Preternatural miracles

Hallquist has posted a partial response to my critique:

http://www.uncrediblehallq.net/2012/01/10/yay-a-reply-to-my-review-except-sigh/

(1) Hayes quotes me as calling Keener’s thesis “weasly,” and then calls this a “conspiratorial interpretation” while ignoring my more detailed explanation of what’s wrong with Keener’s thesis. To recap: the “primary thesis” is poorly-chosen because it’s too trivial to be worth devoting a two-volume set to…

He’s a NT scholar whose book is addressed to members of the guild. He’s challenging the unquestioned assumption that reported miracles in the Gospels and Acts should be automatically consigned to legend. And he’s filling a lacuna in the scholarly literature.

…and his “secondary thesis” is problematic because it’s vague, and seems to provide Keener with an excuse for spending a lot of time accusing people of being closed-minded, instead of doing what he should be doing, which is arguing that miracles actually occur.

i) Keener devotes a great deal of time documenting the occurrence of miracles.

ii) However, many unbelievers are closed-minded. As a result, they are impervious to the evidence. So Keener also needs to challenge their arbitrary rules of evidence.

I suppose I could have spent a little more time on this last problem, for the sake of making things clear. In particular, I neglected to quote some of the more blatant ad hominems, such as, “skeptics ‘have laid out the rules of the game in such a way that they cannot possibly lose’” (p. 703). This quote, along with much of Keener’s discussion of such important issues medical documentation, misdiagnosis, and scientific study of prayer (quoted in my original review), is located in a chapter titled “Biased Standards?” which implies that the key issue with respect to these things is not the quality (or weakness) of the evidence, but whether skeptics are closed-minded.

Hallquist acts is if this is Keener’s hostile caricature of how unbelievers respond to reported miracles. Yet it’s easy to quote unbelievers who’ve “laid out the rules of the game in such a way that they cannot possibly lose.”

The locus classicus is Hume, from his famous essay:

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 as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.

 

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that case, there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.

And there are variants on this argument among other unbelievers. For instance:

That is, he must in effect concede to Hume that the antecedent improbability of this event is as high as it could be, hence that, apart from the testimony, we have the strongest possible grounds for believing that the alleged event did not occur. This event must, by the miracle advocate’s own admission, be contrary to a genuine, not merely a supposed, law of nature, and therefore be maximally improbable. It is this maximal improbability that the weight of the testimony would have to overcome.

 

Those who accept this as a miracle have the double burden of showing both that the event took place and that it violated the laws of nature. But it will be very hard to sustain this double burden. For whatever tends to show that it would have been a violation of natural law tends for that very reason to make it most unlikely that it actually happened.

J. I. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford 1982), 25-26.

Historians more or less rank past events on the basis of the relative probability that they occurred. All that historians can do is show what probably happened in the past. That is the problem inherent in miracles. Miracles, by our very definition of the term, are virtually impossible events.

 

Historians can establish only what probably happened in the past, but miracles, by their very nature, are always the least probable explanation for what happened…If historians can only establish what probably happened, and miracles by their definition are the least probable occurrences, then more or less by definition, historians cannot establish that miracles have ever probably occurred.

B. Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted (HarperOne 2009), 175-76.

Even in the best possible case, in order for an extraordinary explanation to be believable, the evidence (as a whole) must be extraordinarily improbable on any other explanation but the extraordinary one and in direct proportion, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinarily improbable the evidence must otherwise be.

R. Carrier, “Why the Resurrection is Unbelievable,” J. Loftus, ed., The Christian Delusion (Prometheus Books 2010), 311n4.

So Keener’s characterization is not a “blatant ad hominem.”

(2) Hayes complains a lot about it, but never answers two key questions: why do believers rarely pray for limbs to regenerate, and why are the prayers for limb regeneration that people do make so rarely answered?

i) One of Hallquist’s rhetorical ploys is to characterize my response as a “complaint,” then dismiss the “complaint” without engaging my argument.

ii) I’m in no position to know the relative infrequency of such prayers. I’m also in no position to know the relative infrequency of answers to such prayers. 

iii) If it happened to a friend or relative of mine, I’d pray for healing. However, like all my prayers, that prayer would be qualified.

The question is deceptively simple:

i) For one thing, it’s often easier to explain why something does happen than why it doesn’t. Explaining a nonevent, explaining a negative, can be more elusive or inscrutable.

Ask me why God didn’t make it rain in Peoria on a certain date, and I may be stumped for an answer. But if God didn’t make it rain in Peoria on a certain date, there’s no reason a Christian should be privy to the reason.

ii) If God did heal an amputee, the atheist could always say the medical records were inaccurate, say that’s a case of mistaken identity, etc.

iii) If an amputee’s limb regenerated, the atheist could always deny that God did it in answer to prayer. He could say that’s dumb luck. Chalk it up to the post hoc ergo post hoc fallacy.

iv) If an amputee’s limb regenerated, the atheist could always say all this proves is that in some anomalous cases, amputated limbs spontaneously regenerate–like other freak medical conditions.

v) Amputation is a special case of the problem of evil. Underlying the question of why God (allegedly) won’t heal amputees is the ulterior question of why God permits injuries that require amputation in the first place.

Put another way, if God has good reason for allowing (or planning) injuries that require amputation, then God may have the very same reason for refusing to heal the amputee. If God allows (or plans) the injury, then it’s not surprising if God refuses to heal the amputee–assuming that would thwart his initial purpose in allowing the injury to occur.

vi) The question is a diversionary tactic. It deflects attention away from evidence for other types miracles. An ad hoc stipulation for a particular kind of evidence.

vii) Even in Bible history, preternatural miracles aren’t a regular occurrence. To the contrary, preternatural miracles are epochal phenomena. Bible history alternates between phases punctuated by preternatural miracles and phases characterized by ordinary providence. Noah experienced cataclysmic judgment, but after that, ordinary providence resumed (Gen 8:22). (And, strictly speaking, even Noah’s flood may not be preternatural.)

In the wilderness, Israelites experienced preternatural sources of food and water, but after that, ordinary providence resumed (Josh 5:12).

So there’s no antecedent reason to assume that during the church age, God will perform preternatural miracles (e.g. regenerating limbs). If that doesn’t happen, it’s not surprising.

Christians can pray for whatever God permits, but we don’t know in advance whether the church age will include preternatural miracles. That’s something we can only discover, moving forward. 

(By “preternatural” I mean miracles that override natural processes. But miracles or answers to prayer can harness natural processes. What makes it miraculous is that (i) it’s highly unlikely to happen by chance, and (ii) the timing indicates the personal discretion of a superhuman agent.)

viii) The atheist might try to accuse the Christian of special pleading. His position in unfalsifiable because the Christian can always postulate some unknown reason God had not to heal amputees.

However, that objection cuts both ways. The atheist can always postulate some unknown cause (i.e. undiscovered naturalistic cause) for why severed limbs might spontaneously regenerate. He can always postulate inaccurate medical records or mistaken identity. He can always stipulate that any naturalistic explanation, however improbable, is more probable than a supernatural explanation.

And while I’m on the subject: Hayes complains that I’m “leaving myself an out” by pointing out that a leg regrowth story might be a lie. But does he seriously think it’s unreasonable to be skeptical of the story from Pat Robertson’s book?

Assuming that the “Pat Robertson” remark isn’t just a throwaway line.

(3) My answer: In some cases, yes. In other cases, no. But the reason we know that some medical treatments really work is not because of Keener-style collections of stories of people who received medical treatment and then recovered. We know this because we’ve done scientific studies of the effectiveness of many medical treatments, and in many cases the results came back positive.

i) Hallquist originally insinuated that ostensible answers to prayer commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. I simply drew a parallel with medical treatment.

ii) His new argument doesn’t get around the problem. For inductive scientific studies only document a correlation, not causation. That, therefore, doesn’t eliminate the “possibility” of coincidence.

iii) Moreover, one can be equally skeptical of scientific studies:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

Do I deny the efficacy in medical science? Generally no. But the efficacy of medical science is subject to the same caveats as the efficacy of prayer, or reported miracles.

(4) Similarly, if a friend tells me they got sick, took some penicillin, and got better, I’ll figure the penicillin probably contributed to their getting better, because I know there’s good evidence that penicillin helps fight infections. However, if a friend tells me they got sick, prayed, and got better, I’ll think it’s extraordinarily unlikely that the prayer helped except maybe in a psychosomatic way, because there’s no good evidence for the efficacy of prayer. In other words, it’s totally normal to use what you know about the world in general to evaluate reports about specific occasions. This should not be hard to understand.

i) Of course, that’s circular. For the very question at issue is what we know about the world.

And, yes, we often use the general to assess the specific, but the general is, itself, an abstraction from sampling particular instances. A bottom-up process, from the specific to the general. At best that’s descriptive, not prescriptive. Inherently provisional.

ii) There is also a tension in Hallquist’s example. Doesn’t he think a miracle is supposed to be “extraordinarily unlikely” to eliminate sheer coincidence?