Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part One: Can Historians Investigate Miracle Claims?

00:00

Licona vs. Fales: A Debate in 4 Parts – Part One: Can Historians Investigate Miracle Claims?

May 28, 2025

In this episode, we join a 2014 debate between Dr. Mike Licona and atheist philosopher Dr. Evan Fales on whether Jesus rose from the dead. In this first segment of the four-part debate, Dr. Licona answers the question, “Can historians investigate miracle claims?” He gives a resounding “yes” as he defines miracles, discusses how to identify them, provides examples, and addresses objections to miracles. After delivering an approximately 30-minute presentation, Dr. Licona finishes this session by taking audience questions.

Transcript

Hi, this is Dr. Kurt Chairs. Today's episode is part one of a four-part debate between Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. Evan Fales, an atheist philosopher from the University of Iowa. Dr. Licona is the sole presenter in this segment, addressing whether it is legitimate for historians to investigate miracle claims.

After providing a 30-minute case, for why this is a value, followed undertaking, Licona takes questions from the specially selected audience of PhDs and teaching professors from major universities in the U.S. and Canada. Welcome to the Risen Jesus podcast. Let's take questions.

The second hour, same thing, have different content. And then the third hour, Evan will lecture for, and speak for almost the entire hour, the entire hour. The fourth hour, Mike will have 10 minutes or so to offer some sort of response, comments, and response to Evan's presentation.

And then we'll open up for a panel Q&A where we'll have Mike and Evan sitting up here, and people can ask either of them questions. So let's welcome Mike Licona. Yes.

Yes? Great. Well, good morning, everyone. I want to thank Mike Roda, and I'd like to thank the University of St. Thomas for inviting me to participate in this.

And I'd also just like to say I've been looking forward to this because my colleagues on the evangelical side have spoken very highly of Evan. And as I've read Professor Fales' works, I've just admired the ironic tone and the fairness with which he writes, so it's good to meet you, Evan. Well, 2000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth made a historical impression that has been preserved accurately in some cases and been distorted in other cases.

He's impacted cultures and has been the source of division, war, hope, unity, and peace. In the academic world, countless volumes have been written about Jesus concerning who he really was and what claims he really made about himself and his mission. Perhaps no other question related to who Jesus is or was has promoted the writing of endless volumes than whether Jesus was raised from the dead as the earliest Christians had claimed.

Gary Habermas, whom I regard as the leading expert on the subject, has compiled a bibliography of approximately 3,500 academic sources written on Jesus' resurrection since 1975. Now, that's a lot. That's about 90 a year.

So, you know, the bibliography in the back of my large volume is, I don't know how long it is, 55, 60 pages, something like that. And let me say, you know, I've read a lot of that stuff and but at 90, about 90 a year, you can see it's impossible pretty much to keep up within your own topic, right, Steve, when it comes to the resurrection of Jesus. Dale Allison of Princeton is one of the leading historians of Jesus and in his book, Resurrecting Jesus, he refers to this topic we are going to be talking about today as the prize puzzle of New Testament research.

So, when it comes to something to study about the New Testament, you're at the right place at the first session on whether historians are within their professional rights to investigate miracle claims. And then in the second paper, I'm going to give a historical case for the resurrection of Jesus. Now, if an event occurred and left traces, most historians hold that it can be the subject of historical investigation.

But what about when the event in question is a miracle? Well, some historians assign the study of miracle claims to theologians and philosophers, asserting that historians do not possess the tools for investigating the occurrence of a miraculous event. Thus, even if a miracle had truly occurred, the historian as historian could never say that it occurred. It's just beyond their purview and what they can do as historians.

In fact, this current topic on whether historians can investigate miracle claims is not only the subject of debate amongst biblical scholars, but it is the subject of debate amongst philosophers of history. History and theory, the main journal for historians or philosophers of history have been talking about this for some time. And in fact, in 2006, they devoted their theme issue to miracles and historians.

And there's been some subsequent articles even to that where they've discussed in it. Well, I've treated these debates at length in my most recent volume on the resurrection of Jesus. And so I won't devote time to addressing most of them in this paper.

Instead, what I'm going to do in the next few moments is first, I intend to cover, I forgot to switch to Dale Allison here, I intend to cover four topics. First, I will define what I mean by miracle. Second, I will discuss how we might identify a miracle.

Third, I'll provide a few examples of miracles. And fourth, I will address some objections to miracles. So I'll begin by defining miracle.

In my research, I found 23 definitions of miracle. And there are a lot more. This is by no means exhaustive.

This is one of those what we could call an essentially contested concept. There is no consensus agreement on what we mean by miracle. So I don't see any reason to get bogged down in any particular definition.

And I was pleased to see as I was reading some of Evan's works that he kind of feels the same way. He's kind of flexible in it. So I'm just going to provide the following provisional definition and we can discuss it if we need to later on.

I'm going to define miracle as an event having a supernatural cause. All right, an event having a supernatural cause. Now by this definition, an answer to prayer is a miracle.

And by the way, Evan, I know we're, you know, we're going to go out a little bit here today. I'm not trying to give this kind of a definition to, you know, it's not strategic. This is just a definition I'm laying out provisionally here.

So we could say an answer to prayer is a miracle. But I want to make clear that there is a difference between defining a miracle and identifying one. Let's say that I'm looking for a job and I go to a job interview and I pray that I can get this job and then I get the job.

Well, did God answer my prayer? If he did, we could say it's a miracle by this definition. But did God answer it? I don't know. You know, maybe he did.

Maybe not. Maybe I was the most qualified applicant for the position. There's just really no way to know in this kind of case whether we can identify this as a miracle.

So I'd like to suggest two criteria. We may recognize that a miracle, an event is a miracle when A, the event is extremely unlikely to have occurred given the circumstances and or natural law and B, the event occurs in a context or an environment that is charged with religious significance. The stronger the context is charged in this manner, the stronger the evidence becomes that we have a miracle in our hands if the historical evidence for the event is good.

Now, let's suppose we've got a 50-year-old male who's an atheist. He's he was born blind. He's never prayed to receive his sight.

And then one day he and his wife are together in their home and they're having lunch. And all of a sudden the man gets his eyesight. He goes to an ophthalmologist and says, hey, what's the deal here? And the ophthalmologist says, I have no idea.

There's no medical explanation for why you've got your sight. Well, is this a miracle? I don't know. Maybe.

Maybe not. I mean, I don't know. Maybe it's just an anomaly.

One of those freak events of nature that he got his eyesight. But let's change the details a little. Let's say we've got the same 50-year-old man, atheist, born blind.

He's never prayed to have his sight. And one day he and his wife are having lunch when there's a knock at the door. And they open the door and there's a guy who looks a little sheepish and he says, hi, my name is so-and-so and I'm the pastor at the church down on the corner.

And I was having lunch with my staff and we were praying and a few of us independently just had this strong sense that I should come down and pray for you. And so can I do that? And so they're kind of like, this is awkward, you know? But they let the guy in and he prays for him and he says, Lord, I don't know what's going on here, why you want me here, but show yourselves to these folks and immediately the guy's eyes are opened and he can see. He goes to an ophthalmologist and the ophthalmologist has no medical explanation of why he can see.

Is that a miracle? I think it is. Well, what's the difference between the two? The context in which it occurs. The latter occurs in a context or an environment that is charged with religious significance.

Could it still be a coincidence? Well, I guess possible. But it just seems more plausible to think that what we have here is a miracle in our hands. Well, the early reports that Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead occurred in a significant context.

That Jesus performed feats that amazed crowds and that both he and his followers regarded as divine miracles and exorcisms is supported by an almost unanimous consensus of historians of Jesus. That would include atheist, agnostics, Jews, liberals, moderates, conservatives, everyone. That Jesus viewed himself as God's eschatological agent, chosen to usher in God's kingdom, is also widely recognized by historians of Jesus and amply attested in the sources.

Now these data create a significantly charged religious context in which the reports of Jesus's resurrection occurs. And this context becomes even more charged if with a growing number of scholars we grant that Jesus predicted his imminent and violent death and that this would be followed shortly thereafter by his resurrection. Accordingly, if the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead is superior to competing natural hypotheses to explain the relevant historical facts, we're justified in concluding that a miracle occurred.

But what part can God play in a historical hypothesis? Well, there are two ways we can approach the matter. First is to acknowledge the occurrence of the event and posit a theoretical entity for the cause. Physicists posit theoretical entities to explain observable phenomena on a regular basis.

Black holes, corks, strings, glue-ons have never been observed, probably never will according to John Polkenhorn. And since the John Templeton Foundation is funding this event, I figured I'd throw in a Templeton laureate there, right? So in a similar manner, if the two criteria for identifying a miracle are met as we find in the resurrection hypothesis, and if the resurrection hypothesis turns out being the best hypothesis, the historian may conclude that Jesus was raised and proposed God as the theoretical entity who raised him. After all, I think most of us would agree that if Jesus was raised, God is probably the best candidate for it.

The second approach is more modest in its conclusion. It's the one that I take. Historians can offer a positive verdict pertaining to the historicity of an event while leaving its cause undetermined.

This is a common practice of historians outside the guild of biblical scholars. When the Reichstag burned in 1933, Hitler blamed the communist and used it as an opportunity to suspend civil liberties and destroy his political opponents, allowing the Nazi party to gain a political majority. However, debate continues today pertaining to whether the fire was caused by the communist or staged by the Nazis.

So while historians remain uncertain pertaining to the cause of the fire, that does not impede them from concluding that the fire occurred and that the Reichstag burned. We may say something similar when considering at least some reports of Jesus' miracles. While there is widespread agreement among historians of Jesus that he performed deeds that both he and his followers regarded as divine miracles and exorcisms, even those historians who are open to divine causation may admit there is usually insufficient evidence for determining whether a psychosomatic or supernatural cause was responsible for the improved states of some of those healed.

In this manner, the historian can acknowledge the historicity of the event without adjudicating on its nature or cause. One could even call it a freak event or an anomaly and refrain from statements pertaining to its ontology. Now, let's suppose for a moment that the historical evidence for Jesus' remarkable return to life after having been tortured and crucified is so strong that natural hypotheses cannot sufficiently account for the relevant historical facts while the resurrection hypothesis accounts for all of them very well.

Even if a historian remained unwilling to grant that a miracle had occurred, she could in principle grant the historicity of Jesus' remarkable return to life while leaving the matter of the cause unanswered. With this in mind, I want to propose there are good reasons for believing miracles occur even today. In his book Miracles, which appears in two volumes, Craig Keener provides hundreds of cases of miracles, many of which have been reported by eyewitnesses in modern times, and Keener himself interviewed several of those eyewitnesses.

Rather than cite some of those he mentions, I'm going to provide three reports from my own friends and acquaintances, all of which involve extreme answers to prayer. Example number one. In June 1987, Lloyd Reed and his daughter were involved in a terrible car accident, were hospitalized and Lloyd was in a coma.

On July 4th, Lloyd had been in a coma for 21 days. At 4 p.m. that afternoon, a number of members of Lloyd's Church were having a 4th of July picnic and took a few minutes to pray for him. And right around that time at 4 p.m. Lloyd, who was several miles away in the hospital, awakened from his coma.

But it gets even better because there were three other patients in the same room with him, all of whom had been in a coma from one to six months and all of them came out of their coma. Example number two. Don Piper was a Southern Baptist pastor and driving home from a pastor's conference on a rainy day in 1989 when he was involved in a serious car accident on a bridge in Texas in which his body was mangled and he was killed.

He was declared dead by medical personnel and remained so for approximately 90 minutes during which he claims to have been in heaven. I spoke at a Christian camp just outside of Houston last month and one of the camp directors took me to the spot, the very bridge the accident on which the accident had occurred since it was only about 10 minutes away from the camp. Another Southern Baptist pastor who had just attended the same conference but who did not know Don showed up at the scene of the accident.

The pastor felt God impressing upon him to go lay his hands on the dead man and pray for him. Of course he felt strange about doing this and when you realize he was Southern Baptist, you can understand even more so why he felt strange about doing this. But he received permission from the police officer on the scene and crawled through the trunk of the wrecked car the only way inside and placed one of his hands on Don's shoulder and began praying for him and Don returned to life.

Now Don tells of his experience in his book 90 Minutes in Heaven. He kindly spoke to my mom last July, let's see, three days before she died and called her on the phone favor and it just gave her an amazing comfort as she laid there in her hospice bed. The very last words my mom uttered because she had spoken all day.

She was at that point where she really couldn't speak but when Don spoke to her he spoke to her for about 11 minutes and she'd muster all the strength she could and said thank you. And those were her very last words. Whether Don actually visited heaven is something that can be debated.

Of course we could never really confirm that per se but that is a separate issue from the remarkable answer to prayer of Don coming back to life. Example number three, in 2009 I was corresponding with a guy via email who was once a Christian but is now a staunch atheist. When I mentioned the occurrence of miracles he said and I quote oh no I'm not quoting here but he did say oh been there done that he then relayed the following and I quote.

One time my church desperately needed $7641 in order to keep going. After an all night prayer meeting my dad went to pick up the mail and in it was a check for exactly $7641 from someone who didn't even know the church needed the money but it heard one of the pastors speak a few years ago. My dad contacted the giver and she said that after she'd heard the pastor speak she felt God wanted her to put some cash in an annuity and give it to our church.

The process took several years and just days before she decided to close the account and send the accrued money to the church and it happened to be the exact amount that was needed right after an all night prayer meeting end quote. Interestingly he wrote just a few lines later quote I looked as hard as I could but finally realized I had no good reasons to think God existed end quote. All three of these events appear to have had a supernatural cause where extremely unlikely to have occurred given the circumstances and or natural law and occurred in an environment that was charged with religious significance.

I could provide several other stories and I'm certain several of you in this room probably have some stories of your own that you could recall of how God's worked in a miraculous way in your life or in the life of one of your friends and when we add other cases such as well evidence near death experiences experiences of apparitions of the dead during which recipients receive accurate information they could not have known otherwise the evidence for the supernatural component to reality is so strong that one can hardly deny its existence and still call themselves a realist. So let's pause and review what we've just covered. A miracle is an event having a supernatural cause.

We may recognize that an event is a miracle when the event A is extremely unlikely to have occurred given the circumstances and or natural law and B it occurs in a context or environment charged with religious significance. There are two approaches historians may take regarding the use or non-use of God in a hypothesis after concluding that the particular event occurred that appears miraculous in nature historians may A positive theoretical entity as the cause or B leave the cause undetermined. Finally we observe the existence of a supernatural component to reality namely miracles providing a general background knowledge or plausibility related to miracle hypotheses.

Accordingly if a miracle has occurred it can be the subject of a historian's investigation. One can still deny the historicity of a particular miracle given a lack of evidence but historians are not prohibited from adjudicating on the historicity of a report because of an event's purportedly miraculous nature. That's a positive case for the ability of historians to investigate miracle claims.

Now of course not all agree and there are a number of arguments forwarded in opposition. As I mentioned earlier I've addressed most of these in my large volume on Jesus resurrection so given time limitations I'm going to devote the remainder of this paper toward addressing those arguments provided by Professor Fales who argues that belief in miracles is not reasonable. He provides three arguments in support.

I'm going to address the first two in this paper and then I'll reserve the third for my second paper where it will be more appropriately answered. Evan's first argument is miracles are metaphysically impossible. Now that's not that they're terribly improbable it's that they're impossible and in support he cites the laws of conservation of energy and momentum and specifically within the Newton's third law.

He says that quote in a that these state that quote in a causally closed system total energy and momentum remain unchanged over time. End quote. So quote how does God who has no mass energy exert forces on matter given that every force is balanced by an opposite force what does the matter push back against God's body? Moreover Newton's third law is not diffeasible it allows for no exceptions end quote.

Well I have three replies. Number one a law the laws of nature describe what goes on in our universe when it's left to itself. A miracle is not a violation of the laws of nature.

A miracle is not an exception to the laws of nature. A miracle is an instance when nature is not left to itself. Now let me provide a little illustration.

Watch this pen. I could do that a million times over and it's always going to have the same results right. Now watch this amazing huh.

Why didn't the pen fall to the floor? Well because my hand entered the scene and interrupted the normal course of events. In a similar way a miracle is when the hand of God comes into our world and alters the normal course of events. It is when nature is not left to itself.

Second Evan's approach to science is in conflict with what we observe in our world. Now I mentioned three extreme answers to prayer and many more examples could be provided. So we observe the occurrence of authentic miracles in our world.

What then are we to make of Evan's claim that the laws of conservation of energy and momentum are indefeasible? Well many scientists and philosophers contend these laws are defeasible. Robin Collins who is a philosopher of science and a specialist in quantum physics says that quantum mechanics the cornerstone of modern physics provides a good case of interaction, law like correlation in which there's no energy or momentum exchanges. Collins adds that these quantum correlations quote are pervasive throughout the microscopic world playing a fundamental role in the operation of nature end quote.

Timothy McGrew like Evan is a philosopher and epistemologist. He observes that we know there are k mesons in which their decay violates the time reversal and variance of a Newtonian picture. Thus Newton's third law is defeasible.

In his book General Relativity Robert Wald who is a physicist and a specialist in general relativity, he states that in general relativity there's no way of accounting for the energy of the gravitational field in terms of local interactions and even globally we can only speak of the conservation of gravitational energy in the universe in terms of models that are not representative of our universe. Now I'm not a physicist and I'm not a philosopher so very honestly I couldn't tell you the difference between a k meson and a quantum correlation. So what happens were what what am I left with then? I've got two contradictory approaches to science.

What do I do? Well I'm going to go with the one that is compatible with what I observe going on in our world the world in which we live. Now I appreciate philosophers. I tease Bill Craig all the time and say you know because he just finished his book on abstract objects that he's been working on for a decade and I say Bill you know you philosophers answer all the questions nobody's asking and so but he responds you know very well as a good philosopher and he says yeah but we're answering the questions people should be asking.

In preparation for today's discussion when I was reading Evan's work at one point in it he says you know it'd be interesting if he could be shut into a sealed room and in this experiment to see if he made a lot of decisions whether that would increase the amount of measurable energy in the room. Well I think such questions are of interest and it's these kinds of questions that got us to the moon I think so they are important but sometimes we got to stop working in our theoretical world and come down to terra firma where life occurs and where people live and die get married and divorced and when we do this we observe that miracles occur. Third for the sake of argument let's say that Evan is correct and that the laws of conservation of energy and momentum are indefeasible we would still have to possess such a thorough understanding of supernatural beings who of course would be superior to us and their essence in nature.

We would still have to have such a thorough understanding of them that we would know that they are incapable incapable of manifesting themselves in such a manner as to create the same kind of effect on material objects as do other material objects and we do not have this knowledge so we can see that Evan's first argument that miracles are metaphysically impossible cannot withstand critical scrutiny. So let's move along to his second argument against miracles this one is borrowed from David Hume and we heard it yesterday and yesterday's the last seminar lecture that was given we may refer to it as the balancing argument. Now applied to Jesus resurrection it looks like this natural laws inform us that corpses do not come back to life this is supported by a massive amount of evidence and our understanding of science also backs this up very strongly we also observe that corpses do not come back to life with an exceptionalist's regularity so we've got a lot of weight on this side of the argument.

The evidence we have to the contrary is based on human testimony and human testimony is often unreliable it's not to say it's unreliable all the time it's to say that it's unreliable some of the time and it's certainly not going to be as reliable as often as we can count on natural laws obtaining okay so on balance when we weigh these evidences the evidence that we get from the consistency of natural law is going to be far superior to the evidence we get from the inconsistency of human testimony and therefore we should conclude that miracles in general and Jesus resurrection in particular did do not and did not occur. Well I think this argument sounds persuasive at first but when we look at its foundation we use that Hume when building it used the wrong parts you see remember the laws of nature tell us what go on in our universe when it's left to itself the we can see with an exceptionalist regularity that corpses don't come back to life we have a massive amount of evidence that corpses do not come back to life when left to themselves science informs us very clearly that corpses do not come back to life when left to themselves this is what we observe with an exceptionalist regularity corpses do not come back to life when left to themselves but what happens then if we have a supernatural being who decides that in the case of Jesus corpse the supernatural being doesn't want it to be left to itself well then that's a game changer and all bets are off in regards to natural law if natural law describes what goes on in our universe when it's left to our itself and God say comes in and says I'm not going to leave Jesus corpse to itself that changes everything and so the question is no longer what happens to corpses when left to themselves that's the question the way that that Hume gives it but that's not the question to ask the question is is there sufficient evidence to suggest that in the case of Jesus his corpse was not left to itself now maybe you think you know this balancing argument the answer I've just provided to it is fine as long as a supernatural being exists otherwise it's just ad hoc I would agree it would be ad hoc if we didn't have evidence for supernatural so remember the three radical answers to prayer that I provided just a few moments ago there is a supernatural component to our world and what I'm showing here is that Evans arguments against the occurrence of miracles fails in both principle and in practice I'll conclude by reviewing what I've just argued a miracle is an event having a supernatural cause we may recognize that an event is a miracle when the event a is extremely unlikely to have occurred given the circumstances and or natural law and b it occurs in an environment or context charged with religious significance there are two approaches historians may take regarding the use or nonuse of God in a hypothesis after concluding that a particular event occurred that appears miraculous in nature historic historians may a positive theoretical entity as the cause or b leave the cause undetermined we then observed evidence strongly suggesting miracles occur providing us with a general background knowledge or plausibility related to miracle hypotheses finally I contended that the two major arguments against miracles provided by Evan do not hold up under critical scrutiny his first argument is that miracles are metaphysically impossible but I argued one the laws of nature describe what nature does when left to itself whereas a miracle is an occasion when nature is not left to itself two Evans approach to science is in conflict with what we observe in our world and many scientists and philosophers contend the laws of conservation of energy and momentum are diffeasible and three even if some natural laws are indefeasible we don't know enough about spirit beings and God to say they cannot have the same effect on material objects as do other material objects Evan's second argument the balancing argument says the evidence from the consistency of natural law trumps the evidence of inconsistent human testimony I replied that Hume used the wrong parts to build the foundation of his argument since of God had chosen to raise Jesus that's a different matter altogether than what corpses do and left to themselves thus neither of Evans arguments hold up to critical scrutiny accordingly if a miracle has occurred it can be the subject of a historian's investigation one can still deny the historicity of a miracle hypothesis given the lack of evidence but historians are not prohibited from adjudicating on the historicity of an event because of its purportedly miraculous nature thank you some questions online to you who's first take I'm sorry so at some point what you might have been taken to be thinking that the resurrection is basically that a physical corpse that was dead for a while now comes back to life and now you continue to be a physical corpse and sort of act like physical corpse used to act but that doesn't seem to be what happens or that doesn't seem to be what the apostles reported right they reported walking through doors they reported not actually recognizing that it was Jesus but then coming to recognize you know so in other words the resurrected Jesus was not reportedly acting like just another normal physical body so so if you could just speak to what exactly is the event that we're yeah that's talking about fair question with and I'll talk about this more in my second paper what I do see the New Testament authors talking about and going back to Paul and the apostles is that they were claiming as they were holding the typical Jewish view which we also see in second Baruch chapters 49 through 51 and within Judaism that the corpse would be brought back to life and then transformed into an immortal body what that more immortal body would have been like exactly in its essence it's hard to say you know we we go with as historians we go with what we would call historical bedrock these are the known things that we can know with really really high degree of certainty and then there are things that you know we can say there's some evidence for this but we can't really establish this with the same degree of certainty I think we can can establish with the highest degree of historical certainty that Paul was saying that Jesus body his corpse his physical corpse was raised from the dead so it was that corpse that was brought back to life but then he talks about the transformation of that corpse now you know what could that corpse what was it like then if you had gone to shake hands with him would your hand have gone through or what did it have bumped up against it well the gospels talk about it being something that Jesus could eat he could be touched but yet it could also transform it be of such a nature where it could go through doors it could appear and disappear it will like we find in Luke 24 with the appearance to the may as disciples so it's hard to say I like what N.T. Wright called it he either called a trans physical or I think he called it trans physical what that means I don't know I mean that's just kind of vague but I think we have to keep it that way does that make sense in second Baruch 49 to 51 chapters 49 through 51 these are very short chapters I mean really short chapters shorter than saw a Psalm and in chapter 49 it says how will the dead be raised chapter 50 the earth will return the dead in the same form at which it received them chapter 51 after that their bodies will be transformed to shine like the stars so it would have been Jesus body that was raised and then transformed what it's like after that the only description we have is in the gospels and you know that wouldn't be of the same degree of certainty we have with Paul historically speaking hi thanks I had a quick question about when you mentioned identifying miracles I'm wondering maybe you can go back to the slide I've already forgotten what it said oh and on identifying a miracle point b the event occurs in a context charged with religious significance maybe you said this but is there a reason why that needs to be the case or and maybe you say a bit more about that well if we didn't have that then we go back to that the guy the blind guy who he and his wife are sitting there and having lunch and he's born blind never saw and he just gets a sight for some unknown reason is that a miracle it's hard to determine right um because there's no context in which to place it because it's easier to identify it's not necessary that it's not necessary for it to be a miracle I mean again I could pray and have a simple answer to prayer and that you could define that as a miracle and again there's various definitions of miracle Evan could give us a different one and I'd be fine with that I'm just trying to set up something to just make it you know easy for conversation in this one have a worry about selection effect risk medication if the worry is too much thank you um so it occurs to me that there are many many um religiously significant prayers and and situations millions maybe billions and so it seems pretty likely to me that just by coincidence um you know certain unusual events might happen there are natural causes but if there's a kind of selection effect where the cases of quote answered prayers um that accord with the religiously significant situation those are the ones that get told and so they look they meet your conditions but when you actually consider the wider pool of data that in most cases you know and there are studies of the effectiveness of prayer and the like of that and that when you actually study it into a controlled scientific analysis you find um that there's a selection effect problem so I guess that's the worry and then the worry relates to a question which all I should let um Evan speak for himself but I imagine that what he's probably thinking is we don't just have evidence that this is how things go when they're left to themselves we also have evidence that things are left to themselves um and at any sort of alleged counter evidence it's it's you investigate it and you see that it doesn't go through and maybe that's where the debate will end up is kind of an empirical question you have to look at the evidence but um let me let me address those so far yeah yeah so so yeah so so that's basically my question is how do you overcome the selection effect worry in a way that um there are I think evidence there are a lot of different do I which one's recording oh okay so if we're talking about selection there there's no question there's going to be a whole lot of different claims out there in terms of miracles and some are going to have a lot better evidence than others I mean when I was selecting these three I mean I just had tons of them to choose from from my own personal experience um like I could tell one where there was this before I met my wife I was dating this one girl and one night I uh she it was about nine o'clock and she was ready to go home we're standing by her car and she said hey Mike would you pray for my mom she's been feeling sick for several days right now and I said sure let's pray for so we prayed for her so let's just say it was nine o'clock I don't remember the exact time but let's say it's nine o'clock it took her about 10 minutes to drive home she walks in the front door not thinking anything said hey mom how are you doing she said like you know it's really weird that's feeling horrible as you know and then about 10 minutes ago I felt something come over my body and I felt great and I'm feeling great I can't explain it well it's the same time that we were praying for her um you got a whole lot of things like that of course you know now that for me that's I'm impressed by that I think that's a miracle in my mind but I wanted to cite something like Roy Reed who comes out of his coma or Don Piper who comes back from the dead when the guy's praying for him I think that those those are I mean you might be able to say it's possible that that's a coincidence but I think that'd be quite ad hoc and to do that in order to maintain your worldview to do so so yeah you could say that some of these things are going to be coincidence but the real big ones that we see are going to be a whole lot more than coincidence the probability I think is going to lay on the side of this being a miracle for sure um and I forgot the second half you said Evan you thought he might argue that way but how would you argue it if you were a skeptic because Evan will have a chance I mean this might be due to a poor conversation right but this is basically we just get given our evidence um we don't just have evidence that things go this way when they're not touched by God but we have evidence that things just are never touched by God yeah so like there would be times that I pray and I don't get my prayers answered right but that doesn't do anything to say that the time I do pray and they get answered you still have to explain these extraordinary answers to prayer that I mentioned and and those three aren't the only ones I could have given so many I mean I have a friend named Pat Ferguson who had an apparition of the dead appear to her two thirty one morning she hadn't seen this girl for several years um and thought she was fine the next morning she gets up and finds out this girl died at 2 30 in the morning so she wouldn't have known this otherwise how do you explain that given naturalism you can't um how would you explain would you really opt for coincidence on that I mean if you do then you're weighing in with your worldview not with the evidence and bad philosophy corrupts good history yeah thanks so I guess I'm just kind of wondering a little bit even just about the category of miracle in general and just wondering if maybe some of the real work um should be just sort of done upstream a little bit in thinking about your conception of God and God's relationship to the world so even just saying things like you know kind of things left to themselves or sort of uh giving sort of natural laws kind of with the universe set up in such a way that it's just kind of going on by itself but if you think that that God on a classical theism is intimately involved with the world at every single moment then these kind of things that sort of by our perspective seem a little bit unlikely don't seem at all the kind of thing that would be um sort of out of bounds for God who is uh sort of consciously choosing to sustain the universe in existence or or at every single moment you know uh bringing about the uh the occurrence of the world so so I kind of wonder about the the extreme unlikely point here in miracle and if you just want to have like sort of like uh these events have supernatural causes if you have a God that sort of is involved here then um it's like you've kind of done your work and even though it may be surprising for a corpse to come back into existence uh given a really intimate relationship between a supernatural God and and the world that's not the kind of thing we should think unlikely at all now I think it's a good point um I think that's a good point I don't think these things are unlikely I mean I've seen stuff you know and when you experience these kind of things to say well how that happens I've experienced these things um but as I approach this as a historian I cannot come to it with any assumptions of theism um I suppose I could if I wanted to but I'm trying to be as as fair and as unbiased as I can when I come to something it's impossible to be completely unbiased of course but I try to be as fair as unbiased and it's got me in trouble with some of my evangelical colleagues but those on the ultra right because I won't presuppose that the bible's God's word when I come to it as a historian but I'd like your point this point was about um uh your a on the board there um and I I took it that the way you meant A was was sort of consistent with the point that was being raised so what A is basically it's a conditional probability right it's the likelihood of an event given something like the natural laws alone or our best understanding of the natural laws alone something like that and then uh that seems to work fine so even if even if you agree with that sort of view of God's relationship to the world I think what you need is that conditional probability statement in order for you to run your argument yeah like that blind guy you know that I mentioned he's not going to come back or he's not going to get his eyesight it's extremely unlikely he's going to get his eyesight given natural law is that what you're saying and I think you mean alone given natural law alone right or maybe something like given our best understanding of the natural law today alone right yes uh two things a really really quick question that I think you can answer really quickly and then a more more serious one history the word history do you think that history is whatever happened in the past or is it the best account historians can make of whatever happened in the past I mean I think that's going to affect your question that's a great question that that is um I found I think it was 16 definitions of history and again that's not exhaustive either and historians debate over that's just another one of those essentially contested concepts that they don't agree on the definition of history I think you know if to give us something that we can at least be on the same page when discussing I would say history is what happened in the past obvious or Tucker who's a philosopher of history goes with a definition like that but I mean it could be certainly more nuanced but yeah I think something like that probably is best for your case okay now that what I what I want to say I think I can make this briefly too brief to um on Hume's balancing argument one of things it's always been interesting to me is that the only thing Hume saw on the miracle side was testimony that's the only thing he thinks even counts and one can understand that because from Hume's point of view uh he died in 1776 okay testimony was about all he had on the on the resurrection side okay or any any kind of miracle on the other hand that's that's not the right way of looking at it so far as I can see let me tell another uh another story about a very strange event suppose that last night about 930 some students some of them standing over there some of them standing over there who are walking by saw this building we're in right now or this part of the building levitate about 10 millimeters off the ground or something like that and suppose that we go okay well that was Monday night this is a Catholic college anyway it's very unlikely there would be a bunch of drunk students walking around on a Monday night okay furthermore we inspect the building and we discover there's a crack all the way around and a building on a lot of the water pipes are broken and we discover there were no earthquakes or anything like that okay now I know that's not a miracle on your definition and I don't mean it to be because it's not charged with religious significance although we could make it that way somehow but the building levitated and then it came right back down it's what what they say it seems me obvious that that could happen where we could rationally get to the point of saying whoa so this is really strange but somehow the building levitated even though the natural laws are all against that there's no way we could possibly explain it it seems me that it's obvious that that could happen with the resurrection of Jesus it's probably true that from our point of view where we are all we've got his testimony but the original apostles that that's not true they had cracks around the building I mean seeing that the tomb was empty and seeing what they took to be Jesus so I think that well I'll just add that as an addendum to a way of evaluating Hume's balancing argument I appreciate that um yeah I just wanted to suggest I think that something more determinate oh sorry then be might be necessary um to to principally identify miracles and so I just thought I'd give some example so I was thinking that um uh not to have it down or anything but so you're praying for this guy who's in a coma and then somehow the very moment you're praying he dies and everyone in the room dies you know that's that's that's a context charged with religious experience something extremely unlikely occurs but that it's kind of a weird thing don't pray for me brother yeah or like somehow like the moment you pray for someone's eyes to be healed um you know the roof caves in or something or you know and there are termites doing it the whole time you just you know the context is there it's extremely unlikely yeah so you're saying it could be a coincidence that it's still a natural event um because it was unlikely and it occurred in a context charged with religious significance while he was praying and the roof fell in and yeah um well I just thought if we have a principled reason to identify even if it isn't miracle um we may not have a principled reason to identify it as such unless there's some sort of more essential connection like almost a teleological connection or something between whatever religious actions are being performed and what the effect that actually takes place all right so you're not saying you're not suggesting that if the roof fell in when they were praying for these people to come out of the coma the roof fell in and killed them and then you discovered there were all these termites but at the moment of the prayer the roof fell in and killed them you're not suggesting that because of that you'd have to have another criterion is that what you're saying because I think that that would that would fall prey to not fulfilling the first criterion sorry I guess I inadvertently introduced two different cases and didn't distinguish them uh so yeah no I was just thinking that they just all die you know in the room all at one time when someone's praying for them yeah no the the termite thing was supposed to be a different example but forget about that well it certainly wouldn't be as impressive as them coming out of a coma but I almost think that that would I mean oh so you think it would be a miracle perhaps not oh okay but but again you're going to have some things that are some are going to be more impressive than others I mean there's going to be a scale right the thing when I prayed for that girl's mom and she at that very moment I've had a couple instances like that too you know where I prayed for someone and they were listen I'm not charismatic or anything so when I prayed for someone and miles away they were healed at apparently that very instance one guy was a grandfather who had come out of heart surgery and they said he was going to die any moment and prayed for him and a bunch of us prayed for him and boom you know he calls within minutes or a couple hours later I guess and says were you praying for me back at so and so yeah well you know I felt something happened on my body and I don't know that's kind of impressive stuff right there some are more impressive than others if I prayed for someone to come out of a coma and the moment I prayed they died now I wouldn't consider that a miracle but if I prayed for everyone in the room and there were four people in the room and then all of them died simultaneously at the moment I prayed I'd run before the relatives caught up with me you know but I would think that maybe something was going on there um oh yeah but certainly somehow it doesn't seem like you're equally entitled to call bad a miracle right as you yeah and so that it's that sort of not being equally entitled that seems to think that you need some tighter connection between the specific kind of religious context and what occurs okay I appreciate that it's it's it struck me right from the beginning actually that the that B condition the the work that is doing is that it affects what you're going to count as the best explanation for what's going on and so really what's going on is inference to the best explanation it seems to me and in the interesting case that was just suggested right there's a worry whether the best explanation for what goes on when all these people die instead of getting better could be divine action an alternative might be satanic action however which does raise some interesting questions since Satan is a deceiver he might do things that look like divine action but aren't really yeah yeah good point and remember for defining miracle as a an act by a supernatural agent or having supernatural calls that would include Satan or demonic forces he now tells me I'm next in the queue so I have what I take to be a friendly a suggestion for your reply to Evan's argument that miracles are metaphysically impossible so take the principle of conservation of energy in a closed system total energy is conserved you wanted to say yeah but with God in the picture it's not a closed system the natural apply is going to be okay consider this system God and material objects are God in the created world that's the whole system we're talking about now energy in the material part went up oh energy and God better have gone down that doesn't make any sense because he needs the new material being I think the thing to say there is that we don't have any evidence that the principle of conservation of energy applies in a case where the system includes immaterial beings or includes supernatural beings to the evidence we have is about material beings and and that's we have evidence to think that you have a closed system of material beings or physical beings then this principle holds just a suggestion I appreciate it I'd have to think through that one at one point Evan does say in his work he said hey you know if you're going to look at a cause creator the universe or something just include him as part of the system or something like that I think well how can you do that if he created the system he's not part of that system he's outside of it so he might be able to enter at some point but he he doesn't become part of the system that he created he created it so he is distinct from that system well two things can be distinct but still be uh classed mentally in the same category and that's all we mean by system here okay the same maybe causally in the same causal system okay uh no I just I was trying to get clear here on um your argument against what you call the the balancing or the tipping what was it the balancing or and it seemed the balancing argument it seemed to me your response was that huge argument goes wrong because he's not taking into he's just assuming that he's just looking at all the exceptions regularities with with respect to the world the world contained within itself there's no divine interaction or he's sort of closing that off is that correct right when it's left to itself left to itself is how you put it over yeah so um maybe I just I missed something I thought that the thought was something like this um he doesn't even have to look at that he just has to look at when do these kinds of occurrences come well they rarely ever occur miracles right uh and so there's these seem to be these kind of exceptional irregularities with respect to testimony you know we know that that you know as reliable it is it's not nearly as reliable we can doubt it much easier and so our evidence in favor of one seems to be stronger than the other and and that's just neutral with respect to whether or not the with the cause of a violation of an exceptionalist regularity would be right they're gonna go with frequency then um how often do you think countries deceive their citizens with false propaganda how often would you say that happens quite often quite often I agree yeah how often do nations drop nuclear bombs on another nation not that often not that often only twice in all of the history of the entire universe right so given the argument you're just positing here that we're gonna do things on a relative frequency we'd have to say that it's far more probable that the US and Japan work together with one another and spread false propaganda that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan because that occurs with a far greater frequency than nations dropping nuclear bombs on another you'd say well that's ridiculous yeah um well why do we agree that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan because we have evidence so all it takes is one miracle I mean God may not have wanted to raise the corpse of anyone else um if he had reason to do it in the case of Jesus it would be a unique event um we can't rule out a unique event simply because it doesn't occur that often if God has some intentions behind it that changes everything yeah I mean I'm a little lost there's this is a different response than the one you gave initially right yeah well I'm answering a different objection that you're raising now okay and the response just is can you say it one more time just taking it clear okay so the way I understand you pushing back on this and I do appreciate the pushback of course um the challenge is made right thank you um so I understand your pushback of saying him is saying here that these things just miracles don't happen that often we don't see people coming back to from the dead that often um we're not saying it never occurs but if it does occur I mean you do have reports of it occurring Craig Keener gives some in his miracles book so if we do have reports of people coming back from the dead being raised from the dead it doesn't happen often and we see with a far more regularity that they remain dead therefore the weight of evidence is that they remain dead and I'm well let's just take it a little more way we'd say in more wars than not nations do not drop nuclear bombs on another but you wouldn't we only have one war in all of human history where a nation dropped nuclear bombs on another and so we'd have to say well given that kind of reasoning you're you're saying here we'd have to say it's very improbable that the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and we said no you got to look at the evidence there's no not a prior probability that's being used here that would not be appropriate thanks for joining us today if you'd like to learn more about the work and ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona visit RisenJesus.com where you can find authentic answers to genuine questions about the reliability of the gospels and the resurrection of Jesus be sure to subscribe to this podcast visit Dr. Lacona's youtube channel or consider becoming a monthly supporter this has been the RisenJesus podcast a ministry of Dr. Mike Lacona.