Atheists sometimes dispute miracles, the Resurrection of Jesus, and even the existence of God on the grounds that these “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But do they understand the implications and assumptions of this catchphrase? Trent Horn shares his thoughts on Catholic Answers Live.
Transcript:
Caller: I will typically hear atheists claim that extraordinary events like the Resurrection require extraordinary evidence, and you can’t prove the resurrection with biblical sources or non-biblical sources from the first century. So how would I respond to that?
Trent Horn: Well I think the best way to respond is to ask them to define their terms and to defend their assumptions. For example, I would ask them: “Okay, what do you mean by the word ‘extraordinary?’ What do you mean, ‘extraordinary events?’ What makes an event extraordinary?” Because that’s a very subjective term.
So yeah, if you are an atheist, for example, to hear someone say “God answered my prayer,” that’s gonna be a really extraordinary event because you don’t believe there is a God. But as a Christian, if somebody told me: “God answered my prayer,” that’s not extraordinary at all. Now it could be a prayer for something that’s rather mundane, and so I don’t consider it that extraordinary for God to help someone in their life in that regard. So it sounds sensible, but there’s a lot of things loaded in there.
So say: “What do you mean by extraordinary? If by ‘extraordinary’ you just mean ‘miraculous,’ then why are you making a distinction between miraculous events and non-miraculous events, as if you’re saying: ‘Well, we know that miraculous events don’t happen’? How do you know they don’t happen?”
They’ll say: “Well, because we can’t believe this miracle happened in history because we have all of this testimony of miracles not happening.”
How do you know miracles don’t happen?
“Well, because there is no God to cause these miracles.”
As C.S. Lewis said in his book Miracles, it’s kinda arguing in a circle. So I would say: “What do you mean by ‘extraordinary?'” If you just mean “miraculous,” then you’re kind of begging the question. You’re already assuming miracles don’t happen. If you’re saying that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, and “extraordinary” is basically a synonym for “miraculous,” then what you’re saying is “Miraculous events need miraculous evidence.” Well, if that’s the case, why would I believe the evidence exists, if it’s miraculous? You’d need miraculous evidence for that, and you’d have this infinite regress; and so I feel like the atheist has set up a position where you could never be justified in believing in a miracle no matter what the evidence is.
And you can check out my debate with Matt Dillahunty on this. For Matt, for example, he has never articulated when he would believe in God or believe a miracle had occurred. And Lewis talks about this in his book Miracles: you could always assume you were hallucinating. We know people have hallucinations. So unless you already believe God exists, you’re gonna be pretty closed off to miracles in the first. That’s why, when I debated Dillahunty on the Resurrection, in my opening statement I gave an argument for the existence of God, actually, because that makes it easier to believe miracles can happen, if you believe there is a power capable of intervening in the laws of nature.
Now maybe they’ll say: “Well, we don’t mean miraculous; we mean, like, infrequent. We’ve never heard of an event like this happening before, so we need really good evidence for it.” But by that logic, you would fail to believe in many historical events. You know, Hannibal crossing the Alps with war elephants, that’s extraordinary. If I told you I went over the Matterhorn with an elephant—or by the Matterhorn with an elephant—that’s pretty extraordinary, and yet we’re taking the word of Roman historians who wrote decades later. When the Wright brothers flew an airplane in—what was it, like, 1903—there were scientific papers, journal articles, that had come out a few years before saying that heavier-than-air fixed-wing flight would be impossible. And yet would you believe someone who said—by that logic, at that time, if someone told you “I saw the Wright brothers fly a plane,” you couldn’t believe them because it was so infrequent, even if it was a group of people who produced reliable testimony.
So I’d recommend, Rob, when you talk to an atheist about proving whether miracles happen, you gotta get them to lay the groundwork and say: “All right, what standard do we use to determine if something happened in the past? When is testimonial evidence allowed?” Because that’s how we know, like 99% of history, especially ancient history—it’s by testimony. What testimony do we need? Well, if it’s multiple accounts; and there’s evidence they’re sincere, like they’re willing to be martyred; and we have groups of people, so it’s unlikely they’re hallucinating; that kinda raises the bar and makes it more likely we can trust the testimony. So you gotta get them to explain what they mean by “extraordinary events,” and then get them to commit to: “What standard has to be met before you’ll believe a certain event happened? Ordinary or extraordinary, any event, what standard has to be made?”
Finally, I’ll say, Rob, what has to be taken into account—sometimes people will use this analogy: “If I told you there was a dog in my garage, you wouldn’t need evidence. If I told you there was a dragon in my garage, well, you would need evidence that’s extraordinary.” And so it’s kinda like the Resurrection, right? Well I would say, yeah, you need good evidence, but not miraculous evidence.
This is Carl Sagan’s example, the late freethinker Carl Sagan—atheist, whatever—Sagan’s dragon in the garage. Here’s the problem: when someone tells me they have a dragon in their garage, I don’t believe them not just because of a lack of evidence, but I have good reason to believe dragons don’t exist, because if they existed we would see them a lot more. They’re a very large animal, and like other large animals, we’d expect to find them in our ecosystem. Since we don’t, I’m already very prejudiced this person does not mean a fire-breathing dragon. Does he mean a komodo dragon? Maybe.
So that’s what I would say with the Resurrection. Take Jesus’ Resurrection: it’s not the same as Sagan’s dragon, because we don’t have evidence that Jesus’ resurrection did not happen. We don’t have testimony saying that the apostles recanted, for example, of their belief that Jesus rose from the dead. Or, if dragons existed, we’d see a ton of evidence, and we don’t see it, so there’s good reason to believe they don’t exist. But if Jesus rose from the dead and only appeared to the people described in the New Testament, we would expect the evidence we have now, which are churches, tradition, and sacred writings. So we have the evidence you would expect; the question is, does that evidence—is it strong enough to support that belief? Is it reliable enough? That’s what you’d have to pin them on.