Can you rationally believe in miracles?

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

When Richard Dawkins debated John Lennox, two Oxford professors going head to head on the God question, Dawkins found it utterly inconceivable that Lennox believed Jesus was born of a virgin. Exasperated, Dawkins questioned: “How can a man of science believe such a thing?” Now Dawkins may not be the poster child for a philosophically robust atheism, but his question nonetheless resonates with a huge number of people—believers and doubters alike—who have imbibed the common notion that science has disproved miracles.

So given that the Christian story falls apart if Jesus did not rise from the dead, what are we to make of scientific objections to the supernatural? Can you rationally believe in miracles?

Were you to trace back the genealogy of scepticism on these questions, historically speaking, the case against miracles finds its most prominent voice in the 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, particularly in book X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. However, despite the sceptical hype, the truth is there are some serious problems with Hume’s problem of miracles.

First, take what we might call Hume’s logical version of the problem, where in effect Hume argues that miracles, by definition, are impossible. The syllogism would go something like this: (Premise 1): The laws of nature are inviolable. (Premise 2): Miracles violate the laws of nature. (Conclusion): Therefore, miracles are impossible, for you cannot violate the inviolable.

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

C.S. Lewis responded to Hume’s argument with a clever analogy. Say tonight, when you go to bed, you put $10 in your nightstand, and then tomorrow night you put in another $10, only to wake up the next morning and find only $5 in the drawer. What would you assume: that the laws of arithmetic had been broken, or that the laws of Australia had been broken? That an outside agent had reach in and meddled with the contents of the drawer? The thief, right? And just like how the laws of arithmetic don’t stop the thief from meddling in the drawer, but rather expose when he has, so too the laws of nature don’t constrain God from performing a miracle, they are the very thing that allows us to recognise when he does something special.

So science does nothing to disprove miracles. Rather science and supernaturalism walk hand in hand, with science painting the backdrop of nature’s regularity against which God’s special message, a miracle, can ultimately be received. So the logical problem of miracles falls down, for if you simply grant the possibility of Genesis 1:1—that in the beginning God created everything—then anything is possible! So that’s strike 1 for the problem of miracles.

Second, Hume’s more formidable version of the argument against miracles was more of an evidential one, where even if miracles were possible, you are never rationally warranted to believe in them. Why? Because, in Hume’s language, a wise person proportions their beliefs to the odds. But, he argued, since miracles are singularities, unrepeatable, and rare, and since they are only ever attested to by human witnesses, well this testimonial evidence can never outweigh our universal scientific observation of the regularity of nature. And so, wise people should reject miracle claims.

In other words, because our scientific observations say dead people stay dead, the testimony of Jesus’ disciples should not be believed when they claim he was resurrected. The historical evidence for the miracle can simply never be good enough to outweigh the scientific odds.

This is basically the line of reasoning you’ll find in Carl Sagan’s infamous dictum—Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence—which has become a kind of mantra on the internet used by sceptics to shut down supernatural claims. Of course no one ever defines what they mean by extraordinary evidence, or explains how providing supernatural evidence for a supernatural claim can ever escape the infinite loop of suspicion, but usually the dictum becomes simply a shield, one wielded to deflect any amount of evidence you can muster as not extraordinary enough.

But even secular philosophers today, like Hume’s own contemporaries, point out a number of serious errors with this approach to assessing probability. For starters, what makes something an extraordinary claim? If all you mean by extraordinary are singularities that are unrepeatable and rare, then the Big Bang, or me winning the lottery, are by definition, extraordinary. Yet when these things have happened, we don’t demand extraordinary evidence (whatever that means), we just demand sufficient evidence, or the kind of evidence you would expect that anomaly to leave behind. For the big bang, it’s cosmological evidence. For the lottery? Maybe a phat bank account and news footage of me dancing with my winning ticket. And this is the Achilles heel of Hume’s evidential critique of miracles: The probability of an event has to take into account the specific facts and not just the abstract odds. Extraordinary things happen all the time, and we don’t discount something we have good evidence to believe simply because the odds of past observation are stacked against it. So that’s strike 2 for the problem of miracles.

Now you could try and attack the testimony of eyewitnesses in the case for miracles. After all, people are capable of deceit, being deceived, or falsely inferring a miracle out of scientific ignorance. But the people in the Bible were not prescientific ignoramuses. When the angel Gabriel approaches the virgin Mary and says she is to be with child, she does not blindly accept his claim as normal everyday stuff. She asks the obvious biological question. “How can this be since I am a virgin?” It is on the basis of what she did know about the birds and the bees, not scientific ignorance, that she inferred that something special, something miraculous, must be taking place. So when critics assume that Jesus’ contemporaries had no knowledge of the natural order, that empty criticism tends to be nothing more than chronological snobbery.

Furthermore, the character of the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, whose lives were catapulted by this miraculous encounter onto a path of virtue, when coupled together with their willingness to suffer for those claims; these things mitigate against them being deceivers. To give good evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, there are only two things Jesus’ friends need to be able to competently testify to in court: that they were sure he was dead after his crucifixion, and that they are certain to have afterwards spent time with him alive. This isn’t complex stuff. You don’t need a masters degree in biology to play that eyewitness role. Which is why it seems to me that in the case of Christianity the problem of miracles has struck out.

So can you rationally believe in miracles? That depends entirely on the evidence. Wisdom dictates we shouldn’t blindly embrace miracle claims without exhausting naturalistic explanations, but nor should we exclude them out of hand. But since truth invites questioning, if there are good reasons to believe in God as part of the background evidence of our universe, and if the miracle is set against a religiously significant backdrop to send a clear message like with the resurrection of Jesus, and if the quality of the specific evidence for this historical anomaly is strong in the eyewitness accounts, then the calculus dramatically tilts in favour of the resurrection.

There is no rational reason for you not to believe in miracles. So why not launch your own investigation to see if Jesus’ miracles are worth believing.