In a hard-hitting and comprehensive reply to a previous paper by Don McIntosh defending the rationality of belief in miracles, John Loftus argued that McIntosh’s defenses are ultimately self-defeating: his denial of laws of nature in particular, coupled with his religious definition of miracles as “signs and wonders,” would leave no way to distinguish miracles from very rare but natural occurrences. In turn that would leave no way to discern true from false miracle claims, including the ancient and unverifiable claims in the Bible made by credulous and superstitious people. In this brief rebuttal McIntosh pushes back against Loftus’ arguments affirming inductive reasoning and the laws of nature/science, as well as his arguments against the divine creation of life, predictive prophecy, and miracles in the Gospels. McIntosh concludes that in light of the relevant information available, belief in a miracle-working God is rationally justified.

In a previous paper Don McIntosh showed an exceptional awareness of the major objections to belief in miracles. In his attempt at a comprehensive rebuttal to them, his first goal was to argue that there are no fixed, exceptionless laws of nature, and thus nothing to prevent reasonable people from accepting miracle reports from reliable witnesses. His second goal was to argue that miracles are best understood as divine activity that merely defies our expectations and so miracles are akin to "signs" and "wonders." His final goal was to offer a positive case for miracles that doesn't lean on human testimony, which is generally considered weak as part of a defense of belief in miracles. Here McIntosh defended three categories: (1) miracles of cosmology; (2) miracles of prophecy; and (3) miracles of experience.

In this reply John W. Loftus offers a comprehensive rebuttal to McIntosh. Loftus argues that there are regularities of nature on a mega scale that can be described by many essential equations, and that this should be good enough. To deny the existence of the laws of nature raises twin problems. On the one hand, such a denial would open the flood gates to include false miracle claims in the absence of any way to check them against laws of nature. On the other hand, such denial would undercut the basis for belief in biblical miracles since it would concede that biblical authors didn't require solid evidence for their occurrence. Loftus goes on to argue that this is exactly what we find in the Bible—unevidenced, superstitious miracle stories. Finally, he concludes that McIntosh's miracles of cosmology are based on a kind of ignorance, as are the alleged Hebrew Bible prophecies of the promised land, and McIntosh's conclusions from his own personal testimony.

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.

Christian apologist Gary Habermas has spent the last fifty years researching, writing, and debating his "minimal facts approach" for proving Jesus' resurrection. Habermas has now compiled his life's work in the four-volume magnum opus On the Resurrection. Here he asserts that a few facts accepted by even skeptical scholars are sufficient to prove that Jesus rose from the dead. In this review retired lawyer Robert G. Miller argues that the volumes—totaling roughly 4,000 pages—are dense, verbose, and poorly reasoned.