What happens when an atheist doctor and historian is given access to the Vatican’s Secret Archives to investigate miracle claims? Just such a thing happened in the early 2000s, and both the story behind it, and the doctor’s conclusions, are worth recounting.

Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, a hematologist (M.D.) and historian (Ph.D.), was the Hannah Chair of the History of Medicine at Queen’s University from 1988 until 2017, and she’s served as both the President of the American Association for the History of Medicine and Canadian Society for the History of Medicine. It was in her role as a hematologist (a blood doctor) that she got involved with miracles in the first place, as she would later recount:

About twenty years ago, in my capacity as a hematologist, I was invited to read a set of bone-marrow aspirates “blind,” without being given any clinical details or the reason why. The fourteen specimens had been taken from one patent over an eighteen-month period. Using the microscope, I found this to be a case of severe acute leukemia with a remission, a relapse, and another remission. I assumed that the patient must be dead, and the review was for a lawsuit. Only much later did I learn, to my great surprise, that the patient was (and is) still alive. Although she had accepted aggressive chemotherapy in a university hospital, she attributed her recovery to the intercession of Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, a Montreal woman who had died two hundred years earlier. This case became the capstone in the cause for Youville’s canonization as the first Canadian-born saint. Again, I was surprised.

This experience, and the Vatican’s invitation to come to the canonization of St. Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, piqued Dr. Duffin’s interest. She asked for, and received, access to the Vatican’s Secret Archives, containing “the documentation on more than 600 miracles pertaining to 333 different canonization or beatifications from 1600 to 2000,” including at least one miracle for almost every canonization since the early seventeenth century. As a non-believer who was new to this, she wanted to know what the process was like: how medically serious were (and are) the Vatican investigations? And how unusual was it that Youville’s canonization involved the testimony of a non-believing physician?Many people assume that belief in miracles is anti-scientific. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins mocked the idea of miracles, and declared them (by definition!) to be against science:

I suspect that alleged miracles provide the strongest reason many believers have for their faith; and miracles, by definition, violate the principles of science. […] The last King of the Belgians is a candidate for sainthood, because of his stand on abortion. Earnest investigations are now going on to discover whether any miraculous cures can be attributed to prayers offered up to him since his death. I am not joking. That is the case, and it is typical of saint stories. I imagine the whole business is an embarrassment to more sophisticated circles within the Church.

This is characteristic of Dawkins’ approach: he laughs at an idea he’s incapable of actually refuting. He simply asserts that miracles “violate the principles of science” without specifying which principles or why, and then holds the whole thing up to laugh at with a sort of “can-you-believe-it” mockery… even though his own account suggests an approach resembling that of science. Dawkins’ argument amounts to saying that if a doctor says “let’s try Drug X and see if it has any effect on the patient’s disease,” that’s respectable science, but if someone says, “let’s pray to Baudouin for his intercession, and see if it has any effect on the patient’s disease,” that’s silly! The only problem is that, amidst his sneering, he forgets to actually give us any reason why. We’re just left with the blanket assertion that the sacred Principles of Science have been somehow violated.

Contrast this with what Dr. Duffin found when she actually examined the centuries’ worth of medical records related to miracle cases. Her findings were originally presented in a Presidential Address that she delivered to the seventy-ninth annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A revised version of these remarks were published in the Winter 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine under the name The Doctor was Surprised; or, How to Diagnose a Miracle. The whole report is worth a read, and includes several interesting details:

• The way that “new technologies appear in the Vatican records soon after their invention” (in other words, that miracle investigations were relying on the best medicine available at the time);
• The crucial role that medical experts play throughout the whole history of these miracle investigations;
• The use of non-practicing and non-Catholic medical experts, dating back at least to the Middle Ages;
• The high standard to which medical testimony was required to comport (for instance, an apparent miracle in 1906 involving the healing of a 49 year-old nun was treated as inconclusive because the treating physician failed to order a bacteriological examination on the pleural effusion to confirm his clinical diagnosis of tuberculosis).

Dr. Duffin concluded:

With codification of the Consulta Medica of the Vatican in 1949, the gold standard of a miracle cure entrenched three specific characteristics: that the healing be complete, durable, and instantaneous. [….]

Gradually, I began to understand that the process cannot proceed without the testimony of a physician. The doctor need not believe in miracles, the doctor need not be Roman Catholic, nor even a Christian – but the doctor must fill two absolutely essential roles.

The first role is to declare the prognosis hopeless even with the best of the art. This rigorous duty is built into the drama of every final illness. Many of the miracle healings occurred in people who had already received the last rites. No doctor – be she religious or atheist – takes that decision lightly; nor can it be taken in private. As a result, it becomes a public admission of medical failure, available for corroboration in a distant future. Its credibility resides on trust in the physician’s acumen: the diagnosis and prognosis must have been corrected; the learning and experience, solid. Treating physicians who happened to be academics held great sway over the proceedings. A doctor is a good witness, not for being a good Catholic, or a believer in miracles, but for being demonstrably skilled in medical science.

The second role, which is equally, if not more, important to the recognition of a miracle, is to express surprise at the outcome. And here’s the rub – although the doctors must have used the best scientific medicine available, they can take no credit for the cure. A religious miracle defies explanation by science. Traditionally arrogant, medicine must confess its ignorance. [….] For the Vatican, miracles occur when the patient recovers from certain death or permanent disability, following excellent, up-to-date medical care which the doctor claims had nothing to do with the cure. To turn a familiar phrase on its head: the doctor must say “the operation was a failure, but the patient lived.” And only the doctor can say it.

Unless one arbitrarily defines science as denying miracles, the entire investigation into whether a particular healing is or isn’t a miracle is a scientific question, just as much as the question of whether or not a particular healing is a full recovery or only a temporary remission. The same techniques, the same methodology, is used in both.

Duffin noticed what Dawkins was too bigoted to see: that both medicine and science are looking at the same problems, along parallel and complementary lines. When the Church declares that a particular event was miraculous, it’s not just on the basis of faith. It’s after carefully reviewing the relevant medical information, and in light of the latest and best medical technology. Rather than contradicting the principles of science, this is a healthy integration of science and faith, and her research into the process led Dr. Duffin to say, “though still an atheist, I believe in miracles—wondrous things that happen for which we can find no scientific explanation.”

If God is a God of miracles as theists claim, then why doesn’t he perform more to stop evil?

I must admit this is one question I’ve wrestled with in solidarity with my atheist friends.

My initial response is to recall the words of the prophet Isaiah: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Is. 55:8). While I acknowledge this as true, it leaves me dissatisfied.

As a Christian I believe, with St. Paul, that God “works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28), but I’m still often left wondering if there is any sense in God not performing more miracles to stop evil.

Though this is a mystery, I think we can make some sense out of it.

Is God Really Idle?

Let’s begin by distinguishing between moral evil and physical evil. Moral evil is evil caused by the abuse of human freedom, i.e., sin. Physical evil refers to any sort of suffering, decay, or corruption caused by nature.

Now, if speaking of evil in general  (moral and physical), one response is to wrongly assume God hasn’t done anything. It may well be that God has already prevented and is preventing horrendous crimes or natural catastrophes that could wipe out the entire human race. There is simply no way, given our spatial and temporal limitations, to know he hasn’t already done this. As Norris Clarke says, “Our ignorance cannot be a basis for blaming God for what he is already doing” (The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, 288).

Let’s Not Obscure Things

If the question concerns physical evil in particular, one possible answer is that an overwhelming presence of miracles might obscure the supernatural character of the miraculous.

Consider a scenario where miracles are as common as rain. In such a scenario, it would be difficult (though not impossible) to distinguish between the supernatural and the natural, since we can only know the supernatural by contrast with the natural.

As philosopher Edward Feser points out in his lecture for the symposium “God, Reason, and Reality,” such difficulty lends itself to either of two extremes. One extreme is an occasionalist view of the world, a view that holds that God does everything directly without the cooperation of any natural causes. The other extreme is the view that there is no order to the universe at all, which has the potential to lead to an extreme David Hume–like skepticism, or even atheism, since causal regularity is needed to reason to God’s existence as manifested in St. Thomas Aquinas’s five ways.

So, one may conclude that God doesn’t will a more overwhelming presence of miracles to stop physical evil for the sake of not obscuring the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders of reality.

God Values Choice

What about moral evil? Why wouldn’t God perform more miracles to stop moral atrocities in the world?

One response is that it would violate his divine wisdom. Why would God make man with the capacity to choose good or evil in order to merit man’s eternal reward and then rob him of that capacity the second he chooses to exercise it? It doesn’t make sense.

This would be analogous to someone installing an air conditioning system in his or her home and then turning the system off every time it turns on to cool the house. (Having lived in Southern Louisiana the majority of my life, I can affirm this would be a stupid thing to do.) One might be inclined to ask, “Why did you install the air conditioning system in the first place?”

Similarly, it seems contrary to reason for God to create human beings with the capacity to choose for him or against him and then take away that capacity every time they choose to exercise it against him.

“But,” you may say, “perhaps God doesn’t have to take away man’s capacity to choose evil but could stop the evil effects of man’s bad choices—like changing a fired bullet into butter.”

The answer to this question is that God values the power of choice with which he created man. If God never allowed the choices of man to have bad effects, there would be no real value in man’s ability to do good or evil.  In this case the alternative of a bad choice would never be a real alternative. Why give humans the capacity to choose evil if there would never be any real effects from that choice? One might summarize the argument as follows:

If no real effects are possible from man’s choice, then there is no value in man’s power to choose good or evil.

But God values man’s power to choose good or evil.

Therefore, there must be real effects that arise from man’s power to choose good or evil.

It’s reasonable to conclude God doesn’t ordinarily perform miracles to stop bad effects caused by bad choices because he values the power of choice he desires man to have.

Conclusion

These answers by no means fully dispel the darkness of the mystery of why God doesn’t perform more miracles to stop evil. However, they do shed a bit of light that may help one navigate the darkness.

Skeptics argue that miracles are impossible because the laws of nature are necessary. A miracle, they argue, involves a violation of a law of nature. But the laws of nature cannot be violated. Therefore, miracles must be impossible.

One modern skeptic of repute who argues this is Richard Dawkins. In his book The God Delusion, he says, “[M]iracles, by definition, violate the principles of science” (83).

Dawkins and other modern skeptics derive this argument from philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, Baruch Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, argued:

"[I]f miracles are, strictly speaking, all above nature, then you must admit a break in the necessary and immutable course of nature; which is absurd." (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, c. 6)

In the eighteenth century, Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume wrote:

"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is an entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. X)

I'd like to offer two responses to these objections.

Response 1: Miracles are not violations of nature’s laws

We should at first challenge the understanding of a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature. In order to understand why miracles do not violate the natural order God created, it is necessary to understand what laws of nature are.

Laws of nature are not mere descriptions of causal regularities (e.g., When A, then B) that a miracle would disprove. The laws of nature express what things are capable of exhibiting by virtue of their inherent causal tendencies or dispositions. In other words, the laws of nature are descriptive of what objects are capable of producing given the powers they have by virtue of their nature.

So, for example, the law of nature that tells us water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit is simply a description of the nature of water having a tendency or disposition to freeze when the temperature reaches 32 degrees. The law of nature that tells us fire burns is a description of the inherent power fire possesses given its nature.

The laws of nature, therefore, describe laws of natures—essences with inherent dispositional properties that manifest themselves when certain conditions are met. One could say the phrase “laws of nature” is shorthand for speaking about causal powers inherent in the nature of things.

It is this understanding of the laws of nature that allows one to see how miracles are not violations of the laws of nature (proving a law to be false) and thus not a violation of the natural order set by God.

Miracles are extraordinary sensible effects wrought by God that surpass the power and order of created nature. Miracles are occurrences that can be brought about only by God’s direct causal activity and not by natural forces operative in created objects. As such, a miracle does not prove a law of nature to be false but simply indicates a cause beyond the natural causal powers of a thing is at work, and such causal power is divine.

For example, the natural forces operative in a human body cannot produce the effect of the body rising anew in living health after it has died. But God can produce such an effect by directly giving life to a dead body. When he does this, as he did in the case of Jesus, it does not disprove the law of nature that states that dead bodies stay dead. It still remains true that dead bodies have no inherent power to come back to life.

God can also suspend an inherent power from manifesting itself without proving a law of nature to be false. Consider, for example, the miracle involving Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. The fire into which they were thrown did not burn them.

Does this disprove the law of nature that states fire burns? No. God simply willed that the inherent power of fire not manifest itself in this particular situation. Fire still retains its natural tendency or disposition to burn, and thus the law of nature involving fire remains valid.

God has not only the power to suspend an object’s inherent disposition from manifesting itself but also the power to give an object a new property it doesn’t have by nature. Jesus’ miracle of walking on water is an example of this (Matthew 14:22-23).

Water does not have power within its nature to allow a human being to walk on it. But Jesus, being God, can give water such a property in a particular circumstance. This doesn’t disprove the law of nature that states you will sink if you try to walk on water, because water still lacks within its nature a property that would suffice to hold up a human being.

So miracles do not violate the natural order created by God because they do not violate the laws of nature—they are not contrary to nature but above or beyond nature.

Response 2: Laws of nature are not absolutely necessary

The second response to these objections is that they confuse hypothetical necessity with absolute necessity.

The skeptic assumes the laws of nature are absolutely necessary—that is to say, the phenomena they describe must always occur no matter what. Just as God cannot make a square-circle or make a triangle with four sides, God, even if he did exist, could not suspend the laws of nature.

But this is simply not true. The laws of nature have what philosophers call hypothetical necessity, which means they will hold on the condition that no external cause intervenes. As the prominent Christian apologist William Lane Craig writes:

"[N]atural laws are assumed to have implicit in them the assumption 'all things being equal.' That is to say, the law states what is the case under the assumption that no other natural factors are interfering." (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 263)

For example, the law of gravity tells us a rock will fall to the ground every time when I drop it. But it is not an intrinsic contradiction to imagine someone quickly catching the rock before it hits the ground. The law of gravity will hold provided nothing else happens, i.e., all things being equal.

As with the law of gravity, all laws of nature are hypothetically necessary and not absolutely necessary. They are not inviolable in the sense their violation—or, more properly speaking, their suspension—implies a contradiction.

Since the laws of nature are merely hypothetical, it follows the laws of nature cannot preclude God’s causal activity in miracles. Any denial of miracles based on the laws of nature, therefore, is unjustified.

Conclusion

This understanding of miracles and their relation to the laws of nature dispels the myth that one has to abandon science in order to accept miracles. Skeptics often pit miracles and science against each other, claiming you have to choose one or the other. But this is a false dichotomy.

There is no need for a scientist to give up his own research that shows water has no surface tension to support a human body because, as shown above, a miracle doesn’t prove water has such an inherent property. The scientist’s scientific knowledge remains secure. As such, there is no need to abandon science in order to believe in the miraculous.
 
 
(Image credit: Jagannath Puri HKM)

After reading some exchanges on Facebook that were inspired by my recent blog post concerning miracles, it became clear I need to explain exactly what a miracle is.

A miracle is defined as an extraordinary sensible effect wrought by God that surpasses the power and order of created nature.

That’s a mouthful, so let’s unpack it. There are five aspects to the definition.

Aspect #1: Exclusively attributable to divine power

Only God can be the cause of a miracle. This excludes any sort of occurrence that may have unknown created causes—whether it be a hidden force of nature, a force of nature applied by man in an artificial way, or the forces of nature utilized by pure spirits acting with only their natural faculties. Such effects would be wonderful and marvelous, but not miracles.

Aspect #2: Beyond the power of created nature

An effect can be beyond created powers in three ways.

First, a miracle may surpass created powers in the essence of the effect produced. The glorification of the resurrected body at the end of time is an example of this. Such glorification is—by its nature—beyond the power of any created cause. Another example would be the sun moving east instead of west, or standing still as recounted in Joshua 10:13.

Second, the miraculous effect may surpass created powers with regard to the subject in which it manifests and not the essence of the effect, which may be produced in another subject. For example, nature produces life in humans, but it cannot do so in a corpse. It is natural to have sight, but not for the blind. Notice the miraculous is not identified in the essence of the effect—life and sight—but in the subject—a corpse and damaged eyes.

The third way a miracle may surpass created powers is according to themode or manner that produces the miraculous effect. In other words, God may cause an effect that nature usually produces but contrary to the way nature produces it. For example, it belongs to the order of nature for a fever to pass. But if the fever leaves by command, then it is a miracle. A broken bone naturally mends itself over time, but if by the power of intercessory prayer the bone heals immediately, then it is a miracle. Rain is another example. Created powers within nature produce rain, but we consider it a miracle if by the command of a prophet rain falls from a clear, blue sky.

In sum, effects can supersede created powers by the essence of the effect produced, with regard to the subject in which the effect occurs, or according to the mode in which the effect is produced.

Aspect #3: Beyond the order of created nature

So far a miracle has been shown to be solely the work of God—beyond all created powers. But the creation of the world and the soul are effects attributable exclusively to God. Are these divine acts considered miracles?

The answer is no. While the creation of the world and the soul are effects that only God can cause, it is not beyond the order of created nature. The creation of the world is the beginning of the order of created nature, and the creation of the soul completes human nature, which is a part of creation. Both actions bring about things belonging to the order of created nature and thus are not miracles. This idea that a miracle must be beyond the order of created nature constitutes the third aspect of our definition.

Aspect #4: Extraordinary

In saying a miracle is extraordinary we simply mean it is contrary to the ordinary natural and supernatural course of things. To return to our example of the creation of the human soul, it is not extraordinary, because God decreed from all eternity that creating human souls would be part of the ordinary course of things, especially considering the human soul completes human nature.

Miracles must also be contrary to the ordinary supernatural course of things. For example, the infusion of grace in the soul through the sacraments and the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit to perform saving and meritorious acts are not miracles because God wills them as a regular occurrence in the supernatural order.

Aspect #5: Sensible

The last aspect of a miracle is that it is sensible—subject to perception by the senses. This follows from the purpose of miracles defined by the First Vatican Council:

"[I]n order that the submission of our faith should be in accordance with reason, it was God’s will that there should be linked to the internal assistance of the Holy Spirit external indications of his revelation, that is to say divine acts, and first and foremost miracles and prophecies, which clearly demonstrating as they do the omnipotence and infinite knowledge of God, are the most certain signs of revelation and are suited to the understanding of all." (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, ch. 3; emphasis added).

The Council Fathers make it clear that miracles are meant to prove the authenticity of God’s revelation. Such revelation must be marked with a divine character plain to see in order that all, including the ignorant, may know it is authentic. Here miracles have their function, serving as a seal to authenticate God’s communication to humanity, putting the revelation’s authority beyond all doubt.

Furthermore, as miracles confirmed the authenticity of Jesus’ revelation in the apostolic age, the miracles performed throughout the history of the Catholic Church prove the Church’s claims to be true—namely, that it is the church founded by Christ.
 
 
(Image credit: NoDealBook.com)

Should I believe in miracles? This question doesn’t pertain to whether I should believe in this miracle or that miracle. It has to do with whether I’m rationally justified in believing in miracles as such.

David Hume's Wisdom for the Wise

The eightenth-century Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume argued the wise man should not believe in miracles. The basis for his assertion was what might be called the “repeatability principle”—evidence for what occurs over and over (the regular) always outweighs evidence for that which does not (the rare). Since miracles are rare and contradict our uniform experience, Hume argues the wise man ought never to believe in miracles.

While it’s true that a wise man should base his belief on the weight of evidence, it’s not true that evidence for uniform experience always outweighs evidence for what is singular and rare.

We know this for several reasons, but I’ll give you four.

Why Uniform Experience Doesn't Make Belief in Miracles Irrational

First, if Hume’s principle concerning uniform experience were correct, then we would have to deny many things we hold as true. For example, the Big Bang was a singular event that is unrepeatable. Have you experienced any Big Bangs lately? I would also venture to say you haven’t experienced anybody landing on the moon in recent times.

Now, if we hold to Hume’s principle, it would be irrational to believe the scientific account of the Big Bang and the historical fact that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, since these occurrences contradict our uniform experience. But this is absurd. The Big Bang is one of the most rigorously established theories in all of science, and all who are not obsessed with conspiracy theories hold Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon is a historical fact.

Moreover, Hume’s principle nullifies science itself. As an inductive discipline, science necessarily presupposes the possibility of discovering new things that may contradict uniform experience. Scientific laws are revised all the time based on new contrary evidence. But if Hume’s principle were correct, scientists would never have reasonable grounds to revise laws, and thus replacing the Newtonian view of the universe with Einstein’s view would have been irrational. No skeptic can hold this and still be seen as intellectually credible.

A third reason why Hume’s argument from uniform experience fails is that it sets the standard for authenticating a miracle too high. It views rarity as that which disqualifies rational belief, yet rarity is of the essence of a miracle. A miracle, by definition, is an unusual event, something contrary to the ordinary course of things. So, according to Hume’s view, every miracle is disqualified from the start, because every miracle is a rare event.

This is analogous to making a fifty-foot bar the qualifying height for a good high jumper, when no jumpers can even clear an eight-foot bar. It is simply unreasonable to set a standard so high that no one can ever reach it. If skeptics desire Christian beliefs to be subject to falsification, then they ought not set standards where Christian beliefs cannot be proven true.

A fourth critique of Hume’s argument is it commits the fallacy of special pleading, a fallacy in which one deliberately ignores aspects unfavorable to his point of view. Hume is basing his argument on his experience, or perhaps the experiences of those he knows. Perhaps there were people in Hume’s time, or even people of the past, whose common experience involved miracles. This is precisely the claim of the early Christians. While Hume is within his rights to speak authoritatively about his own experience, he cannot do so with regard to others. His own uniform experience cannot be used to exclude the testimony of another person’s experience.

The Improbable is Too High a Hurdle to Jump

A skeptic may not articulate his or her skepticism about miracles as does Hume but simply might express the inability to overcome the hurdle of accepting something so improbable. A skeptic might say, “The miracles in the Bible are just too far-fetched for me to believe—a man rising from the dead? Blind people seeing? You expect me to believe that?”

While I can sympathize with someone who has a healthy skepticism when it comes to improbable events, we can’t reject something outright simply because it’s improbable.

First, an event might be improbable when considered relative to our general background knowledge, but, relative to other specific knowledge or evidence, improbability can decrease.

For example, it’s highly improbable that the winning number for the California Lottery would be 6345789. If the newspaper, however, says this is the winning number, then the probability changes, making the odds for it being the winning number higher. Furthermore, if the news anchor broadcasts it as the winning number on the nightly news, then the odds for it being the winning number become even higher.

Similarly, miracles, like Jesus rising from the dead, are improbable relative to our background knowledge—men don’t usually rise from the dead. But the improbability decreases when it’s considered relative to specific evidence, namely, eyewitness testimonies. If the testimonies are sound, then belief is rational despite the event’s improbability.

A second response to help a skeptic overcome the high hurdle of a miracle’s improbability is Hume’s principle:

"[N]o testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the miracle be of such a kind, that its falsehood be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." (David Hume, Of Miracles).

Many skeptics consider only how improbable a miracle is but hardly ever consider the improbability of a miracle not occurring despite the testimony.

Take for example the Resurrection of Jesus, to which the early Christians testified. Skeptics rightfully consider this event as improbable and are rational when they exercise caution concerning the testimonies of it. But very seldom do skeptics consider how improbable the alternative explanations are.

For example, it’s much more improbable that the early Christians stole the body and lied about the Resurrection only to gain death. People don’t die for what they know to be a lie. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely the apostles would give simple, nondramatic accounts—not to mention giving women the role as first witnesses—if they were lying about the Resurrection.

Another improbable alternative to the literal Resurrection of Jesus is that the Christians hallucinated. It’s improbable because St. Paul records Jesus appearing to many different people on several different occasions as well as appearing to more than 500 disciples at the same time (see 1 Cor. 15:6)—occurrences not typical of hallucinations.

So, when facing the obstacle of improbability, the question should not be “Should I believe in miracles as such?” but “Is there sufficient evidence to believe this or that miracle?” If the evidence for a particular miracle is trustworthy—say, the resurrection of Jesus—then belief in that miracle would be reasonable, even though it’s an improbable event.

The wise man surely needs to exercise caution when confronted with accounts of the miraculous. But the wise man should also be open to following the evidence where it leads, no matter how extraordinary and improbable it is.

Perhaps no single image captures the popular conception of the “Dark Ages” than the idea of trials by ordeal. These infamous trials are the reason we refer to a difficult situation as an “ordeal,” or perhaps a “trial by fire.” One of the most famous depictions of a trial by ordeal is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. A woman is accused of witchcraft, and rather than gathering evidence or taking any but the most cursory of testimony, an elaborate test is designed to “objectively” determine if she’s a witch:

While the scene is exaggerated for comic effect, it’s not far off the mark. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explain:

"During the Middle Ages, if a court couldn’t determine whether a defendant was guilty, it often turned the case over to a priest who would administer an 'ordeal' using boiling water or a smoking-hot iron bar. The idea was that God, who knew the truth, would miraculously deliver from harm any suspect who had been wrongly accused."

As Levitt and Dubner note, “as a means of establishing guilt, the medieval ordeal sounds barbaric and nonsensical.” This assessment seems half-correct. As a judicial process, they were an oft-bloody one, which is why canon 18 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) put an end to ordeals as part of a broader effort to disassociate clerics from bloodshed (a canon which, interestingly, banned priests from participating in everything from leading mercenaries to performing surgery).

But while the ordeals could be barbaric at times, they were perfectly sensible. The defendant is put into a position in which, barring a miracle, he’ll both be badly hurt and found guilty. God alone can save him. The logic — and the justice — of the process is rooted in the fact that both the judicial authorities and the accused believed in God (significantly, ordeals were only ever done to believers). According to George Mason’s Peter Leeson, this is rooted in “a medieval superstition called iudicium Dei (judgments of God). According to that superstition, God condemned the guilty and exonerated the innocent through clergy-conducted physical tests.”

How does this “superstition” hold up? You might be surprised. Levitt and Dubner, summarizing Leeson’s findings:

"Dr. Leeson analyzed a set of church records from 13th-century Hungary; it included 308 cases that entered the trial-by-ordeal phase. Of these, 100 were aborted before producing a final result. That left 208 cases in which the defendant was summoned by a priest to the church, climbed the altar, and was forced to grab hold of a red-hot iron bar.
 
How many of those 208 people do you think were badly burned? All 208? We’re talking about red-hot iron here. Maybe 207 or 206?
 
The actual number was 78. Which means that the remaining 130—nearly two-thirds of the defendants—were miraculously unharmed and thereby exonerated."

The “plea rolls” kept by English courts likewise reveal 19 cases of trial by ordeals, in which 17 of those accused were exonerated.  This is what Leeson refers to as “the peculiar puzzle of ordeals: trials of fire and water that should have condemned most persons who underwent them did the reverse. They exonerated these persons instead. Boiling water rarely boiled persons who plunged their arms in it. Burning iron rarely burned persons who carried it.”

And here we come to a fascinating point.

Leeson’s just uncovered records in two different countries revealing what certainly appears to be objective evidence of miracles. We’re not talking about a case or two in which somehow held a red-hot iron and walked away unharmed somehow. We’re talking about well over a hundred such incidents, just in the limited records that we know of. Yet Leeson can’t accept even the possibility that the ordeals might be what they claimed to be (miraculous). Instead, he offers this by way of explanation:

"Examining the outcomes of the 208 cases in which defendants underwent ordeals is more instructive. The data are telling: probands failed their ordeals in only 78 cases, or 37.5 percent of the time. Probands passed their ordeals in 130 cases, or 62.5 percent of the time. Unless nearly two-thirds of ordeal-officiating priests did not understand how to heat iron, these data suggest priestly rigging intended to exculpate probands. Ordeals exonerated the overwhelming majority of probands tried in the basilica of Nagyva´rad."

Leeson, then, contemplates only two possibilities: either that “nearly two-thirds of ordeal-officiating priests did not understand how to heat iron,” or that priests were falsifying miracles in nearly two-thirds of these cases. Each of these options are ridiculous. Levitt and Dubner inadvertently show this, by describing what Leeson’s theory might actually look like:

"Unless these 130 miracles were miracles, how can they be explained? Dr. Leeson thinks he knows the answer: 'priestly rigging'—that is, the priest somehow tinkered with the setup to make the ordeal look legitimate while ensuring that the defendant wouldn’t be disfigured. Maybe the priest swapped out the hot iron bar for a cooler one, or—if using the boiling-water ordeal—dumped a pail of cold water into the caldron before the congregants entered the church."

Think of some of the elements involved in priestly rigging:

• First, you need the witnesses to be stupid enough to believe that a piece of iron is smoldering hot when it isn’t. Also, it helps if they can’t tell the difference between boiling water and mildly warm water.

• Second, you need a massive conspiracy of priests to fake miracles. We’re not talking about a bad priest here or there, but apparently the entire Catholic clergy cooperating to perpetuate this. And not just in Hungary, but in England, and everywhere else that trials were conducted by ordeals. Levitt and Dubner point out that this theory only works if we assume that virtually all Medieval priests were atheists: “If medieval priests did manipulate the ordeals, that might make them the only parties who thought an all-knowing God didn’t exist—or if He did, that He had enough faith in his priestly deputies to see their tampering as part of a divine quest for justice.”

• Third, you need Catholic congregations docile (and gullible) enough that they’ll accept anything that these conniving priests tell them, no matter how ridiculous.

• Fourth, you need a steady supply of seminarians who can immediately switch from being pious, stupid laypeople to evil, conniving priests. Remember: none of the laity are in on this conspiracy, but apparently all of the priests are. Leeson’s best explanation for this global conspiracy of blasphemous miracle-doctoring is that “According to the developing doctrine of in persona Christi, priests may have believed that they were acting in the person of Christ—that is, that God was guiding them—when they manipulated ordeals.” So apparently, you also need priests and seminarians who don’t understand what the doctrine of in persona Christi means.

• Fifth, you’re left positing a global conspiracy that left no paper trail, and apparently raised no eyebrows. That is, we have plenty of matter-of-fact court and church records relating to ordeals, and plenty of documents even describing the precise conditions in which to perform them, but none of these documents (even the ones written by and for priests!) tell the priest when and how to doctor the miracle.

• Sixth, you’ve got the problem of the exonerated guilty. Peter is tried by ordeal, “miraculously” found innocent, and set free. Subsequent evidence emerges showing that he was really guilty. Even if this evidence were never brought to court, Peter and everyone who knew him to be guilty would now recognize the miracle as a sham.

• Seventh, you’ve got the problem of the condemned innocent.  This is particularly true if further evidence reveals his innocence… or someone else’s guilt.

• Eighth, you’ve got the defendant’s own experience. That is, even a genuinely-innocent man would realize that the reason he was found innocent was that the ordeal was rigged: that the iron wasn’t particularly hot, etc.

That’s just a start. This, by the way, is a 12th century image depicting trial by fire, the ordeal that Leeson apparently thinks can be easily and repeatedly faked:

Given all of this, Leeson hasn’t really given us much reason to think that there wasn’t something miraculous at work here. Of course, that doesn’t prove that it is. The Fourth Lateran Council’s willingness to put the kibosh on this judicial method reveals the Church’s own discomfort with ordeals, and there seem to have been cases of wrongly-condemned defendants when God didn’t perform miracles on demand. But we’re free to believe that, of the 147 exonerations Leeson analyzed, some or all of those results were miraculous.

Leeson, Levitt, and Dubner don’t have that same freedom. Because they view miracles as absurd (Leeson writes it off as “superstition” some 30 times in his article, while Dubner and Levitt list it as a method to “trick the guilty and gullible”), they can’t even consider the possibility of miracles, regardless of the evidence staring them squarely in the face. It’s not a matter of rejecting miracles because the evidence for them isn’t strong enough. It’s a matter of refusing to accept the evidence, no matter how strong, because of a prior commitment to rejecting miracles. I’m reminded of something I wrote about the USA Today demonic possession story:

Christians are free to disbelieve that this case was demonic, of course. Believing that demons exist doesn't mean that everything blamed on demons is really demonic, as opposed to delusions, lies, mental illness, etc. There's no prior commitment to this being demonic or non-demonic: Christians are free to simply evaluate the evidence as it is presented.
 
But for atheist materialists who deny the existence of the spiritual realm, stories like this one are a bit of a red six of clubs. There's no way to easily harmonize the facts presented with the belief that that matter is all that there is. This worldview prejudges the case: the answer must be that there was no demonic activity.

Which brings us to a final irony: we moderns think of trial by ordeal as proof positive of the irrational dogmatism of our religious ancestors’ culture. In fact, the story seems to reveal a great deal more about the irrational dogmatism of our own irreligious culture.
 
 
(Image credit: Dieric Bouts the Elder, Ordeal by Fire, 1460)

On June 20th, 2013, Giovanni Giudici, the Bishop of Pavia, pronounced the cure of Danila Castelli to be miraculous, 24 years after her pilgrimage to Lourdes. Her cure, and the 68 other cures proclaimed miraculous, began as simply one more of the more than 7,000 cures that have been reported to the Medical Bureau of the Sanctuary at Lourdes. While all of the cases are marvelous in their own way, only this small fraction survived the many stages of extensive investigation, both medical and ecclesial, so as to eventually be considered “unexplained according to current scientific knowledge” by the Lourdes International Medical Committee and finally pronounced miraculous by the bishop of the cured pilgrim. It might seem incongruous to many common conceptions of the relationship of faith and science that a site of religious pilgrimage would have a dedicated medical bureau, with a procedure for the scientific study of purportedly miraculous cures, but really, it is perfectly reasonable.

The very idea of a miracle, an event that happens by divine power outside the normal ordering of nature, is absurd for some. Our ever growing understanding of the universe reveals a tightly woven network of scientific laws that govern all of reality, leaving no room for and no evidence of exceptions. The fear is that allowing even one true miracle would ruin the very order and structure that science is built upon. There is no room for the miraculous in this worldview, so many will not even consider the possibilities.

Some Christians, impressed and intimidated by the advances of science, take the exceptionless character of scientific explanation for granted, and they restrict the idea of miracles to personal transformation and conversion, or perhaps try to find some small space for physical miracles between the fuzzy lines of quantum mechanics. While it is certainly true that personal conversion is beyond any natural power, it is by God working through, not against, our natural free will. Further, God absolutely can work through the seeming confusion of quantum systems, but this is an action of his providence working through, not contrary to nature. These redefinitions in concession to science strip the very idea of the miraculous of its depth and power.

In truth, there need not be a conflict between the scientific order and the miraculous when both are properly understood. Moreover, when the possibility of both is affirmed, they provide a richer and more marvelous picture of reality. I would argue that the existence of miracles is a great benefit to the project of modern science and that the existence of modern science is a great benefit to our understanding of miracles as well.

Considering the relationship of miracles to scientific order, there is the obvious fact that we need to know something about what normally occurs in the world to recognize when something marvelous happens, so the better we understand the natural order, the easier it is to identify the truly miraculous. On the other hand, the existence of miracles, by definition, makes necessary a limit to the power of science to fully explain all of reality. But there is more to the relationship of science and the miraculous than defining mutual limits and cordoning off proper realms.

The order and structure that scientists find in nature does not simply prevent false positives in our search for miracles; it also opens us up to new levels of wonder in the miracles we are blessed to encounter and an even deeper appreciation of miracles of the past, most especially in the Scriptures. St. Thomas Aquinas lays out a number of ways to classify miracles, based on their relationship to the natural order, and he does not hesitate to speculate on the process by which certain effects are brought about. The more we understand the natural order, the better we can understand the particular manifestation of divine power in each miracle, and probe the way God worked with, around, or in spite of nature. These efforts are not aimed at explaining—or worse, explaining away—every detail of the mystery of miracles, but at deepening our appreciation of the variety of ways God chooses to work in the world.

From the other perspective, the existence of miracles does not change the process by which scientists seek out particular natural truths, but it does safeguard the goal of that seeking and the truths that are attained by it. The possibility of real events beyond the power of scientific explanation ensures that scientists approach their subjects with a proper humility. It need not, and should not, change the fact that they expect to find a marvelous order and structure in nature, but it prevents them from falsely claiming too much. This is not a claim that they will find holes in their explanations, but that the very order they discover points beyond the purely physical and, eventually, to the God who created that order in the first place.
 
 
This article was written by Br. Thomas Davenport, who studied physics at the California Institute of Technology and went on to earn a PhD in physics from Stanford University. Originally published at Dominicana Journal. Used with permission.
 
(Image credit: Catholic News Agency)

My previous post at Strange Notions underscored the often-unacknowledged philosophical premises at work when believers and non-believers sit down to debate about things biblical. In the course of my argument, I pointed to a possible area of common ground for Catholics and agnostics/atheists. A survey of statements by thinkers as different as Benedict XVI and Bart Ehrman reveals an important agreement upon the reality that everyone carries their own philosophical presuppositions and that a purely objective consideration of Jesus’ miracles is therefore impossible. Today I would like to carry forward this discussion. By way of doing this, I will first briefly summarize Bart Ehrman’s position on Jesus’ divinity and resurrection. Then I will critique what I consider to be an insufficient (but very common) Christian response to the skeptic’s position. Finally, I will dwell upon a couple keys given by C.S. Lewis and Pope Benedict XVI which point out from a Christian perspective the direction a philosophical dialogue about miracles needs to head.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Divinity and the Failure of the “Trilemma” Argument

Ehrman’s position concerning the divinity of Christ can be quickly grasped from his evaluation of C.S. Lewis’ famous “trilemma” argument. According to Lewis, Jesus’ lordship can be shown by reducing to the absurd the possibility that he was either a liar or a lunatic. But in Jesus Interrupted, Ehrman reveals a problem with Lewis’ logic:

"I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God…I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicates that Jesus said any such thing about himself…not three options but four: liar, lunatic, Lord, or legend."

At the risk of oversimplifying Ehrman’s more lengthy narrative, his position is that Jesus’ disciples began to profess his divinity only after they experienced him as risen from the dead. According to Ehrman’s analysis of the data in How Jesus Became God, the earliest Christian sources (Paul and Mark) do not portray Jesus as divine but rather as an exalted human or an angel. While Jesus certainly existed as a historical person, for Ehrman he is nevertheless a “legend” in that he was not divine as Christians subsequently came to believe.

Ehrman on Jesus’ Resurrection

One of the interesting features of Ehrman’s work is that he affirms at least some direct followers of Jesus sincerely believed their master had been raised from the dead. He suggests that “three or four people—though possibly more—had visions of Jesus sometime after he died.” Ehrman states that the question of whether these putative experiences were veridical (i.e. whether Jesus was really there or whether they were hallucinatory bereavement visions) is beside his point. Rather, the claim he puts forth is the following:

"[A]nyone who was an apocalyptic Jew like Jesus’s closest follower Peter, or Jesus’s own brother James, or his later apostle Paul, who thought that Jesus had come back to life, would naturally interpret it in light of his particular apocalyptic worldview— a worldview that informed everything that he thought about God, humans, the world, the future, and the afterlife. In that view, a person who was alive after having died would have been bodily raised from the dead, by God himself, so as to enter into the coming kingdom."

In Ehrman’s view, then, it was the disciples’ own apocalyptic worldview (informed by Jesus’ teachings while he was alive) that led them to think of their visions of the crucified Jesus in terms of resurrection.

An Insufficient Christian Response

While the constraints of this post do not permit me to elaborate further on Ehrman’s arguments, it should be noted that they are formidable and cannot simply be written off without a robust response. For instance, I do not find satisfactory the response to this “quadrilemma” (Jesus is either a liar, lunatic, lord, or legend) in Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics. With due respect to these thinkers whom I deeply admire (and who have likely provided more solid arguments in other texts outside of the present one), I think their response to the “legend” issue unfortunately evinces a rather common but simplistic understanding of the biblical evidence. The authors state that our extant biblical manuscripts contain “very few discrepancies and no really important ones,” but I think Ehrman’s books Misquoting Jesus, How Jesus Became God, and Jesus, Interrupted sufficiently disabuse one of the notion that the Gospels only differ in accidentals such as order and number. And Ehrman is by no means the only author who writes about this sort of thing; he is popularizing information that biblical scholars already know.

Moreover,Kreeft and Tacelli argue, “If a mythic ‘layer’ had been added later to an originally merely human Jesus, we should find some evidence, at least indirectly and secondhand, of this earlier layer.” Here I think the authors have an unduly narrow view of “myth,” and moreover I think they fail to anticipate the obvious response of a bible scholar like Ehrman. What might he say? The evidence for this earlier, non-mythical layer is right there in front of us: it is the Gospel of Mark, whom scholars by and large recognize to be the first gospel composed.

Finally, the authors of the Handbook ask who possibly could have invented such a myth about Jesus. I think they are on to something in remarking, “No one invents an elaborate practical joke in order to be crucified, stoned, or beheaded.” Ehrman agrees to some extent with this insofar as he does not seem to think that the disciples maliciously invented the myth of a divine Jesus. (Remember, in Ehrman’s view at least some of the disciples really thought they saw Jesus alive after his death, and it is this that eventually led them to conclude he was divine). The authors fail to envision this sort of counter-argument when they claim, “Whether it was his first disciples or some later generation, no possible motive can account for this invention.” It is indeed difficult for a Christian to imagine someone inventing the notion that Jesus was divine, but is it fair to say that “no possible motive” could account for this? Couldn’t the disciples themselves have been delusional, as Ehrman seems to suggest? Or couldn’t they have been using the “risen” Jesus as a power play for their own (ultimately unsuccessful) personal ambitions? Now as a believer I am certainly not saying that this is what actually happened, but one cannot properly call it an impossible scenario.

Where the Discussion Ought to Head: C.S. Lewis on Miracles

While C.S. Lewis may not have hit a home run with his “trilemma” argument in defense of Christ’s divinity, I think that his book Miracles is invaluable for those who wish to profess the divinity of Jesus in the face of modern biblical criticism. Lewis begins by arguing along the same lines of Benedict XVI and Ehrman as discussed in my previous post. He correctly observes that the real issue at hand is a philosophical one: “The difficulties of the unbeliever do not begin with questions about this or that particular miracle; they begin much further back.” For Lewis the miracles question boils down to whether or not the natural world we know is the only reality that exists. Looked at from another angle, this is the same as asking whether or not the supernatural or divine exists. A negative answer to the question of the divine’s existence necessarily entails the conclusion that purported miracles such as Christ’s resurrection cannot be true.

A positive answer, on the other hand, means the following for Lewis: “If we decide that Nature is not the only thing that is, then we cannot say in advance whether she is safe from miracles or not.” In other words, if there exists a Being which/who is not limited by the confines of the natural world but is rather the very ground of this world, then we can never conclusively deny that this Being sometimes acts in a way other than that which we tend to expect based on our observations of nature. Lewis thus proposes that within the universe “there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity.” While Christians often speak of miracles as divine “interventions,” this unfortunately appears to presuppose that God is somehow “absent” from his creation and then “intrudes” upon it to perform a miracle. But in truth, if God exists he is always present to his creation. For Lewis, then, the miracles we take to be “interruptions” of nature’s history are in reality “expressions of the truest and deepest unity in [God’s] total work.”

Even if we personally are not conscious of having experienced the miraculous, Lewis reminds us not to discount the fact that our world is full of stories of people who claim to have experienced miracles. Moreover, even if we were to live an entire millennium our experience would not necessarily inform us whether a given miracle happened. Indeed, Lewis and Ehrman both acknowledge that miracles are by definition improbable. It is always more likely that the witnesses to the alleged miracle are lying or deluded than that the miracle actually occurred. And yet, even as we know fraudulent cases exist, these by no means discredit all such claims regarding the miraculous. On this score I myself tend to be very skeptical when people talk of miraculous healings on the one hand or demonic possessions on the other. But then every once in a while I hear an account of some such phenomenon directly experienced by someone I trust and know not to be psychologically imbalanced. These are the moments that make me reconsider the possibility that maybe such things happen after all even if I (thankfully, in the case of possessions) have never directly experienced them.

At the end of the day, Lewis is right: I would be arguing in a circle if I were to conclude that miracles have not occurred merely because I have not experienced them. The bottom line for Lewis is that our experience cannot prove nature is closed, i.e. that it never admits of what from our point of view might look like “interruptions.” To be sure, living sanely in the world requires that we assume the laws of nature continue operating as we have always experienced them (We should not jump out of a boat expecting the gravity to be suspended before we sink into the sea). In fact, Lewis argues that the existence of miracles presupposes that nature is governed by laws. But this does not mean that walking on water is per se impossible. The impossibility of miracles is not something that can be proved, only assumed.

Benedict XVI and the Question of an “Open Philosophy”

I would like to conclude this post by returning to my point of departure in the previous one. In his 1988 Erasmus Lecture, the future Pope Benedict XVI poignantly wrote that “the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” In the course of his lecture, Benedict called for a “criticism of the criticism,” a self-critique of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. In the course of these two posts I have attempted to carry forward this critique in one small way, identifying the presence of philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and underscoring that believing miracles to be impossible is something people can only assume, not prove.

As one who daily engages in the craft of historical-critical exegesis, I find Benedict’s comments on this subject refreshing and liberating. In contrast with a naturalist, “ready-made philosophy” that precludes the possibility of miracles, the Christian approaches the Bible with an “open philosophy” that refuses to exclude the possibility that God himself “could enter into and work in human history, however improbable such a thing might at first appear.” This posture, deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition with its conviction that the boundary of time and eternity is permeable, allows for the Bible to be what the Church has always claimed it to be: the word of God in human words.

And yet when all is said and done, Christians should beware of thinking we have definitively proven that which we hold by faith. On the basis of reason alone we cannot conclude whether the Bible is the word of God, whether a given miracle has occurred, or whether Jesus rose from the dead. The real question undergirding all these has been given to us by Lewis. It is the question of whether or not God exists, whether we have independent reasons to believe that there exists a supernatural Being beyond the natural order, a Being to whom nature owes its existence and who may act within that order in ways we do not typically expect.

Read Lewis’ Miracles attentively, and there you will find well-argued reasons to believe that the answer to the above questions is “yes.” Moreover, even if you do not agree with him, I think you will find that he provides serious arguments which call into question whether a non-theistic worldview offers an intelligible account of the world in which we live. But this post’s aim remains much more modest in focusing on just one key thought from Lewis’ book: If we admit that nature is not the only thing that is—if we come to the conclusion that theism is true—then we are not “safe” from miracles. This by no means disproves atheism or agnosticism, but at least it points out one direction our dialogue needs to go.
 
 
(Image credit: Real Clear Religion)

“At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate.” - Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

My reflection today revolves around this poignant line from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1988 Erasmus Lecture in which he famously called for a “criticism of criticism.” In penning these words, the German cardinal was looking for a self-criticism of the modern, historical-critical method of biblical interpretation. On the part of those involved in the craft of exegesis today, this would entail the effort to identify the philosophical presuppositions we bring to our reading of the biblical text and to consider honestly the degree of certainty warranted for the conclusions we draw when it comes to things biblical.

Joseph Ratzinger: Pure Objectivity Does Not Exist

Ratzinger’s comments a generation ago remain as relevant as ever for the sort of discussions we have here at Strange Notions. Whether we are aware of it or not, both Christians and atheists bring different philosophical presuppositions to the table when we sit down to debate about the Bible. These first principles are ‘spectacles’ we wear which color our entire view of reality, including what we think is going on within Scripture. Ratzinger for his part argues that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies here: “pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction,” for “the observer’s perspective is an essential determinant of the outcome of an experiment.”

What this means in terms of present purposes is that the answers to particular questions we ask of Scripture are in large part determined before we ever open up the text in the first place. What are we to make of Jesus’ miracles and of his resurrection in particular? If one is an atheist, then a natural explanation will be adduced for these phenomena. Such an explanation could take many forms: for example, a putative healing miracle could be explicable in light of modern medicine, or perhaps it was invented by the Gospel authors decades after Jesus’ life in order to convince others of his divinity.

On the other hand, a person who approaches the text assuming theism to be true will likely take the healing story at face value and attribute it to Jesus’ divine mastery over the natural order. Or perhaps the believer might take a position similar to that of the atheist but with the understanding that God in his providence shows us the face of Jesus by working through natural causes, whether that be medicine or human authors with their own agendas.

My point here is not to adjudicate which if any of these explanations best explains a given miracle story in the Gospels. Rather, I simply wish to underscore the reality that our conclusions about a given text are in large part governed by principles and commitments we had before opening up the Bible.

Throughout his career, Ratzinger has shown himself to be at once a great admirer and practitioner of modern exegesis as well as one of its most incisive critics. Far from rejecting a modern approach to Scripture, Ratzinger nevertheless admits that it “has brought forth great errors” caused in no small part by an unquestioning allegiance to certain “academic dogmas.”

A key mainstream assumption he finds particularly problematic is the belief (and I use that word here deliberately, to mean something one cannot prove) that God cannot enter in and work in human history. However improbable divine intervention in our world might appear, Ratzinger argues that this cannot be excluded a priori unless one has definitive proof that God does not exist. The miraculous is by its very nature, if you will, something unexpected and improbable. The jump from calling it improbable to impossible is what Ratzinger finds problematic, and he thinks that many people today read the Bible in this way without reflecting upon whether assuming such a conclusion is warranted or not.

Bart Ehrman: Everyone Has Presuppositions

Since this site is dedicated to fostering dialogue between believers and nonbelievers, I think it is only fair that we attempt to glimpse the same phenomena described by Ratzinger through a competing lens. One of my favorite authors in this regard is Bart Ehrman. The bestselling author, who describes himself as an agnostic, has written several books popularizing modern exegesis and challenging believers to consider more thoughtfully the origins of the Bible and Christianity. The reason I like reading Ehrman, as opposed to many other agnostic or atheist authors, lies not only in his accessible style but above all in his intellectual humility often lacking in believers and nonbelievers alike.

For this post, I simply wish to share some of his thoughts on doing historical biblical study as articulated in three of his recent books. I think there are many points of convergence with what Benedict is saying, even as the two authors ultimately come to quite different conclusions about the Christian faith.

Misquoting Jesus

In this book Ehrman rightly takes issue with those who dismiss modern scholarship out of hand as if it were only practiced by the godless. I suspect that the author is right in remarking that his own books are sometimes written off by those who—whether consciously or unconsciously—perceive his arguments as threatening to their faith. In response Ehrman remarks, “These scholars are not just a group of odd, elderly, basically irrelevant academics holed up in a few libraries around the world.”

In a real sense Christians owe our modern, translated Bibles to such people—some of whom are not believers. These academics have dedicated their careers to producing Bible editions that present us, as closely as possible, with the “original” texts of Scripture.

Most people fail to realize just how complicated was the origin of the biblical texts we now take for granted as “the Bible.” For one thing, we do not possess the original letters of the New Testament fresh from their authors’ pens. Moreover, the (many and much later) copies of texts we do possess contain important variants and points of seeming contradiction among themselves.

As if that were not enough, we then still have to consider the question of how to interpret what we do have. Which manuscripts ought to be considered authoritative? Which, if any, is the one Christians are supposed to consider inspired? As Ehrman says, “If texts could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says.” For better or worse, that is clearly not the case.

Jesus, Interrupted

Ehrman here again goes to great length to make clear his conviction that modern biblical exegesis is not exclusively the domain of agnostic or atheist thinkers:

"My personal view is that a historical-critical approach to the Bible does not necessarily lead to agnosticism or atheism. It can in fact lead to a more intelligent and thoughtful faith— certainly more intelligent and thoughtful than an approach to the Bible that overlooks all of the problems that historical critics have discovered over the years."

The author mentions more than once that his closest friends are both scholars and believers. According to Ehrman, “[I]t was the problem of suffering, not a historical approach to the Bible, that led me to agnosticism.” He discusses the reasons for his conviction elsewhere in his book God’s Problem.

While I do not share his convictions regarding the problem of evil as an insurmountable obstacle to belief in God, that is the topic for another thread which receives frequent attention on this site. For our purposes, let us simply recall that Ehrman’s basis for professing agnosticism has primarily to do with the problem of evil, not the problems unearthed by modern biblical scholarship.

In my estimation, Ehrman does both sides of our debate a great service in debunking the notion that we hold our respective convictions on the basis of certain proofs. For example, he writes that we can neither prove nor disprove the resurrection:

"I am decidedly not saying that Jesus was not raised from the dead. I’m not saying the tomb was not empty. I’m not saying that he did not appear to his disciples and ascend into heaven. Believers believe that all these things are true. But they do not believe them because of historical evidence. They take the Christian claims on faith, not on the basis of proof. There can be no proof."

These words may alarm some Christians who think that we can “prove” the resurrection with the internal evidence of the New Testament or any other evidence for that matter. To be sure, we Christians can and must adduce reasons for our belief and be prepared to defend our faith against objections. But Ehrman is perfectly right to push us on the reality that these reasons do not amount to a definitive proof. That, indeed, is why we call it faith, not science.

Again, the Catholic position is by no means saying that faith is “unscientific” or at odds with science. Rather, the point here is that the Christian and the atheist may look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions because of our prior commitments which involve a decision to view the Bible through the lens of faith or not.

How Jesus Became God

Ehrman probes the issue of belief in the resurrection at greater length in his most recent work. Here he rightly criticizes an all-too common response of Christians when they are faced with the findings of modern biblical scholarship:

"The reason historians cannot prove or disprove whether God has performed a miracle in the past—such as raising Jesus from the dead—is not that historians are required to be secular humanists with an anti-supernaturalist bias. I want to stress this point because conservative Christian apologists, in order to score debating points, often claim that this is the case. In their view, if historians did not have anti-supernaturalist biases or assumptions, they would be able to affirm the historical 'evidence' that Jesus was raised from the dead."

Unfortunately, I have seen plenty in my years of teaching a mostly-Catholic audience to confirm Ehrman’s observations. Sometimes Catholic writers and speakers write off modern scholarship tout court with the use of scare quotes, calling modern thinkers “scholars” as if they were not actually scholars because they lack or at least seem to lack the faith that the Christian thinks is required for them to have any competence at all in their field.

Regarding evangelical Christians—Ehrman’s former self which I take to be his principal audience—the author adds a fascinating point to his criticism above:

"I should point out that these Christian apologists almost never consider the 'evidence' for other miracles from the past that have comparable— or even better—evidence to support them: for example, dozens of Roman senators claimed that King Romulus was snatched up into heaven from their midst; and many thousands of committed Roman Catholics can attest that the Blessed Virgin Mary has appeared to them, alive—a claim that fundamentalist and conservative evangelical Christians roundly discount, even though the 'evidence' for it is very extensive…Protestant apologists interested in 'proving' that Jesus was raised from the dead rarely show any interest in applying their finely honed historical talents to the exalted Blessed Virgin Mary."

This point of criticism is difficult for any Christian to address, and a robust response is needed. While it is not my point here to take on this problem, I would simply note that for the Catholic tradition God’s grace (including the possibility of miracles) is not constrained within the visible confines of the Catholic Church. Unlike some Christians, Catholics are not intrinsically opposed to the possibility of a non-Christian performing or experiencing a miracle.

In a later section of this book, Ehrman turns aside from the above considerations to consider in more detail the fundamentals of how to do history properly. At a pivotal point he says something which I could have mistaken as coming from the pen of Pope Benedict had I not known otherwise:

"The first thing to stress is that everyone has presuppositions, and it is impossible to live life, think deep thoughts , have religious experiences, or engage in historical inquiry without having presuppositions. The life of the mind cannot proceed without presuppositions. The question, though, is always this: What are the appropriate presuppositions for the task at hand?"

This is one of the questions that interests me most and which I think lies at the heart of Pope Benedict’s statement that the debate in exegesis is at bottom a philosophical one. We can never completely suspend our biases, but we can at least do our best to remain conscious of their presence and engage in a self-critique that helps to purify our thought and attune it with the breadth of knowledge we can gain from the sources available to us.

In this critique, a few pivotal questions emerge: Whose philosophical presuppositions best position us for an accurate understanding of the nature of things? Which ones best enable us to live well? And what would the process for making such a determination look like? These are issues I hope to take up in my next post at Strange Notions, but here my concern remains much more basic in showing that there is a problem recognized by good thinkers on both sides of the religious/non-religious aisle.

I would like to draw these remarks to a close with a word on complete objectivity which Ehrman, like Benedict, rejects as a possibility in our effort to interpret the Scriptures. As Ehrman states, “This is one of the great ironies of modern religion: more than almost any other religious group on the planet, conservative evangelicals, and most especially fundamentalist Christians, are children of the Enlightenment.”

Both modern Christians and modern skeptics yearn for a level of certitude that simply does not exist or exists for only a very limited range of truth claims. In Ehrman’s words, “[F]aith in a miracle is a matter of faith, not of objectively established knowledge.” For instance, if Jesus really did perform the miracles the gospels claim he did, then this would help explain how Jesus’ opponents could deny these actions in the face of evidence that God was working through him.

It is the same dynamic that we find in Jesus’ parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. The rich man suffering in Hades begs Father Abraham to send someone to his living relatives and warn them about the place of torment, to which Abraham replies, “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Here again, people could look at the same evidence and draw different conclusions, a process largely determined by their prior convictions.

So did Jesus really come back from the dead as the above parable intimates? And was this parable even uttered by the historical Jesus in the first place? These are important questions which—for both believers and nonbelievers alike—are often answered even before they are asked. In the following post we will continue the conversation in more detail, but for now this is a good place to begin our discussion.
 
 
(Image credit: Marc Cz

Growing up, Holly Ordway was convinced God was little more than superstition, completely unsupported by evidence or reason. She later attained a PhD in literature, traveled the country as a competitive fencer, and became a college English professor, none of which left room for God.

But one day a smart and respected friend surprisingly revealed he was a Christian. That sent Holly on a search for the truth about God, one that weaved through literature, aesthetics, imagination, and history. It culminated in 2012 when she entered the Catholic Church.

Holly recounts her probing journey in a new memoir, Not God's Type: An Atheist Academic Lays Down Her Arms (Ignatius Press, 2014). The book debuted two weeks ago and has already soared up the Amazon charts. When I checked this morning, it was ranked:

• #1 among all religious biographies and memoirs
• #15 among all Christian books
• #30 among all memoirs on Amazon
• #353 among all books on Amazon

I recently sat down with Holly to discuss her early atheism, the role of imagination in her conversion to Catholicism, and the strongest evidence for Christianity.
 

 
BRANDON VOGT: Whenever non-believers analyze an atheist-to-Catholic conversion story, many quickly assume the convert wasn't really an atheist. Would you have described yourself that way during your early life?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I’ve heard that claim often, and I admit, it puzzles me. Even if I hadn’t been ‘really’ an atheist, what does that have to do with whether I’m correct or not in believing Christianity to be true?

But in any case, certainly I described myself as an atheist by the time I was in my twenties. Sometimes people assume there must have been a traumatic event or a rejection of faith, but there wasn’t. It was a gradual process from being non-religious, to being indifferent, to being actively convinced that atheism was true.

I remember a conversation I had when I was about eight years old. A kid who waited at the same bus stop as I did asked me if I believed in God. I thought about it for a moment and said “I don’t know. Maybe God’s real, and maybe not.” The boy said “Oh, you’re an agnostic.” I remembered the conversation not because it seemed important, but rather because I’d learned a new word, and that was always interesting to me as an avid and precocious reader.

My family was ‘culturally Christian’ in a small way: at Christmas, there was a nativity set on display and Christmas carols on the stereo, and my mom at one point reprimanded me for the teen habit of saying “Oh-my-God” as a verbal filler. But there was no Bible or religious books in the house, and we never went to church. As a teenager, I began to be concerned with questions of right and wrong, and felt a longing for meaning and connection, but it didn’t occur to me to explore these issues in religious terms.

In college I absorbed the prevailing idea that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was just a historical curiosity, and that science could explain everything. By the time I was in my mid- to late twenties, I was convinced that there was no God (or any spiritual reality). I did not believe that I had a soul; I thought I was just an intelligent animal, and that when I died, my consciousness would simply blink out. I thought that there was no ultimate meaning in life, and that people who believed in any form of God were seriously self-deluded. It was a bit depressing, but I believed it to be the best explanation of the way the world is, and truth is better than false comfort. If that’s not atheism, I’m not sure what counts…

Sometimes I’ll hear atheists argue that “you don’t have to believe in God to be a moral person.” I agree! I know from my own experience that atheists can be moral people and do good deeds. What I couldn’t do, as an atheist, was to give a compelling reason why I had this moral sense, or to explain why I recognized that my efforts to be good always fell short of my ideals.

I also didn’t understand, then, that Christian teachings on virtue and morality were anything other than a set of rules and pious slogans – I didn’t know that the Church offered a relationship with a living Person who would, if you would allow it, actually do something to change and transform you into a new person, a fully alive person… But that was a something that took quite a while to understand, and indeed it’s only since I’ve become a Catholic that I’ve begun to fully appreciate the fullness and transformative power of God’s grace, above all through the Eucharist. It’s a completely different paradigm.

BRANDON: You followed a unique route to God, one that was philosophical but just as much literary. How did your background as an English professor fuel your conversion, and how did the imagination play a significant role?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I wasn’t interested in hearing arguments about God, or reading the Bible, but God’s grace was working through my imagination… like a draft flowing under a closed and locked door.

To begin with, classic Christian literature planted seeds in my imagination as a young girl, something I write about in more detail in my book. Later, Christian authors provided dissenting voices to the naturalistic narrative that I’d accepted—the only possible dissenting voice, since I wasn’t interested in reading anything that directly dealt with the subject of faith or Christianity, and thus wasn’t exposed to serious Christian thought.

I found that my favorite authors were men and women of deep Christian faith. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien above all; and then the poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, John Donne, and others. Their work was unsettling to my atheist convictions, in part because I couldn’t sort their poetry into neat ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’ categories; their faith infused all their work, and the poems that most moved me, from Hopkins’ “The Windhover” to Donne’s Holy Sonnets, were explicitly Christian. I tried to view their faith as a something I could separate from the aesthetic power of their writing, but that kind of compartmentalization didn’t work well, especially not with a work of literature as rich and complex as The Lord of the Rings.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I needed to ask more questions. I needed to find out what a man like Donne meant when he talked about faith in God, because whatever he meant, it didn’t seem to be ‘blind faith, contrary to reason’.

The Christian writers did more than pique my interest as to the meaning of ‘faith’. Over the years, reading works like the Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Hopkins’ poetry had given me a glimpse of a different way of seeing the world. It was a vision of the world that was richly meaningful and beautiful, and that also made sense of both the joy and sorrow, the light and dark that I could see and experience. My atheist view of the world was, in comparison, narrow and flat; it could not explain why I was moved by beauty and cared about truth. The Christian claim might not be true, I thought to myself, but it was had depth to it that was worth investigating.

BRANDON: For years you trained as a competitive fencer, traveling to tournaments across the country (and winning not a few awards.) How did fencing relate to your conversion?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: Fencing related to my conversion in several ways, but most directly, through the witness of my fencing coach! It was a surprise to me, after working with my coach for about a year, to learn that he was a Christian. He was an exemplary coach, very patient (and I wasn’t the easiest student!), intelligent, and thoughtful, yet clearly a committed Christian, and thus he challenged my stereotypes about Christians as being pushy and thoughtless. So, when I became curious about what Christians really believed—when poetry had done its work!—I realized that I could ask my coach questions and feel safe and respected while having a dialogue about these issues.

After I became a Christian, fencing became an avenue for discipleship and a real-time metaphor for growing in the Christian life. “Taking up the sword of the Spirit” resonated with me!

BRANDON: In Not God's Type, you recount several books that proved helpful during your exploration. What were some of them?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: I read a lot of books! C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity was one of the most important ones, particularly with regard to his moral argument, but also for the way that he provides vivid images and analogies to illuminate what words like ‘faith’ and ‘repentance’ mean.

For the philosophical and historical questions, I was particularly helped by a book called Does God Exist?, a debate between J.P. Moreland (a Christian) and Kai Nielsen (an atheist), articles by philosopher William Lane Craig, and the book In Defense of Miracles, which includes David Hume’s famous argument against miracles as well as arguments for the possibility of miracles. One of the most important books I read was N.T. Wright’s magisterial scholarly work The Resurrection of the Son of God, which convinced me that the Resurrection was a fact of history.

Literature also helped me along the way. In particular, the Chronicles of Narnia helped me connect my intellect and my imagination, so that I grasped the meaning of the Incarnation and saw its importance not as an abstract idea, but as something that impacted my life.

BRANDON: Perhaps the key hinge of your conversion was when you came to believe in the historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead. What evidence led you to that conclusion?

DR. HOLLY ORDWAY: One of the first steps to that conclusion was my realization that miracles are both possible and rational. Since I had come (on other grounds) to believe that there is a transcendent Creator who is the source of morality, order, and rationality, then it made sense that the physical world was orderly and comprehensible, with natural causes operating in a regular way, but also that there was a supernatural dimension of reality. Just as I could allow nature to take its course in a garden, or I could act to alter the course of ‘natural’ events  by planting a tree or pulling up a seedling, it was rational to suppose that the Creator could work with natural causes or could act directly, intervening in history. So I was willing to consider at least the possibility that a particular miracle could have happened: the Resurrection.

There were many pieces of evidence that all fit together to make a convincing case for the Resurrection; I’ll mention just a couple here. One of them is the behavior of the disciples before and after the Resurrection. The Gospel accounts do not portray their behavior after the Crucifixion in a particularly flattering light. Even though Jesus had predicted his own resurrection, the disciples gave up and went away, assuming that Jesus was a failed messiah. If the disciples had made up the Resurrection story afterwards, why would they have included details that made them look disloyal and cowardly? My academic studies in literature allowed me to recognize that the Gospels were written as history, not myth or parable, and that there hadn’t been enough time for a legend to form. It began to seem like the best explanation for all these events being recounted this way, was that they really happened.

Then, after the Resurrection, there’s a complete turn-around in their behavior, and they become bold proclaimers of the Risen Lord. There were plenty of words that people in ancient times could have used to describe visions or sightings of ghosts, and indeed, such language would have gotten them in much less trouble! But they spoke of a Jesus who was alive, bodily resurrected, and in short order were willing to die for that claim.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence for the Resurrection, though, was the Church itself. If I supposed that the Church had invented the Resurrection to explain its own worship of Jesus, I had to ask, how did that worship arise in the first place? If the Church was not the result of a miracle, it was itself a miracle.

It’s important to say that there was no single, knock-out piece of evidence that convinced me; I was convinced by the cumulative claim, the way it all fit together. Historical events can’t be proved like a math problem or tested like a scientific hypothesis, and there’s always a way to form an alternate explanation. But just because an alternative exists doesn’t mean it’s is equally reasonable or likely. Speaking within my own field of literature, there are people who claim that William Shakespeare didn’t really write his plays. There are even a few legitimately fuzzy areas: for instance, a few of his plays were co-authored, and it seems likely to me that at least one passage in Macbeth (Hecate’s speech) was a later interpolation. Nonetheless, the evidence taken as whole points to Shakespearean authorship!

So, that’s what happened with my assessment of the Resurrection, except with even more convincing reasons to support the Christian claim. The evidence was best explained by concluding that the Resurrection really happened. And having come to that conclusion, I knew that there were implications in my life. I had to ask myself: “What does this mean for me? What do I do now…?”

That’s where the imagination had a role, once again: in helping me make the connection between intellect and will. Indeed, imaginative literature continues to play an important part in my Christian life. Great novels and poetry nourish me as a Catholic, helping me to grow in the faith—and to delight in it.