Michael Licona took issue with that a while back. Worth revisiting:
Most biblical scholars and historians hold that the investigation of a miracle report lies outside of the rights of historians acting within their professional capacity. In this essay, I challenge this position and argue to the contrary. A definition of history should not a priori exclude the possibility of investigating miracle claims, since doing so may restrict historians to an inaccurate assessment of the past. Professional historians outside of the community of biblical scholars acknowledge the frequent absence of a consensus; this largely results from conflicting horizons among historians. If this is the present state among professionals engaged in the study of non-religious history, it will be even more so with historians of Jesus. Finally, even if some historians cannot bring themselves to grant divine causation, they, in principle, can render a verdict on the event itself without rendering a verdict on its cause.
Michael R. Licona, “Historians and Miracle Claims” at
We may as well talk about something besides COVID-19. Why let the virus have all the good lines?
News, I agree with Licona. If history is concerned to investigate towards the truth on the actual past i/l/o documentary and other evidence, then it cannot properly exclude events beyond the usual course of events. No inductive exploration of the usual course of the world can exclude that there are legitimately extraordinary events. Warrant cannot demand arbitrarily high substantiation, but only what is reasonable. Also, sufficiently many independent witnesses showing the pattern of surface diversity riding on deeply coherent core are increasingly unlikely to be collectively in error on that core. KF
Interesting. I don’t see any reason to separate out a “spiritual realm”. God’s actions are part of history. God’s designs and intentions are readable in the same way that Herodotus is readable, if we know the language.
But on the specific events of the Jesus story, I’d have to agree with Tabor the ontological naturalist. Those events don’t look like God’s actions, they look more like ordinary human events that were deliberately misattributed to God in order to create a cult. Later cult leaders and scammers have used the same tricks repeatedly.
I suppose you could say that cult leaders and swindlers are part of God’s design, intended to test and develop our rationality; but this isn’t the same thing as calling carnival grifts “miracles”.
Polistra, the resurrection of a man four days dead and stinking, or the healing of men born blind or of notorious cripples and paralytics etc are not feats of prestidigitation. In the case of the passion of Jesus, we have friends eating supper, meeting with a friend, watching him betrayed and judicially murdered;. Only, the timeline is different here: Thurs night, supper and betrayal. Friday, judicial murder. Sunday, meeting with a familiar figure, the one that had been murdered, and across 40 days, over 500 witnesses. Where, deservedly the C17 – 18 deist dismissive arguments have fallen apart. There are two serious alternatives: Jesus died and rose in fulfillment of messiah-prophecies that were hundreds of years old, or there was an utterly implausible mass delusion and hallucinations out of line with cultural expectations. KF
As to this comment:
Huh? Biblical scholars discount the possibility of miracles as being true prior to their investigation of miracles as possibly being true? Why in blue blazes would atheism be the default assumption of any supposed Biblical Scholar? That is insane!
Thomas Bayes would have taken serious exception to that atheistic assumption on the part of supposed Biblical scholars.
Apparently, ‘most’ Biblical scholars have granted that David Hume’s assumption of atheism is true. But then again, Why? I hold that David Hume was basically a two-bit ‘philosophical’ thief who stole the ‘miraculous’ laws of nature away from the Christian founders of modern science who first discovered them.
Specifically David Hume stated, “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature;”
After self-servingly presupposing that the laws of nature are completely natural with no need of God to explain their existence, David Hume, in the same passage, goes on to argue that, basically, since a man rising from the dead would violate the laws of nature, then Jesus resurrection from the dead is a violation of the laws of nature and is therefore impossible.
Yet, David Hume, as an atheist, simply had no right to presuppose that the laws of nature are completely natural with no need of God to explain their existence.
As Paul Davies stated in 1995, “even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”
And again in 2007 Paul Davies went on to state, “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.,,,
,,, the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe,,,”
And as C.S. Lewis stated, “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”
Again. atheists, especially with their a-priori metaphysical assumption that the ‘the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed’ simply have no right to presuppose that the laws of nature are completely natural.
Atheists, with their ‘bottom up’ materialistic explanations, simply have no clue why there should even be universal laws that govern the universe in the first place:
Einstein himself stated, ““You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way”,,,
Likewise, Eugene Wigner also stated, “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind’s capacity to divine them.,,,”
Thus for David Hume, again an atheist, to self-servingly presuppose that the laws of nature are completely natural and that the laws of nature therefore preclude the possibility of any further miracles from even being possible. i.e. “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature;“, is a severely disingenuous and dishonest thing for him to do.
All of modern science was born out of the Christian presupposition that God ‘miraculously’ upholds this universe via His laws of nature. For example, Faraday and Maxwell and even Planck,,,
Again, I hold that David Hume was basically a two-bit ‘philosophical thief’ who stole the ‘miraculous’ laws of nature away from the Christian founders of modern science who first discovered them.
It is also interesting to note that Jonathan McLatchie has recently used Reverend Thomas Beyes line of reasoning, i.e. Bayes’ Theorem, to argue for the existence of God. i.e. To argue that we live in a Theistic universe, as the Christian founders of modern science originally presupposed, instead of us living in a naturalistic universe as David Hume and modern day atheists, (which apparently includes ‘most Biblical scholars’) falsely assume.
In the preceding article Jonathan McLatchie has, basically, strongly reinforced Einstein’s point, “I consider the comprehensibility of the world (to the extent that we are authorized to speak of such a comprehensibility) as a miracle,,, a priori, one should expect a chaotic world, which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way”,,,
It is also interesting to note that Hume’s atheistic assumption that ‘the laws of nature are completely natural’ fails the atheist himself when is comes to quantum mechanics,
Steven Weinberg, an atheist, in regards to quantum mechanics, stated that, “the instrumentalist approach (of quantum mechanics) turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
For instance, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.
Moreover, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally.
First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
January 2020
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/welcome-to-the-brave-new-world-of-science/#comment-690569
Verse:
Thus, it is absurd for ‘most’ Biblical scholars to adopt David Hume’s atheistic assumption that miracles are impossible since they are supposedly a violation of the laws of nature since the laws of nature are, in and of themselves, to be considered miraculous in their own right. Furthermore, even if we were to grant the atheist his premise that the laws of nature are completely natural, the atheist would still fail to be able to prove that humans are ‘completely natural’ since free will in and of itself simply refuses to be reduced to any conceivable law of nature.
In fact, the Darwinian atheist himself is unable to reduce his own Darwinian worldview to ‘completely natural’ laws of nature since there simply is no law of evolution within the known physical universe for him to appeal to,
As Ernst Mayr himself conceded, “In biology, as several other people have shown, and I totally agree with them, there are no natural laws in biology corresponding to the natural laws of the physical sciences.”
In the following article, Roger Highfield makes much the same observation as Ernst Mayr and states, ,,, Whatever the case, those universal truths—’laws’—that physicists and chemists all rely upon appear relatively absent from biology.
Professor Murray Eden of MIT, in a paper entitled “Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory” stated that “the randomness postulate is highly implausible and that an adequate scientific theory of evolution must await the discovery and elucidation of new natural laws—physical, physico-chemical, and biological.”
Thus, the Darwinian atheist, in irony of ironies, is unable to reduce his own Atheistic theory for human origins to, supposedly, completely natural laws. And thus Darwinian evolution itself is apparently a ‘violation of the laws of nature’. Using Hume’s criteria of disqualifying something if it is a ‘violation of the laws of nature’, are we to disqualify Darwinian evolution as being unscientific since it is not reducible to any known law of nature and is therefore, apparently, to be considered ‘miraculous’? 🙂
To go further, embryonic development itself, instead of being reducible to ‘natural law’ as is presupposed within Darwinian metaphysics, can be instead be rightly classified as being miraculous.
It is safe to say that nobody really knows how any particular organism achieves its basic form.
As Alexander Tsiaras states, “The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go, the complexity of these, the mathematical models on how these things are indeed done, are beyond human comprehension. Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with the marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us. It’s a mystery, it’s magic, it’s divinity.”
In fact, contrary to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, and due to advances in quantum biology,
,,, contrary to the reductive materialistic presuppositions of Darwinists, and due to advances in quantum biology, there is now found to be a ‘immaterial’ component to our being, specifically quantum information, that is irreducible to materialistic explanations and, furthermore, is capable of existing beyond the death of our material bodies,
As Stuart Hameroff notes in this following video, “the quantum information,, isn’t destroyed. It can’t be destroyed.,,, it’s possible that this quantum information can exist outside the body. Perhaps indefinitely as a soul.”
Verses: