Defense of Miracles with Gary Habermas

Folks, it's a real treat to welcome back our next guest. He is the department chair of philosophy at Liberty University, author and scholar and contributor to a book called In Defense of Miracles, which is the focus of our discussion for today.

Dr. Gary Habermas, welcome back to the show.

Well, thank you, Nate. I'm glad to be with you. Great topic, great questions. I'm looking forward to it.

Me as well. And, you know, it's just so grateful for your time. We will jump right in to maximize that time. So thinking about miracles as a believer in Jesus Christ entails navigating conversations with skeptics who perhaps do not have a background in understanding these kinds of things.

So we're just asking you to help us walk through these issues. Let's start with a definition question. What is the definition of a miracle?

Defining a Miracle and the Problem with "Violation of Nature"

Okay. Tricky in almost all aspects. I mean, I tell my students, I wouldn't try it for a Ph .D. dissertation, but you could write an M .A. thesis on what is a miracle. That's how complicated the definition is.

The strange thing about these definitions is people will think, oh, they're complicated because believers and unbelievers don't agree. Actually, that's not true. And there's quite a bit of agreement. For example, David Hume, the famous skeptic who didn't believe miracles, said that a miracle is a violation of a law of nature brought about by God or an invisible agent.

And he gives qualifications there. But except for the phrase violation of a law of nature, there's a lot of agreement at this point. And if you would substitute things like an event that apparently supersedes a law of nature, you could even use the portion of the definition coming from God, from God's hand, that kind of thing.

And both sides use that. So stay away from the word violation. And if you say an extraordinary event, some people, some definitions are as simple as this, a special event or an extraordinary event brought about by God or an invisible agent.

And some people add words like with religious significance, an event with religious significance. But you could have a believer, just as frequently as an unbeliever, add or subtract those words, as long as you do away with the words violation of a law of nature.

Believers don't want laws to be violated either.

Right. Isn't there a problem with even saying violation and laws, as if to suggest that the laws of nature are prescriptive instead of descriptive?

Well, yeah, well, that's a great point. And that's why I started out saying, you know, I could say they're this, and you could say they're that. And you could be the guy writing the master's thesis. And so you're going to tell me why you think your definition is better.

But what I'm saying is, those are all moves that are made within the discussion. Now, theists, I would say, to use your example, I would say theists are more likely than non-theists to use the phrase, not violating these laws, but appearing to supersede them, and to be, you know, extraordinary, that kind of language.

An unbeliever is going to, I think, will be pretty happy with you if you move toward breaking the law of nature. But special events, religious significance, all that's fine. And if you want to say, your other point there, if you want to say that these are statistical, laws of nature are statistical definitions of what usually occurs, that's a pretty sophisticated idea today.

And believers are going to be more prone to go there than unbelievers, because our unbelievers want the hard cell, the hard wall that you can't go through, because, you know, they don't want miracles to happen.

But you can get unbelievers to say the same thing, that miracle laws are statistical descriptions.

Yeah. I was reading, this is a very old story back in Reader's Digest, and it was talking about, like, 15 different Christians were supposed to be at a specific building at 9am on this one morning. They were supposed to come together and practice for some reason or other.

And for 15 different reasons, they were detained, and they could not be at that building at that time. Well, one minute after they were supposed to all be in the room, the building exploded. And so, would that be considered a miracle?

Because it seems like that is a very ordinary, there's an ordinary explanation behind the fact of why all those 15 different Christians were detained and were not able to make it in the building, but nevertheless, they were all saved by that explosion.

Is that also a miracle, you think?

Well, no, there's going to be levels. And there's going to be, if you're talking probabilistically, because we're not making a deductive argument here. So any kind of scientific, or any kind of inductive argument is going to be probabilistic.

So you're going to be looking for degrees of evidence. And the tighter the evidence, the more extraordinary, the better on that portion of what's due to a law of nature. Now, in your example of all these Christians who didn't come to the building, what if nine of them were together at a football game, and the game wasn't over?

Or what if nine of them were in a traffic jam? In other words, you could get a traffic jam is a very normal event. And that took away nine of them, that would, you know, I mean, that would make the circumstances look less extraordinary.

But that being said, just the whole picture, let's say all of them came from different directions, and all got held up. Well, that's still not going to be that might be classified as an oddity, or strange, or something we shouldn't look into.

Or does this keep happening in your life? Or five of those together might be helpful. But I think most skeptics are going to look for heavier information than that.

I see. Speaking of Hume, Hume, I think, was the one who introduced the notion of needing extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, such as a miracle took place. Is it true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, you think?

Extraordinary Claims, Skepticism, and the Need for Better Evidence

Well, you know, I've got a few good friends, Christian philosophers, who will not concede that point. And they say it's a prejudicial point, leaning toward naturalism. The view, among other things, the big umbrella, under naturalism, is that the natural world is all there is, and supernatural things don't occur.

But I'm a little more sympathetic to that. And, and the reason I'm more sympathetic, is that even believers that I know, if you said to them, dude, you should have been in church last night, we had the most extraordinary event.

They prayed for this person. And right before our eyes, a person was healed. Okay, if you have one of those sorts of events, and you're telling me that you were there, you saw it. And you might have been sitting there with an open mouth, but I hear it.

And I'm going, yeah, I'm one step removed. And Nate, I've heard these things before. And if I could tell you how many of these just don't pan out to me. What I'm saying is the believer, him or herself, could be one saying, I need a tighter argument than that.

So I can understand extraordinary evidence. But here's where I draw the line, with a lot of skeptics today, a lot of them, especially the Jesus Mither types, the type that just, the type that tend to be angry.

And I, you know, if I'll put, let me put a footnote here. If you say, if you know, if some listener would think to themselves, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're always saying atheists are angry. You know what, just a footnote, I was just reading a debate the other day on the resurrection by a well known New Testament scholar, and an atheist.

It was friendly. But the atheist specifically said, I'm not one of those atheists that are usually angry. I thought, that's an interesting comment. But back to the, you know, the anger, if you're if you're one of the more radical ones, that want to make as hard a case as possible, here's my biggest objection to that question.

My biggest objection is with a lot of these people, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and you give extraordinary evidence. And their answer without an exception is, nope, nope, can't consider that.

Nope, nope, nope, nope. And if when you press them, they will sometimes even say, those things don't happen. So my, my, and by the way, David Hume didn't say that. But my caution then would be, all right, you want extraordinary evidence?

I'll go to first or second base with you. But if you're going to sit there, no matter what I give, and your explanations for what happened are silly explanations, worse than why the people didn't get to the building, you know, that you used, right?

What about this? Or what about that? Yeah, don't you think it's a little bit silly, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? Well, it could be. If their response is, anything is more reliable than a miracle, then save your breath.

And don't say extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence, because you don't believe that. You don't believe that any amount of evidence makes it there. So give me a break, you know, and don't even introduce that if you're never going to recognize something, even if you can explain it.

Yeah. Well, okay. So I think we were touching on it already. But I mean, considering the sort of the presuppositions that you're identifying with skeptics, then how would a skeptic define a miracle? Exactly.

They probably would love you to take a nice, succinct definition like David Hume. A miracle is a violation of law of nature brought about by God, or some invisible agent. Now, they almost always leave out the some invisible agent.

I mean, that would mean like, you know, an angel or a demon could do a miracle. And, and, you know, you have to ask David Hume exactly what he means by that. But he's the one that introduces invisible agent.

But I think they would like to get violates the law of nature, and God did it. And then they can tell you, it's a contradiction to violate the law of nature, nothing violates the law of nature. And even if you, the two of you just wear each other out, giving some good examples, and then they could say, Oh, yeah, well, okay, so we're first base, but we're nowhere close to coming to saying it came from God's hand.

And that's part of the definition, too. So you lose. I mean, they're like anybody, Christians will do this, too. They'll put up as many roadblocks as they can, and hope you can't get over all of them.

But I think they would be happy with the Humean, that simple definition, breaks the law of nature, and God did it. I think those are the keys from a skeptical viewpoint.

Hmm. Well, perhaps then it's best to sort of identify out loud. Again, we might have already touched on this. But just to circle back around, how should we determine whether something is a miracle or not?

Is there a criteria for this? Or what would it be?

Historical Criteria for Identifying Miracles

Okay, back to my point that this is an inductive argument. So therefore, you want to mount up as many, you know, as high a list as you can get of extraordinary not know, okay, well, what do you think about my people not making the building?

All right, um, that might be something lower on my list. But I'm looking for some really incredible claims here. And you'd say what? Well, if you're, you know, if you're familiar with Craig Keener's two volume, Miracles book, one of the criticisms of that too, Craig's not an apologist, he reports testimonies.

And people would say, Oh, a lot of that's anecdotal. Well, Craig just repeating, like I said, what people told him, but some of the cases in that book are pretty solid. For example, if you had a pre and post MRI case, if you had a pre and post CAT scan case, if you had a pre and post, I know a few of these, that's a simple one.

So I'll just do it real quickly. Yeah, a pre and post, broken bone, where a child in one case, I know, an adult in another case, I know, had a very serious leg break. And they took him to the emergency room.

They took all the pictures. Yep, it's a broken bone. They set it up. These are the old days where they put casts on there instead of walking boots. But they get you set up. And the son in the one case, and the father in the other case, different families went home and said to their doctor at home, because they said, Here's your x ray, show it to your, you know, your doctor at home.

So take him to your own hospital. And the person at the hospital said, three days ago, yeah, yeah, well, these x rays say it happened three days ago. And that looks like your leg. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let me just tell you something, your leg is not the one in this x ray.

Well, what do you mean? Because your legs not broken. And well, yeah, it's not broken. Now it's set. But what about what about that? Well, no, because you'll hear something like this. Broken bones are more than just the bone is snapped.

They are changes in the tissue around them. And this is three days ago. And you have no swelling, no sign of the 123 things that we associate with broken bones, even though you have pictures. Yeah, I just can't, I can't accept this.

And then the person is in the in both cases, they're in the process of going back, getting the whole getting the first hospital, a reputable hospital to send the x rays back to the hospital they're now at when they go to their hometown.

The closer those things are where darn, that's you. And that is your leg. And this is three days later, and you're walking fine. And you've got no swelling. And there's no sign of a crack, a heel crack, but there's no sign of any kind of break on that bone healed or otherwise.

The more of those you have, the better it is. And we have a bunch of those cases. Craig Keener's got some rather extraordinary ones there. He's got a case where a little child had had to have a kidney removed.

That's a child. So we're talking about going to a faith healing meeting and so on. This child had to have a kidney removed. And when the child went back for the post op checkup, there were two kidneys in his back.

But one was taken out and there's a scar there. And we know a kidney was taken out. But there's another kidney there. Things like that. We've got a case on our very, very close friend or a family where a man had two biopsies of a tumor, a needle biopsy, and a piece actually taken out.

Both of them said cancer. Family's praying like crazy. Went back to the hospital. Remember the night he went because we're in the middle of a hurricane here. And he went and looked at his results. I mean, I think it was like three weeks in the lab.

And you're thinking that's an abnormally long time. The guy goes, well, I'm okay, because I know I have cancer. So I'm not sitting here waiting if I have cancer. I know I have cancer. I've had two biopsies.

And the results came back. There's not a single cancer cell in your tumor. So those are some of the cases. The better, I'm not saying those are foolproof. You know, there's always the mixed the x-rays, oh, we discovered that.

So that's not a miracle. There's also the, yeah, you had two cancer biopsies, but they both were, you know, false positives. Both were, that's unlikely, but both were. You can always say things like that.

But the more criteria you have, when you take a kidney out, why is there a kidney in your back? The more criteria you take out, you have, the better it looks. So we're looking for evidential levels that, for which there are data, good data.

Right. So now I'm thinking then, how can we, because we're talking about miracles that take place today. How can we look back, though, into history and look at the miracles recorded in the Bible? I was reading a critique by a skeptic.

His name is Lauren Shapiro, who wrote about the miracle myth. And he went to the scripture. But what he did was he, he went to the account of the plagues, you know, Moses being sent to Egypt. And he said, well, there's no way to know that those events were actual miracles.

Maybe it was aliens. Maybe it would, maybe there are other explanations. How, how should we evaluate the miracles recorded in the Bible?

Evaluating Miracles in the Bible and the Role of Enemy Attestation

Well, that's a great question. And of course, the further you go back, the less data you're going to have, on average, you know, you're going to have less data for what Moses and Aaron did in Egypt, than you're going to have for Jesus, even though Jesus, you know, we are, we're getting pretty close to 2000 years ago.

So let me, let me just pose a little question here for you. Without answering that, just let you see that there could be answers. I'll give you an answer. When I went to graduate school, in the 1970s, I was like middle ages when I do that with my PhD students, which is all I teach now.

But when I do that, my PhD students, they go, I wasn't even born then. And I'm thinking, yeah, well, you know, I'm medieval. What do you want? But, but I went to grad school in the 70s, in the 70s. And if you sat in class, I believe Jesus was a healer and an exorcist.

Now the exorcist is tricky. I'll tell you, because if you don't believe in demons, okay, that's an issue. But I'll tell you what, in a minute, why, why, why I'm saying that. So if I were to speak up in class, which I wouldn't have dared at a secular school, and said, I believe Jesus is a healer and an exorcist.

I think people in class would think for sure, this guy's conservative. He's probably an evangelical, or he's a conservative Roman Catholic, or conservative Greek Orthodox, if you, you know, if you know any of them.

If they're in the culture, you know, there were fewer than when I went to graduate school. And, and you would say, yeah, you're probably one of those, but you're a conservative religious person, probably call yourself a Christian.

Okay. So I don't, I don't know what the headcount would be in those days of people who believe Jesus was a healer and an exorcist. Let's just say 25%. Today. Now, what would that be? 45 years later? Today, critics are going to say, we, we believe.

In fact, you hear critics today saying it's unanimous. Critics say today, it's unanimous that Jesus was a healer and an exorcist. So you say, well, why did you use the word exorcist? That one's a tough one.

Because they use it. The critics use it. And they say, he was a healer and an exorcist. Now you could say, well, man, you don't believe in demons, do you? No, of course not. And do you believe in healing?

Well, I think sometimes people get healed with, under these circumstances, but for the most part, they could say something like this. They could say, Jesus was so such a magnetic that he was sure he was doing miracles.

They were sure. And they not just, they threw the crutches away and later got the crutches back, but they could literally have been healed. We know the mind can do crazy things. So there is such a thing as psychosomatic healing today.

Now they wouldn't, they don't necessarily, they don't usually make that judgment, was it psychosomatic, but they'd say he did some extraordinary things like that. So today you will get critics saying the data are good enough to call Jesus unequivocally a healer and an exorcist.

Now, here's my question. Why the change from the mid seventies until almost 2020? Why the change? Why do critics say, I'll give you an example, Marcus Borg, one of the famous co-founders of the Jesus Seminary, passed away a few years ago, but a famous co-founder, he says in one of his books, he says, I don't know what your beliefs about miracles are.

He says, but I'm purely historical grounds. It's pretty close to a quote. He says, I'm purely historical grounds. It is virtually impossible to not, to deny that Jesus did healings. Now why the change among the critics?

Because they think they have data today. Now the data they would have, obviously, we're not going up to somebody who was blind and you have before and after. What if you had historical tests? And Marcus Borg gives three arguments why Jesus was a healer and an exorcist.

And two of them are, that I recall, two of them are because every single source we have for the Gospels, and the way they count them, they're five. Now, if your listeners aren't, they have nothing to do with five Gospels.

They think the sources, they think the Gospels had at least five different sources in them. The four had at least five sources. And Borg says, just as a good historian, five out of five levels, these levels come different times, different places around the Mediterranean.

And all five report that he was a miracle worker. That's one. And secondly, as Marcus Borg says, his enemies admitted it. And that's called enemy attestation. And it goes like this. Well, yeah, you're doing miracles, but you're doing it by Satan's power.

Conclusion, you're doing miracles. Yeah. So Borg says, on historical grounds, it's almost impossible to argue that Jesus was a miracle worker. Now, I think that goes to your question, because we don't have tests, we don't have x-rays, and so on.

But there's some really good historical evidence. And even if you said, well, I'm not satisfied with your historical evidence. If you said that to me, I'd say, okay, look, I'm not on trial here. Why do you think Marcus Borg believes that?

And he's a member of the group that said that Jesus, who rejects 80 to 90 of the red letter words of Jesus according to the way they voted. So why does he believe Jesus did these things? And I might just add, Nate, on the second one, on the demons, on the exorcisms, Marcus Borg says, and did he really cast out demons?

And Marcus Borg goes, well, I know what I believe on this. But he said, I have in my possession a book, where a team of 20, I believe it was, 20 psychiatrists, MDs, 20 psychiatrists investigated a number of people who had really strange phenomena, who exhibited it.

And he said himself, they could explain 18 to the 20 cases. Who am I, Marcus Borg, who am I to tell you what went on in the other two cases? He even says about Lazarus, he goes, okay, okay, fine, fine.

Was Lazarus raised from the dead? And his answer to that is, Jesus was an extraordinary person. How do we know what his limits were? Now, to me, those are extraordinarily open responses by one of.

The best-known critics in this generation. Yeah. It seems to me that, I mean, to tie this back to one of our original questions at the beginning was, you know, what counts as a criteria for determining miracles?

Enemy attestation is maybe another way of saying eyewitness testimony. Am I on track or off track? Because I think, Vin, that... Well, it could be, but I mean,.

Go back to my illustration about you saw something special in church and you told me, all right, I'm not there, so I'm going to be more skeptical. So I'm maybe kind to the skeptics, I'll go, yeah, I don't care if you want more evidence, I want more evidence.

So I'm playing that role too. And let's say you piled up a few things, and you got me interested in going back and looking at those cases. If I'm truly open, if I'm truly interested in being convinced, I would look at the case that skeptics, you know, enemy attestation, agree.

But you know what? I would be skeptical on this one. I would say, all right, forgive me, but what if the skeptics who said Satan was doing it were stupid? What if they wouldn't know a miracle if it hit in between the eyes?

You go, well, they're religious leaders, they know what these things are, and they were there. Yeah, they could be stupid religious leaders, you know, I would be of the two that he gives, I would be more impressed with five out of five sources, what are called, you know, maximum, maximum example of multiple attestation.

So, by the way, the best known skeptic in North America, Bart Ehrman, he's an atheist New Testament scholar. Bart Ehrman says that one of the very best examples of evidence that you can apply to Jesus is multiple attestation.

He's like me, I mean, in the sense that he thinks enemy attestation is fine, but multiple attestation is better. He gives, just to give you an example, he's an atheist, he gives 15 independent sources for the crucifixion of Jesus, and four of them are not even in the New Testament, and they're all within a hundred years of the crucifixion, which is a pretty fair, probably even conservative, length of time to go after an ancient event.

Yeah. Could you maybe say, I'm anticipating people who are not really familiar with taking a historical approach to the conversation that we're having right now. Can you say a little bit more, perhaps, about those five levels?

Are you suggesting that it's different attestations that are unrelated in and of themselves, but then they sort of come together as a cumulative effect or something?

Yeah, they can be different things, but the way they count the five documents, and by the way, now that list is kind of lengthened. Critics think that, well, let's put it this way, Luke 1, 1 -4, just taking a look at face value, and going, I don't even know who Luke, I don't even know who the author is.

Okay, great. But what's he say in the first four verses? Well, he says, he's writing to this man named Theophilus, and he says, since I've known about the life of Jesus from the beginning, I'm going to tell you some of the sources I've investigated.

That's how he starts. And critics now think that there are, you can find, because there's literary arguments for this, totally apart from religion, there are literary arguments for how you find sources.

How do I know you're citing the source when you don't tell me like today? You don't have a footnote like you might today. Or in a newspaper article, you didn't say, I got the story from Mickey Mantle.

If you're not telling people what your source is, how can you tell? And there's a lot of agreement. For example, there's a widespread agreement that the Gospel of Mark used a document called a passion narrative.

He was using a source that narrated what happened to Jesus on the cross. And the latest critics think this source could have been is 37 AD. So we have a, if that's correct, and it's a majority view among New Testament scholars, we have a source that tells us what happened at the cross from just seven years after the cross.

That's one. Critics think that the Gospel of John, even the Jesus Seminar, this real skeptical Jesus Seminar, they believe this. They think that the Gospel of John used a source called the miracles document.

And they get that idea because the author of the fourth Gospel says, water turned to wine in Cana. It says, this is now the first miracle that Jesus did. And later, it says, this is the second miracle that Jesus did.

Now, I would be inclined to say, they're just numbering these things. But critics think the way the writing goes, and it can give see, a lot of people when you're really good in language, you can tell, you can get a pretty good idea when someone's switching sources.

They use different verbiage, different vocabulary, they use their syntax in a different way. And they go that along with saying first miracle, second miracle. Anyway, critics think John used a miracles document.

Doesn't mean everything was a miracle. But it means he had earlier sources. So what they do is they come up with a list of criteria. That's what they're called historical criteria. And some of these criteria would be, if you have an eyewitness source, that's very valuable, you go, what would that look like?

Well, Paul says, first Corinthians 15, eight, last of all, he appeared to me, Paul says, first Corinthians nine, one, am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord? Almost every critic will take that very, very seriously and call Paul an eyewitness to what he, at least he believed, was a resurrection prince.

But then further, Paul tells us in Galatians, which is a unanimously accepted skeptical book, Paul tells us that he went to Jerusalem just three years after his conversion, either only four, five or six years after the cross.

And Paul said he interviewed the eyewitnesses and the theme of Galatians is the gospel. And the gospel is the deity, death, resurrection of Jesus. He's interviewing Peter, James, the brother of Jesus, and Paul.

Bart Ehrman himself says, where do we get closer to eyewitness testimony anywhere in the New Testament? That's the atheist New Testament scholar. So eyewitness is very important. Early is really important.

I just said we have a document of Mark that is plus seven. Paul goes to Jerusalem at plus five-ish and interviews three guys. That's early. Even the gospels themselves, the latest of the gospels, John, is about 65 years after the crucifixion.

In the ancient world, we have almost nothing that close to secular or religious events, almost nothing at only 65 years. Now, critics are very, very tough on the gospels, but they can criticize the gospels all they want, but they don't have anything.

I've got a book on my shelf that's a Buddhist source, and the Buddhist author is a PhD. And he says, we don't have what you Christians have. We don't have sources like that. He said, I'm trying to get the best sources for Buddhism here, and almost every source in this book is 600 to 800 years after Buddha died.

So why are you criticizing John at plus 65 when your best sources for Buddha are five, six, seven, 800 years later? So that's the way they use history. And another example we already gave, the enemy attestation, if they see it and they say, I can't explain that away, but the devil probably made you do it.

All right, well, you just admitted by miracle or embarrassing things. If you're my best friend or you're my dad, and I don't want to tell that story that you want me to tell, because I would make you look horrible.

You know, you went AWOL in the army. I don't want to tell that story. But if someone did, who knows you, another brother tells that story, that is so devastating that if that other brother loves your dad, it's probably a true story.

So those are the kind of historical criteria they use for telling if these things, these miracles really happen. And of course, today, you already said,.

Books for Studying Miracles and Historical Evidence

Today we can use scientific tests. Right. So in closing, you already mentioned Keener's book on miracles, two volume set. Is there anything else that our listeners would benefit from in order to perhaps get a written form of the levels that you're talking about,.

Or anything else that will help in that regard? Yeah, you know what, there are some books out that are if you have a website, or if you have some, some examples, I can send you a couple sources behind besides Keener's two volume miracles, which is over which over 1000 pages.

Another book is by Richard Kasdorf. Now it's come out in different editions, but it's called The Miracles. Kasdorf was a Mayo Clinic, medical doctor, MD, PhD. And there's a British, this can be googled, Kasdorf is more recent.

There's a British medical doctor, I could be wrong on the name Gardner, maybe, but he's a British MD. And in the 80s, he wrote a book on The Miracles. And these are medical reports where people have actually investigated some pretty, pretty incredible cases, and they've got the data written down.

So there are books that do, Keener mostly tells stories. These guys do evidence cases.

Excellent, excellent. Well, thank you for that. And that is our time. So chatting with me today is New Testament scholar, resurrection expert, Dr. Gary Habermas of Liberty University. For more from Dr. Habermas, you can check out garyhabermas .com.

All kinds of helpful articles, books, videos. I go there often. You will not be disappointed. Lots of there to explore. Dr. Habermas, thank you very much for your time. You're welcome, Nate. Enjoyed it.

I really appreciate it.