No Miracles Today Implies None Then?

Amy Sayers 

Whenever I come across a version of this skeptics’ mantra, I pause, shake my head a little, and whisper to myself, “Do they actually think this argument works?”  Yet my reading and hearing of it happens frequently enough to warrant an answer. Often, this argument is made beneath the cover of casual observation and seemingly simple logic like, “I don’t see God working miracles now.  Why on earth would I believe that He worked a major one like resurrecting a dead man two thousand years ago?”  On occasion, I see it made more formally, such as in Richard Carrier’s essay “Why I Don’t Buy the Resurrection Story.” I first comment on the general form of the argument, and then address Carrier’s specific version of it. 

What I find most notable about this argument is that it is built on two untenable premises. Fleshed out, the basic formulation looks like this:

1.      If there are no miracles today, then it is reasonable to presume that there were no miracles in the past. 

2.      There are no miracles today.

3.      Therefore, there were no miracles in the past.           

The first premise is seriously flawed.  Even if it were true that “there are no miracles now,” it does not logically follow that there were “no miracles then.”  This argument of analogy between present and past cannot work in the negative sense.  It could work in the positive sense.  We can make positive observations and apply them to history.  Say, for instance, scientists were to note that the dirt in Palestine, when mixed with spit, demonstrated a healing quality that could make a blind human eye see, we would apply what we know today to the event recorded in Mark and conclude that Jesus had not performed a miracle after all.  We would argue that Palestinian dirt plus spit cures blindness today.  By analogy, Palestinian dirt plus spit cured blindness in the past. 

The analogy does not work in the negative sense.  We cannot argue: X is not the case now, therefore X was never the case.  For instance, there are no dinosaurs living today.  Does this necessarily or even sufficiently imply there were none ever?  One could point out that we have evidence that dinosaurs once existed, and that we have reasonable theories explaining why they don’t any longer.  We don’t, skeptics say, have comparable evidence that miracles once happened, nor a reasonable theory as to why they may have stopped. But this would be shifting the burden of the argument to the different points of evidence and theodicy. 

For this argument to work, the skeptic would have to add the condition, “in the absence of evidence to the contrary.” (For instance, dinosaur fossils would constitute evidence to the contrary.)  The skeptic objection would then go, “No miracles today implies, in the absence of evidence of past miracles or a miracle-working God, that there were no miracles in the past ever.” But the evidence for a miracle-working God includes the resurrection of the man who claimed to be God’s Son.  The skeptic can dispute this evidence, as many do.  But he cannot argue:

1. There is no evidence of past miracles or a miracle-working God.
2. The resurrection did not happen and is therefore not evidence of a miracle-working God.  I know this because I observe that there are no miracles today, and this implies there were none then.
3. Therefore, in the absence of evidence of past miracles or a miracle-working God, I conclude that the resurrection did not happen/was not a miraculous event and does not constitute evidence of past miracles or a miracle-working God.

This is circular logic, dooming the argument to a tailspin it cannot escape.

The faultiness of this first premise is enough to put it the argument to sleep forever.  But I have an additional objection, one that takes aim at what seems to be a habit among skeptical writers: now and then, they set forth questionable premises as though they were as self-evident as rocks. Such premises float about as well as said stones. 

The premise in question, “There are no observable miracles today” is far too bold a claim to make responsibly, a claim whose proof or disproof lies outside a skeptic’s willingness to establish.  Christians—let alone theists in general—make claims that they have experienced miracles. And they do so with such frequency that one would be hard-pressed to walk into a Christian church and NOT find someone who claimed to be at least a witness to a miracle.  The internet is full of web sites that present these stories, our news programs and papers are peppered with astounding tales of survival or freak occurrence or recovery that conclude with the chief witness testifying, “It was a miracle.”    

Now, I’m not offering such unspecified church-goers, web sites and news stories as evidence that miracles do occur.  I’m only pointing to the very, very tall stack of claims that the skeptic would need to evaluate before concluding, “There are no miracles today.” Surely, a good number of these accounts are crackpot fantasies, or exaggerations, or even fabrications.  But I’m not willing to stipulate that all miracle accounts are false.  To establish this premise, the skeptic would have to prove it.  He would be obligated to discredit the positive claims that have been made. And this, as I mention above, is an enormous task, probably far outside a skeptic’s willingness to attempt.  

In the absence of his investigation into each claim, must a skeptic grant that miracles do occur?  Not at all. Establishing this would be the Christian’s burden, and she would have to present a credible miracle account that stands up to scrutiny and investigation.  I won’t make such a presentation here, so neither will I make the claim, “Miracle do occur today.”  It seems that, lacking investigation into specific accounts, both sides of the miracle question are required to suspend a conclusion as to whether they happen. 

But isn’t there another option to proving this negative claim?  After all, to prove a negative, one must either falsify all the evidence for the positive, or summon sufficient evidence to disbelieve and find insufficient evidence to believe the positive. The skeptic thinks he has a whole secular web full of sufficient evidence to support disbelief, but he can’t declare that the evidence supporting belief is insufficient in the very argument he is using to establish that the evidence supporting belief is insufficient.  In other words, he cannot argue in a circle similar to the one I described above. “There are no miracles today.  I know this because I have found sufficient evidence to support my doubt and I have found the evidence to support belief in miracles to be insufficient.  For instance, the Resurrection is insufficient evidence. I know this because there are no miracles today to support belief that there were miracles in the past.”   

Of worthy note is that skeptics rarely make this argument in isolation.  Often, it is presented in context of a host of other reasons to doubt the Resurrection story, or the existence of God, or both.  And those arguments are to be considered on their own merit.  But the skeptic can only claim “There are no miracles today” if 1) he does the work of discrediting all positive claims or 2) he establishes through other arguments that there is insufficient reason to believe in miracles, and sufficient reason to doubt them.  The accomplishment of number 2, however, cannot use “There are no miracles today” without inviting another tailspin of logic into the argument.  

In the section that bears the heading title “No Miracles Today Implies None Then,” (found in <<this>> essay) http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/1.html#ii.  Richard Carrier offers a more specific formulation of the same bad argument.  He presents his observations about identity in relation to physiology, and concludes that when a person dies, he dies.  And he stays dead.  Carrier has had “no conversations with spirits of the dead,” and neither, I presume, has he experienced any other confirmation that dead people are anything but dead.  How can the story of the Resurrection “command more respect that (his) own two eyes?”   

Carrier’s formulation, then, is something like this:

1. If dead people are not resurrected today, they were not resurrected in the past.
2. Dead people stay dead today.
3. There is no evidence that a God exists who would or could perform a miracle that interferes with the deads’ state of staying dead.
4. Therefore, Jesus, who died “back then,” stayed dead, too. 

More simply put, Carrier writes, “This argument that such a radical restoration of life is ‘impossible,’ based on present observations . . .only presupposes that what we observe now is how things worked then.”    

The same objection I made to the general form applies here.  It is not logical to conclude that the lack of resurrected people today implies no person was resurrected ever.  The “what we observe now is how things worked then” analogy, as I argued above, does not apply to an assertion of a negative in history (e.g. “Jesus did not resurrect.”)  Carrier acknowledges as much when he anticipates the Christian response that Jesus may well have been the one exception to the “Dead stay dead” rule.  This is why he includes in this section what I have formulated into premise 3 above, a section that I will discuss below.   

Before diving into all that is wrong with this addition to the general form, I must note that the argument is no longer about whether there could have been one resurrection in the past, or whether God could have worked miracles in the past. And Carrier has not engineered anything to make this flawed formulation stand with any more integrity.  The argument is now about the evidence for a miracle-working God.  This is an enormous question—perhaps it’s the question as it is simply another way to ask, “How do I know that an all-powerful God exists?”  In the remainder of my essay, I do not intend to offer any positive answer to this question, only a defense that explicates why Carrier’s specific objection is not effective.  

Carrier writes, “All that is needed is the demonstration that God, like the laws of nature, is a regular, functioning part of what exists today, and that he actually has powers sufficient to work a resurrection.” 

So. . .Carrier’s standard of evidence is that miracles—which are by definition exceptions to natural law—be as “regular and functioning” as natural law?  How would he then define “miracle”?  This is the first big problem with his standard of evidence.   

The second is that, though an obviously confident man in his own thinking and writing, Carrier does not give enough credit to his fellow  skeptics’ intellectual capacity.  That is, specifically, their capacity for doubt.  What would max-out Carrier’s own capacity?  What would push him from doubt to belief?  If God were to go about “turning all guns in the world into flowers, rendering the innocent impervious to harm, protecting churches with mysterious energy fields” then Carrier’s standard of evidence would be met.  Let him speak for himself, though.  This evidence would not convince all. 

My guess is that other skeptics would suffer from Indiana Jones Syndrome. This is a malady so named for the famed action hero who opens his eyes at the end of the first movie to find throngs of nazis lying dead with cannon ball sized holes shot through them. Even though he did not actually see the power of the Old Testament God melt a man’s flesh from body and face, we would still expect him to chalk up the events of his rescue to the supernatural.  Yet, in movie two, Indie is not a Christian.  He’s not even a convert to Judaism who’s traded in his felt fedora for a yarmulke. It’s clear from the beginning of movie three that he’s not a theist at all.   

If God were to turn all of the world’s guns into flowers, Indiana Jones Syndrome manifested in skeptics would lead them to question the historicity of the event.  Some would doubt that the guns themselves morphed into flowers, and would consider themselves more reasonable to conclude that the gun-owners of the world were either part of an Operation Flower conspiracy or were themselves deceived.  Other skeptics would grant that the guns did turn into flowers, but would postulate that it was more likely the handiwork of aliens than an as-of-yet unproven God.  Still others would grant that it was God who turned the guns into flowers, and that it is unethical to worship such a God who would so callously leave millions and millions of soldiers around the world unemployed as their militaries were suddenly out of business.  And, two thousand years into the future, skeptics would point to the “Story of the Rifled Roses” as a legend circulated by a superstitious people—a majority of the present world’s population (depending the source, 60-80%) is, after all, theistic. 

And if God were to turn all new guns into flowers, making it a repeated event, and not just one of history, then scientists would investigate the matter with the scientific method, searching for the new or previously-un-discovered natural law that was causing the phenomenon.  They certainly would not allow a supernatural explanation to suit the events while the scientific investigation was so young. 

Meanwhile, other sufferers of Indiana Jones Syndrome would be working on the “Un-Harmed Challenge to Atheism,” arguing for why the sudden protection of the innocent does not constitute proof of a loving, powerful, good God.  “I’m innocent!” they’d be yelling, “And this so-called God didn’t protect me from getting mugged last night.”  If the Christian pointed out that God’s Un-Harmed umbrella of protection does not extend to people who don’t worship Him, the skeptic would throw up his hands and ask, “How could you worship such an ego-maniac???” 

Just like Indiana Jones, these skeptics, in the face of what others consider adequate evidence, would sally forth to their next adventure, un-changed by the revelation given to them. 

One might charge that I’ve been silly.  But the point of this silliness is to demonstrate that if miracles were as common as natural law, skeptics would search for a natural explanation for them.  If God performed a huge one-time-only miracle, it would become part of history, and therefore subject to some degree of doubt.  If God performed a huge, one-time-miracle that created a permanent result, such as the carving of “Jesus Lives” into the moon, the result might be indisputable, but the cause of it could still be questioned.  God could give us overwhelming evidence of His existence—and there are some of us who believe He has—but He cannot force people to reach a conclusion.  Or, if He can, He refuses to, as doing so would revoke a significant chunk of our free will. 

Maybe Richard Carrier, or another, would claim that any such skeptical objection made in response to evidence like this would be dogmatic, or unreasonable, or both. But this is just another way to declare how much evidence is enough for him personally.  And, once convinced, the skeptics he’s broken company with would be wrong, and demanding of too much.   

Then the converted-Carrier would be faced with a choice: either address these skeptics’ objections in person, in print, on-line, and in debates, or ignore them and go about living as the Christian he’s still surprised to find he’s become.  With the line of evidence so far behind him, he will wonder how it could still lie in front of others.  

What is clear to me is that this particular argument is a very poor reason for doubt, and should have no role in keeping a person on the doubting side of the line.