In this episode Trent sits down with atheist John Loftus and talks about his new anthology The Case Against Miracles. They then discuss whether any testimony could justify believing in miracles like the resurrection of Christ.
Speaker 1: Welcome to The Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent: And hello. Welcome to another episode of The Council of Trent Podcast. I am your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. And you know on the podcast we enjoy inviting people who disagree with the Catholic faith for a variety of reasons, whether it’s on issues of doctrine, morality, theology, philosophy, whatever it may be. We like having people on to have civil critical dialogues about where we disagree, because we need to have that more.
Trent: In fact, last night I was up late, later than I should have been, on social media where I shouldn’t be, seeing people engaging. I posted just a little thing on my social media profile about recent news events and seeing in the comments section the way people were sniping at one another. It’s just so unfortunate. Even I fell into that temptation ever so slightly and have to drag myself out of it. But that’s not what we want to do here on The Council of Trent podcast.
Trent: We also like to have a variety of guests. We’ve had some guests on recently to talk about moral issues. We’ve had Protestants, we’ve had a previous atheist guest, and we have another atheist guest on the show today. His name is John Loftus. He is an American atheist author. He has written seven books, coauthored three others. He holds master’s degrees from Lincoln Christian Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. So he’s studied a lot of this. He even studied under one Dr. William Lane Craig. So he has studied under some of the best Christian apologists, but today is no longer that.
Trent: He is an apologist for atheism, has been involved in authoring several books and anthologies. I’ve got several of them on my shelf, including a recent one I just blurbed definitely worth checking out. Apologists need to confront the arguments in here and be well aware of them. The anthology is The Case Against Miracles, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about miracles and in particular the question, is it rational for people to believe in miracles? Are miracles something that rational people can believe in? Where do Christians and atheists disagree about the nature of miracles? That’s what we’re going to talk about on the show today, and to break us into that is Mr. John Loftus. John, welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast.
John: Well, thanks for having me. It’s an honor to be here as with any podcast that wants to deal seriously and civilly with these issues.
Trent: Well good. I’m glad to hear that. So if you’d like, feel free to tell us a little bit more about yourself. Anything I may have left out in your bio, and also a little bit about the subject at hand. What led you to put together this anthology on miracles?
John: Well, I’m Protestant. I’m an ex-Protestant, but I was raised as a Catholic in Fort Wayne and went to a couple of Catholic schools, parochial schools, up through fourth grade. I went into public school. And then I went to a couple of Catholic churches when my parents would move from one to the next. Then we went, to a different church. So I was pretty familiar with the Catholic church, at least back then in the day, it would have been in the 60s you know and early 70s. I just never, if I were to say, I just never felt like the Catholic church was… It seemed too rote, ritual, traditional for me. Then about the time that the Jesus movement hit, and you probably understand that phenomenon of that, the Jesus movement, you get high on Jesus.
Trent: Right. Jesus is just all right with me. Yeah.
John: Sure. Doobie Brothers. Yeah. And so, you know, I mean it was pretty exciting to be alive then, you know, and there was some excitement, emotionally charged and , you, you felt this warm feeling in the heart on Wesley, you know. And so I, I followed that feeling, you know, and I, and then it’s interesting I started reading, cause, you know, that’s what you want to do. I was interested in finding out, you know, well what do I believe and why? And so I read books by Josh McDowell. One of the first authors that I read, I found that his evidences was pretty convincing, at least at the time and I read CS Lewis, I read Francis Schaeffer and I went to, you know, a conservative college, Great Lakes Christian College in Lansing, Michigan, and then went on to other conservative colleges and picked up a few master’s degrees like you, by the way, I noticed you have three master’s degrees, so we’re fairly, you know, equal.
Trent: But then the road diverged and the road diverge for you.
John: Yeah. The road to heaven just sort of collapsed on me. Yeah. You know, I write about in my book why I became an atheist, you know, now people say, well, you know, people have bad relationships with their fathers and so therefore that accounts for them leaving faith. Well, Paul Bits wrote about that. That’s not, that’s not the case, but it seems to be the case that on the way to heaven will lead you away from your faith. It’s only because I write about it in my book that what happens is the promises of Christianity just begin to fall. And then when they fall now the grounds near empty rhetoric, you begin looking at the, the reason why you believe God, so.
Trent: Was there a certain particular one that did that for you?
John: Well, yeah. I mean I was, I was accused of rape is all kinds of things going on about that now, today and this world relevant. I, I false devastated me. And at the same time I was in a church where there was all kinds of, you now, problems going on in the church. I mean, the, the Holy Spirit is supposed to live in our hearts, you know, and yet I saw no evidence of it. No more evidence than you would find in a bar, for instance. You know, I mean, you step on somebody’s shoe and you get hit, you know, I mean something like that. Anyway.
Trent: That’s the perennial problem of bad Christians. Of Christians being their own worst enemies. Sure. I can, I’m, I’m sympathetic to that though. I, I mean, this would be a topic obviously for an entirely different show, but, and I would also be sympathetic to those who are sold a false bill of goods with certain Christian beliefs like the health and wealth gospel or other Christian beliefs saying that faithfulness will lead to a life of prosperity or at least freedom from suffering. Catholics we’re more down for redemptive suffering as your Catholic grandmother or nun of the Catholic school would often say when you got hurt, offer it up. So I, I definitely encourage our listeners to check that out more in your book, Why I Became An Atheist. I actually have, I think I got both editions of that in my office on the shelf. Oh, go ahead.
John: The third catalyst was a, you know, the, the studies that I had, you know, studied, you know, all of a sudden these experiences caused me to look at what I’d learned, , in more depth. So for those reasons, I just couldn’t maintain my faith anymore. So, yeah. And that’s, that’s the kind of thing I can talk about. I can talk about more about the reasons why.
Trent: Yeah.
John: And people would say, “well, no, it’s because of your experiences”. Well, what I say is this, it’s, “everything I learn and everything I experience, you know, led me away” and we never learn things in a vacuum. So your experiences are relevant and if they’re relevant, then God should know if he exists, you know, not to give these experiences to you or, or to comfort you in better ways than, than he has or make his people better people so that they don’t do to you the kinds of things that, you know, they do to others.
Trent: Yeah.
John: So it’s a combination of those things.
Trent: Okay. Well let’s talk then about the anthology. So coming out, hopefully soon I had an advanced copy, I was able to blurb for you and it was enjoyable to read through a variety of authors of different perspectives. I think most of them are atheist or they all agree they’re all opposed to the idea of believing in miracles and thought the anthologies the case against miracles. So why don’t you put forward like in a nutshell, the message you want to get across with this book. And we can also zero in a bit on your particular entries on miracles in general, and just talk about those.
John: Well, I think, your blurb talks about the central claims of the book and I think that, you know, they’re kind of summed up in my chapter, Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. And, and that the, testimonial evidence is not enough to overcome what we experienced every single day of our lives, every hour of the day that miracles don’t happen. I mean, and those things that are rare or strange or circumstantial, those things can be accounted for by chance. In the number of people that live on the planet, you would think that there would be, you know, these rare events. I mean, people have won the lottery twice in a row, you know, they find they have a twin somewhere in the other part of the world. I mean, these, these things are not miracles. I mean a miracle…
Trent: Yeah. Let’s, let’s define the term. What do you mean by a miracle?
John: Well as you read in my chapter and in the introduction, I mean one thing they’re not, that’s okay. This will be a point of contention. Certainly something we can discuss at length. There’s certainly not rare events, like a doctor comes and says to you, you know, “you are healed”, even though it’s a one in a million chance that you could be healed, you know, okay. So a one in a million chance is a one in a million chance. It’s not a miracle.
Trent: Sure. A miracle has to involve a suspension. I would say. I mean, I have my definition. A miracle involves when God acts in the world to suspend the laws of nature to accomplish some kind of purpose. So I believe that the key elements involved in a miracle are direct activity by God where an unnatural event occurs. The laws of nature are suspended and it’s done so for some kind of purpose of his. Cause That would be different. What you’re saying. You’re right. Freak occurrences. And I do believe God can work through freak occurrences. We would call that Providence. I’ll give you an example, back in, and now this actually, this story I’ll tell you kind of deals with the extraordinary events Maxim, which I do want to get back to. Back in 1950 in Beatrice, Nebraska, there were 15 members of a choir. I don’t know, have you ever heard this story?
John: It’s coming to me. Go on.
Trent: There are 15 members of a choir in West Side Baptist Church in Beatrice, Nebraska. And there, they were, it was the regular choir practice and they all got there at 7:15 and they were ready to sing at 7:25 and they were all very punctual cause the choir master is really strict lady. So they’re all almost always there. You know, they were the usual thing. Then on one day in 1950, they were all 15 minutes late and the building exploded from a natural gas explosion and all 15 members were had unusual things happen to them make them late. I do not call that a miracle, but I do call, I would call that Providence in just that fortunate timing led to this, this highly improbable and favorable outcome for people. So I would say that yes, there’s a differences between Providence, freak occurrences that are natural but unlikely, and then miracles, which involve some suspension of the laws of nature. So would you, I guess is that what you’re getting at?
John: Well, Providence, it’s interesting, you know, because you know, we could talk about whether Providence is itself a miracle. I think it’d be, it’d be a fruitful discussion, but I would say I would say it isn’t, and I can’t explain the odds there. You know, I’m not, I’m not here to explain them. What I am about to say is that those sorts of things will happen given enough, you know , tries. And that that try just happened to work. Now that makes me on the, on the wrong side of the odd. So say, well, I know that the odds are against what you just said, John. Well, no, they’re not. The odds say that extremely rare occurrences like that will occur somewhere over the world, given 7.5 billion years and given the amount of decades and centuries that have transpired for something like that to have occurred. So yes, I would say the odds are on my side, even though it doesn’t seem like it.
Trent: Well, true. So we also call that the law of large numbers. And so I’m familiar with this from statistians that when you have large groups of people, large members of a set, when it’s large enough, improbable things will happen. But, here’s what’s interesting to me. Like I mean I tell you, cause I want to get to this Maxim that you, you defend and you’ve helpfully given an acronym, which I’ve never seen anybody else do before. So kudos to you for giving an acronym to this for the discussion. The ECREE principle E. C. R. E. E. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. We find the thought in the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume, though I believe the Maxim itself is, more properly comes directly from the late critic and skeptic Carl Sagan. Would you agree with that?
John: I don’t, I don’t try originate to, to fight the origination of things. So what you said is accurate. That’s fine.
Trent: Sure. The idea here is extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think Sagan uses the example. And if I say I have a, you know, a car in my garage, we don’t bat an eye at that. If I say I have a nuclear missile, need more evidence to prove that. If I say I have a dragon in my garage, while I would, I would need mountains of evidence.
John: Yeah, that’s all, that’s all Sagan. That’s his example, dragon in my car, my garage, or maybe a fire breathing dragon he used something like that.
Trent: Yeah. So for me, because in your anthology, in your entry on this ECREE principle, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You do make a distinction between three kinds of claims, ordinary claims, extraordinary claims and miraculous claims. Do you, do you hold that those are three different kinds of claims?
John: Yeah, I mean they may not all be clearly distinct claims and there’s probably some bleeding between one level to the next, but yeah, three different claims. Sure.
Trent: Okay.
John: And then, ordinary claims, like I, I saw, you know, your aunt at this grocery store today, you know, or I’m walking on main street now. Those are ordinary claims. And the trustworthiness of the person who says it is all you need to believe them under normal circumstances. Now the guy who got arrested and, and, and he’s looking for an alibi or something like that. But there might be a reason to question it cause that may become an extraordinary claim.
Trent: Okay. So ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I didn’t quite get this out of your anthology when I was reading this. Are you also saying that miraculous claims require miraculous evidence? Are you keeping that parallel structure?
John: Correct.
Trent: Oh, okay.
John: Yeah, that’s, that’s Hume. Now, miraculous evidence is an extraordinary type of extraordinary claim. So I, I think I said that in, in the chapter. An extraordinary type of extraordinary claim. I mean it’s the apex of the extraordinary claims. It is. It is so, so much above most extraor… Well, all other extraordinary claims that we have to give it a different category because what we’re looking at there, and you had said it in your own definition for miracles, these are the claims that someone says nature was suspended, you know? And so in those areas there you need, you need some kind of suspension of the normal operation of things. And when it comes to testimony or objective evidence, that corroborate testimony. You need an extraordinary evidence, extraordinary evidence above your testimony. Above…
Trent: Well not just extraordinary evidence. It sounds like you’re saying that cause what Hume says is that no testimony can be believed. 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 event it tries to establish. Like you want like miraculous kinds of evidence almost. They’re even more impressive than the miracle itself, or at least it’s false hood were.
John: right. Now that seems like a high standard and we have to unpack what that might mean. What, and it’s kind of hard to do any of that unpacking, we need perhaps a whole article on what that might mean we have to think through that, but we can’t just say it’s … what we can say is this.
John: We can’t say that evidence for a miracle is mere testimony. We can’t say that. That’s not allowed. That someone who says, you know, I saw or let’s take the example of the virgin birth, right. Okay. So Mary says, “well, the Holy Spirit came upon me and, I’m with the son”, and who’s going, who’s going to believe that? I mean not even Joseph believed. And we are told in the gospels that Joseph believed Mary’s testimony based upon a dream. Now a dream is no more evidence of … a dream is not evidence of anything except for a dream. So Joseph believed based on insufficient reasons and his story is included in Matthew’s gospel for insufficient reasons as well. And you wonder why Matthew would include such a story in his gospel. What other research did he do, you know, insufficient research did he do to come up with his other stories? So already I am suspect in believing what Matthew has to say.
Trent: Okay, well let’s, let’s get to the, because we could talk about the mirror and we might have to have another dialogue which would be informative and fruitful on the miracle claims within the New Testament itself. I want to focus on this main principle of whether we could ever be justified in believing in miracles. And here’s, here’s a problem that I have when the bar is raised this high, the saying, well testimony, cause what I gathered from Hume and also from our, our conversation is a claim that testimony cannot overturn uniform experience. If we have uniform experience of something, than mere human testimony can’t overturn that.
Trent: But it seems to me that if we applied that throughout history, we would end up failing to believe many true things because sometimes our experience of what’s uniform, get the, the Apple cart gets upset. I mean I’ll give you three examples of three propositions that were, that were universally held and I mean people tried to offer testimony to them and people scoffed at that, you know, in various circumstances.
Trent: So one, would be the claim that birds can talk. I mean if you live in a place without parrots, you assume birds can’t speak words, but someone who lives with parrots has testimony quite differently. The second would be that rocks fall from the sky. Like scientists didn’t believe in meteorites because they thought those were idle tails of superstition. In Many cases meteorites were worshiped in shrines and things like that. And so they thought it was just, you know, kind of idle tales. The third, I think it’s one that Hume actually addresses, but I don’t think sufficiently in his work. And that would be the claim that you can walk across a Lake. Water, well when it’s frozen. But if you lived in a tropical climate and never experienced ice, why would you believe that?
Trent: So do you see my concern that someone could have uniform experience, but nobody can ever what all of reality’s like. And because of that they’ll shut down any testimony unnecessarily. Do you see my, my concern here?
John: Yeah, I do. And that’s, I like that you might was somebody might have said, well, the earth is flat or, you know, the earth plates that we walk on are not moving, but now all of a sudden we find that the plates do move. So what we do find is that as we have evidence for things like plate tectonics for instance, or that the earth is spherical, then we adjust what we think can happen, you know? Yeah. Right. Okay, sure. And so there might be, surely there would be reasonable people living in the past who would believe things based on unreasonable standards because they didn’t have the reasons, because they didn’t have the evidence for. Sure. Sure. Yeah. I wouldn’t see a problem with that at all. It’s just the nature of the beast. But what we do…
Trent: But are you, so are you saying then that just the price to pay with your epistemology is that you might, it just may be overly restrictive and you’ll fail to believe true beliefs, that way you don’t have to believe false ones.
John: No, no, that’s incorrect. I think the standard, is, should apply even in the past because the, what’s the alternative? The alternative is to say, “well, you know what? Maybe the Earth is spherical”, believe the earth is spherical despite the present evidence, you know, and that’s, that’s unheard of. That’s something you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t want anyone to say, even if they’re right, you wouldn’t want someone to say, the earth doesn’t move. Like, plate tectonics. Those plates are not moving based on a hunch or a guess, you know, or a have it, I’m sorry I have it right. The plates are moving, based on a hunch and a guess. I’m sorry. We just don’t have the evidence for that. I think…
Trent: Okay, so you want people, they should believe things based on the evidence. I totally agree with that. And I think you, you quote Hume, who says, “a wise man proportions, his belief to the evidence”, and I think even all of Hume’s critics at his time would have agreed with that Maxim. Like someone like Thomas Sherlock for example, who wrote a criticism of Hume said that, “well of course for more extraordinary or miraculous events, you’ll need more reasons or evidence than for the mundane”. So I think sometimes when atheists, John, when atheists and Christians talk about miracles and evidence, I think sometimes we actually do, most Christians I think agree with this, that improbable or claims of miracles require more evidence than mundane claims.
Trent: But I think where we disagree is about where the bar is set. And I think Christians feel like if we set the bar that you need miraculous evidence for miraculous claims and that no testimony could ever establish them. It just kind of sets it a priori that you, the bar is set artificially too high. Instead of just saying, well, let’s just see what the evidence says and we need good evidence for claims. What do you think of that?
John: Well, testimony. Okay. There’e one thing to say, can you imagine a testimony that might cause us to believe a miracle happened? Can you imagine that? Can you, can you imagine a scenario?
Trent: Well let’s, could we do that? I think that would be important to figure out how the standard works.
John: I want to dismiss it before you start and here’s why.
Trent: Okay. All right, everyone, don’t touch that dial because coming up right now is part two of my dialogue with John Loftus on is it rational to believe in miracles? You’re not going to want to miss it here on The Council of Trent Podcast. Thank you all for listening. I hope you have a blessed day. Check out the next episode on your playlist for part two.
Speaker 1: If you like today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit Trenthornpodcast.com.