Miracles and Talking Donkeys

Do you ever get the feeling, when you are talking to someone about Kant’s categorical imperative, that the other “person” is actually a tiny worm that you had put on a hook to go fishing?  And that suddenly you realize the worm is talking back to you, but not about Kant at all; instead it is saying: “AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!  This HURTS, you idiot…and you need to read some John Stuart Mill and get back to me!”

Nah, me neither.  But I do sometimes get the feeling that competing intuitions are inhibiting an argument; that sometimes things just seem different to two different people, and thus it’s hard to find common ground to argue on.

This week, I feel a little like that.  We’re going to continue my rebuttal of our guest atheist’s post (which, despite all I’m saying about it, I thought was excellent).  Specifically, I’m going to talk about the part of Grundy’s post that dealt with miracles.  And re-reading our discussion, I have to say that part of me wonders if maybe we are really just proverbial ships passing in the night; ships going to different places and never really meeting at all.

The other part of me wants to tear his post to tiny pieces. Guess which part wins?

Next week, I’ll spend some time addressing the many things in Grundy’s post that I agreed with.  (And yet, dear reader, it will have the same level of sarcastic ineptitude that you have come to expect from the Apologetic Professor).

We’ll start with Grundy’s comment and proceed to my response.

Grundy: What I can’t overlook is the miracles. There’s the splitting of the Red Sea, walking on water, resurrections, talking snakes and donkeys and shrubbery, water turns to wine and sometimes blood, the divine duplication of seafood and baked goods—I seriously don’t see how anyone can believe this and not be just as credulous reading tales of Dracula and King Arthur? The rotation of the earth stops at some point so Joshua can have more daylight to kill Amorites. It just stops. I don’t want to come off as insulting, but I see this as fantasy and I have a hard time understanding how other adults do not.

Apologetic Professor: Well, let me help you understand as best I can.  First of all, there is very little content in this argument.  You’ve mostly asserted by fiat that miracles don’t happen. Maybe in other small and insular circles, you can simply assert that miracles don’t happen and that gets you some applause and pats on the back; just like in some of my own small insular circles, I can say I believe in the Bible and that gets me some superficial praise.  But now you are entering the residence of such thinkers as St. Thomas Aquinas and Augustine and Newton and Kepler – and you’re going to need sterner stuff than that.

One of the problems with so much atheist (and Christian) argumentation is that there is no actual content to attack.  You simply state you do not believe in miracles. It’s like trying to argue with someone who does not believe in England and just repeats over and over again that “England isn’t real, I haven’t seen it, and no thinking person would believe in it.”

This medicine is the most preferred drug by many people because of their numerous benefits, including getting viagra in australia easy and convenient to buy drugs online on Pharmacy Online Drug Store over the internet. However, men with heart diseases are levitra cialis viagra advised to be careful while consuming these pills for your penis. The ditched drama queen created viagra canada overnight http://ronaldgreenwaldmd.com/pdfs/colleen-gallagher-i-am-back.pdf a vitriolic video and posted it on video hosting site You Tube. viagra shops in india Those who suffer from the following should consult their doctor before taking any medication: – Kidney problems- Previous stroke- High or low blood pressure- If you are allergic to Sildenafil Citrate do not go for this medicine at all. Well, I hate to disappoint, but plenty of thinking people do believe in both England and miracles.  To me, this statement from Grundy is no different than Christians who argue that the Bible is true because it says it’s true.  That may end up being accurate, but it’s still very poor intellectual fare.

The primary reason I believe in miracles is the one Jesus suggested in the Bible: “Believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves.”  I’ve followed his advice to seek and find, and I think the evidence points in favor of the miraculous.  I think I’ve seen miracles, and I think the best explanations for some historical events are miracles. Sometimes I wonder if it is only because naturalists rule out, up front, the possibility of miracles, that they deny some of the facts that might support these conclusions. Perhaps that is unfair; but, for the record, I’m not impressed by a method of discovering the truth about England that involves staying at home and denying its existence!

Now, in terms of actual argumentation, I can see two loose themes in Grundy’s statement. (1) The clearest argument stated here is that miracles don’t exist because they seem like violations of the natural order (e.g., “how can I believe the rotation of the earth would just stop?”).

That argument has the exact logical structure of saying “you should not believe in broccoli because it is a green vegetable.”  I mean, the exact same structure.  Of course miracles will seem…well, miraculous.  Of course they will seem like violations of the natural order – because that’s the definition of a miracle. It is a violation of the natural order.  So, yeah, they seem that way to me, too, and yet we are no further to actually answering the question of whether they happen.  So: Next argument.

(2) Your implied inductive reasoning suggests because some stories are legends, all these stories must be legends.  Fair enough – that’s certainly possible.  King Arthur is an excellent example as a starting point, in part because it illustrates a common problem with this sort of argument.

Some people think Arthur was based on a real king. I get that. It may or may not be true — those people could just as easily be based on stories like the Lord of the Rings. If Tolkien had lived in ancient Egypt, we might be talking about Gandalf instead of Osiris; if he had lived in ancient England, we might be talking about Aragorn instead of Arthur. But, right of the bat, there is a problem with the inductive conclusion that “therefore, Jesus is probably a legendary figure, too.” Jesus is different historically from those legendary people by leaps and bounds — they aren’t really comparable. Arthur MAY have been based on a real king; but we don’t even know what king it was, and scholars debate that issue. Jesus wasn’t BASED on anyone; he was a real person, the thing itself. So it’s reasonable to say “the stories about Jesus may have been exaggerated or even made up after the fact” — I respect that possibility. But I’m not sure about saying “Jesus himself was actually a hero of unknown origin from a different time period that got turned into a myth.” I don’t think that’s a very historically accurate picture of the state of things.

So that’s just a start.  It’s useful to establish, right up front, that some percentage of the “legends” people use in this sort of inductive argumentation (including both of the ones you use) are not really very good comparisons.  Therefore, when you say “how can I believe in Jesus’ miracles but not Merlin’s magic?” my initial response is, “for one thing, Jesus was clearly a real historical figure tied to a real historical time period in a real historical place, whereas Merlin is just a shadowy legend.”

That doesn’t get us directly to miracles, of course.  And I have no argument to “get” anyone to “miracles” from Go. I’ll leave the larger argument about Jesus’ resurrection aside in other and more capable hands than mine.  Rather, I’ll say this: I see no reason why the natural order we see must necessarily be the only order; most people at most times – including a decent percentage of the smartest people who have ever lived – have believed in the supernatural; at least some percentage of those same people report experiencing a miracle; therefore, it seems useful to at least consider the possibility that events in my own life and others that seem odd may be explained via miracle.  When I do so consider, I find that the vast majority of these events that seem “odd” are likely coincidences explained by chance or natural laws; but I still find a few that do not seem readily explained and seem clearly miraculous.  Independent of that, I also find inside of me a strong hope that the supernatural exists in some way – a love of mystical things – the occasional yearning for a better place – that coincides with this belief.

Of course, Hume may be right and these things may all ultimately be explained by coincidence, chance, exaggeration, lying, and the like.  I like Hume; I’m open to that; yet I’m not going to consent to it just because some folks assert by fiat that miracles don’t happen, or are uncomfortable with the idea of a talking donkey.  I see no reason to assume that they can’t, and therefore I feel fine using them as a possible explanatory mechanism.  When I do that, I find it highly probable that they have happened in my own life and in the lives of other people I know.