William Lane Craig's Articles: Historical Jesus


7. The Problem Of Miracles: A Historical And Philosophical Perspective

Original article

By DOUG SHAVER
August 2006

Craig begins with a citation and apparent endorsement of a pronouncement by Gottfried Less, an 18th-century theology professor. To establish that a miracle has occurred, according to this dictum, Craig says, "first, one must determine the historicity of the event itself and, second, one must determine the miraculous character of that event." Some rephrasing might be in order here. Given a report that something happened and a concurrent claim that it was a miracle, we have two questions. The first is: Does the evidence compel us to believe that the event did actually occur exactly as reported? The second is: If so, then are we compelled to believe that its occurrence was due to divine intervention? Craig's article is largely a historical summary of philosophers' debates on the two questions from the Enlightenment through the mid-20th century, predictably culminating in Craig's version with a victory for the traditional Christian view. He begins his concluding paragraph:

It seems to me, therefore, that the lesson to be learned from the classical debate over miracles, a lesson that has been reinforced by contemporary scientific and philosophical thought, is that the presupposition of the impossibility of miracles should, contrary to the assumption of nineteenth and for the most part twentieth century biblical criticism, play no role in determining the historicity of any event.

It intrigues me that Craig appears to balk at saying he has proved the presupposition wrong. He says there is a "growing recognition" that it is "illegitimate." He says in his final sentence that it "ought to be once and for all abandoned." By why should it be abandoned? Because it is false? He doesn't say that, although of course he thinks it. Anyone who believes that at least one miracle has happened must believe also that the presupposition of their impossibility is false, or else accept a contradiction. Perhaps what Craig is suggesting is that he has shown it to be unreasonable to think miracles are impossible.

Before examining his argument, I make a stipulation. An investigator seeking to determine whether any miracle has ever happened in the history of the world cannot proceed honestly if he assumes beforehand that the answer will be negative. No matter what the true answer would be, even if he gets that answer, he cannot get it honestly if he assumes antecedently that he will get it. But that also includes his assuming that the answer will be positive. No matter what outcome is being presupposed, there can be no honest investigation by anyone who presupposes that outcome. However, an investigation to determine some general principle under which the universe operates is one thing; but once some principle has been discovered, or seems to have been discovered, then an investigation into whether an exception has occurred on a particular occasion is another thing. If the question is "Did X happen?" at a certain time in a certain place, we are not compelled by the mere virtue of open-mindedness to pretend that no investigation into X-like events has ever been undertaken before or that the results of those investigations should be dismissed as so many irrelevancies.

Craig's begins his historical survey with "German Rationalists of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth centuries," apparently trying to imply that until then, Western intellectuals took it for granted that the gospels were simple records of historical fact. And that might indeed have been the case in general. Obviously, the Enlightenment saw changes in a great many consensuses. Whether or not "Enlightenment" be a misnomer, no philosophical label would have been put on the period if there had been no change in people's thinking. What should interest us is whether the particular change in belief about miracles was justified or not, considering what people knew or reasonably thought they knew at the time. What German intellectuals apparently thought they knew, to hear Craig tell it, was that the gospel stories were entirely factual but misinterpreted. What the gospel authors say happened did happen, but not because of divine intervention.

But they were at pains to provide a purely natural explanation for the event . . . . Given that events with supernatural causes do not occur, there simply had to be some account available in terms of merely natural causes.

Of course the result was just so much creative speculation, such as a platform hidden just below the surface of the Sea of Galilee that enabled Jesus to apparently walk on water. Whenever a writer says Jesus brought a dead person back to life, the person was never really dead. And when all the gospel writers say Jesus returned from the dead, then, according to this kind of thinking, we may infer that he wasn't really dead, either. The proposed explanations did not always suppose a simple misunderstanding on the part of the gospel authors. Karl Bahrdt, according to Craig, suggested in a work published in the late 18th century that Jesus faked his death and resurrection "to convince people that he was the Messiah."

The question of whether a hoax is more plausible than an actual resurrection need not divert us here. The more pertinent question is why we should suppose that the gospels are accurate in every last detail except only when they attribute some event to actual divine intervention. What reason have we to suppose that the gospels are without error except on that single point? Craig doesn't go there, of course. His aim is to show what absurdities can result from denying miracles. But insofar as these philosophers' conclusions were absurd, it was not just because they assumed miracles to be impossible. It was because they conjoined that assumption with the assumption that the gospel stories were otherwise exactly true. But Craig is not about to suggest that anyone should ever be faulted for making the latter assumption.

The next philosophical fad in Craig's account came during the early to middle 19th century, typified by the work of David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss and his cohorts' explanation for the miracles was that they didn't even apparently happen. As Strauss argued, in Craig's paraphrase, "The contrived and artificial character of so many of these [naturalistic] explanations was painfully apparent, and the proffered explanations were no more believable than the miracles themselves." In Strauss's view, Craig says, the miracles were "products of religious imagination and legend, and, hence, require no historical explanation." As Craig observes, this was not actually a new idea. Strauss was the first, however, "to compose a wholesale account of the life of Jesus utilizing mythological explanation as the key hermeneutical method. . . . In his Leben Jesu, Strauss sought to show in detail how all supernatural events in the gospels can be explained as either myth, legend, or redactional additions."

The naturalistic explanations of the miracle stories were prima facie absurd, but what was wrong with Strauss's mythological interpretations? Craig can find nothing wrong with them except for their impetus. He suggests that Strauss had no reason whatever to propose them except for his conviction that "Any event which stood outside the inviolable chain of natural causes and effects was ipso facto unhistorical and therefore to be mythologically accounted for." I doubt that Strauss would have agreed with such a reconstruction of his thinking. Even so, he may well have had such a conviction or something close to it, and we may well ask how well he could have justified it. Craig turns next to that question. He claims that skepticism about miracles was inspired by the Newtonian scientific revolution, although, perhaps paradoxically, the same revolution also reinforced belief in God, at least according to many intellectuals of the time.

Under Newton's pervasive influence, the creation had come to be regarded as the world-machine governed by eternal and inexorable laws. Indeed, this complex and harmoniously functioning system was thought to constitute the surest evidence that God exists. . . .

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Given such a picture of the world, it is not surprising that miracles were characterized as violations of the laws of nature. For the same evidence that pointed to a cosmic intelligence also served to promote belief in a Deity who master-minded the great creation but who took no personal interest in the petty affairs of men.

This particular concept of God came to be called deism. Adapted to modern cosmology, it asserts that God figuratively lit the fuse to the big bang and has done nothing since then except to watch what has been happening.

Not all skeptics took their cues from Newton, though. Several years before the Principia was published, Benedict de Spinoza argued against miracles largely on theological grounds. Craig paraphrases two of his arguments thus.

(1) Spinoza argues that all that God wills or determines is characterized by eternal necessity and truth. Because there is no difference between God's understanding and will, it is the same to say God knows or wills a thing. Therefore the laws of Nature flow from the necessity and perfection of the divine nature. So should some event occur which is contrary to these laws, that would mean the divine understanding and will are in contradiction with the divine nature. To say God does something contrary to the laws of Nature is to say God does something contrary to his own nature, which is absurd. . . . (2) Spinoza maintains, in rationalist tradition, that a proof for the existence of God must be absolutely certain. But if events could occur to overthrow the laws of Nature, then nothing is certain, and we are reduced to scepticism. Miracles are thus counter-productive; the way in which we are certain of God's existence is through the unchangeable order of Nature. By admitting miracles, which break the laws of Nature, warns Spinoza, we create doubts about the existence of God and are led into the arms of atheism! . . . Finally, a miracle is simply a work of Nature beyond man's ken. Just because an event cannot be explained by us, with our limited knowledge of Nature's laws, does not mean that God is the cause in any supernatural sense.

Without further comment on Spinoza, Craig goes to David Hume, famous for his argument that, whether or not miracles are possible in principle, we can never in practice be justified in believing any particular report of a miracle. Hume states his principle this way in Section X of his Essay on Human Understanding: "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish."

The deists, Spinoza, and Hume hardly had the intellectual battlefield to themselves, and Craig proceeds next to review the responses of orthodoxy's defenders. Against Spinoza, Jean Le Clerc claimed that the empirical evidence for miracles is sufficient to trump any argument from abstract principles. Furthermore, Spinoza's appeal to human ignorance to explain apparent miracles, he says, implies that apparent miracles ought to be more commonplace. Craig elaborates:

Le Clerc insists that no one will be convinced that Jesus' resurrection and ascension could happen as naturally as a man's birth. Nor is it convincing to say Jesus' miracles could be the result of unknown natural laws, he continues, for why, then, are not more of these effects produced and how is it that at the very instant Jesus commanded a paralyzed man to walk 'the Laws of Nature (unknown to us) were prepared and ready to cause the. . . Paralytic Man to walk'?{29} Both of these considerations show that the miraculous facts of the gospel, which can be established historically, are indeed of divine origin.

Another apologist denied the identification of natural law with God's will by denying even the existence of natural law. Samuel Clarke claimed all events are God's actions. What looks like natural law, he said, is just the way God usually acts, while miracles are things he does unusually. Furthermore, according to Clarke, not all miracles are God's doing. Some are accomplished by angels or demonic powers. As Craig explains Clarke's position, the way to tell whether a miracle is of divine or godly origin is to check its "doctrinal context." If it seems to undermine orthodoxy, then the devil did it.

Thus, the correct theological definition of a miracle is this: 'a work effected in a manner unusual, or different from the common and regular method of Providence, by the interposition either of God himself, or of some intelligent Agent superior to Man, for the proof or Evidence of some particular Doctrine, or in attestation to the Authority of some particular Person.'{37} The relationship between doctrine and miracle is that miracle proves that a higher power is involved, and the doctrinal context of the miracle enables us to discern the source of the miracle as either God or Satan.

Still other apologists took various other tacks against Spinoza, all challenging in one way or another his premise that it is logically inconsistent for God to effect a violation of natural law, generally by some appeal to his sovereignty: Being the omnipotent ruler of the universe, he can do whatever he wants, and as a matter of fact he does. From there, Craig goes to the case brought against Hume.

As it happened, someone unwittingly anticipated Hume in Tryal of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus. In that work by Thomas Sherlock, written about 50 years before Human Understanding, a lawyer advances an argument practically identical to Hume's, that "no human testimony could possibly establish" the factuality of Jesus' resurrection, "since it has the whole witness of nature against it." Sherlock raises three counterarguments. First, our suppositions about what nature witnesses against could be distorted by limitations of our experience with nature. Sherwood offers the example of people living in a hot climate finding the notion of solid water to be incredible. Second, in Craig's phrasing, "The resurrection is simply a matter of sense perception." The claim is that a man was seen to die and was later seen alive. Neither claim is itself extraordinary and is routinely believed on the basis of ordinary testimony. "Thus," says Craig, "considered as a fact, the resurrection requires no greater ability in the witnesses than to be able to distinguish between a dead man and a living man." Sherlock does concede, he says, that "we may require more evidence than usual" in the case of man being seen alive after he was seen dead, "but it is absurd to say that such cases admit of no evidence." Third, Sherlock argues that the resurrection is contrary to "neither right reason nor the laws of nature." It cannot be logically impossible that "The same Power that gave life to dead matter at first can give it to a dead body again." And, "The so-called course of Nature arises from the prejudices and imaginations of men."

A contemporary response to Hume was made by Gottfried Less, who covered the same ground as Sherlock but in more detail. Less claims, according to Craig, that "the New Testament witnesses fulfill even Hume's conditions for credibility of reports of miracles." He argues that, given God's omnipotence, miracles are "just as possible" as any ordinary event and are therefore "just as believable." Furthermore, if we cannot believe anything not already confirmed by our own experience, then we can never learn anything new. Finally, that miracles are contrary to common experience does not make them contradictory to common experience. By this, Craig means that there is no logical contradiction between the absence of miracles in common experience and the occurrence of at least one miracle. A unique event, by definition, cannot be part of the common experience of humanity. Most Christians, obviously, will agree that in the ordinary course of human events, dead people do not return to life; but Jesus' life, death, and resurrection were not supposed to be part of the ordinary course of human events. They were supposed to be extraordinary, an intervention by God into the course of human events. That is a point well taken, but it still leaves open the question of why a reasonable person may not doubt that it actually happened. Not everything that is possible is ipso facto credible.

Craig does not explain how Less demonstrated the equivalence between possibility and believability, but it is reminiscent of the argument that all contingent events are equally likely. It goes like this. If an event is certain to happen, then by definition it has a probability of 1.0. If it is impossible, then it is certain not to happen and its probability is zero. Anything else either will or will not happen but we do not know which. Since we do not know, it is equally likely that it will or will not happen, and therefore it has a probability of 0.5 either way. So goes the argument. It will strike some as a spoof, but I have seen it made in dead seriousness.

Of course there is some absolute sense in which one may say, "If X is possible, then X is believable." But there must be degrees of believability. It would be folly to believe every story we hear on no other condition than that it just possibly could be true. If for no other reason, we all hear contradictory stories all the time, and contradictions can never be true. But even where there is no prospect of contradiction, it is intuitively apparent to most of us that as a general principle, a belief ought to have more going for it than "not provably false." It doesn't have to be much. "I read it in the newspaper" works for some people." "My sister's hairdresser said so" works for others. Whatever. I am not arguing against credulity as such, only against the suggestion that skepticism is never reasonable.

A reasonable skepticism wants better evidence for claims that are prima facie unlikely to be true than for claims that are prima facie likely to be true. All else being equal, we know that a story about a dead man returning to life is less likely to be true than a story about a sick man who returns to normal health. We all know people who have been sick and gotten better. None of us knows anybody who died and became alive again. And so if someone we're talking with says, "I was sick for a few days last week, but I'm feeling fine now," we usually just take their word for it. Usually. But if they say, "I was dead for three days last week," chances are we won't just take their word for it. If we know them to be honest, we won't think they are lying, but we will surely think they are mistaken. The specific details of what would convince us in any particular case are not important here. The point is that as a general rule, improbable stories need better evidence than probable stories. It is the way most of us are, and we are like that for good reason. What makes a story improbable, after all? It is that we have learned from experience that stories of that kind are usually untrue.

But, Less objects, if we judge everything in terms of what we already know, then how can we learn anything? Craig does not explain Less's reasoning here, either, but it seems to involve a straw man. I don't know any skeptic who thinks we should never believe anything that contradicts what we think we already know. All we ask is that the evidence be of such a nature as to convince us that we were mistaken about what we think we know. And what kind of evidence would that be? That depends among other things on the kind of evidence that seems to prove what we think we already know. Stories about dead people coming back to life might be rare, but they didn't stop when the last book of the Christian canon was written. They have continued to be told for the past 2,000 years, and new ones are still coming up every now and then. Without exception, they are believed by almost nobody. There are always a few believers, but not many, notwithstanding the invariable claim of eyewitness origin. Even so, practically nobody is accusing us skeptics of being pigheaded for disbelieving those stories. What most people—including most Christians—assume is that those eyewitnesses were mistaken about what they saw. What Christians are saying is that the stories about Jesus coming back to life are different. All we skeptics are saying is that we don't see enough difference.

Then, says Craig, "Hume's other objections are easily dismissed," and he quickly goes through four of them.

(1) No miracle has a sufficient number of witnesses. This is false with regard to the gospel miracles, for they were publicly performed.

Craig is back to assuming his conclusion. He has not yet proved the historical reliability of the gospel accounts. All he has done is assert that they are reliable and quote some credentialed apologists who agree with him. And besides, we don't have those witnesses' reports. What we have is a report that (a) a miracle happened and (b) there were lots of witnesses present when it happened. But that report itself was written by someone who almost certainly was not a witness to any of it. There is all the difference in the world between a dozen witnesses' reports and one report by a non-witness alleging the presence of a dozen witnesses.

(2) People tend to believe and report miraculous stories without proper scrutiny. This shows only that our scrutiny of such stories ought to be cautious and careful.

It is gracious of Craig to concede that. If he is satisfied that his scrutiny of the gospel miracle stories has been cautious and careful, good for him. I am satisfied that my scrutiny has been cautious and careful, too. He reached his conclusion, and I reached mine. I won't say his conclusion was unreasonable if he won't say mine was.

(3) Miracles originate among ignorant and barbaric peoples. This cannot be said to describe Jesus' miracles, which took place under Roman civilization in the capital city of the Jews.

In saying that they "took place," Craig again begs the question. But did Hume actually say that? Here are his actual words on this particular point.

It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions.

We may assume that the men who wrote the gospels, whoever they were, were neither ignorant nor barbarous. But where did the stories that they wrote about Jesus' miracles originate? That we do not know. We know what church tradition says about their origin, but that is a received opinion that, as Hume notes, always comes with "inviolable sanction and authority."

(4) All religions have their miracles. This is in fact not true, for no other religion purports to prove its teachings through miracles, and there are no religious miracles outside Jewish-Christian miracles.

Craig has got me there, on both points. I have not checked the miracle stories of every religion that has ever existed to see whether any of them besides Christianity ever used the miracles to prove any of its claims. And, I have not the foggiest notion what Craig thinks is the difference between religious miracles and whatever other kinds he thinks there are.

But even so . . . so what? How is it that Christianity's miracle stories are supposed to be more credible than those of other religions, just because Christianity would be proven true if the miracles really happened? The point of the objection is that Christians are just as skeptical of other religions' miracle stories as we secularists are of the Christian miracle stories, but as far as we can tell, the Christians don't have any better evidence for their stories than the other religions have for theirs. In other words, we're just treating Christians the same way they treat all their competitors in the religious marketplace. If they think their miracle stories ought to get special treatment, they need a better sales pitch than "We're the Real Thing," because that's what their competitors are saying, too.

Of course Craig disputes my claim that his competitors' evidence is as good as his. But he doesn't prove that he has better evidence than they. He only asserts that he does.

Less later examines in considerable detail the miracles alleged by Hume to have equal footing with Christian miracles, particularly the miracles at the tomb of the Abbe Paris.{55} In all these cases, the evidence that miracles have occurred never approaches the standard of the evidence for the gospel miracles.

Craig is here referring to an examination undertaken some 250 years ago by someone committed to the defense of Christianity. I will happily stipulate that Hume was every bit as biased against miracles as Less was biased in their favor. But this was not the only time or the last time anybody did a comparison. Miracle stories and other tales of the supernatural from all religions and other belief systems have been studied quite thoroughly since Hume's and Less's time. It just is not true that the gospels have a credibility edge—except only in the minds of those who already believe them.

Craig next brings up William Paley's A View of the Evidences of Christianity, which he calls "a studious investigation of the historical evidence for Christianity from miracles." Paley to some degree reprises the earlier responses to Hume while adding some of his own. Acknowledging that miracles are not part of the common experience of humanity, he says this is to be expected on the supposition that God used miracles to inaugurate Christianity. That is clearly a reasonable supposition if we also suppose the truth of Christian dogma, but not otherwise. Paley's next argument, as Craig presents it, is likewise circular.

As to determining whether a miracle has in fact occurred, Paley considers Hume's account of the matter to be a fair one: which in any given case is more probable, that the miracle be true or that the testimony be false? But in saying this, Paley adds, we must not take the miracle out of the theistic and historical context in which it occurred, nor can we ignore the question of how the evidence and testimony arose. The real problem with Hume's scepticism becomes clear when we apply it to a test case: suppose twelve men, whom I know to be honest and reasonable persons, were to assert that they personally saw a miraculous event in which it was impossible that they had been tricked; further, the governor called them before him for an inquiry and told them that if they did not confess the imposture they would be tied up to a gibbet; and they all went to their deaths rather than say they were lying. According to Hume, I should still not believe them. But such incredulity, states Paley, would not be defended by any skeptic in the world. [Emphasis added.]

Once again we get the false dichotomy: Either the disciples told the truth or they lied. In the world of evangelical apologetics, when discussing Christianity's origins, human error seems never to be a possibility. Mistakes were not made. The disciples knew the truth about Jesus, whatever that truth was. Whether or not they spoke the truth, they knew the truth. If the resurrection really happened, they knew it had, and if the resurrection did not really happen, then they knew that, too. Could they have thought it happened although it did not really happen? No, they could not. That would have been an error, and according to the truth-or-lie dichotomy, the disciples were incapable of error.

But this is all irrelevant in a way, because it is not a fact that anybody was ever killed for saying that Jesus rose from the dead. There is no evidence that it ever happened. None. Yes, there is evidence that Christians were persecuted, but none at all that any of them was ever told that he or she could would be set free if only they would deny the resurrection. And in particular, there is no contemporary account of the death, by martyrdom or otherwise, of any of Jesus' disciples, with one barely possible exception. Every story of apostolic martyrdom is pure legend, not appearing anywhere in the documentary record until many generations later. The possible exception depends on when and by whom the book of Acts was written. Its author reports that "James, the brother of John," was killed by Herod. He gives no motive for the killing, though, except to say that Herod wanted to "harass some from the church." That is the only death of any of the 12 disciples (not counting Judas) that is mentioned in any canonical document or in any other document with even a pretense to being an eyewitness account of anything. The apologetic claim that "they all died for their testimony" is utterly lacking in factual evidence. As for the more particular claim that they all died simply for proclaiming "Christ is risen" and that they could have saved their lives by specifically denying the resurrection, not even the legends corroborate that absurdity. None of this proves that they could not have died that way, but no speculation about something that could have happened can be evidence that anything else must have happened.

After presenting Paley's arguments, Craig goes into a lengthy digression on "Natural Law and Miracles," which he concludes with the trivial observation that "Only an atheist can deny the historical possibility of miracles" because "if it is possible that a transcendent, personal God exists, then it is equally possible that He has acted in the universe." But Craig has done nothing yet to take us from "could have happened" to "must have happened" or even "probably happened." All we have are the assertions of a few people, none of them known to have witnessed anything themselves, that some miracles happened.

Craig ends this essay with responses to some specific arguments raised by Spinoza and Hume. Spinoza's first objection to miracles was that they would violate God's own nature if they happened, and his second was that they could not prove God's existence even if they did happen. To the first, Craig notes that Spinoza, a pantheist, understood God to be one with nature and so a violation of natural law would be a violation of himself. Since orthodox theism is not pantheism, but assumes instead that God transcends nature, Spinoza's argument is rendered irrelevant. However, since most people who doubt the occurrence of miracles are not pantheists, this response is equally irrelevant to Craig's case.

Spinoza's second objection is more subtle. Here is Craig's summary of it.

His main point appears to have been that a proof for God's existence must be absolutely certain. Since, therefore, we conclude to the existence of God on the basis of the immutable laws of nature, anything that impugned those laws would make us doubt God's existence. Underlying this reasoning would appear to be two assumptions: (1) a proof for God's existence must be demonstratively certain and (2) God's existence is inferred from natural laws. The Christian thinkers denied respectively both of these assumptions.

Craig correctly observes that belief in God may well be warranted by evidence that is sufficiently persuasive even if not conclusive. This is the position of empiricists generally, as opposed to rationalists like Spinoza, who try to establish all facts to the same degree of certainly as mathematicians establish their theorems. Craig is also on the mark when he notes that if there is any other proof of God's existence, then it makes no difference if it can be inferred from natural laws. And, to be sure, many other proofs have been offered. Whether any of them, or Spinoza's, have any validity is clearly another matter.

Craig spends some time here revisiting a semantic issue that he thinks is important. He argues that a miracle should be seen not as a violation of natural law but as the occurrence of an event that is impossible under natural law. In other words, no natural law prevents a miracle, and so there is no violation, but neither are natural laws sufficient to make it happen, and so it is not possible if only natural laws are in operation. When God's power is brought to bear by his will, however, then things can happen that would not otherwise happen, and we call them miracles. And, Craig suggests, he makes them happen, not to prove his existence but to prove that he can alter the natural course of history.

I am not sure yet whether this is a distinction with a difference, but it still begs the question of whether we have good reason to believe that any such alteration has ever really happened. And whether, in performing a miracle, God violates natural law or simply makes something impossible happen, whatever difference that could make, he has to exist either way. If the evidence for miracles can be made credible only on the assumption of his existence, then Craig has a problem. Craig agrees that Jesus' resurrection was not possible under natural law. Why, then, should I believe that it happened? Well, he says, we have good testimony that it happened. But, I say, that testimony is not good enough. Aha, he says, but it would be if you were not an atheist. Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't, but that is not my problem. It is reasonable for me, as an atheist, to think the testimony is unreliable. For Craig to prove my doubt unreasonable, he must prove my atheism unreasonable, and he cannot prove that by appealing to the resurrection if he has said that miracles are not supposed to prove God's existence.

Moving on to Hume, Craig takes him to task for either begging the question or overstating his case when he wrote:

Nothing is esteemed a miracle, if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as an uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle

Craig correctly responds, "To say that uniform experience is against miracles is implicitly to assume that the miracles in question did not occur. Otherwise the experience could not be said to be truly uniform." On the other hand, if instead of "uniform" Hume meant "usual," "then the argument fails of cogency. For then it is no longer incompatible that general experience be that miracles do not occur and that the gospel miracles did occur." Hume, he says, is confusing science and history. Science might establish, at most, that a resurrection is naturally impossible, while history could establish that at least one nevertheless did occur. This raises the question, though, of whether a historical investigation may be undertaken without any consideration to what science has told us is possible. If an ancient document of uncertain provenance affirms that a dead man returned to life, are we to simply ignore everything science has told us about the likelihood of such an occurrence? Suppose science had proven that once in a great while, dead people do return to life even after three days. Would Craig then deny that Jesus' resurrection was a miracle? Would he stop claiming that it was evidence of God's intervention in human history? Probably not. For him and his Christian readers, it was a miracle made to happen by the power of God because the Bible says so, and nothing that either science or history could possibly say to the contrary can make the slightest difference. The Bible says it, they believe it, and that settles it.

Craig tries next to muddle things by putting all ancient writings on an equal footing. History, he suggests, is just so much testimony by people about things they saw happening. While he seems to acknowledge that some reports are more credible than others, he thinks no suspicion ought to be attached to reports of miracles relative to other stories.

Qua history, they stand exactly on a par. It is contrary to sound historical methodology to suppress particular testimony out of regard for general testimony. In the case of the resurrection, for example, if the testimony which we have in the New Testament makes it probable that Jesus' tomb was really found empty on the first day of the week by some of his women followers and that he later appeared to his disciples in a non-hallucinatory fashion, then it is bad historical methodology to argue that this testimony must be somehow false because historical evidence shows that all other men have always remained dead in their graves.

So, Jesus' return to life is the only one for which any historical evidence exists? I have never known that argument to be made by anyone. Nobody could make it without presuming that, of all documents asserting that a dead person came back to life, only those in the New Testament are to be considered "historical evidence." There are plenty of other stories just like that one in the historical paper trail. If Craig says they don't count as evidence that other dead people besides Jesus have returned to life, then he is just assuming his conclusion that the gospels are uniquely reliable among all religious writings.

Somewhat to his credit, Craig acknowledges that people who doubt the resurrection on grounds of scientific skepticism should, as in fact they do, also doubt lots of other things that nobody is claiming are miracles, if they are to be consistent. Up to that point, I quite agree with him. But then he seems to imply that those other things should indeed be believed.

As Paley contended, Hume's argument could lead us into situations where we would be led to deny the testimony of the most reliable of witnesses to an event because of general considerations, a situation which results in an unrealistic scepticism. In fact, as Sherlock and Less correctly contended, this would apply to non-miraculous events as well. There are all sorts of events which make up the stuff of popular books on unexplained mysteries (such as levitation, disappearing persons, spontaneous human combustions and so forth) which have not been scientifically explained, but, judging by their pointless nature, sporadic occurrence, and lack of any religious context, are probably not miracles. It would be folly for a historian to deny the occurrence of such events in the face of good eyewitness evidence to the contrary simply because they do not fit with known natural laws.

If something is not possible because they are inconsistent with the laws of nature as they are currently understood, then I could not care less whether Craig's dogma allows us to suppose that God made them happen. Some eyewitness evidence is good and some is not so good, but none is infallible. Of course, neither is any scientific theory, but the scientific method, properly executed, can establish a theory to such a degree of certainty that a few anecdotes cannot reasonably prevail against, no matter how respectable are the people who tell the anecdotes. The most honest and intelligent people in the world can be mistaken about what they see or what they remember having seen. Human memory can be exceedingly treacherous. It usually is not, but sometimes it is, and it is especially so in highly unusual or stressful situations. It is one of the defining characteristics of the scientific method that it employs techniques specifically designed to compensate for such human failings to the extent that compensation is possible. If Craig thinks it unreasonable to doubt the reality of levitation or spontaneous human combustion, then he is wrong for the same reason as when he says it is unreasonable to doubt the reality of Jesus' resurrection. The laws of nature, as best we understand them at this point in history, do not allow any of them to happen, and reports that they nevertheless have happened are not good enough to make us reconsider our understanding of either nature's laws or the historical reliability of a few ancient religious texts.

Eventually, Craig obliquely gets back to whether historians ought to work under scientific constraints. He quotes D. E. Nineham reporting the current consensus:

It is of the essence of the modern historian's method and criteria that they are applicable only to purely human phenomena, and to human phenomena of a normal, that is non-miraculous, non-unique, character. It followed that any picture of Jesus that could consistently approve itself to an historical investigator using these criteria, must a priori be of a purely human figure and it must be bounded by his death.

And why is this?

According to Carl Becker, it is because that method presupposes that the past is not dissimilar to our present experience:

History rests on testimony, but the qualitative value of testimony is determined in the last analysis by tested and accepted experience . . . . the historian knows well that no amount of testimony is ever permitted to establish as a past reality a thing that cannot be found in present reality. . . . In every case the witness may have a perfect character--all that goes for nothing . . .

. . . We must have a past that is the product of all the present. With sources that say it was not so, we will have nothing to do; better still, we will make them say it was so.{76}

Craig sticks the label "historical relativism" onto this position, apparently because it "allows him to reshape the past with impunity so that it is made to accord with our experience of the present." But relativism, it seems to me, would be the position that the past was whatever those who lived in it said it was. What Becker is arguing is that we can be pretty sure, on an absolute basis, that certain things did not happen in the past no matter who says they did.

It is in no historian's power to reshape or change the past. The most a historian can hope to do is reshape what we think we know about it. To suggest that this ought not to be attempted is to assume that prior to some recent moment, everything we thought we knew about the past was infallibly true. But what would have made it so? Our earlier notions of history came from earlier historians. If those notions were infallible, then those historians must have been infallible, and we surely have no reason to suspect that they were.

It is not a question of modern historians being wiser or more competent than their predecessors. We may reasonably suppose that historians of all time have done the best they could under the circumstances in which they lived. But that in no way implies that we have no good reason to think we can do better. In any field of intellectual inquiry, the modern scholar has no good reason to think that his predecessors made no mistakes, no good reason to think he cannot identify some of his predecessors' mistakes, and no good reason to resist learning from those mistakes—even if while making a few of his own.

Craig next addresses the "principle of analogy" stated by Ernst Troeltsch, trying to put it off limits to miracles.

According to Troeltsch, one of the most basic of historiographical principles is that the past does not differ essentially from the present. Though events of the past are of course not the same events as those of the present, they must be the same in kind if historical investigation is to be possible. Troeltsch realized that this principle was incompatible with miraculous events and that any history written on this principle will be sceptical with regard to the historicity of the events of the gospels.

So, what is wrong with that? Craig says the principle, if properly applied, "means that in a situation which is unclear, the facts ought to be understood in terms of known experiences." OK. We have a document in which it is claimed that a dead man came back to life. What is unclear about it? Well, how about, it is unclear whether we should believe that the document's report is factual? What are the relevant known experiences? There are many, actually, but two are most pertinent. We know it doesn't happen in the natural course of things, and we know that people do write stories reporting events that never really happened. We furthermore know lots of reasons why people tell stories that are not factually true and why many people tend nevertheless to think they are true. Craig of course acknowledges these facts, and he gives examples of untrue stories that get told and believed: "myths, legends, illusions, and the like." They can be "dismissed as unhistorical," he says, "because they are analogous to present forms of consciousness having no objective referent." True, but so stated, it begs the question. No ancient document reporting a myth, legend, or illusion calls it a myth, legend, or illusion. The documents reporting what we agree are myths etc. all say that those things really happened. We infer that instead of actually happening, the reported events were myths, legends, or illusions because we have good reason to doubt their factuality.

Craig's train of thought at this point gets hard to follow, but he seems to be conflating events with the telling of events. It is "not the want of an analogy that shows an event to be unhistorical, but the presence of a positive analogy to known thought forms." Actually, it's both, or at least it often is. If a document reports an event for which nothing analogous is known to have happened in real history, we suspect it to be unhistorical, and then we look for analogous unhistorical stories to explain the document's origin. Documents are written for many reasons, one of which is to create a factual account—or as close to factual as the writer knows how to make it—of something that really happened. We learn most of what we think we know about history by reading documents that we reasonably believe were written for that purpose. Sometimes we cannot be sure whether the writer intended to write factual history, and even if we are sure about that, we may have reason to think he was not very successful at getting his facts straight. In any case, we have no events themselves to study. We have only the documents in which events are said to have happened. And for any imaginable event, there are plenty of analogues for events very like them to have been written about without their having actually occurred.

That includes real events, by the way. Any library will have thousands of documents containing accounts of events just like events known to happen all the time, but the particular events reported in those documents never did really happen. Those documents are called novels, and their stories are called fiction. The natural realism with which a story is told implies nothing about its truth, but a lack of realism justifies much doubt about its truth.

Next: the empty tomb.


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(This page last updated on June 15, 2015.)