I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (33 page)

Through miracles, God could tell the world which book or which person speaks for him. So, if God wanted to send a message through Moses, Elijah, Jesus, Paul, Muhammad, or anyone else, he could pour out miracles through that person.

If God actually works in this way, then a miracle confirms the message and the sign confirms the sermon. Or, to put it another way, a miracle is an act of God to confirm the word of God through a messenger of God.

The question is, does God work that way? Does the King of the universe use such signs? Are miracles even possible? Our secular world says no. As we’re about to see, they are seriously mistaken.

I
S THE
B
OX
O
PEN OR
C
LOSED
?

On a recent trip to Russia to speak to Russian educators, seminary professor Ronald Nash had a big challenge. He wanted to talk to them about God, but knew he wouldn’t get anywhere with them unless he could overcome their long-held biases against theism. For more than seventy years, Russians had been taught a worldview that ruled out God in advance. The official state religion was atheism, and the atheistic world-view asserts that only the natural, material world exists. According to atheists, miracles are impossible because there is no supernatural realm. To believe otherwise is to believe in fairy tales.

Nash began by showing them two small cardboard boxes. One was opened, and one was closed.

“Here is the difference between your worldview and mine,” he began. Pointing to the closed box, he said, “You believe that the physical universe is closed; that the universe is all that exists, and there’s nothing outside it.”

Shifting to the open box he continued, “I believe that the physical universe exists as well; but I also believe the universe is open—that there’s something outside the universe we call God.” Nash paused and added, “And God created the box!”

He then reached into the open box and said, “Just like I can reach into this box to manipulate its contents, God can reach into our universe and perform what we call miracles.”
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For some reason, this was a profound illustration to the Russians. Lightbulbs began coming on in the minds of educators all over the room. These educators had assumed their naturalistic worldview was correct and had considered no other alternatives. Nash helped them think that maybe another alternative, like theism, had better evidence.

As we have seen in chapters 3 through 7, theism does have better evidence. We know beyond a reasonable doubt that a theistic God exists. Since God exists, the universe represented by the closed box is false. The box is open and was created by God. So it
is
possible for God to intervene in the natural world by performing miracles.
In fact, miracles are
not only possible; miracles are actual, because the greatest miracle of
all—the creation of the universe out of nothing—has already occurred.
So with regard to the Bible, if Genesis 1:1 is true—“In the beginning,
God created the heavens and the earth”—then every other miracle in the
Bible is easy to believe.

Can a God who created the entire universe out of nothing part the Red Sea? Bring fire down from heaven? Keep a man safe in a great fish for three days?
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Accurately predict future events? Turn water into wine? Heal diseases instantaneously? Raise the dead? Of course. All of those miraculous events are simple tasks for an infinitely powerful Being who created the universe in the first place.

Now this doesn’t mean that God
has
performed those biblical miracles. That remains to be seen. It only means that he could have—that such miracles are possible. In light of the fact that we live in a theistic universe, ruling out miracles beforehand (as many atheists do) is clearly illegitimate. As C. S. Lewis put it, “If we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain.”
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So why do so many people today say that miracles are not possible or should not be believed? How can skeptics disbelieve in miracles when the whole universe appears to be one amazing miracle? We need to address those questions before we begin to investigate whether God has confirmed the truth of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam through miracles.

O
BJECTIONS TO
M
IRACLES

Since the late 1600s, two major objections to miracles have arisen that we need to investigate. The first is from Benedict Spinoza, and the second is from David Hume. We’ll start with Spinoza’s objection.

Natural Laws Are Immutable
—The argument that natural laws are immutable was first popularized in the 1670s by Benedict Spinoza, a Jewish pantheist. Spinoza’s argument against miracles goes something like this:

1. Miracles are violations of natural laws.

2. Natural laws are immutable.

3. It is impossible to violate immutable laws.

4. Therefore, miracles are impossible.

If Spinoza is right—if there is no way natural laws can be overpowered, interrupted, or interfered with—then miracles are impossible.

The problem with this objection is that it begs the question. If you define natural laws as immutable, then of course miracles are impossible. But that’s the very question! Who said natural laws are immutable?

Spinoza, in accord with his pantheistic worldview, illegitimately ruled out the theistic God, and thus miracles, in advance. But if God exists, miracles are possible. And as we have seen, the greatest miracle of all, the creation of the universe out of nothing, has already occurred.

Creation itself demonstrates that natural laws are not immutable. Something doesn’t naturally come from nothing. But here we are.

We also know that natural laws are not immutable because they are
descriptions
of what happens, not
prescriptions
of what must happen. Natural
laws
don’t really cause anything, they only describe what regularly happens in nature. They describe the effects of the four known natural
forces—
gravitation, magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Once you introduce intelligent beings into the picture, natural forces can be overpowered. We know that those forces can be overpowered because we do so ourselves every day.

For example, when a baseball player catches a falling baseball, he is overpowering the force of gravity. We do the same whenever we fly planes or blast off into space. In such cases, gravity is not changed, it is simply overpowered. If finite beings like us can overpower natural forces, then certainly the infinite Being who created those forces can do so.
⁸

Miracles Are Not Credible
—A number of years ago, I (Norm) was invited to speak at Harvard University’s divinity school, one of the most liberal divinity schools in the country. My topic was “Harvard’s Premature Farewell to Evangelicalism.” Believe it or not, Harvard, like most other schools of its day, was founded by evangelical Christians in order to train students to know Jesus Christ. Harvard’s 1646 charter states its purpose clearly (original spelling and Scripture references retained):

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).
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How did Harvard get so far away from its charter? Because they bought into one of the most powerful arguments against miracles ever formulated. It wasn’t Spinoza’s argument. Due to the advances in modern science and our better understanding of the natural world, not many today really believe that natural laws are immutable. The argument against miracles that is accepted today—and has been accepted at Harvard—was put forth by the great skeptic David Hume (1711–1776) about a century after Spinoza.

You may remember Hume from chapter 2. He was the one who said that any talk about God is meaningless because such talk does not involve empirical observation or self-evident truths. We saw that his claim is self-defeating.

But Hume’s argument against miracles is a bit more sophisticated, and not as easily refuted as his argument against God-talk. Perhaps that’s one reason it is still believed today. In fact, Hume’s argument against miracles is one of the pillars of the so-called Enlightenment (that’s where we supposedly became enlightened enough to abandon our superstitious belief in miracles and put our faith in reason and the empirical truths found by the scientific method). Hume’s argument helped advance the naturalistic worldview, which later metastasized with Darwin’s theory of evolution.

What follows is basically the material I presented to the audience at Harvard that day. I began by spelling out Hume’s anti-miracle argument and then moved on to critiquing it. Here is Hume’s argument in syllogistic form:

1. Natural law is by definition a description of a regular occurrence.

2. A miracle is by definition a rare occurrence.

3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare.

4. A wise man always bases his belief on the greater evidence.

5. Therefore, a wise man should never believe in miracles.

If those four premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows—the wise man should never believe in miracles. Unfortunately for Hume and for those over the years who have believed him, the argument has a false premise—premise 3 is not necessarily true. The evidence for the regular is
not
always greater than that for the rare.

At first glance this might not seem to be the case. In the age of instant replay, premise 3 seems to make sense. For example, a football referee sees a play from one angle at full speed, while we get to see it from several angles in slow motion. We have greater evidence seeing a play over and over again (the regular) than does the ref who only sees it once (the rare).

But what may be true for a videotaped football game is not necessarily true for every event in life. To disprove premise 3 we only need to come up with one counterexample. We actually have several, and they are from Hume’s own naturalistic worldview:

1. The origin of the universe happened only once.
It was a rare, unrepeatable event, yet virtually every naturalist believes that the Big Bang evidence proves that the universe exploded into being.

2. The origin of life happened only once.
It too was a rare, unrepeatable event, yet every naturalist believes that life arose spontaneously from non-life somewhere on the earth or elsewhere in the universe.

3. The origin of new life forms also happened only once.
Those rare, unrepeatable events are nevertheless dogmatically believed by most naturalists, who say it all happened by unobserved (i.e., rare) macroevolutionary processes.

4. In fact, the entire history of the world is comprised of rare,
unrepeatable events.
For example, David Hume’s own birth happened only once, but he had no trouble believing it occurred!

In every one of these counterexamples from Hume’s own naturalistic worldview, his third premise must be disregarded or considered false. If Hume really believed in that premise, he would not have believed in his own birth or his own naturalistic worldview!

So we know by some of these counterexamples that Hume’s third premise, and thus his entire argument, cannot be true. But what are the specific problems with this naturalistic kind of thinking?

First, it confuses
believability
with
possibility.
Even if premise 3 were true, the argument would not disprove the
possibility
of miracles; it would only question their
believability.
So even if you personally witnessed, say, Jesus Christ rising from dead as he predicted—if you were in the tomb, verified the body was dead, and then saw him get up and walk out of the tomb—Hume’s argument says that you (a “wise” per-son) shouldn’t believe it. There’s something wrong with an argument that tells you to disbelieve what you have verified to be true.

Second, Hume confuses
probability
with
evidence.
He doesn’t
weigh
the evidence for each rare event; rather, he
adds
the evidence for all regular events and suggests that this somehow makes all rare events unworthy of belief. But this is flawed reasoning as well. There are many improbable (rare) events in life that we believe when we have good evidence for them. For example, a hole-in-one is a rare event, but when we witness one we have no trouble believing it. We certainly don’t say to the golfer, “Since the evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare, I’m not going to believe your shot unless you can tee it up and do it five times in a row!” Likewise, we certainly don’t tell a lottery winner who beat 76-million-to-one odds that he’s not going to get his money until he can win it five times in a row! No, in these cases, the evidence for the rare is greater than that for the regular. Sober, sane eyewitnesses provide greater evidence for a rare hole-in-one no matter how regularly that golfer had missed the hole in the past. Likewise, a winning ticket provides greater evidence that a certain person improbably won the lottery no matter how regularly that person had failed to win in the past.
¹⁰

So the issue is not whether an event is regular or rare—the issue is whether we have good evidence for the event. We must
weigh
evidence for the event in question, not
add
evidence for all previous events.

Third, Hume is actually arguing in a circle. Instead of evaluating the veracity of the evidence for each miracle claim, Hume rules out belief in miracles in advance because he believes there is uniform experience against them. As usual, C. S. Lewis has great insight:

Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely “uniform experience” against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.
¹¹