(2026)
Introduction
Regularity or Circularity?
Science, Mysteries, and Miracles
Non-Testimonial Evidence: The Origin of Life
Non-Testimonial Evidence: The Prophetic Rebirth of Israel
Miracle Testimony in the Gospels
[This article is forthcoming in the Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology, Vol. 5 (Fall 2027) in collaboration with the Trinity Graduate School of Apologetics and Theology. The version presented here is slightly modified in formatting. Used with permission.]
ABSTRACT: 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.
Introduction
It’s an honor and a pleasure to be interacting with John Loftus again, this time on the question of miracles. A well-known and widely published atheist philosopher, counter-apologist, and critic of Christianity (and miracle claims in particular), Loftus has answered my 2025 article defending the rationality of belief in miracles[1] and concluded that my arguments are inadequate to justify such a belief. In the process he has managed to strike a friendly and respectful tone even while hitting back with replies that are insightful, vigorous, brutally honest, and rhetorically formidable.[2] This is just how it should be, I think, so I will do my best to answer in kind.
That said, in addressing most of my points and adding many of his own, Loftus has covered a lot of ground. Rather than attempt to answer each of his many counterarguments in the short space available to me[3], I will focus on what I consider the most interesting, important, and relevant of those arguments—specifically his arguments affirming the soundness of inductive reasoning, the reality of laws of nature, and the reliability of science—and then his arguments against the divine creation of life, predictive prophecy, and the miracles reported in the Gospels.
Regularity or Circularity?
According to Loftus, how the perceived regularities of nature are metaphysically defined, or whether they can be scientifically confirmed at the subatomic level or near the speed of light, matters less than the fact that they obviously work at the level of common observation: “Take gravity for instance. If someone jumps off a high rise building and hits the concrete below he will certainly die. Since gravity is based on such a certainty we might as well call it a law of nature.” Intuitively unobjectionable as such a proposition may seem, the only way we can be certain that if someone jumps from such a height he will fall to his death is by knowledge of universal human experience. The problem is that human experience is not universal, at least not according to human reports of it.
Take the example of Jesus himself. According to the New Testament, the disciples of Jesus heard him make claims to divine status, witnessed a number of healing miracles at his hand, and saw him alive shortly following his crucifixion and burial.[4] Finally, they watched him ascend into the sky and disappear beyond the clouds. Now if the ascension account is true, then the experience of unsupported objects falling to the ground is not uniform because Jesus ascended instead. Yet an assumption of uniform experience is not only impossible to verify, but really our only basis for assuming that the account is not true. Such circularity lies at the heart of inductive reasoning.
Loftus asserts that I have brought up the problem of induction “to escape from underneath a heavy burden of proof”—because if nature operates according to fixed laws, I would have to defend the rationality of belief in miracles against David Hume’s powerful anti-miraculous arguments premised on those laws. But whereas Hume’s (inductive) argument against miracles has been subjected to comprehensive critiques by scholars of all stripes, from Christian apologists like Tim McGrew and C. S. Lewis to agnostic philosophers like John Earman, most observers would agree that Hume’s argument against induction is sound, or at minimum seriously difficult to refute. As David Papineau observes, induction is the means by which scientists decide “that some scientific theory is true.” Yet because there is simply no way to ensure that nature will always behave a certain way, “The problem of induction seems to pose a threat to all scientific knowledge.”[5] Though Loftus calls it a “red herring,” the problem of induction has not gone away since Hume and remains entirely relevant to the question of miracles. Given that inductivism remains problematic, Loftus bears the heavier burden of proof, namely to demonstrate that nature actually does operate according to fixed laws.
As Loftus goes on to say, we don’t need certainty, an “impossible standard,” to accept that there are laws of nature; we only need to think “in terms of the probabilities.” This seems less than consistent. The very idea of laws of nature is that they render certain physical consequences necessary, not probable. But if it’s probable, not certain, that there are such laws, the consequences that they entail are likewise probable but not certain. That being the case, evidence in the right context, and of the right kind and quantity, might well be enough to justify belief in miracles. Besides, Loftus maintains later that “extremely rare” (improbable) events happen “within the natural world” every day, which on its face suggests that probability is a poor criterion for deciding whether miracles have occurred or not.
Science, Mysteries, and Miracles
All parties would agree that talk of miracles is far removed from the practice of natural science. So Loftus assures us that when scientists “replicate the same exact tests of the same exact phenomena under the same exact conditions they receive the same exact results.” History, however, indicates that scientists often enough get different results, at which point they abandon or modify the hypothesis—or in quite a few cases simply make note of the unwelcome result and file it away.[6] Even if a genuinely scientific view of the world is in some sense correct, the laws of nature on that same view are always potentially falsifiable in principle. And any law of nature that is falsifiable in principle could one day be falsified.
In fact, numerous empirically successful theories derived from putative laws of nature have been falsified or abandoned over the years. Larry Laudan has documented a number of such now-defunct theories[7], whereas Thomas Kuhn has revealed in depth the strong and even irrational resistance that so often precedes acceptance of the new theories.[8] Loftus argues that science is “self-correcting by nature, as scientific experiments can correct false conclusions.” Yet the fact that science is continually self-correcting suggests that it never is actually correct. For that reason, as I argued some years ago, “It could be said that the flip side of ongoing scientific progress is enduring scientific ignorance.”[9]
As Loftus himself has noted, even Newton’s once-vaunted laws evidently fail to hold “on a subatomic level or … near the speed of light.” Astrophysicists like Stephen Hawking similarly maintain that beyond the event horizon of a black hole “the laws of science break down”—suggesting that those laws do not hold always and everywhere. And though Loftus is careful to distinguish between the quantum world, where “a whole lot of strangeness is taking place,” and the world of everyday experience, these are just different scale levels of the one world in which we live. In truth there is no clear delineation between the strange subatomic world and the “common sense” world of classical physics. The Manhattan Project taught us that lesson in a powerful way, and quantum computing now tells us the same.
Recently declassified and publicized evidence of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs) suggests even stranger strangeness taking place. According to the United States Anomalous Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), US Navy pilots have recorded numerous encounters with UAPs. (Interested readers can view the footage at aaro.mil.) The objects recorded exhibit “impossible flight characteristics” and “appear to violate the laws of physics”—particularly Newton’s third law.[10] As well as anything else, evidence of UAPs demonstrates that the carefully controlled domain of natural science is but a small subset of the much larger, more complex, and more unpredictable world where most of us live, and where miracles, if they happen at all, are said to happen.
Non-Testimonial Evidence: The Origin of Life
Though many arguments have been made for a miraculous creation of the universe[11], I believe a yet stronger argument supports that the origin of life was a miracle. Loftus responded to my initial argument by acknowledging that the origin of life “remains a mystery” before adding ten caveats to suggest that it was not a miracle.[12] Caveats notwithstanding, even if there are indeed laws of nature, the law of biogenesis (that “life can only come from life”) appears as firmly established as any other, in that we have billions of confirmed instances and no confirmed counterinstances.
Of course, scientists don’t take this sort of thing lying down and have devised various theories of abiogenesis (fifteen of them, according to Loftus) to explain life’s origin. Because in principle the process took several hundred million years, it cannot be directly tested. But if it’s right to say that abiogenesis has been tested it seems to have been falsified, by means of countless failed attempts not only to confirm a single abiogenesis event, but to reconstruct a viable chemical pathway that could generate life from prebiotic chemicals—or even to identify the “physico-chemical principles” that could potentially constitute such a pathway.[13]
Once we do manage to explain the generation of the first self-replicating living organism, Loftus argues, “evolution takes care of the rest.” While evolution in biology means a few things, in this context it indicates what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification”: a theoretical process of macroevolution[14], which over the course of roughly four billion years of prehistory carved out a suite of completely new body plans, countless structurally complex adaptations, and eventually the entire taxa-spanning diversity of life on Earth—all from a lone common ancestor. These days, by contrast, evolution appears to be little more than microevolutionary changes in frequencies of alleles in populations of species over time, arguably producing the occasional new species (depending on one’s definition of species[15])—but no new body plans, taxonomic groups, or complex adaptations. Loftus declares that “if there is micro-evolution then there is macro-evolution” but it’s doubtful whether that actually follows. Those designations represent differences of kind, not of degree.
Consider manufacturing as a rough analogy. To manufacture a systemically complex product requires not merely design, but fabrication and assembly: “Fabrication involves producing individual components out of raw materials, while assembly involves joining these parts together to create a finished product.”[16] Familiar mechanisms like natural selection and genetic drift would be analogous to fabrication—shaping, compressing, stiffening, dyeing, and otherwise manipulating[17]—the various parts of a functional system. The “parts” particular to living systems include complex macromolecules like proteins, and yet more complex subsystems like organelles, cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems. Yet whether design can be proven or not, there appear to be no natural processes that might account for the assembly of those parts into functional systems (i.e., beyond routine chemical “self-assembly” at the molecular level) in the first place.[18] In any case, my argument was about the origin of life, not evolution. I have written at length about evolution elsewhere.[19]
As for the origin of life itself, concludes Loftus: “The best answer is to acknowledge that we don’t know yet.” Supposing that’s correct, ignorance of how abiogenesis could possibly have occurred is a conspicuously weak position from which to assert that belief in the miraculous creation of life by God cannot be rationally justified. I will concede, however, that if an event for which there is abundant evidence, which carries strong religious-theological significance, and which appears to violate a law of nature does not qualify as a miracle (or at minimum strong evidence for a miracle), then belief in miracles is difficult to rationally justify.
Non-Testimonial Evidence: The Prophetic Rebirth of Israel
In my initial paper affirming belief in miracles, I appealed to the worldwide scattering and subsequent modern-day regathering of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland as evidence of divinely inspired predictive prophecy. To this Loftus first objects that I did not seek out scholarly consensus to get a proper “exegetical understanding.” Then he appeals to the multiplicity of scholarly opinions and schools of eschatology to argue that such a search would be fruitless anyway: “If theologians disagree with each other over the fulfillment of this prophecy, we need to deflate the probabilities that the miracle occurred as prophesied.”
Apparently Loftus is disappointed that I didn’t consult the scholarly community only because he knows they mutually disagree about almost everything (as academics are inclined to do), including interpretations of prophecy. But in the same way that I don’t need a priest to interpret Scripture for me if its meaning is already clear, I don’t need scholars to tell me when a scriptural promise has been fulfilled if I already have clear evidence of the fulfillment.
In fact it was a long-deceased nonbeliever who first revealed that evidence to me. As a fairly new convert to the Christian faith around 1986, I had developed an interest in philosophy. One day at a used bookstore in Austin I picked up an old copy of The Story of Philosophy by the agnostic historian-philosopher Will Durant. Reading his introduction to the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I came upon Durant’s panoramic overview of the plight of the Jews in history:
The story of the Jews since the Dispersion is one of the epics of European history. Driven from their natural home by the Roman capture of Jerusalem (70 A. D.), and scattered by flight and trade among all the nations and to all the continents; persecuted and decimated … outcast and excommunicated, insulted and injured; — yet, without any political structure, without any legal compulsion to social unity, without even a common language, this wonderful people has maintained itself in body and soul, has preserved its racial and cultural integrity, has guarded with jealous love its oldest rituals and traditions; has patiently and resolutely awaited the day of its deliverance, and has emerged greater in number than ever before, renowned in every field for the contributions of its geniuses, and triumphantly restored, after two thousand years of wandering, to its ancient and unforgotten home.[20]
Upon reading Durant’s sweeping narrative, I remembered the prophecy of Ezekiel in 36:24-36 (with parallels in Ezekiel 4 and 37, and in Jeremiah 16), which reads in part:
“For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land…. I will call for the grain and multiply it, and bring no famine upon you. And I will multiply the fruit of your trees and the increase of your fields…. Then the nations who are left all around you shall know that I, the Lord, have rebuilt the ruined places and planted what was desolate…”
Durant wrote in 1926, nine years after the Balfour Declaration (1917), which encouraged Jews to return to Palestine. But more was to come: the ratification of Israel by the UN in 1948, only a few years after a Holocaust that threatened to eradicate the Jewish people completely, as well as victories in the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War against the combined forces of several Arab nations.[21] Each of these seemingly improbable “minor miracles” helped cement the larger prophetic miracle of Israel’s physical restoration. Despite occasional displays of arrogance and errors of judgment on the part of her government over the years, Israel remains a bastion of democracy and free market economics in the Middle East. Some forty years of study and meditation after my conversion, the restoration and preservation of Israel still strikes me as an obvious fulfillment of prophecy and a powerful sign that God is still at work in the world.
Loftus further counters my argument from prophecy with six examples of what he considers failed prophecies. I will not attempt to answer them all here, but will go ahead and address the first two just to show that answers can be provided. According to Loftus, Isaiah’s prophecy that the Nile River will dry up (Isaiah 19:5-7) “was clearly meant for his time.” Given that in chapter 19 Isaiah repeatedly uses the future tense and the repeated phrase “in that day,” it’s actually not clear (to me at least) that it was meant for his own day. If we allow that it was not meant for his time, but rather for the modern era, some interesting facts emerge. Due to consistent population growth in the Nile region, along with the impact of Ethiopia’s GERD (Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam), “Average water availability per person has declined from almost 1,900 cubic meters in 1959 to fewer than six hundred today—well below the United Nations’ water-poverty threshold.” That number is expected to fall further still by 2050, “signaling an absolute water scarcity level.”[22] The Nile is drying up, in other words.
For his second example, Loftus points out that “Isaiah 17:1-2 asserts Damascus will cease to be a city forever.” Because Damascus is the capital city of modern-day Syria, he says, most people living there today “would find such a prophecy rather funny.” To that I would say that first, most translations do not include the qualifier “forever,” as this was a mistranslation in the Septuagint (LXX) from the Hebrew name Arorer, which evidently refers to a city (or area) “around the Arnon River east of the Dead Sea,” likely controlled by Damascus and conquered by Hazael of Aram around 825 BC.[23] And some observers would contend that the sacking of Damascus by Tiglath-Pileser in the eighth century (recounted in 2 Kings 16:9) met the conditions of the text, in that a city with its walls demolished and its people deported is scarcely distinguishable from no city at all. However, given that Damascus is often regarded as the “oldest continuously inhabited city in the world,” it might be correct to say that the prophecy has not been fulfilled.
Even if that were so, not fulfilled does not mean failed. Obviously some time has to elapse between the initial utterance and its fulfillment, and typically how much time is needed is not specified in Scripture. Thus Isaiah’s prophecy about Damascus (like the many prophecies foretelling the end of the world) could well be true, but its fulfillment still pending. Critics like Loftus might object that prophecies being open-ended in this way makes them unfalsifiable—and I would agree. The fact that there is no statute of limitations on most prophecies amounts to another reason to regard miracles as “signs” of God acting in the world rather than as testable hypotheses.
Miracle Testimony in the Gospels
As for Loftus’ various arguments against miracle testimony in the Gospels: I am frankly nothing like an expert in historical apologetics, let alone a textual or source critic, which is why I made no attempt in my initial article to confirm specific miracles in the New Testament (like the resurrection of Jesus) based upon that testimony. And I have neither the time nor the space here to try and improve upon the works of recognized scholars like Gary Habermas, Craig Blomberg, or Peter J. Williams on New Testament miracles. But I will offer a few remarks in reply.
After making passing reference to the scholarly consensus opinion that Mark was the first Gospel, Loftus says: “Subsequent Gospels borrowed from Mark and/or fact-checked the previous ones. The authors chose which stories to include, which ones to exclude, along with their order. They also slanted their stories to make theological points about Jesus to their readers.” I believe this statement to be mostly right—and entirely to be expected on the premise that the Gospel writers were concerned to get both their history and their theology correct. Loftus seems to suggest that agreement signals some degree of collusion or plagiarism, while disagreement means contradiction. Yet it would be strictly impossible for the four Evangelists to write narratives that neither agree nor disagree with one another.
History is essentially a human enterprise, the work of people with various beliefs and biases who accumulate sources that collectively depict important events of the past [24] and interpret that information to create their own reconstructive narratives. By the time that they are done, their narratives are often redundant, yet dissimilar, and many generations removed from the events themselves. But that should not be thought some sort of epistemic liability. In many respects we know more today about, say, the Battle of Waterloo than did Napoleon, Wellington, or any of the other participants who wrote individual eyewitness accounts from their uniquely limited—but not usually contradictory—personal perspectives.[25] Similarly, in many ways we know more about the life of Jesus now than did Matthew or Luke when they began compiling material for their Gospels.
Loftus maintains that “prescientific people” in the first century believed in miracles because they had no concept of laws of nature. Maybe not, but they knew how things worked; that’s how they were able to harvest crops, breed animals, design chariots, forge weapons, and build aqueducts and temples. That’s also why they were so often “faithless” and “slow of heart to believe” (as Jesus described his own disciples) in miracles. “Whatever phenomena they could not explain,” says Loftus, “they attributed to God, and there was a great deal they couldn’t explain.” Substitute “nature” for “God,” though, and it becomes clear that twenty-first-century naturalists are no less credulous than first-century Christians—the only difference being that naturalists implicitly attribute omnipotence to nature rather than God. On naturalism, nature has the power to create the universe (or multiple universes, or even an infinity of distinct universes) from nothing; to evolve a limitless supply of inimitably complex creatures (including highly intelligent, self-aware creatures like Loftus); and if quantum theory is to be believed, nature can even be in two places at once.
Finally, Loftus says that my intent with all of this has been “to make miracles more acceptable to scientifically minded people in the modern era.” That’s not quite correct. My intent rather is to encourage faith in a miracle-working God among people of all persuasions (science-minded or otherwise), along with an understanding that such belief is not only rationally justified, but a source of great hope.
Notes
[1] Don McIntosh, “Signs, Wonders, and Justified Belief in Miracles.” The Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology Vol. 3 (Fall 2025): 73-96.
[2] John W. Loftus, “Assessing McIntosh’s Sophisticated Defense of Miracles” (June 4, 2026). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/library/modern/assessing-mcintosh-on-miracles/>. All remaining quotations of Loftus are from this same article. Let me say that I regard John Loftus not just a worthy debate opponent, but a friend. Whereas he was at one time a serious Christian believer, I have also experienced serious doubts—to the point that it would be accurate to say that I have quietly spent brief periods as a skeptic (an example of why ideological labels are not always helpful). As sharers in the human condition, then, John and I have much more in common than readers might suspect.
[3] As editor of the Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology, where our first debate began, I held Loftus to an arbitrary 3,500-word limit for his “final-word” response. In this, the final word of our second debate, I aimed to keep myself to the same word limit, but wound up overshooting it by 120 or so words. Rather than apologize for that extra bit, I will attribute it to the strength of Loftus’ latest contribution to the debate and thus the challenge of answering it effectively.
[4] I mention these background considerations to suggest that the probability of Jesus rising from the dead is “much more antecedently probable than the resurrection of some random guy.” See Don McIntosh, “On the Prior Probability of the Resurrection” (February 22, 2017). Cadre Comments blog. <https://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2017/02/on-prior-probability-of-resurrection.html>.
[5] David Papineau, “Philosophy of Science” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd edn. ed. Nicholas Bunnin & E. P. Tsui-James (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2003): 286-316, p. 286, 287.
[6] The well-known “file-drawer problem” or publication bias occurs when statistically significant positive results (in keeping with the hypothesis tested) are more likely to be published in the peer-reviewed literature, which means that “an equally significant rejection of a hypothesis is not considered worthwhile” for publication, according to Jeffrey D. Scargle, “Publication Bias: The ‘File-Drawer’ Problem in Scientific Inference.” Journal of Scientific Exploration Vol. 14, No. 1 (2000): 91-106, p. 93n2.
[7] Larry Laudan, “A Confutation of Convergent Realism.” Philosophy of Science Vol. 48, No. 1 (March 1981): 19-49.
[8] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[9] Don McIntosh, Transcending Proof: In Defense of Christian Theism (San Antonio, TX: Gerizim Publishing, 2021), p. 87.
[10] Kevin H. Knuth, Robert M. Powell, & Peter A. Reali, “Estimating Flight Characteristics of Anomalous Unidentified Aerial Vehicles.” Entropy Vol. 21, No. 10 (September 25, 2019), 939.
[11] For a relatively brief treatment of variations on the traditional cosmological argument, see Michael Almeida, Cosmological Arguments (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[12] How life originated is no ordinary mystery, like what happened to Amelia Earhart or who wrote the book of Hebrews. It’s a mystery precisely because it contravenes a law of nature as commonly understood.
[13] “Significantly, even if the underlying principles governing the transformation of inanimate to animate were to be revealed, that would still not mean that the precise historic path could be specified” per Addy Pross and Robert Pascal, “The Origin of Life: What We Know, What We Can Know and What We Will Never Know.” Open Biology Vol. 3, No. 3 (March 2013), 120190.
[14] One biology textbook has it that macroevolution is “Evolutionary change above the species level, including the origin of evolutionary novelty and new taxonomic groups…” See Eric J. Simon, Jean L. Dickey, & Jane B. Reece, Campbell Essential Biology, 5th ed. (Boston, MA: Pearson Education, 2013), p. G-10.
[15] See, for example, Amal Y. Aldhebiani, “Species Concept and Speciation.” Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences Vol. 25, No. 3 (March 2018): 437-440. The author discusses eight particular species concepts “present in the taxonomic world” and adds: “There are many others (ex. composite, internodal, genetic and etc.)” (p. 439).
[16] Essengold Metalworks, “Assembly and Fabrication” (n.d.). Suzhou Essengold Metal Works Ltd web site. <https://essengoldparts.com/machinery-manufacturing/assembly-and-fabrication/>.
[17] Eugenie Scott says that, unlike engineering, tinkering means “a structural problem is solved by taking something extant that can be bent, cut, hammered, twisted, or manipulated into something that more or less works, however crudely,” an activity which “mirrors the process of evolution” in Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), p. 39. What Scott leaves unexplained is the much bigger structural problem: how the “something extant”—a systemically complex organism—may have evolved. Even if we accept abiogenesis as given, it should be clear that a hummingbird, for example, is far more than a microbe subjected to a lot of crude evolutionary tinkering.
[18] Most engineers recognize this distinction, even if a lot of biologists don’t or won’t, which may help further explain why so many engineers are creationists (or at least skeptical of textbook evolutionary theory)—see for instance Eric Holloway, “The Salem Hypothesis: Why Engineers View the Universe as Designed,” Mind Matters, June 7, 2022, https://mindmatters.ai/2022/06/the-salem-hypothesis-why-engineers-view-the-universe-as-designed/
[19] See Don McIntosh, Engineered for Life: The Failed Dogma of Evolution and a Fresh Model of Creationism (San Antonio, TX: Gerizim Publishing, 2023).
[20] Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Great Philosophers of the Western World (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1926), p. 113.
[21] Anonymous, “The Yom Kippur War.” JewishHistory.Org: We Bring Jewish History to Life web site. <https://www.jewishhistory.org/the-yom-kippur-war/>.
[22] Alessia Melcangi, “The Nile at a Crossroads: Navigating the GERD Dispute as Egypt’s Floodwaters Rise” (November 10, 2025). Atlantic Council blog. <https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-nile-at-a-crossroads-navigating-the-gerd-dispute-as-egypts-floodwaters-rise/>.
[23] See Harald Schoubye, “Isaiah’s Damascus Oracle: Responding to International Threats” (PhD Dissertation, Concordia Seminary, 1996), pp. 50-51.
[24] According to Aviezer Tucker, history can be defined in part as “accumulated knowledge of the past” in Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1.
[25] Besides the distress and strain of the battle itself, John Keegan writes: “There were other causes … which deprived men of a coherent or extended view of what was going on around them” in The Face of Battle (New York, NY: Barnes & Noble, 1976), p. 129.
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