Debate 3: Matt McCormick and

Russell DiSilvestro

Suppose the almighty creator of the universe with the power to control every aspect of reality had sought to achieve a state where all or most normal, thoughtful adult human beings could reflect on the evidence available to them and come to the reasonable conclusion that he exists.

Could such a being create a state of affairs where beings with our powers of reasoning could consult the evidence and arrive at a justified, reasonable conclusion that God is real or that Jesus was resurrected from the dead?

Could God have given Christianity a better foundation?

Certainly.

But he didn’t.

If God had been in charge, the miracles should have been better.

Consider a few obvious improvements for performing better miracles that would have helped alleviate the various concerns that undermine the miracles of Jesus for us.

If God was interested in proving something with miracles, here is a list of ten improvements:

Committed, zealous believers should not be the ones who evaluate, investigate, or record miracles.

We often manage to find what we’re looking for. The virtue of double blind testing procedures in science is that they help us prevent undue influence by wishful thinking, conflicts of interest, hedging, confirmation bias, and sloppy thinking.

The person who deeply wants the conclusion to be true should not be the same person who is investigating the evidence that might show that it is true.

Many people claim that there are miracles happening on a regular basis now.

It would be a relatively easy matter to have an independent panel of objective evaluators, doctors in the case of a healing miracle, examine just the evidence before and after an alleged healing without any leading or suggestive information about what they are looking for. Just show them the X rays, or the diagnoses, or the CAT scans before and after someone is alleged to have been healed of a brain tumor, for example.

If miracles are real now, it would be easy to prove it.

In general, small samples of information are less trustworthy.

The more evidence,the better. If a miracle were to occur, all other things being equal, we would have better evidence if there are more people who attest to it or more evidence to show it.

A few emotional believers with a great deal of investment in the cause of the miracle claim are not as reliable (or not reliable at all) as a large group of diverse, autonomous people.

If God has the goal of proving his existence through miracles, he’d need to make them evident to a great many, well-educated, skeptical minded people who do not already believe. And it would certainly be within the abilities of an all powerful being to do it.

The larger scale a miracle is, the greater the possibility that it can be corroborated, confirmed, cross-checked, and witnessed.

A small miracle—a spiritual leader making a golden ring appear in his palm (which is an old magician’s trick)—is going to be more difficult to confirm, more likely to be faked, and less indicative of some real violation of the laws of nature than a large one. Even a resurrection that becomes know to a handful of dedicated believers is trivial.

With small miracles, the rest of us are merely likely to get hearsay, anecdotal evidence, conflicting stories, and poor transmission of the information. A miracle that appears to everyone could be vastly more effective.

The power of suggestion, social pressure, and peer expectation can be very influential in getting people to believe that something special or extraordinary has happened.

Dozens of psychological studies have shown that it takes very little prompting and only slight suggestions to get people to fabricate stories, deny what they have seen with their own eyes, and come to genuinely believe something is a mistake.

Any miracle claim is going to be up against this psychological background that will create challenges to its authenticity.

Stage magicians have devised ways, through entirely natural means of trickery, to perform feats that are stunning for what they appear to be. They make large objects like cars and people disappear and reappear, they levitate, walk on water, transport from one location to another.

The ability of con artists and performers to do these tricks casts substantial doubts on any alleged miracle that resembles them.

Wouldn’t it be perverse of God to bring about a real miracle, but it was the sort of thing that is easily duplicated by a teenager with a magic kit or a magic how-to book, and thereby completely obscure its significance and occurrence?

Many of the miracles that people allege are idiosyncratic, local, and selfish. High school football teams pray fervently for God to help them win the upcoming game while the other team does the same. A rap star gives thanks to God for the modest success of his latest misogynistic and violent CD. A man at the convenient store wins $500 with a lottery ticket and claims that his prayers have been answered. Jesus turns water into wine or withers a fig tree.

Even if God did play some role in these events, it’s difficult for the rest of us to believe that the omnipotent and omniscient creator of the universe takes such an active interest in the outcome of a football game between the rival high schools in Hollister.

Consider how baffling it would be if God had played some role in the success of a rap album or the amount of wine at a party while ignoring the genocide of millions of innocent people in Rwanda.

Events that are merely fortuitous for the person considering them, like having a baby, or surviving a car wreck (especially since many babies are stillborn, and many other people die in car wrecks), even if they really are the result of God’s violating the laws of nature, they just aren’t going to be convincing to anyone who thinks about it very much. These sorts of events don’t look special at all when viewed from a distance. In fact, they appear to be completely predictable and ordinary—every day there will be some people who will survive car wrecks, especially with seatbelts and airbags, and every day there are babies born, especially when people have unprotected sex. Couldn’t I throw a ball up into the air and just as well claim that its coming down is a result of my divine powers and is evidence of my miraculous powers? If it was going to happen anyway, can’t everyone equally claim credit for it, and doesn’t that show that no one gets credit for it as a miracle?

Powerful feelings of awe, religious significance, excitement, and enthusiasm themselves are not indicators that something special has happened in the world. We have too many examples of cases where people got very worked up over things that turned out to be mistakes, deceptions, or just insignificant events. Recall that eclipses have been treated in history as indicators of profound supernatural significance. Presumably, God would have the ability to do something more than induce such feelings in people, and he’d know how much those feelings cloud the truth.

As the first century Christians, living in the Iron Age, saw it, the world was infused with magical and supernatural events. Their minds and lives must have been overrun with spooky events, spirits, supernatural forces, mysteries, and frightening possibilities. Virtually none of the facts about nature that you take for granted were a part of their knowledge base. They didn’t know that such a thing as oxygen exists, they didn’t know that infections are caused by viruses, they didn’t know that it gets dark at night because the earth is turning, they didn’t know what made water boil, and they didn’t know that there are no evil demons. The vast majority of them did not know how to read or write. The average life expectancy was 20-30 years because of their ignorance of medical science and basic hygiene and public sanitation. If you were God and you were going to pick an audience with the intention of proving your existence and communicating your desires, you almost could not find a more gullible, easily impressed, and more ignorant group. It would take surprisingly little to completely stun them—a toaster would appear to be a wondrous, and miraculous artifact from heaven.

The placebo effect is well-documented in human beings. When they have the expectation that they are getting treated for a medical problem, the expectation itself has a substantial effect on their state and their reporting of their state. A minimum requirement for even the most modest over-the-counter cold medicine is that it must demonstrate effectiveness significantly beyond the placebo effect level. If it does not, the FDA will not allow manufacturers to claim any real capacity to treat illness. The effects felt in many putative spiritual cures, alternative medical therapies, faith healings, and alleged miracles are undoubtedly the placebo effect. If you’re God and you’re performing miracles, you need to do better than that. And presumably, you’d have the power, the knowledge, and the will to do so.

1. If God had sought a widespread level of belief in his existence or Jesus’ divinity on the basis of miracles, then he could have brought about much better miracles that would have achieved this goal.

2. He did not bring about better miracles that achieved this goal.

3. Therefore, God did not seek a widespread level of belief in his existence or Jesus’ divinity on the basis of miracles.

It isn’t reasonable to think that God

performed the miracles that Christianity

has been grounded on.

And if it’s not reasonable to believe in

those, then it’s not reasonable to be a

Christian at all.

The miracles upon which Christianity is

built are too small, obscure, poorly attested

to, inappropriate, easily faked,

insignificant, mired in psychological

glitches, and pedestrian to be attributed to

God.

Christian miracle doctrine doesn’t make

enough sense from the inside for us to

accept it as plausible.