"A double burden"

According to John Loftus,

“When it comes to believing in miracles, Christians have a double burden of proof.”

We do? O dear, I’m holding my breath.

“On the one hand, they must show that a particular “event” was not very likely.”

No, we don’t have to do anything of the kind. We only have to show that a certain event occurred.

You don’t have to classify an event to identify the occurrence of an event. You don’t have to show that a miraculous event happened; you only have to show that an event which happens to be miraculous happened.

How we classify the event is a retrospective judgment logically independent of documenting the event itself.

All we must do is to show that a miraculous event qua event occurred, not a miraculous event qua miraculous. How you interpret the event is a separate question.

“On the other hand, Christians must show that the purported miraculous event happened. And yet, everything they say to establish the first burden of proof takes away the strength of the second burden of proof. That is, the more they argue that an event was miraculous, the less likely such an event occurred. But the more they argue that an event was likely to have occurred, then the less likely that event can be understood as miraculous.”

Except that, as I’ve just pointed out, this is a specious dilemma.

What evidence do you need that someone came back from the dead? The only evidence you need is evidence that he was dead, and then he came back to life. Pretty straightforward if you ask me.

“The only way people judge whether or not a miracle occurred is whether or not it fits within their control beliefs (i.e., which God he believes in and was taught to believe). One cannot start with the evidence for a miracle to show that the Christian God exists, simply because a person must already believe it’s plausible for the Christian God to exist in the first place (unless it’s a case of accepting what someone says because that person is believable).”

Another non-sequitur. Loftus is confusing epistemology with ontology. The fact that a miracle presupposes the existence of God doesn’t presuppose that our ability to recognize a miracle assumes a prior belief in God. You can argue from evidence for the existence of a miracle to the existence of God.

“Otherwise, the evidence isn’t evidence for anything.”

Once again, he’s conflating evidence for the occurrence of the event with evidence for the miraculous character of the event. Any evidence for the miraculous character of the event would also be evidence for the existence of God.

“The Christian believes and defends the Christian miracles. He rejects other miracles; those that don’t align themselves with his control beliefs. Even among Christians themselves they disagree. Do Protestants accept the Virgin Mary sightings in Fatima, Portugal, 1917? No. Why? Because they don’t think Mary is everything that Catholics say she is.”

Do we reject Marian sightings? Once again, Loftus has bundled together several distinct issues.

i) We put more credence in some miraculous reports than others for the same reason that we put more credence in some non-miraculous reports than others.

Is it arbitrary of me to admit that I don’t believe everything I read in the newspaper? Should I either believe everything or nothing at all?

Some reports are more credible than others because some reporters are more credible than others.

ii) What does it mean to say that we reject Marian sightings? This doesn’t mean that we necessarily reject the “sightings” of an individual whom the witnesses report to be Mary.

Are we talking about the experience of the percipient or the external stimulus?

A “sighting” can either have reference to the subject of the sighting—the perception of the observer, or the object of the sighting—what was seen.

We might credit their subjective experience. We might admit that they saw something. What they saw is a matter of interpretation.

After all, how do they know what Mary looks like? Jesus was seen by his contemporaries. But no one today is a contemporary of the Virgin Mary. No one knows what she used to look like when she was walking the earth two thousand years ago.

Any “recognition” of Mary would be based, not on a knowledge of the historical individual, but on Catholic art and iconography. Mary a la Raphael.

iii) Given the OT prohibitions against necromancy, why would we expect the Virgin Mary to be popping up all over the place? Why would Mary do what is forbidden in Scripture? Why would she entice the faithful to traffic with the dead? Seems out of character.