In this episode Trent and atheist John Loftus finish their discussion of miracles, philosophy, and whether any testimony could justify belief in miracles.
Resources mentioned:
- Tim and Lydia McGrew – The Argument from Miracles
- John Loftus – The Case Against Miracles
Speaker 1: Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent : Thanks for stopping by The Counsel of Trent podcast. This is part two of my interview with John Loftus on whether it’s rational to believe in miracles. John is the editor of the anthology, The Case Against Miracles, probably the most substantial critical work on miracles I’ve read in recent years. This is part two, the concluding section of my dialogue with John on the question, is it rational to believe in miracles?
John: I want to talk in terms of concrete examples, the so-called testimonies that we have. I want to talk about the concrete examples, like a virgin giving birth to a baby deity or resurrection.
Trent : Or a man rising from the dead, for example.
John: Right. I want to talk about… now I’ve heard some pretty interesting scenarios but they’re hypotheticals. They’re all hypotheticals. We’re not dealing with what’s real when you leave reality. So no, I don’t really want to deal with what can be imagined.
Trent : But here’s the reason why I want to do that. The reason I think that’s important is, it’s like we’re saying, “Okay, do we have enough evidence to believe in the Virgin birth? Do we have enough evidence to believe in the Resurrection?” It’s like, we’re all standing around these stories and there’s this bar that’s floating in the air, the evidence bar, and the evidence has to get over that bar. We’re thinking, “Okay, well, where is the bar set,” and we disagree.
Trent : But if we could agree, “Okay, we wouldn’t believe a miracle based on this evidence. It’s like it’s too low.” We agree it’s just somebody just says a miracle happened in passing and never affirms the testimony again. Even I don’t consider that good evidence. So you and I would agree on the evidence. We both would probably agree on the evidence that’s too low that fails to meet the bar. But then … Oh, go ahead.
John: Then you agree with me. All right, you agree with me because what we have in the New Testament, which is something that you form your faith on or in the theology since then, are the stories in the New Testament. Well what we have are four testimonies, not 500, not 12 disciples, not the women. We have four testimonies.
Trent : John, I really want to stay on the main principles here. We both agree when there would be evidence that’s insufficient. But it seems odd to me if we don’t have a case where it’s sufficient. Then we can’t know when it’s ever rational to believe. I mean, would you ever believe that a miracle happened to you at least personally?
John: Oh, yeah, sure if one happened. I mean, I would have to run my experience through a whole bunch of filters. What am I asked to believe based on this? In an evil God? Well, no I might be forced to believe against my will there, but it’s like I don’t want to believe that, who does?
Trent : Okay. So you would believe … Because there’s two kinds of miracles. There’s a miracle that happens to you personally. Then there’s the miracles, a testimony you’ve heard of happened to other people. There are some people who claim personal miracle experiences, small subset. Then there’s most other people believe in miracles based on the testimony of others. So they’re related. But are you saying that … Would it ever be rational for an individual to believe a miracle has happened to him or her?
John: Yes, if one happened, if one actually happened.
Trent : Okay.
John: Now, my testimony, even as a former Pentecostal charismatic Christian who believed in miracles, and went to services and faith healing type of events. Even after all those experiences and upon hindsight reflection, they never had that person who was healed step up there next week and walk around. Or we never saw a doctor pronounce the person is healed. So I never saw one in my entire life. I’ve never seen a miracle my entire life.
John: That’s what we’re talking about concrete examples. If I’m supposed to believe and God wants me to believe, you think that He’d give me.
Trent : Okay. But that’s interesting. You’ll say, “Okay, so an individual could believe a miracle has happened to him or her.” Because someone could defend Hume’s argument and say, “Well, what’s more likely that the laws of nature were suspended, or that you had a psychotic experience or a psychotic break?”
Trent : There’s lots of people who have had psychotic breaks in history. We don’t have any repeated miracles. So would you say that that the possibility of a personally experienced miracle can overcome Hume’s maxim in that case? We’re not talking about testimony. We’re just talking about immediate experience.
John: Well testimony I would assume … I think I’m correct in saying this. Testimony for Hume would be other people’s testimony. At the end of his chapter, he talks about a personal miracle. He says, “Well, the only reason that Christian religion can be believed is because the person has experienced a personal miracle in his life.” That’s the one time I think he talks about a personal miracle. He says that’s the only reason people would believe in Christianity because they’ve had a personal miracle.
John: There’s some debate about what he meant there. There are two roads of debate. Is he really saying that, or is he just being sarcastic? I take the fact that he’s being sarcastic, because in the end of one of his other books he says, “What can we do with metaphysics books or just burn them up in flames?” So I think he was serious there. So yeah, I mean if a miracle happened, then it’s reasonable to believe one happened, sure.
Trent : At least to you because the problem is, if you directly experience it. But you wouldn’t say if a miracle happened, it’s reasonable to believe it happened if someone told you about it. Because it sounds like you’re saying there’s never a case where you’d be justified in believing that testimony.
John: Well, I’m going to defend Hume here. He said that at best, human testimony can only … “At best, the best and quality and quantity of human testimony can at best equal the uniformity of nature that goes against miracles.” So on one hand you have the uniformity of the nature that says miracles don’t happen. On the other hand you have an equal amount of testimony, that said one did happen. He says at that point, all you can do, the best you could do is suspend judgment.
John: Because when you proportion your belief according to the evidence in order to believe a miracle happened, you have to have some kind of probability that it happened. If all you have is that suspension of judgment, and when you weigh them on the scales, then that’s at least being reasonable.
John: It’s reasonable to say even then you should suspend judgment. You don’t just all of a sudden, well I got 51% probability here with the testimony I have. So I’m going to take a leap of faith and cover up the other 49% and reach 100% certain conclusion. So even there you suspend judgment.
Trent : Well, here’s the problem I have with that. Because when I see this in Hume’s writing, it makes it seem like we have a scale, and we’re balancing whether to believe a miracle has happened. So on one end we’ve got uniform experience of dead men staying dead, for example. Then the other, we have the testimony of individuals close to a man who is proclaimed to have risen from the dead. At best it could equal it, but usually the uniform evidence is just so heavy it outweighs it.
Trent : But to me, the uniform experience of the laws of nature operating predictably, I don’t like how it’s used as evidence to counterbalance any miracle claim. Because if miracles did happen, they could only be miracles if there was uniform activity in nature in the first place, that’s what they are by definition. So it makes it seem like that uniform, predictable behavior of nature should make us never believe in testimony about miracles. When we would expect that if there were miracles, otherwise miracles, would never stand out if the world was just a crazy place. Do you see what I mean?
John: Right, and these conundrums as apologists put them forth are looking for an escape to the fact that nature is uniform. It didn’t have to turn out this way. I mean it just really, we lack an imagination about what could have been. Now I’m not talking about the same kind of imagination that we’ve mentioned earlier about imagining a scenario where a miracle could occur given the uniformity of nature. I’m talking about imagining what God could have done and He could have done miracles in every generation. He could’ve sent His Son to communicate with us and do miracles every generation.
Trent : Whoa, Whoa, wait, no, you’re just saying miracles would be more frequent. I agree with you, miracles could have changed in their frequency that we see though they would, I think get kind of boring after a while. But in order, even in those circumstances, for them to be miracles, there would have to be uniform laws of nature.
Trent : Otherwise, if just things could appear at random or disappear at random or cause and effect didn’t work, then you can never find a miracle. Because life would be chaotic. But I don’t see as rational beings how we could exist in a world without laws of nature at all.
John: Well, the people before science, I guess I’d have to go back before Aristotle, but even before Newton and Galileo, they did live in such a world. No they didn’t really, they thought they did. I mean they saw demons under every bush, and they talked about miracles that didn’t happen. You talk about so many accounts in the Greco Roman world and miracles were happening. People were virgin born, they were demigods walking around the area.
John: So in their world, according to their mind, this world was chaotic. Yet they lived a good life as much as possible given the ancient world and stuff. So by saying, what you’re doing is you’re presupposing this world, and the one that we found, and you’re saying, well I can’t live without this world.
John: Well I think you can. I think that God could have made the world exactly like the ancients thought it behaved and they believed in God and had their own views of what God would be.
Trent : But they believed in the regularity of nature as well. They knew that when the sky was red, that was a sign that a storm was coming. They knew there were regularities in nature. They could figure out so they could live their lives. They were aware of that.
John: That’s true, but it didn’t prevent them from gaining some kind of scientific understandings of nature. Aristotle for instance, he knew everything that was to be known back then, so we were told. So we’re not saying that this is the only world that had to be, if God existed, it could have been a different world.
Trent : Well let’s just … go ahead.
John: Let’s just say every preacher had five miracles to do every month. I mean just boom like that, or 10 miracles or five a year. That could have been done, but no, God didn’t think about it.
Trent : You’re just saying that miracles, if they were more frequent … Well here, I guess what’s interesting is if these instances happened with all this kind of regularity, we wouldn’t even call them miracles at all. We would just all agree God exists. We wouldn’t have a distinction between natural and supernatural. Well, I guess we would understand that God operates in a way in the world that human beings cannot to achieve effects and then we cooperate with God.
Trent : So, but it sounds like what you’re saying is that if Christians could perform miraculous fetes on command, then people would believe. It’s almost like we’re creeping a little bit closer to the line of when it would be okay to believe things by testimony.
Trent : So for example, if God appeared in the sky to like a million people and spoke to them. You weren’t there, John Loftus to see it, but you heard all their testimony that might move you or would it not move you?
John: Yeah, sure would. But that’s one of those hypotheticals. So I mean, okay, let’s do it. I’ll sit here and wait like what is it, Elijah when the Prophets of Baal were trying to call down fire from the sky, all right go. I probably wouldn’t even show up.
Trent : But the point is though that with the hypotheticals’, that we use them to narrow us down to what is the most minimum hypothetical we would accept. Then see if reported miracle claims can cross that bar. I sometimes get a little irritated sometimes when, when I’ll ask atheists, “what would it take for you to believe?” There’s a fantastic proposal or example rather than just a definition. I think you could sympathize with me if you were having a conversation with a creationist, and you asked them what would it take for you to believe in the theory of evolution?
Trent : They asked for something like, well, I would want a time lapse video that shows the whole thing happening. It’s like, well, I don’t have that evidence for you, but I have good evidence if you’re willing to consider it. So that’s just what I’m saying for miracles. I might not have the spectacular evidence people want, but if I have good evidence, shouldn’t that be enough?
John: Well yeah, I would want to … So that’s why we need to talk about concrete examples. Because let’s talk about those concrete examples.
Trent : Yeah. Well like somebody coming, we tried resurrection in general. So Thomas Sherlock was a critic of Hume, and he put forward an interesting observation about proving someone has risen from the dead. Because Hume was all about sense impressions. That’s the way we can know that things are real.
Trent : What Sherlock said was, “Well, when it comes to resurrection, all we’re doing here is we’re establishing three things in a row. Somebody was alive at one point, and then they died, and then they were alive again.” We don’t doubt people’s ability to show somebody was dead and that they were alive before that point. So if they’re able to do that, we should be able to hear, we might need a bit more investigation and evidence.
Trent : But we’re just saying, did they have good reason to believe this person was alive at another point in time? So then we would say, okay, well how much testimony would be sufficient? If it’s reliable people, they have no motive to lie. They’re in control of their mental faculties, then I think we should be open to that.
John: Well, surely you didn’t just present a case, did you? I mean, I could present a much better case. That would be, again, you need to imagine things differently. Now if Jesus did exist, and I think He did, but let’s say He didn’t, I mean let’s say He did. Born of a Virgin and He died in a cross for sins and then was resurrected from the grave in order to save people in the past from their sins.
John: So who needed to be redeemed in the past, like the past 2000 years, the past 10,000 years, whoever it met. However many years He has to forgive the sins of the human beings. So if He could die then and save them from their sins, then if you have an imagination, you could say, well, why not?
John: Why didn’t Jesus come and die in the years say 10,000 A.D. When there was all kinds of forensic evidence much better than ours that could show that He was alive and He died and He rose again from the dead. We do it under test conditions. We can test His DNA evidence before and after.
Trent : I don’t understand how that makes sense to say, here is evidence I’m presented about this miracle claim. Well why didn’t God give me better evidence? Here’s evidence X. Well, why didn’t God present us better evidence Y? Because He did not present better evidence Y, we’re were not justified in current evidence X.
Trent : It was kind of like one of the chapters in your anthology that kind of fascinated me was, I think it was McCormick’s the first chapter. He was arguing kind of like in principle that God wouldn’t perform miracles. He was like doing a kind of problem of evil argument saying that, “well, you know, if God miraculously healed someone, why didn’t He heal other people? We shouldn’t believe God just picked somebody out.”
Trent : But that would be like me saying, imagine that a rich person like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates randomly picked someone out of the department of education, student loan roles and decided to pay off their debt because they just felt like being generous. I mean, they could have paid lots of other people’s debt off without batting an eye, but you wouldn’t be justified in saying, I can’t believe this person paid my debt off because they could have helped these other people. Okay, well they didn’t choose to do that. But they chose to help you and you have good evidence for that.
John: Yeah. Your analogy is a good one for a different subject. I mean, really good one, but not here. Because what we’re talking about is whether or not it’s good evidence, what you have. My chapter in the case against miracles on Jesus’ resurrection I think shows you that it’s deficient.
Trent : But I agree with you, there could always be better evidence. But the existence of better evidence doesn’t prove the current evidence is not good.
John: Well you don’t have any extraordinary evidence, you just don’t. I mean you have at best the gospel of Mark Q, you have the gospel of Thomas, and you have Paul. I go through that in my chapter and I show in R, no I’m sorry, in Q, that’s a source for the gospel of Mark.
John: In the Mark’s gospel itself, you don’t have a resurrection appearance and you don’t have it in gospel of Thomas. The only one that says so is Paul, and it’s quite likely he didn’t think about the resurrection. Even if he did think about it, the resurrection in his words are not conducive to think it was a by body resurrection.
Trent : We’ll stay in the ancient world, but I want to still go on principals. So would there be a case of documentary evidence to convince you that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead? Would that ever be possible?
John: That would require rewriting history. Not just rewriting history, that would require a different history than what we have. You would have to come up with that which no longer exists, if it had existed at all in the first place. I’m not sure what that is and that’s talking hypothetical. What I want to talk about it as the evidence you have.
Trent : Well, no, the John, the reason I bring that up is it will be a fruitless endeavor for me to sit down and talk about, well, here’s why I believe Mark is a reliable source. Here’s why Paul believed in bodily … and maybe in the future we will have that discussion.
Trent : But I don’t even feel like sitting down if at the very end of it, you could say, “Oh but Trent, no testimony from the ancient world’s ever going to can ever convince someone a man rose from the dead.” So if that’s still on the table, I don’t feel like playing. You see what I mean?
John: I get you. I understand it. I do have some testimony though.
Trent : For what? What do you mean?
John: I have some solid testimony, not just the uniformity of nature. Not just the laws of nature, which is testimony in and of itself, pretty solid testimony. But I have some testimony from the Jews who lived in that day. Who walked where Jesus walked, who believed in Jesus is gone. Who knew the old Testament prophecies. Who believed in miracles that we read in the old Testament. They were in Palestine and they were outside Palestine.
John: Catholic biblical scholar, David Sim has written an extensive essay showing how many Jews lived in that in that day and age, and how many were Christians at the end of the first century. You may or may not agree with his statistics, you’ll have to read his essay. But he concludes that there were eight million Jews living in in the world at the time of Jesus, 2.5 million living in Palestine.
John: He says, after doing his research, that at the end of the first century, only a thousand at best. He said, only a thousand Jews believed. Because the message of Jesus went out to the Gentiles, through Paul. Now here’s the point of that testimony. If there’s anyone who who could have testified for me, John Loftus living in this day and age, that miracle happened of the resurrection, they would be it. They were actually the beloved of God.
Trent : Well do you believe the Jewish sources in Josephus that say that Honi the circle drawer made rain. Or that other Jewish freedom fighters. There are Jews who testified to miracles of their own day that I don’t think you believe them.
John: No.
Trent : So why, why would you believe them about Jesus?
John: Because the overwhelming numbers of them didn’t believe in that specific miracle, even though they believed in other miracles. They were miracle believing people. Yet they didn’t believe in Jesus’ resurrection, their Savior.
Trent : Well wait, but John, this cuts both ways. It’s like heads I win, tails you lose. Because if they did believe you could say, well they’re gullible, miracle believing people that’ll believe any idle tale. If they don’t believe, then that proves the Christians don’t have a good message. Like I can’t win you see?
John: Good try. You would be the first to present that evidence to me if the Jews overwhelmingly believe, if the numbers were reversed, 7.9 million Jews became Christians.
Trent : Well let’s go to the principal then. So what would it take if if 51% of the Jews in Palestine had converted and become Christian and believed Jesus had risen from the dead. If history turned out differently, would you still be Christian and say, well look at all that evidence right there.
John: Well, I’ll answer that question if you can answer how many whiskers it takes to have a beard. What I know is I hear.
Trent : I can’t grow a beard because I’m part Irish. I can’t grow a beard or eat anything spicier than a potato.
John: I’m part Irish myself. But no, I mean there’s certain demarcation lines that philosophers and theologians love to dispute. I’m not one of them. I know a beard when I see one I and I know a case when I see one.
Trent : Okay, so then we don’t have to have a line. We don’t have to have the line. We could just say there could have been ancient testimony to convince us of a miracle related to Jesus. There could have been, but there was not.
John: Exactly. There could have been, but there wasn’t. The Jews would have been exhibit A on your docket there.
Trent : But that’s good for us in our discussion. Because then I’ll be willing in the future to sit down with you or other atheist apologists. Because otherwise, if Hume was right, a person could just fold their arms and say, “I don’t care how many documentary sources you … I don’t care if you get Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, Philo, archeological evidence. You could put all of that together, it’s not going to move me on Jesus, the mission of.
Trent : Because as Hume says, no human testimony, unless it’s falsehood, were more miraculous. But then the problem here is even if there was a ton of human testimony, you might say, well that is such a miracle. Why should we believe that testimony’s authentic. So I think we’re at a good place to say, “okay, it is possible for testimony to establish a miracle. But the Christians haven’t passed muster.” When you look at the arguments they put forward and say they don’t work and Christians would disagree. So then we’re worthwhile having that conversation about the evidence as put forward.
John: Sure.
Trent : Okay. I’m fine with that. We got a little bit of time left. There’s one other element I want to address that when we’re talking about whether miracles occur. Because you also did a neat entry in your book on different types of apologetics. It seemed to draw from the same five styles of apologetics that I think it’s Steve Cowen talks about in his book, Five Views on Apologetics. Was that something that you were paralleling?
John: Yeah.
Trent : So you’ve got the classical guys who like William Lane Craig or Peter Kreeft or Aquinas who say, here’s the philosophy for God. We believe there’s a God. Then from there we look at history to find miracles. Because part of when we’re discussing miracles, whether one is open to miracles or not does deal with the prior probabilities of saying well does God exist?
Trent : Cause for me, I’ll agree with you. If someone doesn’t believe in God, miracles are pretty far stretched to believe in. But if you do believe God exists, it’s not as far fetched to say He’s acted in history and I think God, His direct interventions to suspend the laws of nature are not frequent. But I’m more open to them because I have good evidence to believe that there’s a God who made the world.
Trent : You even said in your book, I think that you said it pained you to say this, that it’s rational to believe in like a generic Supreme being. What did you mean by that?
Trent : You bring it up here.
John: I think I used the word loathe.
Trent : You loathe, it was loathe.
John: If I could even grant, I don’t even want to, yeah, I remember somewhat of when I said that. But I’m trying to remember the context. If I could grant something like, oh, well a barbaric god you mean? Yeah. I edited a whole book called Christianity is Not Great. It’s a big hunker of a book where we document the … Once you believe in things for less than good evidence, then you can commit atrocities
Trent : Well what you said was just about that it could be rational to believe in a generic god, maybe not the God of the Bible, but it could be rational. You don’t agree, but it could be rational to believe in a generic god.
John: Yeah, it sure is. I mean it wouldn’t be a miracle working god. Because like I said, if you’re dealing with concrete examples, I didn’t see no concrete examples of miracles. See possibilities don’t count in my epistemology. I mean, first it comes for a discussion, a hypothetical discussion, which like I said, philosophers and theologians love to engage in. But concrete examples give us our definitions. Concrete examples give us the demarcation points even if we can’t be too specific about where they are.
John: So the sort of generic god wouldn’t be doing miracles because we’ve seen none, and we see no reason to believe one. So there might be some kind of like whatever supernatural spiritual world out there. But if there is, it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change anything about what I should do. What I should believe, how I should act. I mean this god doesn’t tell me how I should act.
Trent : Now, but we want to make sure we’re not a priori or a posteriori. That if there were a generic god, he would not do miracles. You could have a priori reasonable because of the nature of this generic god. Or, because it sounded like what you’re saying, he just didn’t because none of the evidence has ever stacked up that way. Are you saying this generic god, even if it did exist, the evidence doesn’t show that or that we know a priori he wouldn’t do miracles. It would do miracles.
John: The evidence is probable, maybe overwhelmingly probable, maybe even exceedingly probable that we haven’t seen a miracle that has been verified and so if that hasn’t happened. Then if there’s a generic god then he hasn’t done them.
Trent : Okay, so it’s an a posteriori question. So, but I think this has been been fruitful that we can see that it could be possible. The evidence could be there and people dispute whether it is. I think that would be a good conversation to have and happy to have it with you or I’m hoping to have other atheists on the podcast.
Trent : So just a reminder to our subscribers, be sure to go to a Trenthornpodcast.com, support the podcast there. You get access to bonus content, and you help me because I would love in the future. I’d love to have John sit across from me here in San Diego. I’m sure John wouldn’t mind coming out to San Diego would you John?
John: That’d be cool. Really cool.
Trent : I’m sure it wouldn’t be that hard to drag you out here to maybe talk about the resurrection or talk about other evidences for these claims. Because you see we could continue on with the discussion and I hope that we do. So. John, I thank you for helping us talk about miracles. Do you know when your anthology might come out or where people can get a copy of it?
John: Yeah, it’s being delayed, but I don’t know why. November, I’m saying November, so just in time for professors to consider for their classes come January. Now and The Case Against Miracles, and it’s the crowning work of my publishing career, I’ll tell you that. Michael Shermer wrote the forward and he had some pretty glowing things to say about it, which amazed me. He said, “these days he’s never seen a book like this, and it makes it a better case than everything else he’s read.” I thought, wow.
Trent : No, I agree. It’s probably for me, one of the most substantial volumes I’ve seen from miracle critics in a long time, so I definitely recommend that. Is there a volume or a work or an author who defends miracles you think people will be worth checking out as a mirror image to yours?
John: Well, you of course.
Trent : Well, I’m flattered to be.
John: You need to sell me one of your books. I need to get one of your books.
Trent : I will send you a few copies, though I would love to do a full treatment on the resurrection or miracles in general. I would also recommend our listeners. I know there is an anthology called In Defense of Miracles you all might enjoy checking out. I would recommend to our, oh, here’s our recommend to our listeners.
Trent : So if you want the case against miracles, check out John Loftus’ book when it comes out in November. If you want a good case for miracles, Timothy McGrew, M-C-G-R-E-W, and his wife Lydia, have done some wonderful work on this. They have a cumulative case argument for the resurrection.
Trent : So I’ll include a link to John and his work and a link to Timothy McGrew and his work. So you can compare the two and hopefully our listeners, whoever they may be, and maybe we’ll get a few atheists and a non non-theist, non-Christians in the podcast listening. You might enjoy checking that out as well. John, thank you much for coming on. Hope to have you back again on the Council of Trent Podcast.
John: Yes, thank you so much, appreciated being on.
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