Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[Ryantology]

I hear a circular argument: If miracles are impossible, the report of any miraculous event must be false, and therefore, miracles are impossible.

Miracles are assertions made without justified cause until it is demonstrated that no possible natural explanation can ever describe an event, as natural events are too numerous to count and many are documented in exhaustive detail. Unless a miracle is a presently inexplicable natural event, in which case, it's not a miracle at all, by definition. Your argument is yet another example of a believer insisting that your assertions should be regarded as true simply because your beliefs have persisted for a long time. It doesn't work that way anymore. Your assertions must be shown to be true, or at the very least, be supported by sufficient physical evidence, before anybody outside of your religion will take you seriously.

I am defining miracles as special acts of God in the world. Since miracles are special acts of God, they can only exist where there is a God who can perform such acts.

What was that you just said about circular reasoning?

If one does not believe in God, then they cannot say miracles, as I define them, are impossible.

There are two problems with this. One, you've made it so that pretty much anything can be a miracle. Finding lost car keys or winning a free lottery ticket can be miracles. It dilutes the essence of the word to the point where a miracle means nothing more than a lucky break. Second, until you conclusively demonstrate that any event, ever, is certainly a special act perpetrated by the one of thousands of human gods you specifically believe in, miracles, as you define them, are just baseless assertions on your part.

Hume's position was that miracles were violations of the laws of nature. He said nothing is esteemed a miracle if it happens in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly healthy, should die suddenly. 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 the appellation.

And that is exactly what a miracle should be. The impossible. Something that absolutely cannot happen, under any circumstances, unless your God, specifically, intervenes, breaks the rules, and makes it happen anyway. Anything less than that is...

Instead of weighting the evidence in favor of miracles, Hume simply plays statistical games. He adds evidence against them. Since death occurs over and over again and resurrection occurs only on rare occasions at best, Hume simply adds up all the deaths against the very few alleged Resurrection and rejects the later....But this does not involve weighing the evidence to determine whether or not a given person, say Jesus of Nazareth... has been raised from the dead.

... a numbers game. Unlikely events happen all the time. People beat 200 million to 1 odds and win sick cash in the lottery. Buildings collapse and everybody inside dies except for one person. A person gets shot in the face point-blank and suffers only slight wounding.

Hume should not have rejected the resurrection claims based on their small number. He should have rejected them based upon the fact that every single one comes from myths and legends. When resurrections take place in an environment that allows for them to be verified independently, then we can play the numbers game. Until then, the only statistic which matters is the number of resurrection stories verified to be true: zero.

Moreover, Hume confuses the probability of historical events with the way in which scientists employ probability to formulate scientific law. In science, the more times an event is observed, under similar occurrences and similar conditions, the greater the probability that scientists think their formulation of a law is correct. But historical events including miracles are different; the events of history are unique and non-repeatable. Therefore, treating historical events including miracles with the same notion of probability the scientist uses in formulating his laws ignores a fundamental difference between the two subject matters.

Miracles are not historical events until demonstrably true.

C.S. Lewis answers Hume’s assertion that nothing is esteemed a miracle if it ever happens in the common course of nature.” Lewis says,” Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other wor4ds they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately, we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports of them to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.”

We can only assume anything to be true which could be repeated. This is why it is wrong to group miracles with other historical events. To suggest that a freak storm destroying the Mongol fleets about to invade Japan is a miracle is incorrect because storms happen all the time, and the Japanese just happened to luck out that one happened when and where it did. But, it's also 100% reasonable that it did happen exactly as it happened. There is no need to invoke divine intervention, as the Japanese did (though it's understandable why they did).

If modern science ever documents a legitimate spontaneous resurrection, then we know that the Jesus story has, at least, a kernel of truth to it, though a million resurrections do not prove that Jesus was ever one of them. And, even that does not legitimately become a miracle until every single possible legitimate physical explanation ever conceivable is applied to it and found lacking. And, we'll be waiting an awfully long time for that day.

This is not circular reasoning. This is the very nature of miracles, the very way their inventors have described them, not being possible by the rules we all have to play by. When you move the goalposts past a certain point, positive proof is just as impossible to find as negative proof, and that is how believers have framed the argument, not us.