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(2025)

Introduction
What is a Miracle?
How to Corroborate a Miracle?

Introduction

The reports of miracles in the Bible have a major purpose. The following biblical passage sums it up:

We must pay closer attention to the things we have heard, or we may drift away, because if the message spoken by angels was reliable, and every violation and act of disobedience received its just punishment, how will we escape if we neglect a salvation as great as this? It was first proclaimed by the Lord himself, and then it was confirmed to us by those who heard him, while God added his testimony through signs, wonders, various miracles, and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to his will. (Hebrews 2:1-4, NIV)

Miracle reports are supposed to verify the Gospel message of salvation. “Doubting” Thomas, for instance, was admonished for not believing reports that Jesus was raised from the dead. He had said: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). Of course, not even I would demand that high of an evidential bar. Regardless, Jesus tells him, and us: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”[1] So reports of miracles are supposed to convince people who have not seen miracles for themselves. Quite often faith is praiseworthy: “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7); “Faith is being sure of what we hope for. It is being sure of what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1).

In what follows I’ll briefly argue that biblical reports of miracles fail to do what they’re supposed to do.[2] If successful, this achievement will undercut religions that are grounded in the Bible.

What is a Miracle?

Defining a miracle seems crucial. A miracle cannot merely be a rare circumstantial event within the natural world, or an event that just happened “at the right time.” Otherwise such a circumstantial event would not require God’s intervention for it to take place, and therefore, in turn, it would offer no reasonable proof of a God. For a miracle requires a supernatural being who supernaturally intervenes in the natural workings of the natural world. If coincidences counted as miracles, then miracles would be so plentiful, so prevalent, and so ubiquitous that they couldn’t count as establishing anything unique or special about a god acting in the world. Yet miracles are supposed to offer some proof of God. They must do this, or else they offer no proof of God. Can I say it any plainer?

We know from statistics that rare coincidental events take place regularly in our lives. Believers will quote their believing doctors who say that the odds of being healed were “one in a million” as evidence of a miraculous healing. But a one in a million healing is not equivalent to a miracle in a world of eight billion people!

David J. Hand is an emeritus professor of mathematics, a senior research investigator at Imperial College London, and a former president of the Royal Statistical Society. He convincingly shows that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He does not believe in truly supernatural miracles, though: “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive.” We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.[3]

How to Corroborate a Miracle?

All claims about the objective world require sufficient evidence appropriate to the nature of the claim. The amount and quality of the evidence required is dependent on the type of claim being made. This applies to three types of claims: (1) normal mundane types of claims; (2) out-of-the-ordinary strange and totally unexpected types of claims; and (3) miraculous types of claims about events that are way beyond strange, events that go against how the natural world works, like a resurrection from the dead, a virgin-conceived baby, and so on.

A legitimate miracle claim (the third type) calls for the highest level of the strongest kind of objective evidence. It’s a claim that, if true, requires a supernatural intervention in the natural workings of the natural world as proof that a god exists. Requiring this kind of evidence of a miracle is not an unreasonable demand. It’s the nature of the claim itself that generates the requirement, for evidence of anything less wouldn’t provide what a miracle claim is supposed to provide—some proof that God exists. Odd circumstances just doesn’t cut it.

Consider the philosophical arguments about miracles made by David Hume. Hume argued that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous [i.e., more improbable] than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”[4] To justifiably believe a miraculous tale in the Bible requires more than mere human testimony. Just think of what it would take to believe someone who told you that he consecutively sank eighteen hole-in-ones on a golf course. It would take some strong objective evidence (in terms of quality and/or quantity) to justifiably believe him. Believing that a naturally impossible event occurred, especially in the distant past, would be equivalent to believing a golfer who claimed that he flew in the air from tee to tee while making eighteen consecutive hole-in-ones!

When it comes to miracles a supernatural bias reasonably has a very high burden of proof to meet. By contrast, the so-called bias of science has been very well established.

If a scientist cannot establish the occurrence of biblical miracles using the scientific method and sufficient objective evidence, then faith cannot do so times a hundred thousand.

Bart Ehrman, an agnostic historian of Christianity, tells us: “From a purely historical point of view, a highly unlikely event is far more probable than a virtually impossible one like a miracle.” Why is this wrong? By what else can we judge that which did or did not take place?[5]

James McGrath, a liberal historian of Christianity, has said: “All sorts of fairly improbable scenarios are inevitably going to be more likely than an extremely improbable one. That doesn’t necessarily mean miracles never happened then or don’t happen now—it just means that historical tools are not the way to answer that question.”[6]

If a historian cannot establish biblical miracles using the historical method, based on sufficient objective evidence, then faith cannot do so times a hundred thousand.

So Christian biblicists don’t have an objective method to justify claims that biblical miracles occurred as reported in the Bible. They cannot do so based on the scientist’s requirement for sufficient objective evidence. Nor can they do so based on the historian’s requirement for sufficient objective evidence.

One thing is for sure: we know what does not count as extraordinary evidence of the objective kind. We cannot reasonably accept second-, third-, or fourth-hand reports from alleged eyewitnesses without being able to cross-examine them for consistency and truth. So uncorroborated second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t cut it, nor does anecdotal evidence as reported in completed documents that postdate the supposed events by three centuries (documents that were additionally copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries).

We also know that subjective feelings, experiences, or inner voices don’t count as objective evidence when it comes to biblical miracle claims, and neither does testimony from someone who tells others that his writings are divinely inspired, whether through dreams, visions, or anything else. Nor can the special-pleading appeal to psychic communication from the supposed Holy Spirit constitute such evidence, as William Lane Craig has asserted. Reasonable people need sufficient objective evidence to corroborate the negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible on behalf of its miracles. But that evidence clearly does not exist. So there is no such thing as reasonable belief in biblical miracles, nor can believers punt to faith-based subjective psychic experiences of the Holy Spirit.[7]

Notes

[1] John W. Loftus, ““‘Doubting Thomas’ Tells Us All We Need To Know About Christianity” (April 19, 2021). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2021/04/doubting-thomas-tells-us-all-we-need-to.html>

[2] I’ve written on this subject before; see my Secular Web author page for more.

[3] There are other important books by people who now say the same thing. For example, Harvard-trained University of Toronto statistician Jeffrey S. Rosenthal wrote Knock on Wood: Luck, Chance, and the Meaning of Everything (2018) on these topics (as well as his 2006 Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities). Marlboro College emeritus professor of mathematics Joseph Mazur wrote Fluke: The Math and Myth of Coincidence (2016). Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design coauthor and theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow wrote The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2009). Pomona College economist Gary Smith wrote What the Luck? The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives (2016). And Temple University mathematician John Allen Paulos wrote Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (2001).

[4] David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Section X (“Of Miracles“), Part 1, #91.

[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don’t Know About Them) (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 171-179.

[6] James McGrath, “Easter Ehrman” (April 8, 2009). Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. McGrath. <https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2009/04/easter-ehrman.html>.

[7] See Loftus, “Psychic Epistemology: The Special Pleading of William Lane Craig” (October 31, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/psychic-epistemology-the-special-pleading-of-william-lane-craig/>.

Copyright ©2025 by John W. Loftus. This electronic version is copyright ©2025 by Internet Infidels, Inc. with the written permission of John W. Loftus. All rights reserved.