Welcome to Defender’s Voice. Greetings to every one of you in the precious and wonderful name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I hope you are doing well. Please visit our website www.doctorpaul.org. Support this ministry with your tax-deductible donations.
In today’s episode, let us see the attacks on the miracles of Jesus. Did Jesus perform the miracles reported in the New Testament?
Richard Dawkins called himself a ‘cultural Christian’. He says, I love Christmas, I love visiting cathedrals, I love Christian hymns, but I don’t believe in miracles. There are many people like Richard Dawkins. They say they like Christmas gifts but they don’t believe Christmas is a miracle of God. Bart Ehrman also behaves in the same way. He says, ‘Enjoy your Christmas holiday. But don’t believe what is in the New Testament, especially the miracles of Jesus’.
Two thousand years ago, Jesus lived in Judea, in the region of what is now called Israel and the West Bank. The New Testament records around 37 miracles he performed in several regions of the Holy Land. One day, he went to a wedding. The guests ran out of wine. So, Jesus turned water into wine.
One day, over ten thousand people came to listen to Jesus’s sermon. At the end of the day, they were all hungry. Jesus took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed them all to their hearts’ content. One day, there was a storm on the Sea of Galilee. Jesus rebuked the storm and it went away.
In the town of Bethany, Lazarus had been dead and buried for 4 days. Jesus went to the cemetery and called him back to life. On other occasions, he gave vision to the blind, strength to the paralytics, healing to the lepers, and voice to the mute.
These miracles look like fantasy stories to us. How can someone stop a storm by speaking to nature? How can he spit and cure permanent blindness? We see such things only in fantasy literature. But what is fantasy to us is normal to our Lord Jesus Christ, because he is a fantastic Savior. He is called the Wonderful. Why did he do all those miracles?
Let us see Hebrews chapter 2. Let us read from verse 3.
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation;
which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord,
and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him;
God also bearing them witness,
both with signs and wonders,
and with divers miracles, and
gifts of the Holy Ghost,
according to his own will?
Hebrews 2:3
Note those words. We were given a great salvation in Jesus Christ. It was spoken by the Lord. Confirmed unto us by them that heard him. That’s knowledge by testimony. We came to know this by their testimony. God also bears them witness, both with signs and wonders, with diverse miracles, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
This Jesus is true. His message is trustworthy. Walk in his way. God bore the witness. The apostles witnessed those miracles and reported them in the Holy Scriptures. Their testimony is precious. They believed it, lived it, preached it and died for it.
‘This Jesus is a fraud, this Jesus is a charlatan, this Jesus is a lie – Why should we risk our lives for him? Why should we get whipped for his message?’ Had they thought along those lines, they would have abandoned Christianity in a week. But they took so much risk. They were humiliated. They were insulted. They were ostracized. They were arrested. They were beaten. They were imprisoned and they were killed. Because they believed that Jesus Christ is who he claimed to be. Because they met the resurrected Christ.
Now, let us look at the critics, starting with David Hume. He lived in Scotland. His life was between 1711 to 1776. Hume said, ‘I don’t believe in the miracles of the Bible’. He gave two reasons. First, miracles are violations of the laws of nature. Second, they never happen nowadays.
Hume’s first contention was that miracles are violations of the laws of nature. Second, they were against our common experience. They don’t happen now. So they could not have happened in the past. This is called the uniformity principle.
Hume was a philosopher but he embroidered his arguments in the garments of science. Looking back, we know that Hume had serious misconceptions of science. Every physical law operates with three central characteristics.
Symmetry
Information
Probability
Every physical law must abide by those three characteristics. Third one is probability. Our lives are no different. Everything we do is determined by probability.
Where were you born?
Which town did you grow up in?
Which school did you attend?
Are you employable?
Who did you marry?
How many kids are you going to have?
How long are you going to live?
They are all events of probability. The laws of nature are no different. They are probabilistic in nature. You take a coin and flip it. Are you going to get heads or tails? You wouldn’t know in advance. I wouldn’t know in advance. But if you flip the coin a million times, we can measure the probability of outcomes. There would be a 50 percent chance of heads and a 50 percent chance of tails. This is called the Law of Large Numbers.
This Law operates in other areas of nature too. What is the likelihood of a hurricane this year? How is our economy going to be in the next one year? How do the digits of the Pie behave? They are determined by the Law of Large Numbers.
When we talk about probability, we should also think about Blaise Pascal. He lived in France in the years between 1623 and 1662. We can consider him the father of the mathematics of probability. Should we believe in the existence of God? He said, consider the four combinations.
God does exist, God does not exist.
You believe, You don’t believe
First combination: God does not exist, but you believed in him. You lose. Let us say 10 percent loss.
Second combination: God does not exist, and you did not believe in him. You won. Let us say that is a 100 percent win.
Third combination: God does exist, and you believed in him. That is so good. You go to heaven and you get eternal life.
Fourth combination: God does exist and you did not believe in him. That is so bad. You go to hell and you get eternal damnation. That’s scary.
Based on these four outcomes, Pascal says, ‘Just believe in God. if you are right, you go to heaven and if you are wrong, you don’t lose much’. This is called Pascal’s Wager.
That does not mean Pascal turned to God based on a utility model. He was consumed by his devotion to God. He abandoned a glorious career in science and mathematics to focus on theology and spiritual things. He became a member of the Janenist movement, which is called ‘fideism’. He believed in the need for salvation by faith alone. He elaborated these thoughts in his unfinished work, Penses. Life without God is absurd and miserable. A meaningful life is not something that plays Wager, but a life lived in fellowship with a living God.
His God was a God of individuals who makes personal relationships. He is not a God of probability. He is a God of persons. He is not a God of philosophy. He is a God of people. He is not a God of Descartes like a perfect being or a philosophical proof, a first mover or first cause. He is a God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. He is not a God of head. He is a God of Heart – the heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know. He is not just a God of intellect. He is a God of intimacy. He wrote, ‘There is an infinite distance between knowledge of God and love of God’. This gave him a new perspective on life. Our contradictions, our greatness, our depravity, our sufferings, our unhappiness – they all fall into place giving us a higher purpose to life.
At this juncture, we should also talk about Thomas Bayes. His life was between 1701 and 1761. He was a Presbyterian minister. He invested his time in the science of probability. He gave us the Bayes theorem.
According to Bayes, when we learn new information about the probability of the occurrence of some event, we often already have information about how likely that event is. His theorem presents a mathematical formula for how to interpret the new information about likelihoods in light of the information that we already have. In this view, probability is interpreted as a measure of degree of belief. Bayes theorem is a mathematical equation relating two conditional probabilities.
Bayes’s theorem is not a simple matter. Someone said, ‘What Pythagoras’s theorem is to geometry, Bayes’s theorem is to probability theory’. It describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. It plays a great role in the progress of science. Different probabilities are assigned to all sorts of propositions and when the data comes in you update your credence in your theory.
Right from our infancy, we constantly collect data and test hypotheses about our world. This type of probabilistic learning is called Bayesian learning. We make predictions about the world based on a combination of two things: Prior knowledge and current evidence. We change our prior knowledge based on current evidence and make predictions about the future.
For example, what is the likelihood an individual will get a heart attack in the next 12 months? It depends on the age and other risk factors. A 20 year-old non-smoker is less likely to get a heart attack than a 70 year-old smoker. If new evidence reveals that the 70-year old also has a family history of heart disease, the risk goes even higher. That is Bayes’ theorem.
On Bayes’s death, his papers were transferred to Dr.Richard Price, another Nonconformist minister and mathematician. He was called “the greatest Welsh thinker of all time”. On the memorial plaque over his house, we read, ‘In this terrace of 1658 lived Dr Richard Price 1723 – 1791, Preacher, philosopher, mathematician and radical’. These guys were Christian preachers, mathematicians and radicals. Great stuff, folks. They used mathematics of probability to probe into ‘God questions’.
Thomas Bayes (1701 – 1761) was a contemporary of David Hume.Some scholars speculate that Bayes delved into probability theory to rebut David Hume’s argument against believing in miracles. Price used Bayes’ theorem to critique Hume’s argument against Biblical miracles. It takes conditional probability based on evidence. Richard Price’s rebuttal against Hume asks us to consider several factors.
What is the reliability of testimony?
What is the frequency with which testimony has been confirmed?
What is the frequency with which it has been disconfirmed?
What is the character of individuals reporting these testimonies?
What is the integrity of the reporter?
Price argued for ‘the slightest testimony to overcome an almost infinite improbability’. You can read his papers on the Stanford University online library ( https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/richard-price/). Slightest testimony carries more weight than infinite improbability. He asked us to consider the character and integrity of the Apostles. Were they deceived? Were they deceivers?
American legal historian Simon Greenleaf (1783 – 1853) investigated the New Testament miracles and wrote, “In trials of fact, by oral testimony, the proper inquiry is not whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true”. David Hume said, the apostles were liars. Yes, it is possible that the Apostles could have been lying, but we have sufficient probability that their testimony is true.
After his resurrection, Jesus appeared to over 500 individuals on 11 different occasions in three different regions during a course of 40 days. The disciples recognised him. They walked with him, they ate with him, they touched him. They even touched his wounds.
We do not see any evidence that they were deceivers and charlatans. There are two central characteristics in Bayes theorem. Prior knowledge and current evidence. From reading the Old Testament, Apostle Paul knew so much about the Messiah. Then he heard all these stories about Christ and his miracles. He wanted to destroy Christian faith before it became a larger threat to Judaism. But then he encountered Christ on his way to Damascus. That was enough to convince him to stop what he was doing and follow Christ. Paul used Bayes’ theorem long before Bayes. He took prior knowledge and current evidence to become a Christ. So, if we look at the miracles of Christ in the light of Bayes’ theorem, we have to conclude that miracles really happened as they were reported in the New Testament.
David Hume also said, ‘Miracles are violations of the laws of nature’. They don’t happen now. He illustrated it with the sun. Our sun rises every morning. That has been the norm for millions of years. Tomorrow morning, the sun rises in the east. Are you sure? You cannot be absolutely certain. But based on our experience, we can predict that the sun will most likely rise in the east tomorrow morning. It has to be like that. Hume says, unless you experience something like you experience the sun every day, don’t believe in anything.
Hume’s argument sounds convincing. But that is highly misleading. Yes, we do believe that tomorrow morning our sun will come back because that is what we have seen all the days of our lives. But we also knew that the sun was born only once. We don’t say, ‘Unless I see it, I don’t believe in the birth of the sun’. You cannot insist on present experience to believe the past, rare events.
Sir Isaac Newton looked at the sun and said, ‘This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being’.
Hume’s uniformity principle actually came from Newton. Newton had no problem believing in the uniformity principle for current operations of nature while attributing its origin to God. Newton said, “God could have set up the natural world using a wide variety of different possible laws. There is no way to tell by reason alone which of the possible laws are the true ones. So you must use observation and experiment – and induction – to find out which of these possible laws nature follows.”
Newton’s words are consistent with the nature of the physical laws. We have seen earlier that the three central characteristics of every physical law are symmetry, information and probability. Even the laws of physics must follow probability. They are not absolutes.
Charles Babbage was a great mathematician and computer scientist. His life was between 1792 to 1871. He lived in England. He created the first model of a computer. Inventing a computer is not like inventing a spoon or a cup. You must know mathematics, physics and mechanical engineering. He thought of computers over a century earlier than the rest of the world. So, he must be a genius.
He also rebuked David Hume for questioning the miracles of Lord Jesus Christ. He said, ‘“Miracles are not a break of established laws, but….indicate the existence of far higher laws”. I like that because that is consistent with what the Bible teaches. We think we know a lot about nature. We see these planes, satellites and rockets around us and assume we know pretty much everything about our universe. But that is a misconception. What we know is very little compared to what we do not know. The universe is full of dark matter. We know very little about it. The universe is full of dark energy. We know very little about it.
‘God broke this law. It can’t be’. We should not shout like that.
A God who created the universe, why can’t he split the Red Sea?
A God who created the solar system, why can’t he stop the sun for a few hours?
A God who created the blood, why can’t he stop a bleeding disorder?
A God who created life, why can’t he conquer death?
A God who created the galaxies, why can’t he send a little star to Bethlehem?
David Hume got it wrong. He said, ‘God cannot break the laws of nature’. So, for Hume, God too must obey the laws of physics. We see this view down to our time. ‘If God made the universe, who made God?’.
Do not put God below nature. Put nature below God.
Do not put God below the laws of nature. Put the laws of nature below God.
That is what great mathematicians and scientists did. We have talked about how Blaise Pascal, Thomas Bayes, Richard Price, Sir Isaac Newton, and Charles Babbage believed in science and also believed in the miracles of Lord Jesus Christ. They are not mutually exclusive.
We have also seen why the miracles were recorded in the Bible. Hebrews chapter 2.
How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation;
which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord,
and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him;
God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders,
and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost,
according to his own will?
God gave us great salvation through Lord Jesus Christ. This is confirmed to us by the eye witness testimony of the apostles who lived with Christ. God gave witness by performing signs, wonders, and diverse miracles. Miracles are not to entertain us. They are meant to help us believe in the claims of our Lord Jesus Christ as anointed by God.
Today, I hope you receive Christ into your life as your Lord and Savior. Please visit our website www.doctorpaul.org for more information. God bless you.