Fathoms of doubt

I'll comment on the latest rant by Ed Dingess:

Now, based on Steve Hays' arguments, what can we say? I suppose that we have to accept these claims at face value or else we are borrowing methods from skeptics and atheists. But then again, we are talking about someone that seems to be drifting more and more into the bizarre with his openness to paranormal activities, muslim dreams and visions about Jesus bringing the gospel to them, and who knows what else. This man presented four people that claimed to be dead for years, not days. And he supposedly raised them from the dead. Apparently you are not supposed to die before age 70 and if you do, he can raise you from the dead. Not only that, but any Christian should be able to do this, according to Gwajima. When you compromise on Sola Scriptura, and you permit just about any hermeneutical method to enter the camp, it becomes nearly impossible to stop the flow of rancid, putrid dogmas and ideas that enter the community passing themselves off as biblical, or cutting edge, or fresh ideas. 

Ed suffers from such mental confusion. One after another after another.

Let's begin with the larger issues:

i) I haven't been saying anything new, really. This is a continuation and extension of my longstanding critique of atheism. Take my critical reviews of books edited by atheists like Jeff Lowder and John Loftus. For instance, my review of the Lowder volume goes back to 2006. 

Atheists think reported miracles must overcome a standing presumption against their occurrence. Miracles are inherently improbable. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. A naturalistic explanation is the default explanation. If someone reports a miracle, that, in itself, impugns his credibility as a witness. 

I've argued against all that. When reading MacArthurites, it's deja vu. 

ii) What about the paranormal? What does Dingess even mean by "openness to paranormal activities"?

The "paranormal" is an umbrella term for phenomena which scientists committed to naturalism refuse to investigate. In that respect, it's a negative designation. It doesn't stand for anything in particular. Simply what the scientific establishment refuses to explore. Or what, at best, scientists investigate to debunk, on the prior assumption that it must be bunk. 

According to naturalism, everything that happens (at least above the subatomic level) is the result of physical causation. Physical effects of physical causes. That includes personal agency, for personal agents (e.g. humans) are deemed to be purely physical entities. 

Although naturalism isn't synonymous with physicalism, that's the ideal. Some naturalists grudgingly subscribe to Platonism (e.g. abstract objects), but naturalists usually labor to reduce everything to matter. 

Put another way, according to naturalism, everything that happens in the world is the result of one thing in the world effecting or affecting another thing in the world. A closed system. Nothing interrupts the continuum. No miracles. No discarnate spirits. No incorporeal minds. No intervention from the outside. 

The paranormal challenge those assumptions. Paranormal events, if they happen, seem to defy physical transmission. They bypass a causal chain that mediates the effect. 

Because they break the physicalist paradigm, that's why the scientific establishment, dominated by atheists, is so hostile to the paranormal. At most, it only sanctions research which presumes at the outset that this must be bogus.

iii) On a related note, a stock objection to biblical miracles is that in the "real" world, nothing happens that can't be explained naturalistically. That's our day-to-day experience. So they say. But the existence of the paranormal challenges that dogmatic claim.

iv) Those are metaphysical objections to the paranormal, which parallel metaphysical objections to biblical miracles. In addition, epistemological objections to the paranormal parallel epistemological objections to biblical miracles, viz. the reliability of testimonial evidence, the value of anecdotal evidence. 

Therefore, solid paranormal research is an ally in Christian apologetics.

v) Acknowledging the existence of the paranormal is not an endorsement of the paranormal. It's no different than the study of history or nature. Or even the study of the occult. If a discernment ministry studies the occult, that's not an endorsement of the occult. 

The Bible itself confirms the existence of paranormal or occultic agents and events. This is the sort of world God put us in. That's reality. 

vi) Ed takes the bizarre position that if you're not a cessationist, you must accept modern miraculous claims at face value. Is he really that undiscriminating? He has no standards whatsoever. For him, it's either total acceptance or total rejection.

The criteria for assessing testimonial evidence are the same for miraculous events as providential events. There are standard monographs that discuss the criteria. Cf. C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study.

vii) There's a basic difference between saying I don't believe that happened and saying I don't believe that kind of thing happens. I can grant that things like that happen without vouching for every reported instance. 

viii) There's a theological presupposition against raising the dead on a regular basis. Death is a standing penalty for original sin. That's the norm. The general resurrection awaits the Parousia. During the inter-adventual period, resurrections, if they occur at all, would be quite exceptional.

ix) I never said Jesus brings the gospel to Muslims in dreams and visions. For one thing, I only discussed the possibility of "preevangelism." Dreams and visions that might "prepare" a Muslim for the reception of the gospel. And that's analogous to the case of Cornelius. I also discussed it hypothetically. 

I have no antecedent objection to the possibility that Jesus appears to some people. Jesus lives. Jesus is sovereign. 

x) Since the Bible promises the occurrence of certain types of miracles for the duration of church history (e.g. Jn 14:12; Acts 2:17-18; 1 Cor 13:8-12; Jas 5:13-16), it hardly compromises sola Scriptura to expect what Scripture predicts. However, Scripture doesn't tell us how often that will happen. It may be quite intermittent. The distribution of postbiblical miracles is up to God's sovereign wisdom and discretion. That's not something we can anticipate or count on. It will happen when and where God makes it to happen–directly or indirectly. 

xi) Unfortunately, methodological atheism isn't confined to the Jesus Seminar or the Society of Biblical Literature. Many cessationists have a compartmentalized faith, where they say they believe in all the Biblical miracles, but when we switch to testimony for modern miracles, they suddenly assume the posture of David Hume or secular debunkers like James Randi, Martin Gardner, and Paul Kurtz. 

Professing belief in biblical miracles only seems to be a token film over a fiord of skepticism. They find it easy to believe in biblical miracles, while they find modern miracles simply incredible, because, for them, biblical miracles are safely unfalsifiable, due to their distance in time. A convenient abstraction. But when it comes to modern miracle claims, that hits much closer to home, and unfortunately, when that edges up to their own time and place, their default setting is reflexive, even defiant, disbelief. That's a unstable position, and it betrays a shallow belief in biblical miracles, like an oil slick thinly covering fathoms of doubt just underneath the shiny surface.