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"MIRACLES EVEN IF PROVABLE DON'T PROVE DEITY"

Opponents of a miracle apologetic argue that a proven miracle-even the miracle of Christ's resurrection-would be vacuous, for it still would not require belief in God. This viewpoint is held by those opposing miracles, but even a philosopher who is at pains to show their epistemological meaningfulness makes the assertion:

The fact that theological underpinnings are necessary to the very identification of a miracle in the first place is, of course, one reason why miracles could never be regarded as a proof of the existence of some god or God to an unbeliever who was aware of the various different supernatural powers which could in principle be invoked as explanations of scientifically anomalous events.

Often the claim that "miracles can't prove God" is little more than a variation on Lessing's theme that "the accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason." Insofar as the argument proceeds in this fashion, it can easily be disposed of, for Lessing confused what contemporary analytical philosophers term the "synthetic" (factual) and the "analytic" (purely formal) areas of assertion. Only in the analytic realm are "necessary truths" possible-truths about which one can be 100 percent certain. Synthetic evidence, involving probabilities and plausibilities, can never rise to such a level of proof. God-statements do not fall into the analytic realm, unless by "God" we mean only a formal assertion of deductive logic or pure mathematics! How ever, if by "God" we mean an existent, factual being, then any proof of His existence or statement about Him must lie in the realm of the synthetic; that is, it must be factual in character. In reality, then, only "the accidental truths" of historical experience are ever capable of becoming the proof of God's existence! Granted, the proof will never reach 100 percent (faith will have to jump the gap from plausibility to certainty), but such proof is the basis of all our factual decisions in life and cannot be summarily dismissed just because a vital religious question is at issue. Thus Jesus was quite willing to use His miraculous healing of the paralytic to demonstrate (not to analytic certainty but with synthetic persuasiveness) that He could forgive sins and was therefore truly divine (Mark 2:1-12, et. al.).

But how persuasive is such a miraculous demonstration, after all? If I were to grow hair on a billiard ball, would this warrant a claim on my part to deity? Hardly, and such an illustration brings us back to the point made earlier in this paper that the significance of a miracle depends in the final analysis not on the degree to which it "violates natural law" (whatever such a notion can mean, and I doubt that it can mean much in an Einsteinian age), but on the character of the miracle-specifically whether or not it speaks to universal human need.

Even an event that allows for the full range of secondary causes to explain it can have significant miraculous impact if it operates at the point of man's existential need. Holland offers the example of an express train's sudden stop just ahead of a child on the railroad track, owing to a sudden heart attack experienced by the engineer as a result of an earlier argument with a colleague. Holland perceptively comments on this "coincidence" or "contingency" miracle:

Unlike the coincidence between the rise of the Ming dynasty and the arrival of the dynasty of Lancaster, the coincidence of the child's presence on the line with the arrival and then the stopping of the train is impressive, significant; not because it is very unusual for trains to be halted in the way this one was, but because the life of a child was imperiled and then, against expectation, preserved. The significance of some coincidences as opposed to others arises from their relation to human needs and hopes and fears, their effects for good or ill upon our lives. So we speak of our luck (fortune, fate, etc.). And the kind of thing that, outside religion, we call luck is in religious parlance the grace of God or a miracle of God. But while the reference here is the same, the meaning is different. The meaning is different in that whatever happens by God's grace or by a miracle is something for which God is thanked or thankable, something which has been or could have been prayed for, something which can be regarded with awe and be taken as a sign or made the subject of a vow (e. g., to go on a pilgrimage).

When we turn to the unique, nonanalogous event of the Resurrection, used by Jesus and by classical Christian apologists to attest the claim that "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (2 Cor.5:19), we find a maximally compelling reason to bring God into the picture, namely that this miracle deals effectively with the most fundamental area of man's universal need, the conquest of death. Not just a single child is saved from a railway accident; the entire race is freed from death by Jesus' act and consequent promise that "whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die" (John 11:26) and "because I live you shall live also" (John 14:19).

Philosopher Paul Dietl correctly observes that "to prove the existence of a being who deserves some of the predicates 'God' normally gets would be to go some ways toward proving the existence of God" and "when and for whom He did miracles would be evidence as to His character." This is precisely why the Resurrection has led so many to affirm Jesus' deity and why His deity is the proper inferential conclusion from His resurrection. The conquest of death for all men is the very predicate of deity that a race dead in trespasses and sins can most clearly recognize, for it meets man's most basic existential need to transcend the meaninglessness of finite existence. Not to worship One who gives you the gift of eternal life is hopelessly to misread what the gift tells you about the Giver. No more worthy candidate for deity is in principle imaginable than the One who conquers death in mankind's behalf. And it should go without saying that the Giver of such a gift has to be regarded as metaphysically positive ("God"), not negative (an archdemon) because of the positive character of His gift in relation to human need. In sum, the Resurrection does point unequivocally to the truth of Jesus' claim to Godhead, and cannot be left on the plane of an inexplicable anomaly requiring no inferential judgement.

If someone were to acknowledge that Jesus performed all the actions attributed to him in the Gospels, but still asserted that "miracles" had not occurred since every action was explicable in terms of coincidence at the microphysical level, the implied conception of miracle would be so different from the one traditionally at issue that there would be no reason for any believer to take his objection seriously.

The gospel events, if they can in fact be shown to have occurred, require an answer to Jesus' straightforward question, "But Whom do you say that I am?" (Matt. 16:15). Now, as then, only one answer will fit the facts.

And it should be noted with care that once the facticity of Christ's resurrection has been granted, all explanations for it reduce to two: Christ's own (He rose because He was God) and any and every interpretation of the event in contradiction to this explanation. Surely it is not difficult to make a choice here, for Jesus (unlike anyone else offering an explanation of the Resurrection) actually arose from the dead! His explanation has prima facie value as opposed to those in contradiction to it, presented as they are by persons who have not managed resurrections themselves. The very fact that a miracle is a nonanalogous event offers an even greater reason than ordinarily to let it interpret itself, to seek its interpretation within itself. What other event or interpreter, after all, could help us understand it? But when we do go to the One who personally experienced the Resurrection, all gratuitous interpretations of the chariot-of-the-gods, creature-from-outer-space variety evaporate in the light of His own clear affirmation of His divine character, to which the sign of Jonah unequivocally points.

"MIRACLES CAN ALWAYS BE REDUCED TO NATURAL EVENTS"

What of the argument that one is never required to appeal to the miraculous as a category of interpretation-that all events, however strange, can be considered as falling within natural boundaries? We have already provided a partial answer to this objection in the immediately preceding discussion, in showing (1) that even some "coincidental" events, to say nothing of unique, nonanalogous events of overwhelming existential import (in particular Christ's resurrection), cry out for interpretation as genuine miracles, and (2) that the most satisfactory interpretation of an event such as the Resurrection will be the construction placed on it by the person who himself brings the event about, even if that construction involves the category of miracle.

To be sure, we are not advocating a metaphysical program of maximum miraculization; those events backing the credentials of miracle must rigorously be subjected to natural explanation. We agree with Rev. Charles Kingsley who said of Newman's endorsement of the miracle story of St. Sturme and his donkey (they both fainted at "the intolerable scent" arising from the "vices and uncleansed hearts" of a band of unconverted Germans bathing in a river) that the story only proved that "St. Sturme had a nose"!

The question before us is really not whether it is theoretically possible to reduce all alleged miracles to natural events (anything is possible, it has been said, with the conceivable exception of squeezing toothpaste back into the tube!), but what one loses by forcing unique, nonanalogous events into established patterns. Any apparent gain in achieving trouble-free regularity in one's universe may be more than counterbalanced by the loss of rationality in one's interpretive technique ("coincidence" enters as a magic formula to explain all). The point can perhaps be seen best by example, and several effective illustrations have been offered by recent philosophical defenders of the epistemological meaningfulness of the miracle-idea. Holland writes:

Suppose that a horse, which has been normally born and reared, and is now deprived of all nourishment (we could be completely certain of this)-suppose that, instead of dying, this horse goes on thriving (which again is something we could be completely certain about). A series of thorough examinations reveals no abnormality in the horse's condition: its digestive system is always found to be working and to be at every moment in more or less the state it would have been in if the horse had eaten a meal an hour or two before. This is utterly inconsistent with our whole conception of the needs and capacities of horses; and because it is an impossibility in the light of our prevailing conception, my objector, in the event of its happening, would expect us to abandon the conception-as though we had to have consistency at any price. Whereas the position I advocate is that the price is too high and it would be better to be left with the inconsistency.

Turning from this purely hypothetical example, Holland cites the wedding miracle at Cana (John 2: 1-11) as another instance of an event which, if established by firsthand empirical observation, could not be reduced to a natural phenomenon without paying "too high a price" for consistency.

A number of people could have been quite sure, could have had the fullest empirical certainty, that a vessel contained water at one moment and wine a moment later-good wine, as St. John says-without any device having been applied to it in the intervening time. Not that this last really needs to be added; for that any device should have existed then at least is inconceivable, even if it might just be argued to be a conceptual possibility now. I have in mind the very remote possibility of a liquid chemically indistinguishable from say mature claret being produced by means of atomic and molecular transformations. The device would have to be as something enormously complicated, requiring a large supply of power. Anything less thorough-going would hardly meet the case, for those who are alleged to have drunk the wine were practiced wine-bibbers, capable of detecting at once the difference between a true wine and a concocted variety in the "British Wine, Ruby Type" category. However, that water could conceivably have been turned into wine in the first century A.D. by means of a device is ruled out of court at once by common understanding; and though the verdict is supported by scientific knowledge, common understanding has no need of this support...At one moment, let us suppose, there was water and at another moment wine, in the same vessel, although nobody had emptied out the water and poured in the wine. This is something that could conceivably have been established with certainty. What is not conceivable is that it could have been done by a device. Nor is it conceivable that there could have been a natural cause of it. For this would have had to be the natural cause of the water's becoming wine.

Boden employs the parallel illustration of a genuine healing of lepers-"not merely that a man is reported to have had an ulcerous rash which disappeared virtually overnight, but to have lost all his fingers in the gradual onset of the disease over the past years and to have had them fully restored."

Could we reasonably suggest, with all our knowledge-imperfect though it may be-of the nature of tissue-growth and cell-differentiation, and of the ravages of the leprosy bacillus within the human body, that such an "anomalous" event might one day be scientifically explained? I think not: such a suggestion would be at least as blatant an act of faith as the wildest claim ever made in the name of religion...It is the biochemical facts, which might have been different (in particular their temporal parameters), which exclude such a phenomenon from the class of unexplained events which we may hope to explain one day. To regard such a phenomenon as in principle scientifically explicable on the basis of general remarks about falsifiability and revolution in scientific knowledge would be as perverse as to insist that we should seriously regard the circulation of the blood as a matter of mere hypotheses, one which not only could logically be falsified, but which might as a matter of fact be falsified in the future.

After a close analysis of miraculous healings, Jean Lhermitte of the French Academy of Medicine declared in a similar vein: "To suppose that all extraordinary, inexplicable, or apparently supernatural healings can be adequately explained by the chance operation of psychosomatic factors is to attempt to cross an unbridgeable chasm."

Speaking generally of the miraculous aspects of Jesus' ministry, philosopher Tan Tai Wei of Singapore argues:

Assume, say, that Jesus had really predicted his own death and resurrection, claimed his miraculous feats to be deliberate so as to demonstrate his 'Sonship' to the 'Father', and that we have empirical certainty that there were a few occasions at least where such exceptional phenomena occurred in strict coincidence with such demonstrations of his divinity. Now, one such occurrence, although enough to generate wonder, might be reasonably presumed after deliberation to be an accidentally coinciding natural phenomenon. Such a conclusion, though, would already seem unduly sceptical if, say, the raising of Lazarus was the only miracle of Jesus. For Jesus had confidently ordered the removal of the grave stone, prayed aloud that God should there prove his poser, and then cried 'Lazarus, come forth!' And he did. And if such feats had indeed been so frequent as to be common in the life of such a person, then even if it be conceded that the exceptions, though unrepeatable or rarely repeatable, are nevertheless merely natural phenomena, the question still left unanswered is why the repeated coincidence of such rarity within the intentions and performances of this one man obtains....At some point, abandoning scepticism would be more rational, because here some of our ordinary criteria (which are independent of religious considerations), governing the rational acceptability of purported coincidences as merely ordinary natural ones, would not be met.

What the several thinkers we have just quoted are maintaining is that there is a point of diminishing returns when one insists on regarding all events, however empirically established as unique and nonanalogous, as ordinary events. Eventually one acquires so flexible and allinclusive a notion of "coincidence" that the concept loses all significance and functions as a kind of asylum of ignorance. At such a juncture, a new kind of faith is introduced to avoid the pressing claims of religious faith, namely the blind faith (credulity would be a better word for it) that maintains, against all evidence, that a unique, nonanalogous event is somehow really a regular, ordinary event after all. But when this naturalistic faith is set against supernatural faith (and they must be so opposed, since both cannot be true), the former must rationally yield to the latter, since naturalistic faith flies in the face of the data, while supernatural faith is willing to go wherever the empirical evidence leads.

"SCIENCE REQUIRES US TO REDUCE MIRACLES TO NATURAL EVENTS"

Finally, we shall speak to a stronger statement of the objection just discussed. Here the critic does not merely claim that one can always regard alleged miracles as part of a "natural" context, but that the very character of the scientific operation demands that we do so. Alastair McKinnon well expresses this viewpoint in his philosophical defense of "the scientist's resolve to treat all events as subject to natural law":

This does not mean that he insists that events should conform to some conception he already has. Nor does it mean that he disregards those which he has not yet been able to fit within such a conception. Rather, it means that he has resolved to view all events in this light. For him, law is a slogan; it is the way in which he proposes to look at the world. His acceptance of all events as expressions of natural law is the way in which he guides himself in his attempt to discover the real content of this conception. It is therefore essential that he refuse to treat any event as discrepant. This is not to say that certain scientists have not so treated events upon convenient occasion. It is only to say that when they have done so they have ceased to be scientists.

McKinnon is here describing a philosophy of science which reminds one strongly of the theological presuppositionalism of such thinkers as Herman Dooyeweerd and Cornelius Van Til: science (or theology) begins with its a priori as to the nature of things and no factual data can ultimately upset it because the presuppositional starting point becomes the criterion for the evaluation of all the data. Elsewhere I have argued that such an approach is self-defeating for theology since it goes against the inductive character of Christian faith, which must always begin with the facts purporting to constitute revelation, not with a presupposition as to their existence or as to the nature of theology. Such aprioristic "invincible ignorance" leaves Christian faith with no positive means of establishing its truth-claim as superior to competing religious options that contradict it and vie for men's souls.

Scientifically, even less (if possible) can be said for this viewpoint, for the object of science is, after all, to comprehend facts of the world, not to create-much less presuppose- a system into which all facts must fit willy-nilly. To look for regularities is the quintessence of wisdom; but to insist that all data conform to ordinary expectations and fit a nonmiraculous model is the antithesis of the scientific spirit. Models must arise as constructs to fit data into alien categories.

I have illustrated this truth in another context with reference to modern studies of the nature of light. Today's physicist, finding empirically that light tests out in a contradictory fashion as both undulatory and corpuscular (wave-like and particle-like), is even willing at that point of necessity to shelve his standard of rational consistency for the sake of the facts and conceptualize the unit of light as a "wave-particle" (the photon). If the true scientist is willing-as he should be-to subordinate interpretation/explanation to the facts even if rational consistency suffers in the process, surely he cannot insist on forcing facts into the mold of substantive regularity! Regularity (like consistency) is properly employed up to the point where the data are no longer hospitable to its operation as an interpretive category: in the face of recalcitrant nonanalogous uniqueness, regularity-not the facts-must yield.

We conclude with another, and no less striking illustration. One of the great scientific advances in the nineteenth century occurred with the development of the so-called periodic table of the elements through the efforts of Mendeleev and others. The table successfully arranged the known chemical elements by their properties, first according to atomic weights, later by atomic numbers. Its general utility was confirmed by the successful prediction that unknown elements would be found to fill in the gaps remaining in the table. The modern periodic table elegantly arranges the elements in columns according to valences (combining properties based on the hypothesized structure of the element's outer electron shell). One of the table's columns turns out to represent zero valence, or zero combining power, embracing the so-called "inert gases": helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon. These elements offer no combining opportunities, since their outer electron rings are already complete (comprising stable electronic octets).

Early in the 1960's however, against the force of this powerful conceptualization, inert gases were in fact combined chemically with other elements! At the Argonne National Laboratory, chemists (including representation from evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois) successfully produced xenon tetrafluoride, and since that time other chemical combinations of "inert" gases have followed. How was this achieved? by sophisticated atomic techniques unavailable until the 1960s? Not at all, "The tetrafluoride, which was the first to be reported, is made by heating five parts, by volume, of fluorine with one part xenon, to 400 degrees, followed by quenching in cold water"; the resulting compound is a "white solid at room temperature."

But why, then, was this insight not arrived at a half century earlier?

Since the discovery of the noble gases, at the turn of the century, the majority of chemists accepted the view that these elements were incapable of forming normal chemical compounds. Undoubtedly the early electronic theories of valence strengthened this attitude by emphasizing the significance of the stable electronic octet. Although first ionization potentials of the heavier noble gases, xenon, 12.2 e.v., and radon, 10.8 e.v., are lower than for oxidizable elements such as chlorine, 13.0 e.v., and nitrogen, 14.1 e.v., and despite the apparent small influence of the electronic octet on the valence of the heavier elements, few serious attempts to prepare true compounds of the inert gases were made.

The neatness of the periodic table-the elegance of a generalization-so mesmerized investigators that they did not attempt with any real seriousness to combine the "inert" elements. Generalized explanation and regular pattern, as represented by the periodic table, were so comfortable that the empirical investigation of factual particulars was neglected. The particular was subordinated to the general, the irregular to the regular, the fact to the theory-and truth suffered. I should like to think (though it may not be the case) that the evangelical Christian who was a member of the team responsible for the xenon tetrafluoride breakthrough was motivated, at least in part, by his conviction that the general must always yield to the particular, even as the graves of humanity had to open up in the face of the sheer nonanalogous uniqueness of Good Friday and Easter morning.

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The conclusion of the whole matter is, then, that the more willing we are to allow empirical evidence of the unique and nonanalogous to stand, modifying our general conceptions of regularity accordingly, the better scientists and philosophers we become. And the more willing we are as Christians to employ the biblical and classic miracle apologetic, the more effectively we can give a reason to our dark age of secularism for the hope that is within us. In this matter as in all others, clear thinking does not reduce the value of gospel proclamation; rather it serves as its handmaid.

Used by permission of Thomas Nelson Publishers, copyright 1978. All rights to this material are reserved. Materials are not to be distributed to other web locations for retrieval, published in other media, or mirrored at other sites without written permission from Thomas Nelson Publishers.

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