If God exists, are miracles possible?
If God created the natural world, then what nature can do on its own is not the limit of what can happen if God acts. A miracle still has to be established by evidence.
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If a Creator exists, could He act beyond what nature ordinarily does? This prepares us to investigate Jesus' resurrection.
Step 1 gave us reasons to believe in a Creator. Now the issue is what follows when we hear a miracle claim: nature's limits are not automatically God's limits, but the claim still has to be established by evidence.
The cemetery
A few days later, a shortcut takes you past an old cemetery. Jordan looks through the fence at the headstones. “Okay, say I grant that there may be a Creator. That still does not get me to Christianity. Dead people stay dead.”
You tell him you agree. Dead people do not naturally come back to life.
He looks over. “Then why should believing in a Creator change anything? If science tells us what dead bodies do, why should I take a resurrection claim seriously?”
You point out that there are really two questions on the table: what a dead body can do on its own, and what the Creator of the body could do if He acted.
Jordan thinks for a second. “So you're not saying dead bodies normally come back to life. You're asking whether nature gets the final word if there really is a God beyond it.”
Natural laws tell us what nature does under natural causes. If a Creator exists beyond nature, those regularities do not tell us what God cannot do. Miracles are possible in principle, but a particular miracle has to be established by evidence.
Step 1 made a case for a Creator. If that case is sound, we cannot rule out miracles before looking at the evidence. We still have to show that a particular miracle happened.
What changes if God exists?
Dead people stay dead. That is what we see in the ordinary course of nature, and Christianity does not deny it. Christians are not claiming Jesus' body started working again on its own. They are claiming God raised Him from the dead.
We need to separate what nature can do on its own from what its Creator could do. Natural laws describe the regular ways the physical world behaves. They tell us what to expect from natural causes. They do not, by themselves, establish that natural causes are the only causes that exist.
The earlier studies change the starting point. We have considered reasons for believing the physical universe depends on a Creator beyond itself. If that case is sound, then the Creator is not one more physical object inside the universe, limited to whatever matter can do on its own. The fact that a dead body cannot naturally restore itself does not show that the Creator could not act on it. Natural impossibility is not the same thing as saying God cannot do it.
Of course, an unexplained event is not necessarily a miracle. An unusual recovery, an unlikely coincidence, or something science cannot currently explain is not automatically an act of God. A miracle claim still needs positive evidence that the event happened and good reason to think divine action explains it better than the alternatives.
David Hume gave one of the most influential challenges to believing miracle reports. He begins with a sensible principle: we should proportion our belief to the evidence. We normally trust testimony because people often report events accurately, but we also know witnesses can be mistaken or deceptive. When someone reports a miracle, Hume says we have to weigh that testimony against our repeated experience of the regular course of nature. In his famous test, testimony should establish a miracle only when it would be even harder to believe the testimony was false than to believe the miracle occurred. He then gives further reasons for skepticism, including problems with witnesses, people's attraction to remarkable stories, the settings in which miracle reports arise, and competing miracle claims from different religions.
Hume raises questions we should take seriously. Witnesses can be mistaken, stories can change, and not every miracle report is true. That is why we examine the evidence for a particular claim.
But ordinary experience that dead people stay dead establishes something more limited: dead people do not naturally return to life. It does not establish that God has never raised anyone. Once we have independent reasons to believe a Creator exists, the evidence for a particular miracle has to be considered with that background in view. We should ask how well the miracle claim explains the evidence and how well the alternatives explain the same evidence.
You may also hear the slogan, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” If that means an unusual claim deserves careful scrutiny and good evidence, that is fair. But we do not need to require a special kind of evidence for miracles that we would not require for other claims. We need sufficient evidence for the claim and good reason to prefer it over the alternatives. That is the same standard we have been using throughout the course, and it is the standard we will use for the resurrection.
So none of this proves that Jesus rose from the dead. It clears away a reason for refusing to investigate the claim at all. If God exists, resurrection cannot be dismissed just because nature could not produce it. Now we can ask the historical question: what happened to Jesus, and which explanation best accounts for the evidence?
Bottom line: If a Creator exists, the ordinary powers of nature are not the limit of what can happen if God acts. A miracle cannot be rejected just because nature could not produce it. Whether God acted in a particular case has to be decided by the evidence.
Think about it: What part of Hume's challenge should a Christian agree with?
Possible does not mean proven
You agree that the cemetery shows exactly what we expect from nature: dead people stay dead. But that does not tell us what the Creator could do if He acted.
Jordan nods. “So science is telling me what happens naturally. It is not telling me that God could never raise someone.”
“Right.” You explain why Hume's challenge is still worth hearing. A miracle claim should not be believed just because someone reports it. Testimony can be wrong, and the evidence has to support the conclusion.
Jordan thinks for a moment. “So I should not believe the resurrection just because God exists, but I also should not rule it out just because dead people normally stay dead.”
“Exactly.”
He glances back at the cemetery. “Then the next question is whether there is actually enough evidence that Jesus rose.”
Use what you learned in a different situation
Someone says, “We have far more evidence that dead people stay dead than that one person came back to life. Isn't it always more reasonable to think the witnesses were mistaken?” How would you answer without weakening the regularity of nature or assuming the resurrection is already proven?
The full course lets you write your response, compare it with a model, and track your progress.
Practice this inside the full courseQuestions this argument still has to face
“Dead people stay dead.”
Yes, dead people stay dead naturally. That tells us what a dead body does when nature runs its ordinary course. The Christian claim is not that Jesus' body naturally restarted. It is that God raised Him. If we already have good reason to believe a Creator exists, the fact that nature cannot raise the dead does not show that the Creator cannot.
“Hume showed that it is always more reasonable to think the witnesses were wrong.”
Hume gives us a real reason to examine testimony carefully, but the issue cannot be settled by natural regularity alone. We have to consider the background case for God, the reliability and content of the testimony, the other historical evidence, and how well the competing explanations account for it.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
If that means a remarkable claim deserves careful scrutiny and strong evidence, that is reasonable. But it does not tell us what a different kind of 'extraordinary evidence' would be. The real question is whether the available evidence is sufficient and whether the proposed explanation accounts for it better than the alternatives.
“If science cannot explain something, you just call it a miracle.”
No. Something being unexplained is not enough. A miracle claim needs positive evidence that the event occurred and good reason to think divine action explains the evidence. A gap in our current scientific knowledge is not, by itself, evidence of a miracle.
Use this in a real conversation
- Do not argue against the regularity of nature. Agree that dead people stay dead naturally; that is part of why resurrection would count as a miracle.
- Keep possibility and occurrence separate. God's existence makes divine action a live possibility, but it does not prove that any particular miracle happened.
- Do not use 'science cannot explain it' as evidence for a miracle. Ask what positive evidence there is and which explanation accounts for it best.
- If Hume comes up, explain the argument before answering it. His concern about testimony is worth taking seriously even though it does not settle the resurrection in advance.
- When someone uses 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,' ask what they mean. If they mean good, strong evidence, agree. Then move to the actual evidence instead of arguing over the slogan.
This lesson does not establish that Jesus rose from the dead. If the Creator argued for in Step 1 exists, though, resurrection cannot be rejected in advance just because nature could not produce it. The next studies have to make the historical case.
Sources for further study
- David Hume | An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X: Of Miracles: Hume's own argument about experience, testimony, and the evidential burden faced by miracle reports.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Miracles: Surveys definitions of miracles, Hume's argument, later criticisms, and the role of probability and testimony.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | David Hume: Explains Hume's argument about proportioning belief to evidence and notes the debate over how absolute his case against miracle testimony really is.
- Reasonable Faith | Creation, Providence, Miracle: Explains why a naturally impossible event is not the same as an event impossible for God and why background information matters when assessing a miracle claim.
- Stand to Reason | Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?: Challenges the idea that unusual claims require a special kind of evidence rather than sufficient evidence that supports the claim.
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