Category: Book Plunge

The Case Against Miracles Chapter 3

What do I think of John Loftus’s chapter? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Well, I was wrong. I thought I had got to the chapter last time that was the worst. I thought nothing could top Matthew McCormick’s chapter. Sadly, I spoke too soon. John Loftus had a chapter next on defending ECREE.

If you don’t know, that means Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. The problem with this is first off, what is an extraordinary claim varies from person to person. I consider it an extraordinary claim that God doesn’t exist. Someone might consider macroevolution an extraordinary claim. Another would consider Intelligent Design an extraordinary claim. Some might consider Muhammad being a false prophet an extraordinary claim. Some might consider reincarnation being false an extraordinary claim.

Who decides the standard?

Second, how do you recognize extraordinary evidence? Does it glow in the dark? What does it really look like? The terms are way too vague.

Also, this whole chapter seems at times loaded with any atheist canard that Loftus can put in there. This especially goes after New Testament ideas. It would have been better for Loftus to just stick to his argument, which is essentially just repeating Hume ad nauseum.

In defining his terms, Loftus says that

Third, a miraculous claim is one made about miraculous events that are unexplainable and even impossible by natural processes alone, which requires miraculous levels of testimonial evidence.

Is this not begging the question? It requires miraculous evidence? Who says? Suppose I pray for someone blind to have their eyes opened and as I pray in Jesus’s name for their healing, their eyes open and they see. Am I justified in believing in a miracle? Why not?

He also talks about the way believers treat Hume.

They continue to believe in their sect-specific miracles despite his standards. But they duplicitously use his standards when assessing the miracles of the religions they reject.

Well, no. Not all of us. I have no problem with miracles occurring in other religions. I am fine with Muslims having prayers answered or anything like that. Maybe God is giving them a dose of grace to lead them to Him. Maybe some miracles are demonic in nature. If you talk about visions of Mary appearing, I am open, and even if I don’t know what is going on, I do not rule it out. I also do investigate those in my own tradition, much like I investigate political claims in my own political walk. Many of you know my father-in-law is a New Testament scholar and when possible, I try to verify him as well.

Now some claims I do think are quite false for evidential reasons. I don’t think many of the claims of Mormonism are likely to be true, but could miracles happen there, if perhaps even by demonic powers? Why not? I don’t rule it out.

Loftus interacts with a critic who argues it is self-defeating to use ECREE since the principle itself doesn’t have extraordinary evidence. Loftus has a threefold response. I will deal with what I deem relevant. First

My response is threefold. First, since all claims about the objective world require sufficient corroborating objective evidence commensurate with the nature of the claim, it’s clear that extraordinary types of extraordinary claims require more than mere ordinary testimonial evidence.

But this is just him stating his principle again to which one just has to ask, “Why?” All he has done is taken ECREE and restated it as if that counts as a response. Why should it?

Second, such an objection entails there must be exceptions to the ECREE principle.

Or it could just entail that ECREE is false.

And then we get into the usual arguments.

But what we find exclusively on behalf of miracles in the Bible is human testimony, ancient pre-scientific superstitious human testimony, second- third- fourth-handed human testimony, conflicting human testimony filtered by editors, redactors, and shaped by early Christian debates for decades and/ or centuries in the ancient pre-scientific world, where miracle claims were abundant without the means to discredit them.

Where does someone begin with a train wreck like this? First off, pre-scientific? Granted they didn’t do science like we do, but they had rudimentary knowledge. They knew dead people stay dead. They knew people don’t walk on water. They knew virgins don’t give birth. They knew paralysis and blindness don’t just get healed without a reason. They are called miracles for a reason.

Also, not all of this testimony is second or thirdhand. Consider 2 Corinthians 12:12.

I persevered in demonstrating among you the marks of a true apostle, including signs, wonders and miracles. 

Here Paul is saying that he did miracles in the midst of a testimony to a church that is questioning Paul’s apostleship. Note that also no one disputes that Paul wrote this. If Paul is making a claim like this, he’d better be sure that even his opponents know it.

Finally, miracles back then could be evaluated and they were often scoffed at. Lucian is a prime example. If people just believed miracle claims blindly, then why did the whole world not immediate turn to Christianity? Loftus himself will have something in his book about most Jews rejecting Jesus at His time. Why, if miracles were blindly believed?

Next he looks at the virgin birth, which I do affirm.

Let’s take at face value the extraordinary miraculous tale that a virgin named Mary gave birth to the god/ baby Jesus. There’s no objective evidence to corroborate her story. None. We hear nothing about her wearing a misogynistic chastity belt to prove her virginity. No one checked for an intact hymen before she gave birth. Nor did she provide her bloodstained wedding garment from the night of her wedding that supposedly “proved” she was a virgin before giving birth (Deuteronomy 22: 15– 21). After Jesus was born Maury Povich wasn’t there with a DNA test to verify Joseph was not the baby daddy. We don’t even have first-hand testimonial evidence for it, since the story is related to us by others, not Mary, or Joseph. At best, all we have is the second-hand testimony of one person, Mary, or two if we include Joseph who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream, yes, a dream (see Matthew 1: 19– 24), one that solved his dilemma of whether to “dismiss her quietly” or “disgrace” her publicly, which would have led her to be executed for dishonoring him.[ 97] We never get to independently cross-examine them, along with the people who knew them, which we would want to do, since they may have a very good reason for lying (pregnancy out of wedlock?).

The reason why we believe the stories here is because we believe in the resurrection of Jesus and believe He’s fully God and fully man and lo and behold, a miraculous birth seems consistent. Some other points to consider are Mary would hardly be able to implicate YHWH immediately. A story of rape or just a one-night stand would be shameful but more readily believed. Second, the writers would not want something that could seem remotely close to paganism, and yet critics would use this. Third, it would confess that Jesus was not the biological son of Joseph which would bring shame to Him. Fourth, while Loftus dismisses a dream, we do not know all the content of this dream. We just know it was convincing and why couldn’t God speak in a dream?

He also says the Gospels were anonymous, which simply means the names weren’t included in the manuscript itself, much like the majority of other ancient works from that time. It’s not the case that no one knew who wrote it. A Gospel did not just show up at the door of a church one day and no one knew who wrote it. A person delivering it would know or somewhere on there it could say who wrote it. Any New Testament survey could give you reasons why a traditional authorship can be believed.

No reasonable investigation could take Mary and/ or Joseph’s word for it.

Because? I mean, if Luke or Matthew is already convinced of the deity of Christ and His being the Messiah and His rising from the dead and doing other miracles, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to believe in these miracles. Perhaps they also spoke to the wise men and/or shepherds. We don’t know. We know Luke was a thorough researcher though, particularly in Acts.

For if this is the kind of research that went into writing the gospels, we shouldn’t believe anything else they say without requiring corroborating objective evidence. But if research was unnecessary for writing their gospels— because they were divinely inspired—why do gospel writers give us the pretense of having researched into it (see Luke 1: 1– 4)? Why not simply say their stories are true due to divine inspiration and be done with the pretense? Then the gospel authors would be admitting their tales lack the required corroborating objective evidence, which in turn means there isn’t a good reason to believe them.

So Loftus says “They did research that ends in miracles and we know that didn’t happen.” How? This is begging the question. Then because these are divinely inspired, then why do research? Loftus brought up inspiration. Not I. Inspiration is a detail that doesn’t really matter. If it’s true, it’s true whether inspired or not. Even if God is inspiring the work, why can it not be done through the means of research? Thus, Loftus has it that if they go and do their research, we can’t believe them because research would never admit a miracle. If they don’t do research, we still can’t believe them.

He then goes on to quote Robert Fogelin.

Hume nowhere argues, either explicitly or implicitly, that we know that all reports of miracles are false because we know that all reports of miracles are false… Hume begins with a claim about testimony. On the one side we have wide and unproblematic testimony to the effect that when people step into the water they do not remain on its surface. On the other side we have isolated reports of people walking across the surface of the water. Given the testimony of the first kind, how are we to evaluate the testimony or of the second sort? The testimony of the first sort does not show that the testimony of the second sort is false; it does, however, create a strong presumption— unless countered, a decisively strong presumption— in favor of its falsehood. That is Hume’s argument, and there is nothing circular or question begging about it.

So it is. How do we evaluate it? Well, off the top of my head I would say we examine the claimants and see what evidence they give and see what the environment is and what the claim entails and then decide if it happened or not. It’s noteworthy in all of this chapter I didn’t see Keener referenced once. You know, the guy who went out and did just that with the evidence. I also don’t see Candy Gunther Brown referenced. Not a shock.

In my previous anthology, Christianity is the Light of Science,

I have to say I was delirious with laughter when I read this. Now, I know we could say it’s just a typo, of which is the first chapter I read with such typos, but I don’t know if we can. I mean, this is the great John Loftus we’re talking about. He studied under William Lane Craig. Surely he would not make a mistake like this. Well, I guess he wants us to know that Christianity is the light of modern science. Excellent!

One idea he says about archaeology disconfirming the Bible is first off, the Exodus. The problem here is that there are some who have questioned this, such as Hoffmeier in his books. Second, such used to be said about David as well. Used to be. Now we have found David in archaeology.

The next is Nazareth being a town during the life of Jesus. Bart Ehrman doesn’t even think this one has validity. See here for details.

Loftus then goes on to mention atheists who have argued against Hume’s argument.

Graham Oppy, who has been every fundamentalist apologist’s friend for taking their beliefs seriously, strangely says “Hume’s argument against belief in miracle reports fails no less surely than do the various arguments from miracle reports to the existence of an orthodoxy conceived monotheistic god.” Surely he doesn’t really mean that? Does he?

Oh please say it isn’t so! Say that Oppy really doesn’t mean it! Surely he would know better! If Loftus’s argument is reduced to “Surely he doesn’t really mean that does he?”, then we have the case of a child just crying wanting it to be otherwise. This does not count as an argument against Oppy. Perhaps we could say it’s “cognitive dissonance.”

He also argues against Mike Licona who says that much of what we know about the past comes from one source and rarely beyond all suspicion. Loftus says

So if historical evidence about ordinary claims in the past has such a poor quality to it, as Licona admits, then how much more does historical evidence of extraordinary miracle claims in the past? If the first is the case, then the second is magnified by thousands.

But Licona didn’t say they have poor quality. He said there’s sometimes one source and just because it is disputed doesn’t mean the evidence is poor. That vaccines don’t cause autism is disputed. That 9/11 wasn’t an inside job is disputed. That heliocentrism is true or the Earth is round is disputed.

Loftus also begs the question again about his standard for miracles. If I question his standard before, why should I accept it now?

Finally, Hume argues that competing religions support their beliefs by claims of miracles; thus, these claims and their religious systems cancel each other out.

I can only surmise that Hume didn’t know much about miracles and religions. Let’s consider Judaism first. The grand miracle of that would be the Exodus. Christians have no problem with that and I doubt Muslims would as well. Jews would reject Christianity’s grand claim of the resurrection as does Islam. Islam itself has no founding miracle except the Qur’an itself. Hinduism and Buddhism have no founding miracles.

If we go further, Mormonism depends on Christian truth to some extent such that if there was no resurrection, Mormonism would likely fall as well. I can also question Mormonism on other grounds, like the Book of Abraham. So I have to ask what Hume was getting at.

Furthermore, all this proves is not all religions would be true, which we would accept. Some would be false. Would it work to say some theories on the origin of life contradict, so they all must be false? Of course not.

If miracles are the foundation for a religion, then an apologist for that religion cannot bring up a miracle working god to establish his supposed miracles. For miracles are supposed to be the basis for the religion and its miracle working god.

And later

Apologists might start by first arguing for their god’s existence, but very few of them say, “Here is the objective evidence that our god exists.” They always seem to talk in terms of “presenting an argument” rather than “presenting the evidence,” which is very telling. So, an unevidenced god will not help an unevidenced miracle, just as an unevidenced miracle will not help an unevidenced god. The only thing apologists can do is special plead to their god and his religion by assuming what needs to be proved.

Loftus doesn’t realize apparently that an argument is evidence, which he should since all he has been giving in this chapter is an argument. I find that very telling. Second, there is nothing inconsistent. This is the classical approach. One uses arguments, like the Thomistic ones, to show that there is a God and some qualities He must have. At this point, belief systems like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are still in the running. Then one looks at the different religious claims to see how that God might have revealed Himself.

One could also start the other way though. One could look at the evidence for the resurrection and be convinced it happened and say “There must be a God then!” That’s not inconsistent at all. Loftus knows if Jesus rose, it would be the Christian God. As he says,

At this point they’re already assuming their Christian god exists and is the one who raised Jesus from the dead, for if the hypothesis was that “Allah raised Jesus from the dead,” we already know the answer— of course not! Nor would it be the Hindu god, any of the pantheistic gods and/ or goddesses, a deistic god, or even the Jewish god, since overwhelming numbers of Jews don’t believe in the Christian god.

But it’s not being assumed. A case is made that a God exists that is consistent with the Christian God, but it does not necessitate the Christian God. That is an important fact to remember.

Finally, he gets to what he calls private miracles

There are two of them. One) Christians claim the gospel writers received private subjective messages from the spirit world who subsequently wrote down these messages known as the divinely inspired Scriptures. On this see David Madison’s excellent chapter for a refutation. Two) Apologists also argue that Christians receive their own private subjective messages that lead them to trust the private subjective messages of the gospel writers.

I’ll be fair and say I agree with some criticisms here. I tire of people constantly thinking God is talking to them or the Holy Spirit is giving them a secret message. Why do I trust the Scriptures? Not because of anything I feel. I trust them because the evidence for them is strong.

So I conclude once again that if this is the best kind of argumentation Loftus has, our Christianity is in really good shape.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Torahism

What do I think of R.L. Solberg’s book published by Williamson College Press? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

There are many things that bring the Christmas season home to me and make the holiday so special. Getting to put up decorations, going out and looking for lights, getting together with friends and family and exchanging gifts, hearing Christians tell me that Christmas is pagan, good times. No holiday season ever seems complete without that last group showing up.

So it is that when R.L. Solberg had a friend say the same thing on Facebook, he engaged with the post and found himself caught up in something greater. As a result, he wrote Torahism asking if Christians are to keep the law of Moses? Torahism can often go beyond that as some people like this deny the Trinity and the deity of Christ and are definitely very anti-Catholic.

So looking at Solberg’s book, I’ll start with the things I liked about it and then suggest areas I’d like to see improved.

First, I’m glad that the book has been written. There are too many people who are Christians and not Torahists who also have questions about the Law of Moses. There are too many atheists that present the Law as if it was to be a perfect guide for all time and be the perfect moral system. Both need answers to their questions.

Second, the book is easy to understand. You don’t need to have a Seminary background to understand what is being said here. Solberg writes in simple language and does not use complex terminology.

Third, each chapter is stand alone so you can look at each section that is relevant to what you’re talking about and getting it from there. Of course, you could read straight through like I did, but it’s not necessary. The information is really easy to find.

So what we have is good, but there are some changes I would like to see Solberg make for future editions.

First, more engagement with the scholarship in the field, especially Old Testament scholars like John Walton, Tremper Longman, Michale Heiser, Walter Kaiser, and others. It would have been good to see what scholars in the field say about the Law. I am especially thinking about Walton’s book The Lost World of the Torah.

Second, in the section on the deity of Christ, I would have liked more answers on such questions like “How could Jesus die on the cross if God can’t die?” I would have liked to have seen more on the Trinity. With this, a work like How God Became Jesus would be great.

Third, one point I was surprised to not see mentioned was that of slavery. Would Torahists like to have some kind of system like this? Along those same lines, would Torahists be open to allowing a man to have more than one wife?

It is always good to see people filling a niche in the apologetics world. A group like the one called Torahism is one that needs some responding to. I am thankful Solberg took the time to answer them and I hope that there will be further expansion on this work.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Jesus, Skepticism, and the Problem of History

What do I think of Darrell Bock and Ed Komoszewski’s book published by Zondervan?

This book is largely a response to Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne’s book Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity. The editors have put together a fine team of scholars to write various chapters illustrating that the criteria do still work. In the end, there are also three responses from those who can be critical looking at what was said.

For those not aware, the debate largely centers around checking various criteria to see if we can know if the historical Jesus did and said certain things or didn’t do and say certain things. These have been debated various times, but for the most part what we have is generally accepted with some qualifications. If anything, it really seems to come down to worldview a lot of the times.

A number of the essays in here provided some interesting viewpoints. I don’t know if I agree with Beth Sheppard on Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount in a theater, but her other insights on the culture and Jesus is excellent. Who would have thought that the Roman guard getting a sponge with wine for Jesus when He was crucified would also be an insult along the lines of toilet humor?

I appreciated also Paul Anderson’s essay on the Gospel of John. This is a Gospel that has sadly been neglected, and yet there is much in there that is supportable by new evidence that has come forth from the Dead Sea Scrolls and archaeology. However, I don’t think the Gospel of John will spark the fourth quest for the historical Jesus. If anything, I think the fourth quest should be involving a look not just at the Jewishness of Jesus, but also at the honor-shame culture that Jesus lived in.

Also, everyone who is familiar with New Testament studies will find something they like in here and also someone that they like in here. You can find Blomberg, Wallace, Licona, Bird, Keener, Evans, and several others contributing to this volume. You will have topics covered like the burial of Jesus, the resurrection, and the book of Acts.

The responses are also interesting. Scot McKnight’s was probably the most engaging and the one that I am thinking about the most. McKnight argues that the problem is not the methods but the results and that the premise of historical Jesus scholarship is to find the real Jesus instead of the one that is presented in Christianity. I wonder if this is really the case.

After all, if two people are doing the same methodology and reach different conclusions, either wrong data was used or someone made a mistake or some combination thereof. If we are doing history right, will we not find the Christ of Christianity if Christianity is true? It’s the same approach I take to science in that if Christianity is true, science can never contradict it.

At any rate, this volume is definitely a great defense of using the criteria in historical methodology to demonstrate several facts about the historical Jesus to be likely true. Even if you are not interested in that debate, the reader will gain much knowledge on other areas reading this. I highly recommend this volume for those interested in historical Jesus studies.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

The Case Against Miracles Chapter 2

What do I think of Matthew McCormick’s article? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

The only work of Matthew McCormick I had ever previously reviewed here was his work “Atheism and the Case Against Christ.” The great delight of that was getting to catch him in a major gaffe. This one was about the fake god Jar’Edo Wens.

Now after reading this chapter, I am even more sure of the kind of researcher McCormick is. His whole chapter is about God would not perform miracles. Nowhere in this chapter did I see interaction with people like Alvin Plantinga or Craig Keener or anyone like that. Plantinga would have been an important one since McCormick’s whole article is really the problem from evil and saying “Well, if God wanted to do a miracle of healing, He would heal everyone wouldn’t He?”

It’s really amazing that McCormick’s whole argument is all about what an omniscient and omnipotent and omnibenevolent being would do, because, you know, McCormick certainly has a lot of experience with beings like that to make proper judgments. I went through this whole chapter wondering “How do you know that?” It certainly doesn’t make any sense to me to say, “If I was this being, I would do that.” It’s like it’s never considered that maybe if you were omniscient you would know some things that you don’t know now.

McCormick says

Even if a full-blown violation of the laws of nature occurs, we have compelling reasons to reject the hypothesis that the all-powerful, omniscient creator of the universe was responsible for it. A being of infinite power and knowledge wouldn’t act by means of miracles.

Well, this is quite a claim. Let’s see how good he does at backing it. At least on one level, McCormick puts forward the appearance of being open. As he says later in his essay:

It would be a mistake, I believe, to rule such a claim out a priori or virtually so with Hume’s global standards. Surely the all-powerful creator of all of reality would have sufficient power at its disposal to generate evidence that would be compelling; and I’d rather be prepared to revise all of my beliefs and the convictions I attach to them proportionally to the evidence.

As we go through, McCormick says

The Christian God is, by all accounts, an omni-god. He is the all-powerful, all-knowing, singular, personal and infinitely good creator of the universe. Jesus is alleged to have been his son, who was divine, but he was also a man, by Christian doctrine. The extent to which he was a man and lacked the status of a fully omni-being is a point of some controversy, even between believers.

Not among believers. Maybe between believers and heretics, but believers have always included in our creedal statements that Jesus is fully God and fully man. This is yet another point that makes me doubt McCormick really understands the Christianity he criticizes.

He also says that walking on water would require less power than stopping fusion reactions in stars. Sure, but also pointless. After all, God has infinite power so it’s not like He has a storehouse He has to reach into and then recharge. I wonder why McCormick keeps bringing up things like this.

He also says some statements about what a being who is omnipotent could do. One is reverse time, but even this one is debated. Aquinas said that God could not change the past and yet Aquinas never once questioned that God is omnipotent.

McCormick argues that for some miracles, a being would not have to be omnipotent. This is true, but I don’t know of academic philosophers arguing that God is omnipotent on purely miraculous grounds alone. There is always some metaphysics involved.

This is part of the problem for McCormick. He never looks at arguments for theism. If theism is true, and this can be demonstrated by the Thomistic arguments I believe that are inductive, and then we have evidence of miracles taking place, such as from Keener, then it’s reasonable to conclude miracles are the work of the omnibeing that has been shown to exist. McCormick wants to go after miracles still more so he says later that

The problem is that at any given moment on the planet, now and when these miracles are alleged to have happened, there are millions or even billions of other people who are not being cured, healed, or benefitted by a miracle. A miracle that we attribute to an infinitely good God is problematic because of what it omits; it is alleged that it indicates that God is there, and under some circumstances, he will intervene in the course of nature to achieve some good end. But there are all of these other cases, many of which appear to be perfectly parallel, or even more desperately in need of divine intervention, yet none occurs. While Jesus turns water into wine at one party, thousands or millions of other parties go dry. Even worse, millions of people suffer horribly from disease, famine, cruelty, torture, genocide, and death. The occurrence of a finite miracle, in the midst of so many instances of unabated suffering, suggests that the being who is responsible doesn’t know about, doesn’t care about, or doesn’t have the power to address the others. If a doctor travels to a village with enough polio vaccine to inoculate 1,000 children, but only gives it to ten of them, and withholds it from the rest, and then watches the rest get sick, be crippled, or die, we would conclude that doctor was a monster, not a saint. That doctor had the power, the knowledge, the wherewithal to alleviate more suffering, but did not. That doctor must be lacking in some regard.

The problem is McCormick is making this argument so he has to back it. His argument is there is no good reason for God to not heal everyone else if He heals one. Okay. Maybe there isn’t, but He needs to convince me of it. It’s not just enough to assert it.

Let’s go with the doctor example he gives of the doctor with a polio vaccine. Let’s suppose he knew that one child he would give the vaccine to somehow would grow up and become a dictator in that country and murder most of the population. He chooses to withhold the vaccine. We could debate if that was right or wrong, but we can all understand why he did it.

He goes on to cite Christine Overall asking why Jesus is turning water into wine at a party when He could have been healing lepers. McCormick also says if God can heal everyone, why hasn’t He done so already? Why not yesterday?

The water into wine was done because Jesus was invited to the party and He wasn’t trying to make the party go longer, but rather to help the host of the party avoid shame. It was a good act to do to help out. As for why not heal, McCormick wants God to be a Johnny on the Spot fixing all of our problems. Is that really God’s goal? What if God has something far greater and nobler in mind than making sure we all have perfect lives here on Earth?

McCormick also cites William Rowe about situations in the inductive problem of evil. Note that I am sure Rowe would reject the argument McCormick puts forward as McCormick seems to be going with just the logical problem of evil. Now saying evil exists is no longer enough to refute theism as the majority of atheist philosophers on the subject concede. So what does Rowe say about certain instances of evil?

William Rowe has called these, “instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.”

So again I have the same question. How does he know? How does he know that this evil could have been stopped without losing a greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse? How could this possibly be established? Note that the atheist has the burden of proof. They are making the claim that needs to be backed.

McCormick later says:

If God has the goal of instilling belief, inspiring faith, fortifying resolve, discouraging misbehavior, or enforcing commandments, it takes very little imagination to conceive of more direct, effective, and sustained means of achieving those ends.

Notice it’s “If God has the goal.” We wait to hear how McCormick has discovered the goals of the Almighty, but that is not coming. He goes on to cite Ted Drange saying:

if these were God’s goals, then it would have been a simple matter to directly implant belief into all people’s minds, or perform more spectacular miracles that would convince more people. What would be more personal than if Jesus had reappeared to everyone, not just a handful of easily discredited zealots? Millions of angels, disguised as humans, could have spread out and preach the word behind the scenes. Or God could have protected the Bible from defects in writing, copying, and translation.

If those were the goals. What if they’re not? After all, Biblically, it’s been when miracles have been at a high that faith has often been at a low. Jesus was doing miracles and got crucified. The Israelites in the wilderness got several miracles and still rebelled. Maybe God’s goal is not just getting people to know He exists. Maybe He wants people to really seek Him on their own and want Him on their own. Maybe He doesn’t want to compel, but simply to woo. Of course, McCormick’s essay would not be complete without a version of Ancient People Were Stupid:

Consider the problem this way. For all of the alleged miracles in history, facsimiles that are undetectable to anyone but an expert can be performed naturally by even mediocre magicians and illusionists. David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear on television. Penn and Teller catch bullets in their teeth. A Las Vegas magician appears to walk on water in a swimming pool and float in the air over the Luxor hotel. Imagine the social and religious impact these ingenious illusionists could have had amongst the superstitious, poor, and uneducated masses of New Testament Palestine. Religious leaders such as Billy Graham, Peter Popoff, Robert Tilton, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell use cruder and more transparent trickery and deception to win the hearts of millions of people and acquire vast wealth from more educated, modern people.

To begin with, I don’t know anyone who would think that Billy Graham was out there trying to get vast wealth from people. However, does McCormick not realize ancient people knew some basic facts? They built ships because they knew people don’t walk on water. They made wine because they knew it didn’t just happen. They grew food because they knew food doesn’t multiply. They knew blind eyes don’t suddenly open and paralytics don’t get up and walk and dead people stay dead. This was not news to them. If we want to talk about things modern people fall for that is unbelievable, it’s that they still fall for this line of reasoning McCormick gives.

In conclusion, I am once again seeing why it is that McCormick could fall for something like Jar’Edo Wens. He really just thinks he’s asking astute questions, but he’s not. There is no interaction with any number of Christian experts on the problem of evil whatsoever. There are just blanket assertions. Anyone can raise questions. It’s a shame he doesn’t try to find answers.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

The Case Against Miracles Chapter 1

What do I think of David Corner’s chapter? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

David Corner has the first chapter in John Loftus’s book on Miracles and the challenge of the apologist. Why is it that an apologist would have a hard time with miracles? Reading through, I didn’t really find anything that I found remotely convincing in Corner. It looked like more just pointing back to Hume over and over.

Also noteworthy is I remember no mention of Keener’s work in the chapter. If a miracle has taken place, then the challenge of Corner is taken care of. Corner could try to just say “Well, it’s some natural thing we don’t understand yet.” Feel free to think that, but most of us will be unconvinced.

Early on, Corner starts with defining a miracle. He cites both Augustine and Aquinas, but then goes to Hume. This to me sounds like going to Ken Ham when you want to learn about evolution. Even if you disagree with Augustine and Aquinas, why not go with them because then you know you’re going with someone who represents your opponents’ side? I think we know why. Still, let’s see what he says about Hume.

In his Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding,[ 30] David Hume offered two definitions of “miracle;” first, as a violation of natural law;[ 31] shortly afterward he offers a more complex definition when he says a miracle is “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”[ 32] This second definition offers two important criteria that an event must satisfy in order to qualify as a miracle: It must be a violation of natural law, but this by itself is not enough; a miracle must also be an expression of the divine will. This means that a miracle must express divine agency; if we have no reason to think that an event is something done by God, we will have no reason to call it a miracle.

I do think the idea of being connected to God at the end a good point to have. Suppose we have a case where someone is in a state such as a comatose state and has no response whatsoever and there are people gathered in prayer. Just as they are done praying, the person wakes up. Are they justified in believing in a miracle? Yes.

The problem also is Corner spends a lot of time addressing supernaturalism, but he never talks about what it is really. He says this about the idea of nature:

Those who would defend supernaturalism sometimes do this through a commitment to an ontology of entities that exist in some sense outside of nature, where by “nature” is meant the totality of things that can be known by means of observation and experiment, or more generally, through the methods proper to the natural sciences.

But what is meant by observation and experiment? I know 2 + 2 = 4 by observation. I don’t have to do experiments to find that out. At times throughout the day, I can look out my office window here and see cats. There are many different cats, but I get the idea of cat out of all of them and learn what a cat is despite differences in size, color, etc. The same could be said for dogs.

I can reason to other things like triangularity or goodness from there. I can also reason to God. I don’t do an experiment. I just follow rules of deductive reasoning to get to my conclusion. What I wonder though is by Corner’s definition if the nature of cats, triangularity, goodness, etc. would be part of nature or not. Evolution might explain how cats came about. It doesn’t explain how the universal nature of cats exists.

He also contends methodological naturalism tells us that observation and experiment can tell us all that we need to know. I disagree with this definition of it. What I see it as being is that when a scientist does his work in the lab, he assumes that there are no external agents interfering without cause.

The first hurdle Corner deals with is testimony. Can testimony evidence a miracle? The problem is Corner presents a number of ways testimony can go wrong, and it can. He never says how it can go right. What are the grounds by which a miracle could be said to have a reliable source? If he cannot give any, then is he not begging the question to say it can never overcome?

That would make sense since that is what Hume said. The best Corner can say is it will give us the suspension of judgment, but if you approach every testimony to a miracle with “Either false or suspend judgment” then you will never conclude a miracle has happened. Why? Because you know a miracle has never happened. This gets us into begging the question. More will be said on that later.

He also does cite Earman, but there’s not much engagement. Earman points out that Hume’s argument would work against marvels being believed and would thus be a science stopper if followed through. Earman says this as an agnostic. One point made is that Earman says we could have a large number of witnesses. Corner replies that we have no way of accessing their credibility as witnesses so we shouldn’t trust them.

But again, this just gets us to begging the question. The account cannot possibly be accepted as true. Corner gives us no grounds and even if true, it is insisted that it would have to have a natural cause. Corner has things stacked in his favor here. No matter what, it has to be a natural event because, well, reasons.

When asked about begging the question, Corner says we can’t assume the “supernatural” worldview is correct and says an apologist arguing for a miracle is. Yet at the same time, Corner thinks it’s just fine to assume the naturalistic worldview is correct. An apologist arguing for a miracle does not have to assume a supernatural worldview. He can present this as evidence for God and the person responding can decide if the evidence is reliable or not. You don’t have to accept God’s existence to think there could be good evidence for a miracle.

Corner later goes so far as to say that we usually say that either an event has a natural cause or a supernatural cause. He argues maybe it had no cause at all. He would have someone who would challenge that. Namely, David Hume, or is this the point where we drop Hume?

“But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that that anything might arise without a cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source.” (David Hume to John Stewart, February 1754, in The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols, ed. J. Y. T Greig[Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1932], I:187)

And once again I am reminded how far skeptics like Corner will go to to defend their position. It strikes me as a position of believing anything else before believing a miracle. Nature can just go through spontaneous lapses sometimes in uniformity, but yet this would destroy science itself. Would Corner sacrifice science to avoid a miracle? Possibly.

Corner also asks how a God could do a miracle. He says:

All of the cases of causal interaction of which we are aware occur between physical entities that are fundamentally similar to one another in terms of possessing physical properties such as mass, electrical charge, location in space, etc. Thus, we know for example how one billiard ball may move another by virtue of the transfer of momentum. But God, as normally conceived by theistic religion, possesses none of these qualities, and cannot therefore interact with physical objects in any way that we can understand. God cannot, for example, transfer momentum to a physical object if God does not possess mass.

Yet this is again begging the question. What if I believe that I have an immaterial aspect to me and that that aspect of me interacts with my body? Then I have firsthand evidence in my case that immaterial forces can do that. Do I know how? No. Not at all. I don’t know how I fall asleep at night either, but I seem to do it every night.

Even if all that we had indicated physical changes are caused by physical objects, that does not demonstrate immaterial objects can’t do the same thing. Corner needs to demonstrate this and he hasn’t done so. Furthermore, if I have theistic arguments and I am convinced they work, then I have a priori evidence that this does happen.

He also says the problem of miracles is they lack predictive power, but why should this be a problem? If I am dealing with a free-will agent, why should I think they will always follow rules like that? My wife will appreciate something from me at one time and the next time not appreciate it. Some days I might enjoy a game and some days I might not. Free-will agents don’t act according to natural laws like that.

He also asks about miracles that do have natural causes, but this is not a problem. Suppose the Israelites cross the Jordan and we are told that regularly the waters stop so people can walk through. The miracle is not that they stopped, but when they stopped, in direct response to prayer.

In conclusion, I really don’t see anything convincing in Corner’s argument, at least for his position. If anything, it makes me more aware of the hurdles skeptics go to to avoid miracles. It’s easier to believe in things even Hume called absurd apparently than to be open to a miracle at all.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Myths and Mistakes of New Testament Textual Criticism

What do I think of Peter Gurry and Elijah Hixson’s book published by IVP? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Textual Criticism is a fine science. There are many nuances to it and it’s easy to make mistakes in it. Fortunately, this book has been written to address many of the myths that one finds out there so that the apologist, scholar, and pastor can be better equipped.

About time isn’t it? Yep. Bart Ehrman has been putting some misinformation out there. It’s great to know that a work has been written to address his mistakes. Right?

Well, no. Ehrman is mentioned, but if anyone is in the sights of these authors the most often, it’s fellow Christian apologists! Does that make any sense? Why would a book devoted to errors in textual criticism be targeting people who are on their side?

Because many people today who are apologists and scholars and pastors are getting things wrong and if we want to be people of truth, we have to be willing to call out our own.

You could think that textual criticism is a big field, and you would be right. You could think that no one can be a specialist in everything out there in this field, and you would also be right. You could then think that two people couldn’t write a book addressing those areas, and you would again be right. That’s why Gurry and Hixson have gathered a team to write about these myths, each person having a specialty study in the field.

I am so sure of the importance of this field that I went to my father-in-law, who many of you know is Mike Licona, and told him that he needs to read this book before he goes anywhere and answers a question on textual criticism again. Many great scholars have bought into these myths. I even found some that I have held before, such as the idea that you could re-create a strong majority of the NT from the writings of the church fathers alone.

The reader will find several other topics here. Exactly how many manuscripts do we have and how does that compare to classical works? Are earlier works really necessarily better? Were the texts of the NT copied by amateurs who just weren’t competent as scribes? How many variants are there and how do we date manuscripts?

If you have spoken on textual criticism at any time and go through this book and don’t find you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the way, you are a very rare person indeed. I would recommend every apologist and scholar out there read this before speaking on the topic. We will still make mistakes, but let’s not make these mistakes again.

If you want to know how to avoid mistakes in the field, buy this book. If you want to know better information about how we got our text and its reliability in transmission, buy this book. If you just want to be better informed, buy this book.

Bottom line. Buy this book.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Deeper Waters Podcast 12/28/2019

What’s coming up? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

What are the Gospels? I understand that we can say they’re the accounts that we have of the life of Jesus, but what are they? What purpose do they really serve? What did the writers want us to get out of them?

Not only that, what purpose did they serve? How did the ancient people view the Gospels? What did they expect when they read the Gospels? Did they think the authors really believed there was a historical figure who did these things or did they think this was a nice set of novels?

Let’s go even further. What were the writers of these works thinking? Did they have any ideas for the best way to go about telling the accounts of Jesus? What liberties did they have with the source material? Why didn’t they cite source material? What sources did they even use and were they right to use them?

These are questions we can ask when we approach the Gospels. We can also ask then about the reliability of the Gospels. Was memory that reliable? What about the distance in time? What about the Gospels being anonymous?

If only we had someone who had really studied all of these kinds of questions and was an excellent scholar in the field.

Oh, wait. We do have such a person, and he is my guest this Saturday for the Deeper Waters Podcast talking about his latest book (Although he’s sure to have written another one in the time it took me to write this blog), Christobiography. Returning to our show is Craig Keener.

So who is he?

According to his bio:

Bio sketch: Craig S. Keener (PhD, Duke University) is F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of Biblical Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. He is author of twenty-eight books (thirty-three volumes), six of which have won awards in Christianity Today, plus other awards. He has also authored roughly one hundred academic articles; seven booklets; and more than one hundred fifty popular-level articles. His IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, which provides cultural background on each passage of the New Testament, has sold more than half a million copies. Craig is the New Testament editor for the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, which won the International Book Award for Christianity and Bible of the year in the Christian Book Awards. In 2020 Craig is president of the Evangelical Theological Society, and he is married to Dr. Médine Moussounga Keener. His blog site is http://www.craigkeener.com/.

Now that the holidays have passed, hopefully, we’ll be able to devote the time to getting the shows back on schedule again. I hope you’ll be waiting. Be there for the next episode of the Deeper Waters Podcast.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Urban Legends of the Old Testament

What do I think of Gary Yates and David Croteau’s book published by B&H Academic? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

When I saw this book, I was intrigued by the idea and ordered it, and I am thankful that I did. This is a book that you can either read straight through or go through select chapters. Each chapter is short and starts off with the legend and then a response and then an application that follows.

The book is really incredibly readable. For me, many times when I near the end of the book, I really want to just finish it. With this one, I found myself enjoying each chapter as they were stand-alone in a quite entertaining way. At the same time, they’re incredibly informative.

This doesn’t mean that I agree with every assessment the authors have. For instance, I am still prone to see the Angel of the Lord as a Trinitarian precursor. Some items in particular I was very pleased to see. I was pleased to see the Harbinger and Isaiah 9:10, the Isaiah passage about how God’s word will not return void, and of course, Jeremiah 29:11.

Others I think they did a good job on but still left open to a kernel of truth. Perhaps Psalm 22 is not a prophecy of the crucifixion, but perhaps it can depict Jesus as the ultimate unjust sufferer who is handed over to His enemies as is the case in the Psalm. Perhaps Ezekiel bread really is a very healthy bread, but it might not be that just because it’s a meal described in the Bible we should eat it.

Some I think many people might be astounded by today, but the case I thought made was quite good. Could it be that Genesis 3 really doesn’t contain a prophecy of the virgin birth (Which I do affirm)? Could it be that maybe the Arabs aren’t the descendants of the Ishmaelites and that wars between Muslims and Christians today aren’t a result of that dispute thousands of years ago?

Some of these correct false teachings that need to be corrected, but at the same time provide a better teaching. What about training up a child in the way he should go? Does Proverbs 31 give a mandate for every wife to be like that woman? Is Song of Songs really best seen as describing dating?

Also, the authors don’t really try to go after controversial debates in the Old Testament as urban legends. How old is the Earth? Nothing said about it, although there is something said about NASA supposedly finding Joshua’s missing day. The issues here should be ones that Christians largely can agree on.

I really found this book to be a fascinating and engaging read and I highly recommend it. You’re bound to find something of interest in here and I have deliberately left out many of the conclusions just so you can discover them for yourselves. The book is also definitely layman-friendly and would be a great resource for small groups.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Walking This Walk

What do I think of Brad Erlandson’s book published by Xulon Press? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Upfront, Brad is a friend of mine. He gave me his book free of charge as a gift and I wish to provide a fair review. I am going to try to avoid bias as best I can.

I have long had the opinion that if you had a good writer and director behind it, you could take the life of any person you meet on the street and turn it into a major motion picture and it would be a box office hit. People are fascinating and their stories are interesting.

Erlandson’s story is a common story about growing up in a family and actually being rebellious. Eventually, he finds his way to Jesus and from then on, his story is about his zeal to spread the gospel. Something about the book is that he goes regularly from autobiography to exhortation about how he thinks people ought to live.

In the last third of the book, he gets to the main part where he talks about being hit by a drunk driver and how he is now in a wheelchair as a result. He talks about his attitude toward the lady who hit him and how to view the disabled. He talks about his opinion on faith healing and how some pastors do go too far with this.

There are times I found myself disagreeing with some positions Erlandson gave in his book, but these are rightfully on secondary issues and Erlandson says he is fine with people having different opinions, which he knows from our personal discussions. He doesn’t deny that these issues should be discussed, but they should not be a point of disagreement. With this, I fully agree.

The book is also easy to read. There is not really difficult theology in there that people will not understand. There is a touch of apologetics involved. This is not just about the problem of evil, but other areas. Erlandson himself spent some time teaching apologetics at a church.

Sometimes, I did wish Erlandson would focus more on the crash. As I said, this showed up in the last third of the book. Perhaps it would have been good to have done it like it can be done in a TV show where you will get shown a scene of a later event and then the episode goes to show you how you got to that event.

I also did think sometimes Erlandson seemed to get distracted and spend more time with a story than I thought necessary. These stories could be interesting at the time, but then you’d move on and wonder what it has to do with the main story. Of course, the problem could lie with me.

Still, Erlandson’s story is a sad story and a happy one both. It is sad to think about the evil that he has gone through, but there is joy in seeing that he handles it and perseveres. Does he want to be healed? Of course, but he at the same time still lives and enjoys his life in the meanwhile. It is one thing for evil to happen to you in the past. It is one thing to stay in that and let it keep happening to you. As he says, you can get bitter or better. Erlandson has chosen better, and may it not be taken from him.

In Christ,
Nick Peters

Book Plunge: Primal Screams

What do I think of Mary Eberstadt’s book published by Templeton Press? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.

Wolves are not solitary animals. They travel in packs. They form families. They have tribes. They work together in a community. People might have believed the lone wolf was typical some time ago, but today those who know animals know that that is a myth.

People also tend to travel in tribes. For most of us, the first tribe is the family, but what happens if the family isn’t a tribe? What happens if the family is in disarray? What happens if you don’t know who your Dad is and you don’t have siblings to relate to and Mom is bringing home a new man on a regular basis?

Our culture has changed drastically since the sexual revolution, which is what Mary Eberstadt is writing about in this book. In the past, it was the norm for sexual behavior to take place between a husband and a wife in marriage. Today, no more. In the past, you used to see a man and a woman go into a room in a movie and heard a lock click and you knew what was going on. Today, you have to see them taking each other’s clothes off because that’s the only way you can know what is happening.

This leaves men and women wondering what it means to be a man and a woman, especially our young people. Is it any wonder there’s so much confusion? If I don’t know who I am, I will jump at any chance to have a rock I can put my identity on. I need something stable. This also assumes that God is not there properly understood. We are alone in a universe adrift and we have to figure out how we’re going to make it.

So here comes individualism and identity politics. Why do we have so many people running to safe places and talking about being offended and cultural appropriation? Because they really feel unsafe, they are offended, and they do think their culture is being taken from them. We’ve heard them complain about this and we have called them snowflakes, but how many of us have considered that while we disagree with what they’re saying, they really are convinced of it?

After all, if your culture defines you, what happens if someone tries to take your culture for themselves? They are really attacking your identity. How can that make you you if I can take it for myself? You thnk you need a safe place because you think you as a person are under attack. You see yourself being offended because you think you again are being attacked.

In this culture, men don’t know what it means to be men. Men don’t really know how to approach women and how to treat them. Big shock that they’re trying to just demonstrate their manhood and they think the best way to do that is to conquer as many women as possible, which leads to women becoming notches on bedposts. Pornography isn’t such a big deal then if women are just bodies to bring about pleasure.

Women also don’t know how to handle men. What does a woman think is going to happen when any man invites her to a hotel room for the night? The MeToo movement has shown that many women are not aware of how to handle things. Could women have come forward en masse because women didn’t know they were allowed to do that? Did women think this is par for the course with men? Did they also think that because men failed to be protectors and instead solely became predators? After all, in many of these stories about women being assaulted in some way, where are the good men?

This thinking also leads to transgenderism. Why not? The lines between the sexes have blurred so much that there is now getting to hardly be any distinction between them. As it turns out, now men are truly superior at everything. Men are superior at being women.

So it is that we have a culture that does not know who it is and Eberstadt’s book is sounding the alarm. The wolves normally don’t travel alone. Sometimes they leave the tribe for whatever reason and then you hear their primal screams of abandonment.

The culture is screaming.

Let’s do something about it.

In Christ,
Nick Peters