Debunking continuationism

I'm going to comment on continuationism in relation to what I'll dub the MacArthur circle. By that designation I mean John MacArthur, Pyromaniacs, and Fred Butler.

In particular, I'm going to focus on Dan Phillips. It's a little hard to me to tell what his actual argument is, because, at least from what I've read, he so often resorts to tweets and ridicule rather than presenting a sustained argument. 

i) He seems to focus on the worst representatives of continuationism. Now, there's certainly a place for that. But if that's all you focus on, that's like debunking creationism by picking on Ken Ham or Kent Hovind, or debunking premillennialism by picking on Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, or John Hagee. 

ii) Now, perhaps he'd excuse his emphasis by saying there are no good representatives of continuationism. But that's obviously false. 

(Notice, I'm not attributing that to Dan. I don't know his rationale.)

iii) Unfortunately, he does come across as the Richard Dawkins of cessationists. Richard Dawkins has been criticized for simply ridiculing Christianity, without demonstrating a competent knowledge of what he's ridiculing, much less presenting a sustained argument. Perhaps there's more to Dan's position than meets the eye. 

iv) He also seems to resort to the following argument (if you can call it an argument):

Some (many?) continuationist make exaggerated claims. Since reality doesn't live up to their inflated claims, that disproves continuationism.

But if that's Dan's argument, then all he's proven is that continuationists who make exaggerated claims are wrong. That doesn't tell us anything about continuationists who don't make inflated claims. 

v) Let's be clear on the burden of proof. As I understand it, Dan distinguishes between miracles and miracle workers. He thinks God still performs miracles, but he thinks that after the NT era, God cut out the middle man. When God performs a miracle, he does so directly. There are no modern-day prophets, prophetesses, healers, or miracle workers. There are charlatans aplenty, but no one is the real McCoy. 

Now, I think distinguishing between mediate and immediate miracles is a valid theoretical distinction. Up to a point, I'm sympathetic to that distinction. At the same time, you have to do more than posit that distinction. You need to argue for that distinction.

vi) And this brings us back to the burden of proof. Dan's cessationism involves a universal negative. That means he's assuming a very high burden of proof. For it would only take a single exception, just one credible counterexample, to disprove his ironclad cessationism. All you'd need is one bona fide prophet or healer or miracle worker between the death of St. John and today, to disprove his contention. 

vii) Put another way, what's the logical alternative to cessationism? Dan seems to think the logical alternative is a regular occurrence of miracles, miracles of a certain kind occurring at a certain rate. But that's not the logical alternative to cessationism. Logically, the alternative to cessationism doesn't select or predict for any particular outcome. Minimally, it simply allows for exceptions to Dan's universal negative. These could be few or many. Frequent or infrequent. Clustered or isolated.

viii) Perhaps, though, Dan would defend his distinction by saying you can never prove that a modern is the effect of a miracle worker. Maybe he'd say correlation doesn't prove causation. That inference commits the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

For instance, suppose a "healer" lays hands on a terminal cancer patient. Later that week, his oncologist can find no trace of the cancer in his patient. 

In principle, Dan could always chalk that up to spontaneous remission. Or he might say God directly healed the patient, while the involvement of the healer was adventitious. 

If Dan staked out that position in that situation, you couldn't prove him wrong. But if that's the position he always took, then that would the cessationist equivalent of unfalsifiable methodological naturalism. As one quipster recently put it:

Because the naturalist could always provide some far-fetched naturalistic explanation to explain the evidence. Consider:

Scientist: “We just discovered that fifty stars, millions of light-years away, just reformed themselves to spell ‘I am God’ in the sky and then they started blinking the same message in Morse Code. After that, the stars just disappeared!”

Naturalist: “Oh, odds are, and as Hume tells us, it is more believable that you are just lying rather than that actually happening.”

Or.
Naturalist: “Oh, that is just an advanced naturalistic alien civilization playing games with us silly humans.”
Or.
Naturalist: “Oh, it is substantially more likely that you and all the other scientists who allegedly saw that happen just hallucinated the whole episode.”
Or.
Naturalist: “Oh, we are just part of a computer simulation and our naturalistic overlord programmers are just having fun with their version of the Matrix.” 

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-haldane-krauss-argument.html?showComment=1375531136385#c6848516501722590835

Unfortuately, some cessationists rehash Humean objections to reported modern miracles. 

In addition, it would be disingenuous to demand that continuationists provide evidence if you're determined to discount whatever evidence they provide.

Now maybe there's more to Dan's argument than I'm aware of. Maybe his followers can point me to a detailed argument.  

I should hasten to add that Fred Butler generally argues for his positions.