Miracles #14

Miracle accounts run through the Bible from the parting of the sea (Exodus 14:21-22) to fire falling on Elijah’s altar (1 Kings 18:38) to Jesus turning water to wine (John 2:11). Modern skepticism about such accounts is often traced to the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, who argued that since miracles are by definition violations of exceptionlessly uniform natural law, and since our experience of natural law is always more uniform and constant than the testimony of any witness claiming otherwise, it is never rational to believe a miracle report — the evidence against will always outweigh the evidence for.

The Argument

Christian philosophers, most notably in modern form C.S. Lewis and later Alvin Plantinga and others, respond that Hume’s argument quietly assumes what it needs to prove: that nature is a closed system with no God who could act within it. If God exists and created the natural order, a miracle isn’t a “violation” of nature so much as an act by the very being who instituted the natural order in the first place — no more logically impossible than a novelist stepping into a scene of the novel. Once the question “does God exist” is bracketed as open rather than settled, Hume’s blanket dismissal reduces to circular reasoning: miracles are impossible because nature is uniform, and nature is assumed uniform because miracles are ruled impossible from the start. Peter’s sermon in Acts 2:22 treats Jesus’s miracles as a matter of public record, “as you yourselves know,” appealing to the audience’s own recent memory rather than private mystical experience.

Common Objections

Even granting miracles are philosophically possible, a fair objection remains: how do we distinguish a genuine miracle from fraud, misperception, or an as-yet-unexplained natural phenomenon in any specific case? Apologists generally respond that this is a question to be settled case by case through ordinary historical evidence (multiple independent witnesses, hostile corroboration, proximity to the event) rather than ruled out by philosophical fiat before any evidence is examined — which is precisely the approach taken toward the resurrection as the paradigm case.