Don McIntosh

In mid-2024 John W. Loftus and Don McIntosh debated whether horrendous suffering refutes theism on the Secular Web. This year McIntosh opens a follow-up debate on whether belief is miracles is rationally justified.

Objections to the veracity of miracle claims typically run something like this: even if we concede that miracles are logically possible, an event falling outside the bounds of the laws of nature (a miracle) is so outlandishly improbable, and human testimony supporting it so unreliable, that no amount of testimonial evidence is ever sufficient to justify a miracle claim. Given our knowledge of the laws of nature—fixed, observable regularities of the physical world—along with our understanding of probability and our familiarity with the vagaries of human nature, the only rational response to miracle claims is skepticism.

In this opening salvo against that reasoning, McIntosh argues first that in light of the problem of induction and the incompleteness of our knowledge of nature's perceived regularities, there are no grounds for believing in natural laws that are universally binding. For that reason, he argues further that miracles are best understood as "signs" of divine activity that defy the expectations borne of human experience rather than events that run against, around, or beyond the laws of nature. Finally, he briefly describes three categories of miracles which do not invoke the testimony of witnesses, and in which belief appears justified: (1) miracles of cosmology; (2) miracles of prophecy; and (3) miracles of experience.

Many Christians maintain that, in principle, atheists can never "prove the negative" that God does not exist. But atheists often regard this objection as a mere quibble, counterclaiming that the burden of proof rests solely upon the believer who has claimed knowledge of a supernatural being. In "Proving a Negative" Richard Carrier argues that proving the nonexistence of God is actually relatively easy, making passing appeals to the role of evidence in epistemology and the presumed incoherence of Christian theology. But in taking this position Carrier has assumed a substantial burden of proof, a burden that his arguments fail to meet.

Misunderstanding the Burden of Proof (2019) by Richard Carrier (Off Site)

In this response to Don McIntosh's "Transcending Proof," Richard Carrier explains how McIntosh does not actually address the logic or arguments Carrier makes in his "Proving a Negative," and updates its logical structure to make the same point using Bayesian epistemology.

In Chapter Four of Science, Confirmation, and the Theistic Hypothesis, Keith Parsons defends the dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence as part of a general critique of miracle claims which aims to defend naturalism as a rational operating philosophy against potential defeaters. In this defense of miracle claims Don McIntosh argues, first, that for any unknown the burden of proof falls equally upon naturalists and supernaturalists; second, to repudiate all miracle claims in one fell swoop with a mere presumption of naturalism renders naturalism unfalsifiable and unscientific; and third, estimating the prior probability of miracles introduces an element of subjectivity that makes any general probabilistic argument against them suspect. These points leave open the possibility of confirming specific miracle claims on the basis of historical evidence and eyewitness testimony.