Why Miracles
Miracles can seem like a hard sell. David Hume didn’t believe you should believe in a miracle even though you saw one. Atheists and skeptics refuse to accept any report of the supernatural. If it doesn’t routinely happen, we simply pretend the accounts don’t exist. Recently, the entertainment industry in China was told that it could no longer portray supernatural events in its programming. Is there actually a case for miracles being real? Is a miracle possible?
1. A Basic Argument for Miracles
C.S. Lewis, once an atheist, had this to say about miracles. “But if we admit God, must we admit miracles? Indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain”. And he is quite right. If we believe in a God who can bring a universe into existence, it is possible that the same God can produce miracles within the universe he formed. A supernatural God makes supernatural events possible. Logically, it is undeniable. To disprove miracles, it would be necessary to disprove God. This has not been done.
Several neo-orthodox scholars such as Rudolph Bultmann and commentators like William Barclay look for natural explanations of the miraculous. They have done this for ostensibly good reasons. They would say that the secular world is turned away from Christianity because of miracle stories, and they would believe that the development of a natural solution would prevent the Bible from being viewed as wrong.
However, this misses the point that miracles are very important. Consider this: without miracles, the Bible cannot be the Word of God. It becomes a human book written by humans for humans. If all the miracles found in the Bible did not occur, the Bible cannot be a credible document. Jesus cannot be the Son of God except in a most general sense. Jesus made truth claims and performed miracles to support those claims, if the miracles are not credible then claims of Jesus are also suspect. In addition, without miracles, the resurrection cannot be an act of God. If the resurrection did not occur, we cannot be saved from our sin. So, before we jettison miracles, we should think long and hard about the consequences.