On miracles
I mock-debated miracles with a colleague of mine, here’s what happened
A whopping 67% of Americans, that is, two out of three, believe that miracles are possible in the 21st century, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center. Moreover, 51% think that miracles in the past happened as described in the Bible, and 38% (more than one in three) claim to have personally experienced a miracle.
Worldwide the numbers aren’t as bad, but are also not particularly comforting, from the point of view of critical thinking: in 2021, again according to Pew, approximately 30-35% of adults worldwide reported believing that miracles happen.
I am writing this while on a visiting professorship at the University of Turin, in northern Italy. I am co-teaching a course on the New Atheism together with my friend Andrea Nicolotti, within the broader context of a MA degree in religious sciences. While Andrea is just as skeptical of religion as I am (and he is the world expert on a particular miracle, the famous Shroud of Turin), we decided to conclude one section of the course by staging a mock debate in front of the students, whereby Andrea graciously attempted to defend the proposition that miracles are real while I took the opposite stance.
It seems to me that there are four basic arguments in favor of the notion of miracles, countered by five standard arguments against, the whole thing underpinned by an important methodological point that is often overlooked. Here is how I see it.
Arguments in favor
The first way to defend the notion of miracles is to invoke testimonial accounts. Millions of people across different cultures and historical periods have reported miraculous experiences. The convergence of independent testimonies, proponents argue, cannot easily be dismissed as collective hallucination or deliberate fraud.
Next, we have an argument articulated in different fashions by the Christian novelist C.S. Lewis and by theologian Richard Swinburne: if God exists, miracles are a priori possible – indeed, one might expect a personal God to intervene in the world. The argument is conditional and rather modest: given a certain theology, miracles are not incoherent with the natural order.
Third, the argument from unexplained healings: there are, allegedly, documented cases that involve recoveries that physicians cannot account for in naturalistic terms, such as those examined by the Bureau des Constatations Médicales at Lourdes. It’s important to grasp that the argument is not just “impossible to explain = miracle,” but rather the more modest notion that the unexplained residue is at least compatible with divine intervention.
Lastly, we have the resurrection argument as presented by theologians and apologists like William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas. The historico-philosophical version is that certain minimal “facts” surrounding the resurrection of Jesus – the empty tomb, the post-death appearances, the conversions of Paul and James – are better explained by the miraculous hypothesis than by any naturalistic alternative.
