistic science" will never really touch on the idea of a god, and so it can hardly be called "theistic." It would only be able to show that one particular natural explanation for something was untrue. But there will always be another one around the corner, and his theistic scientists would be like hamsters treading a wheel. A real "theistic science" would actually seek to experimentally prove that a god exists, and as Beck defines God, that would be a feasible scientific endeavor. But that cannot be done by merely debunking alternatives--for there will always be a new alternative. And since science has repeatedly failed to experimentally prove that Beck's god exists, the concept of a "theistic science" is ludicrous--even more ludicrous than the idea of a "psychic science" (and for a critique of how an exclusive focus of null-hypotheses has doomed parapsychology, see Dr. Susan Blackmore's autobiography In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist, 1996). I am left wondering whether Moreland knows this, and thus is being devious by avoiding the issue, or if he has somehow missed this essential point.
After Moreland, some contributions were obviously necessary to make their cumulative case for miracles, but are not really worth reading. For example, W. David Beck's essay on "God's Existence" (149-162) is a rather poor summary of tired arguments for the existence of god that we have all seen refuted before. The one useful feature of his essay is that he actually defines "God." Moreover, his definition may surprise you: "God is a being powerful enough to produce events in space/time" and thus doesn't have to be omnipotent, "God is an intelligence with a capacity to frame the convergence of events in space/time" and thus doesn't have to be omniscient, and "God is a personality with the moral concern to act in history" and thus doesn't have to be omnibenevolent (149). Of course, most Christians believe God is all these things and more, and the book itself does not make a consistent case, since Stephen Davis gives a different definition of God later on (163). But Beck at least sets himself a task that is much less ridiculous. Even so, he fails to make a case, and in a separate chapter I address Beck's Failed Attempt.
Perhaps the most useless essay included is that of Stephen Davis, who argues the seemingly inane point that a god acting in history is plausible (163-177). In particular, is it possible for God to be "immaterial" and yet still affect matter and energy? Does the idea of god being "timeless" still allow for discrete actions in time? Does it make sense for a divine genius to keep tinkering with a universe that he should have been smart enough to make tinker-free in the beginning? Does it make sense to even believe in a miracle-working God? These sound like impressive questions to tackle, but Davis only addresses them in the most cursory and predictable fashion. The only answer Davis gives to each of them is "it's possible" and yet that hardly needs to be argued. This, then, is not an argument for belief, but a defense against alternative theologies, like Deism, which deny that a God acting in history is logically possible, and against atheists who like to bombard theists with boring, nitpicking arguments.
Davis' contribution is essentially like that of John Feinberg (226-246), who desperately defends the notion of the trinity (and the dual-nature of Christ as God and man) by arguing vigorously that it is logically possible. Both authors acknowledge that being possible is nowhere near the same thing as being true, yet they say nothing about why we should believe that their solutions to these problems have anything to do with the truth. Consequently, both these essays are of very little value--unless you are one of those who think the answer to any of those questions is an unqualified "its impossible." Since I am not one of those, I will not discuss these chapters further.
All the remaining chapters deal in one respect or another with history or historical method, and so they will be discussed in more detail in separate chapters. One thing they all have in common is historical incompetence. It is often supposed that all historians do is read and write, and since anyone can do that, anyone can do history. This mistaken idea has captured virtually every Christian apologist, and these authors are no exception. Beckwith, Geivett, Clark, Newman, and Craig and Habermas each make at least one, if not several, mistakes of fact or method which no competent historian would likely make, much less get away with.
For there is a lot more to doing history than just reading and writing. I have not spent eight years of my life just learning how to read. Although I have devoted many of those years to learning how to read in four different languages (in addition to my own), something essential for any real historian, especially a historian of antiquity, the great bulk of my time, and my professors' attention, has been spent upon two tasks which take years to perfect and are essential for history to be done competently:
- First, it is necessary to become so immersed in a time and
culture that its features become familiar, and connections and
comparisons readily made, and importing modern assumptions into ancient
contexts easily avoided
- Second, it is necessary to master all the means and methods of error and deception in every form of historical evidence, from material evidence to inscriptions to literature, by constantly exposing yourself to these materials and studying the common features of obvious, and not-so-obvious, lies and mistakes.
Finally, Geivett and Habermas compose the book's introduction, which, among other things, surveys the modern history of historical thinking in basically a single page (15-6). But they forget to provide a similar summary of ancient historical thinking. Since the central focus of the book is on miracles recorded in antiquity, not to address how historical thinking in that period would affect the transmission and reception of stories is a serious fault. It is, however, indicative of how apologetics gets done: Christians think only within the box of their own time, culture and literature. Rarely do they read widely in the non-Christian literature of ancient times, much less tackle in any depth the critical issues of ancient history. Instead, they often import modern assumptions when examining ancient claims. This, too, will become clear in my more detailed analysis of their treatment of historical issues in this book.
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The Problem with Miracles and the Shaky Groundwork of Corduan and Purtill (1999, 2005)
Richard Carrier
[Part 3A of a larger Review of In Defense of Miracles.]
Defining "Miracle"
Purtill defines a miracle as "an event brought about by the power
of God that is a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature
for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history" (72). The
primary problem with his definition is that it makes recognizing an
actual miracle as a miracle almost impossible. As an empirical hypothesis, using Purtill's definition, the statement "x is a miracle" requires that we establish, with empirical evidence, a causal connection between the event x
and this God, which in turn requires that we establish, with empirical
evidence, that this God exists. That is a tough task. Moreover, we must
establish, again with empirical evidence, that God caused x for a
specific purpose, which in turn requires us to be able to examine and
demonstrate the intentions of God in that specific case. That can
sometimes be done without interviewing the agent--we can infer intent
from the nature and context of an action, and we often engage in such
reasoning in law courts, but it often isn't easy. Finally, we must be
able to establish that x could not have happened in "the ordinary
course of nature." In other words, we must show that God is a
necessary, not just a sufficient, cause of x. So Purtill has set
the bar almost too high for anyone, in the present world as we know it,
to ever recognize a miracle. Even if a miracle happened right in front
of us, we would almost never be able to establish that it was a miracle,
and this difficulty only becomes exponentially greater when the miracle
happened to someone else a long time ago.
Lazarus
As an example, according to Purtill, the resurrection of Lazarus was a miracle, because "it was Lazarus's nature to die in the circumstances of his illness" and so "his resurrection was, in the strict sense, supernatural,
going beyond what was natural for him" (63). On the other hand,
"if...we find that some apparently wonderful event can be accounted for
by some power less than the power of God" then it is not a miracle (64).
He gives no example here, yet he should give us a contrafactual about
Lazarus to show us he is seriously considering the problems with his
definition. We are left to wonder just what evidence or argument would
suffice to convince him that the resurrection of Lazarus could be
accounted for by some power less than that of God. Certainly we can account for Lazarus's resurrection as a result of natural causes, and are only prevented from proving
this by our inability to access any evidence, lacking a time machine or
any records, such as those of a doctor overseeing the care and burial
of Lazarus.But Purtill is equally unable to show that Lazarus's resurrection went "beyond" what was natural for him. He does not know what illness Lazarus had or whether he was really clinically dead, and so he does not what was natural for Lazarus, and almost certainly never will. Yet both he and I know there could be a plausible natural explanation for the report we have, for history and science afford us ample evidence that this sort of thing can happen. Do we have anywhere near as much evidence that there is a god who can explain it? We do not. And even if we had better proof that God exists, then we could only offer God as a possible explanation for Lazarus's revival. Of course, at present I honestly can't even do that, having no reason at all to believe there is such a god. Yet even if I had that proof, I would still only have God as a possible explanation, not a necessary one. In other words, even if I believed God exists, I would still not have enough evidence at hand to say that God raised Lazarus from the dead even if he did. That is because it is not enough to show that God could be a sufficient cause of this event. We must prove that God is a necessary cause, which, given the present state of the evidence, we can never do. This is a serious problem for Purtill. Later in the book Winfried Corduan attempts but fails to solve it.
Are there Any Recognizable Miracles?
However, I must make one thing clear: Purtill's definition at least
allows that it may be possible, in some circumstance, to prove--even
scientifically--that a miracle has occurred. But the circumstances
required would be so unusual that this is of little use to Christians,
since the resurrection of Jesus, for instance, does not meet these vital
circumstances and thus cannot be shown to be a miracle by Purtill's
definition. We simply have no evidence that will allow us to demonstrate
that God is a necessary cause of the reported resurrection of
Jesus. But since I expect it of Purtill, I will offer my own
contrafactual to show that I am serious about my position:I can imagine my pet fish suddenly speaking to me, telling me that God gave it the power to tell me that He loves me. As a rational person, my first hypotheses would be either that I am being tricked by someone, or that I am suffering from hallucinations--either from a brain disorder or chemical influence. Indeed, I would be running through my memory to recall if I drank anything that someone might have dropped a tab of acid in. I would then test all those hypotheses. Can others hear the fish talk? Can the fish tell me anything that I could not have learned any other way--like the name and location of a lost child? Is the sound unmistakably coming from the fish--even when I move it, and change its bowl? Can others confirm all of this? Can doctors confirm that I have no drugs in my system and no obvious brain disorder? Under these conditions, I believe I would have enough proof to call this a miracle under Purtill's definition (this example is borrowed from my article "A Fish Did Not Write This Essay").
Now, someone might say that even this is not enough, because this phenomenon could still conceivably be caused by demons or aliens or psychics or something equally bizarre (or an even more elaborate natural explanation, such as an extraordinarily sophisticated delusion). In other words, I still would not have enough to be certain that God was a necessary cause of the fish's ability to talk, but given what the fish is saying and what I am learning from it, and all the other details, I would have enough evidence to reasonably believe that it is God doing it, and for the requisite purpose (since the effect--the things said by the fish--allows us to infer this, even if we happen to be wrong). In such a case I would indeed convert at least to the teachings of my fish, so long as, upon interrogation, the fish's wisdom proved to be morally good and the fish could adequately prove all its assertions--and did not expect me to believe what it could not prove (since it is immoral to demand blind obedience), and so long as this theory is not refuted in the future. But all this evidence is totally lacking in every other miracle account in history. Thus, although Purtill's definition at least makes it possible for the "argument from miracles" to convert me to theism, I know of no real case which meets these requirements. This is, in fact, a major reason why I am an atheist.
This means that Purtill's chapter fails to support the rest of the book's argument. None of the following chapters presents sufficient proof that God has ever been a necessary cause of any event in history. Most of the chapters do a good job of showing that God can be a sufficient cause of certain events, but that fails to show the existence of any miracle by Purtill's definition, and this renders the book as little more than a philosophical exercise, with no useful application to reality. Of course, if a God really existed, we would see miracles all the time, and then Purtill's definition would be immensely useful--it might even become a scientific principle. The fact that it is not useful, because there happen to be no miracles that can be identified, makes a good case for atheism, or at least for the lack of miracle-working in the behavior of any god, neither of which is a conclusion that these authors want us to reach.
Corduan to the Rescue...or Not
Nevertheless, the editors tried to salvage this disaster by
recruiting Winfried Corduan to clean up the mess. His attempt is an
embarrassment. Consider what he claims to have established by the end of
his essay: "the recognition of a miracle is initially the prerogative
of believers" who can sway unbelievers only by arguing for "prima facie
presumptions" that only "sometimes favor" the hypothesis that God has
acted in history (111). Think about that. Believers can realize things
we unbelievers can't. Why? Because they follow certain unproven
assumptions (that is what a "prima facie presumption" is) that might
support the belief that God did something. I'm not joking. This is
Corduan's argument: in a nut shell, miracles can only be recognized if
we first assume, among other things, that God exists and acts in
history! This is as vacuous as arguments get. It fails to show that any
event in history actually can be recognized as a miracle, at
least by Purtill's definition, and thus the entire book fails to show
that any miracle has ever occurred. All Corduan can tell us is that
miracles can only be identified by believers, and not because they know
anything we don't, and not because they have some special sense or
source of data that we lack, but simply because they assume their
worldview is true, a worldview which comes ready-supplied with
officially-identified miraculous events, like the resurrection of Jesus.
"Miracles exist because miracles exist." Tautology galore!
Defining Natural and Supernatural
How Corduan talks himself into this ridiculous circle is worth
examining, because many skeptics stumble over the same block. His
chapter begins by outlining the usual objections to recognizing a
miracle, all of which boil down to what I call "the naturalist fallacy,"
which he gives in various forms, citing various naturalists who often
parrot this mistaken argument: "if new observations conflict with
present theories, the scientist needs to revise his or her theories, not
blame the event on something supernatural" (100), or in other words "a
scientist may never consider the possibility of a natural cause to have
been eliminated" (101) and thus can never consider a supernatural
theory. This is a fallacy, which is believed valid only because people
do not define the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural," and
do not recognize that it is only valid as a rule of thumb, not as a
logical principle (as I will explain in the end). Corduan sees it is
fallacious, but fails to correctly identify why, and that is where he
slips. For when this distinction is carefully made, it becomes apparent
that the "naturalist fallacy" is not always true because it can
pointlessly eliminate possible theories. Eliminating theories is a valid
enterprise, but you must have a reason for it, and there is no reason
which will allow a blanket elimination of some category of theories
called "supernatural" if this category is entirely arbitrary. And is
there any objective way to distinguish the natural from the
supernatural?Consider psi, the undefined power which would explain ESP and telekinesis, among other things. We would all readily call that supernatural. But why? If there was a lawful, regular feature of the universe which allowed ESP and telekinesis to exist, then wouldn't psi be natural, not supernatural? What makes something supernatural anyway? We can levitate and move an entire train with magnetism, and transmit thoughts by radio, two powers that the ancients of Paul's day would certainly have called supernatural. Even God could be entirely natural, for if he existed he would be a regular feature of the universe, every bit as much as you or I. The attempt to draw a line between God and nature will always be somewhat arbitrary. "Nature is created" the theists will say, "God is not." But does that mean if we discovered the universe was not created, we would have to conclude that nature does not exist? That would be a silly thing to say. Nature is what exists: we look at the world, learn how it works, discover its inhabitants and rules, and call that nature. Consequently, God, miracles, psionics, angels, ghosts, flying saucers, would all be a part of nature if they existed.
Even if we ignored this simple observation, and chose to draw lines at whim between natural and supernatural things, this would never give us the right to absolutely exclude one of those categories from all possibility of investigation. The only category of theories that can legitimately be excluded from investigation is the category of all untestable theories. If we can test a theory, then it cannot be excluded from investigation. But it will not suffice to make "supernatural" and "untestable" into equivalent categories, since human convention is already set against such an equivalence. Why this is so is important, and I will address that in the end.
For example, the theory that Julius Caesar shaved every day of his life is untestable, but it is hardly supernatural by anyone's use of the word. Likewise, it is impossible to test the theory that there are other universes that are a lot like this one but that will never influence this universe in any way. Yet this is not a supernatural theory, either--it is in fact a scientific theory called the "multiverse hypothesis." Thus, it should be clear that the "naturalist fallacy" is indeed a fallacy. Consequently, a scientist can consider miracle theories if he wants to, so long as the theory of miracles is testable, as Purtill's definition allows. Miracles are only closed to scientific investigation when they are untestable--and if they are untestable, then even the theist is forced to admit that he cannot know if any such theory is true, any more than he knows whether, for example, it is true that Julius Caesar shaved every day of his life.
From the Naturalist Fallacy to the Theist Fallacy
This is where Corduan goes wrong: in order to escape the
"naturalist fallacy" he rightly enters the point of view of "someone who
is open to the supernatural" in order to see if it is possible "to
recognize a miracle" (102). But he steps immediately not into an open
mind, but into a theist's mind: he only considers the point of
view of a "believer" who specifically and only accepts that some
"miracles" may have happened. But that still excludes every other
"supernatural" theory, such as psi. So Corduan moves from a naturalist
fallacy into a theist fallacy, and thus has made no progress. If he had
genuinely stepped into an open mind, he would no doubt have realized
that miracles cannot be recognized as miracles because there are so many
competing theories that cannot be eliminated, such as psi, or
demons, or aliens, or the features of Buddhist and Hindu worldviews
which also allow the incredible to happen. At the very least, he would
have been forced to deal with this problem, and might have escaped the
vicious circle that his chapter ends up circumscribing.
Post Hoc Reasoning
But instead, Corduan offers fallacies as if they justified the
"believer" in his belief in particular miracles. In other words, he
address the problem of recognition by proposing that adopting a
fallacious inference allows us to distinguish miracles from
coincidences. Consider his first example of how a believer can
"recognize" a miracle: he tells a story whereby a man loses a job
application and prays to god to help him, and by an incredible stream of
natural events the application ends up at its destination anyway. This
example is textbook in the way it shows how superstitious thinking
arises from shallow analysis: Corduan argues that the man is justified
in regarding it as a miracle because it is what he prayed for. This is called a post hoc fallacy, and it is a primary cause of superstition, as Stuart Vyse demonstrates at length in Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition (1997), especially in chapter 3, which begins with the following true case:Bjorn Borg, five-time Wimbleton champion, was playing in the French Open while his grandfather listened by radio as he was fishing. His grandfather "spat in the water and at just that instant Bjorn won a point." Believing it was no coincidence, "he continued to spit throughout the match, going home with a sore throat. Borg won in four sets" (59-60). Bjorn's grandfather falsely reasoned that because spitting was followed by his son's success, he was entitled to believe that spitting was responsible for it, and thus continued spitting, and his son's continued victories only reinforced his belief. This is post hoc reasoning, which is short for post hoc ergo propter hoc, "after this, therefore because of this," the assumption that a sequence of events entails causation. Humans are actually inherently designed to make this mistake, because our brain is built to "see" causes by the only data available: sequence. Moreover, Vyse surveys scientific studies showing that post hoc superstitions are more likely to persist when they are set-up by a prior belief in their truth, and even more so when reinforced by social approval--the very conditions which cause Corduan's "man" to think his prayer was answered by God (i.e. religious socialization and prior commitment to the efficacy of prayer).
Corduan's example is an excellent example of this post hoc reasoning. Consider: the man's job application was already ready to be mailed--it was addressed and stamped--when it was lost. Thus, the odds of it arriving at its destination were from the outset fairly good--it could have been found by anyone at any stage on its journey and been placed in the mail. This compares with the fact that Bjorn was a champion--the odds of his winning a set were already fairly good (though not too good, since he was playing another champion at the time). Likewise, how often do we think Corduan's hypothetical man prays for God's help? Almost certainly, he does so on a regular basis, just as Bjorn's grandfather's spitting in the water while fishing was probably not an unusual event. Thus the prior odds of a prayer coinciding with any coincidence in the hypothetical man's life are also very good. This means that the odds of a match between a prayed-for-result and a coincidental outcome are going to be good enough that at least one match can be expected in a man's lifetime, if not several, even though these matches will be entirely accidental. Appealing to a "prior assumption" that God answers prayers is exactly like Bjorn's grandfather appealing to a "prior assumption" that spitting can influence a distant tennis match: it is not a justification, but an error. Yet Corduan thinks otherwise, and he implies that R. F. Holland and Norman Geisler also think so, too (105).
The Regrown Hand
Corduan's second example of how a believer can "recognize" a
miracle goes like this: "a believer might claim that a miracle has
occurred if her hand had been severed in an accident, she prayed, and a
new hand 'grew back' instantaneously" (105). First of all, note that he
chooses a good example--an example better than any other healing miracle
in the Bible. The actual miracles reported in the New Testament are not
this clear-cut. Unlike the regrowing of a severed limb, never once
reported of Jesus, the actual healings attributed to Christ can easily
be explained as psychosomatic. It is no accident that these hypothetical
examples that Corduan uses to make an argument are always better than
any real examples. For example, he posits a holy man whom skeptics would
have a hard time denying was a miracle-worker, since he "heals people
of various diseases, including some that are irreversibly degenerative"
(109) [emphasis added]. But this last phrase entails the existence of
evidence not available in any of the cases of healing reported in the
Bible. How curious that even he thinks we need stronger evidence
than that found in the gospels before we can really believe in miracles.
Now, reports of regrown limbs appear in the middle ages, and it is also
interesting that these authors never mention any of these medieval
accounts. I suspect that since these are not essential to their
evangelical mission of conversion, these miracles can "safely" be
dismissed as delusions, exaggerations, mistakes, or pious frauds, even
though they stand on the very same quality of evidence.But let us move back to the original problem: in this regrown-hand example he has moved from one closed mind to another, and thus fails to see that the evidence is not sufficient to recognize this as a miracle. The woman can just as easily conclude that she psychically healed her hand herself, the prayer merely focusing her desire to heal, or being a coincidence (since she no doubt always prays when hurt), or that reality can be changed by changing one's perception if the desire is strong enough (and a prayer would likely coincide with a powerful desire), or that demons answered her prayer, or that she has a genetic mutation which gives her an extraordinary healing ability, and so on. Before she can conclude that the cause really was God, she must eliminate other plausible explanations like these, in order to establish God as a necessary cause. Certainly, the theory that her body healed her hand by the same means as every other human, which we normally call the "natural explanation," can be ruled out here, but Corduan is mistaken in thinking that this allows one to immediately adopt God as the best explanation. There is more to proving a theory than merely eliminating one competitor. You must have positive evidence for it.
Are Believers Skilled Miracle-Recognizers?
Corduan moves from these examples by trying to argue that
"believers do not have a definite recognition formula at their disposal"
(106) yet "it is quite possible that believers are more expert when it
comes to recognizing miracles" because their worldview prepares them for
it (107). His analogies are telling:- Identifying the symptoms of diabetes: he says a doctor will
recognize this more readily than a layman, thus his expertise is to be
trusted.
- Recognizing the aurora borealis: a says a meteorologist will
recognize this more readily than a layman, thus his expertise is to be
trusted.
- Seeing that a certain syllogism is invalid: he says a logician will recognize this more readily than a layman, thus his expertise is to be trusted.
Prima Facie Presumptions vs. The Lessons of History
The next step Corduan engages is to identify the necessary "prima
facie presumption" that a believer needs in order to identify miracles.
The presumption is this: it is a miracle if "as-yet-to-be-discovered
scientific laws" must be resorted to as an explanation, since this
"appeals to something we do not have while we do have something else,
namely a cogent supernatural explanation" (109). But this rationale does
not work. By this reasoning we would never have made any scientific
progress. In the 1st century we had no idea what caused lightning, but
we had a cogent supernatural explanation in divine or demonic agency,
ranging from the anger of Zeus to the combats of evil spirits in the
clouds. Is Corduan saying that pagans successfully recognized lightning
as a miracle? That can't be, because we now know it was not a miracle.
As this shows, his method clearly fails, for it justifies every
superstitious explanation, so long as it is "cogent." On the other hand,
scientists of the 1st century proposed that lightning was caused by
friction between colliding clouds, by analogy with colliding flint
stones. It should not be lost on us that this explanation is actually
closer to the truth. It only lacks the "as-yet-to-be-discovered
scientific laws" of electricity, laws which a man like Corduan would
have said were too bizarre and implausible even to investigate, and
sufficiently so that he would be justified in attributing lightning to
Zeus instead.This is where Corduan's underlying assumption is exploded: he assumes that a Christian's worldview better prepares him to recognize miracles, but never shows that a Christian's worldview is likely to correspond to reality. Yet he must do this first before he can appeal to that worldview as a justification for any belief about reality, including the existence and nature of miracles. On the other hand, ancient scientists had found that what we call "natural" explanations kept working: contrary to "cogent supernatural explanations," the stars and planets actually followed predictable laws that had nothing to do with human events, tested drugs cured the sick more often than spells, agriculture flourished under scientific care but floundered under prayers and magic. Then they found that atomic and other "naturalistic" explanations for all phenomena had a much wider explanatory power than divine theories, predicting more things, more successfully. Thus, they correctly guessed that they were on to something, and stopped accepting "supernatural" explanations because they constantly failed, and instead they pursued "natural" theories. Thus, they got very close to the truth, articulating explanations for sound, light, evolution, weather phenomena, poison, disease, and certainly getting far closer than any theologian ever came.
Unfortunately, this brilliant discovery was thwarted by the rise of Christianity, which put science on hold for 1000 years, relying instead on Corduan's "cogent supernatural explanations." It was not until the Renaissance, when pagan science was rediscovered, that the bias in favor of what we now call the "natural" was taken up again, and lo and behold, every century since has seen unprecedented progress. Here is the lesson: we have come to call this bias "natural" precisely because it has so often and so successfully corresponded with success. In other words, we developed a bias for what worked, having proven over a thousand years what didn't work, and then divided these two into the "natural" and the "supernatural." There is thus some merit to the naturalist fallacy (discussed above): it is indeed valid as a rule of thumb, which is more likely to produce success, even though it is not valid as an absolute law. Its utility as a rule of thumb is entirely dependent on the fact that all reliable evidence of any kind supports the rule, and so far offers no support for breaking it. So uniform and massive is this body of evidence that it has even led moderns into assuming that the "supernatural" was so useless that it could never be true, hence the naturalist fallacy. This is why the naturalist worldview is a more reasonable model of reality than Christian theism, and why Corduan cannot appeal to the latter to support the existence and identification of miracles.
Lack of Evidence is the Final Straw
In order to overcome the overwhelming evidence against him, Corduan must present good positive evidence
for the theory that any particular event is a miracle, otherwise it is
never going to be reasonable. It is simply an undeniable fact that,
given two options with equal evidence--a plausible natural explanation
("he has an as-yet-unexplained immunity to asp poison") and a
supernatural alternative ("God rewards his faith with an immunity to asp
poison")--we are simply smarter to bet on the former. The natural type
of theory is like a horse from a trainer whose numerous horses have run a
million races and none of them has ever lost. What idiot would bet
against one of his horses in the next race? Corduan's argument is this:
since all the races aren't finished, and we have not seen this specific
horse run yet, we are not entitled to believe that this horse will win.
That is hardly a sound argument, given the evidence of the past. Sure,
it is possible the horse will lose, but is it reasonable to
expect it? Even still, scientific thinkers wisely follow Corduan's
advice, but they reserve judgment until we actually watch the horse run,
and don't even stop there, but wait until we've seen it in a dozen
races before trusting its infallibility, and even then we allow that it
might yet fail. That is science. Corduan's alternative is to never let
the horse run a race, and on the "evidence" that it has not won a race,
pronounce it lame.In the end, Corduan has utterly failed to explain how theists are to distinguish a miracle from something else, and thus it stands, as far as I can see, that this can never be done, except in the most unusual of circumstances, which have never been met in any real case.[2] This destroys the entire mission of the book. Corduan says it all with the following posit: "when the evidence for the occurrence of an event is beyond reasonable doubt and there is no other plausible explanation available" then we just might have a miracle. Of course, think of what this would have done for the ancient explanation of lightning, and you will see the flaw in his reasoning: "not having a proven explanation" is not the same as having a falsified one, nor the same as having evidence for any alternative. He wants us to think that "lack of an explanation" is actually proof of an explanation. It does not work that way. But in the end even this is moot, because we must ask: has there ever been a case where there is no other plausible explanation available? I cannot think of any, and Corduan has presented none--even his hypothetical examples fail this test.[3] He has thus failed to show us how to recognize a miracle, even if miracles do in fact happen.
Return to this review's Table of Contents to read more detailed critiques of specific chapters in In Defense of Miracles.
[1] I think I know what Corduan was thinking. There is one sense in which pure expertise can create knowledge without criteria: acting on learned reflexes, e.g. riding a bike, carving a statue from stone, distinguishing variations in color or sound, etc. These things differ from identifying miracles in that although I can ride a bike without knowing the criteria for every correct action, the statement "when I trust my intuition, I can ride a bike" is itself a criteria-based empirical hypothesis: you don't need to know how to ride a bike to know from observation whether I can. The knowledge involved in riding a bike is noncognitive and thus differs categorically from propositional knowledge (like "I can ride a bike"). A statement like "this is a miracle" is propositional, not noncognitive, and therefore requires criteria. In fact, these criteria are entailed automatically by the meaning of the sentence itself.
Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958) gives a good account of noncognitive knowledge, although I think his views must be tempered in light of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed. (1946), which explains why verbal sentences automatically entail criteria for their own verification or falsification. I discuss my own epistemology as it relates to such issues in Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005).
Even our ability to make distinctions in sensory data or patterns is not without describable criteria: someone can learn to identify middle-C without knowing what length of string or surface (and hence what audio-frequency) would confirm their judgment, but this is "trained intuition," where the brain is trained to automatically employ certain criteria. This is not the absence of criteria, for the statement "this sound is middle-C" must still have verifiable truth conditions which would allow anyone to confirm it, otherwise it would have no meaning as a statement. As with all definitions, the criterion in this case is whether the judgment conforms to human convention (what English-speakers have chosen to call "middle-C"), but even without such a convention, the criterion would be sensory distinctiveness from all non-middle-C sounds. Since miracles involve theories of causation, not just mere sensory distinctions, much less mere coherence to arbitrary human naming conventions, expertise cannot be a substitute for criteria in their case.
Finally, intuitive expertise must be learned from repeated cases of success, i.e. actual training. Thus, for intuitive expertise to aid in recognizing miracles, we would have to have extensive experience observing genuine miracles that we could confirm as such independently. After all, we could not identify them with intuitive experience we don't yet have, and so without criteria we could not know whether we were learning to identify actual miracles or something else.
[2] See Richard Packham's The Man With No Heart for a good example of a hypothetical "well-attested" miracle. On how numerous problems arise when we start combing the actual historical record for "good examples," see my discussion of Beckwith's Chapter.
[3] Although it should be noted: the argument that there are no plausible explanations for certain events (except the explanation of "miracle") is attempted by Craig and Habermas, and Geivett and Newman.
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