Miracles

What is a miracle? It's not unusual to hear people call any astounding event a "miracle," especially if it results in feelings of amazement. The birth of
a child, for instance, is a "miracle" in that sense. But the theological definition of a miracle is different. It refers to exceptions to the laws of the
physical universe -- instances in which physical objects operate in ways beyond their observed natural capacity.

No miracle is as basic to the Christian faith as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. As Paul wrote in First Corinthians 15, if Christ is not risen then our
preaching is hollow, our faith is futile, and we are of all men most pitiable. Some scholars have attempted to "de-mythologize" the resurrection of
Christ, explaining it as merely a series of visions imagined by some of Jesus' unstable, emotional followers. At the core of those attempts, though,
there is a sinful bias: such attempts to re-write the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are based on the premise that the authors' belief that
miracles happen was incorrect. By peeling away the components of the gospel that describe miracles, the researchers hope to discover the
"Historical Jesus."

Some historians, such as Bart Ehrman, claim that when they describe the Biblical account of Jesus' resurrection as an account of something non-
miraculous, they are only making deductions about what probably happened. Their approach tends to take the following form:

PREMISE 1: The historian's task is to reconstruct past events based on evident of what is most likely to have happened.

PREMISE 2: Scientifically, anything is more likely to have happened than a miracle.

CONCLUSION: The historian should always interpret evidence as evidence for non-miracles rather than for miracles.

However, that syllogism is flawed. It only takes one flaw to destroy the force of such an approach, and that argument has two flaws.

The second premise is flawed because it is just as theological as it is scientific. Miracles are unlikely when God does not want them to happen, but
they are very probable when God wants them to happen. To presume, when accounting for past events which were described as miracles at the
time, that a miracle is an improbable explanation of the evidence, is to assume to know what God wanted to happen. Putting it another way: when
a theologian believes that God exists, and believes that God has the power to perform miracles, and partly on the basis of those beliefs he affirms
that God has performed miracles, he calls these beliefs theological beliefs. But when a historian denies that God exists, or that denies that God has
the power and the will to perform miracles, and on the basis of those beliefs he denies that God has performed miracles, he calls those theological
assumptions part of the historical method.

The first premise, when taken with the second premise, is flawed because it implies the absurd. Picture a historian using the assumptions required by
these two premises: suppose he looks up one day and observes a miracle. As he watches it, he is certain that he is observing an object operate in a
way which, up to this point, was beyond its natural observed capacity. Then the miracle is over. How could the historian who uses those premises
describe what he saw to anyone else? He would have to deny that he had experienced a miracle even though he had experienced one. There is
something wrong with that sort of reasoning; it is not logical; it is an anti-supernatural prejudice.

"It's a logical prejudice," someone might say. But it isn't. There's only one way to tell what any object's observed natural capacity is: by
observation. If an object is observed to do something ~ however rarely ~ then the definition of its observed natural capacity should be enlarged so
as to include that. As far as miracles are concerned, that means that supernatural acts are not precluded by natural laws, because the natural laws
themselves are established by observation. To accept only that evidence, and only those observations, which agree with one's premises, while
denying other evidence and other observations, is not a scientific approach to history or any other academic discipline.