by Lee Strobel
“Yet,” I said, “other incidents aren’t merely improbable; they better fit Purtill’s definition. For instance, you did a radio show with a pastor who offered examples of several cases in which people were healed after he prayed for them in the name of Jesus. He provided names, dates, witnesses, and medical evaluations. Why don’t you find cases like this convincing?”
“First of all, I haven’t seen the medical reports myself,” he said. “But when you give anecdotes about medical healings, it always seems to be things that might have happened on their own anyway. A tumor went into remission—well, sometimes cancer does go into remission. It’s not common, but is it a miracle? I’d say it’s a statistical anomaly. It’s part of nature, so, no, I wouldn’t call it miraculous.
“And by the way, we see remarkable recoveries through the placebo effect, which is when people receive a fake or ineffective treatment, but they get better anyway because they believe they’re being healed or they expect they’ll get better. This can be seen when people are asked to subjectively rate their pain. ‘How’s your migraine today? It’s a nine? Okay, we’re going to try meditation or prayer.’ Now it goes down to a six. Did that really work? I don’t know. It could have been wishful thinking. But let’s be realistic: you’re not going to heal an AIDS patient that way.”
“What would it take to convince you?” I asked.
Shermer thought for a moment. “We have all these wounded soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of them are amputees. They have Christian families that pray to Jesus, and yet none of them has grown back a limb. Why can’t God do that? Certain amphibians can grow back limbs. Why can’t God do that?”
“So,” I said, “you’d want something unambiguous, out in the open—clear and obvious.”
“Yes, growing back a limb would get my attention. That would be more convincing than cancer. It would definitely make the evening news. Of course, I’d want to make sure it wasn’t some sort of illusion or magic trick. But assuming it wasn’t, I’d say, ‘All right, God, here’s a roomful of amputees. Get to work!’”
He said the problem with anecdotes about healings and other miracles is that they’re just that—anecdotes. “Without corroboration or some sort of physical proof, ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten,” he said. “We need to study them scientifically. And when we do, guess what? Science doesn’t support them. I’m sure you’re familiar with STEP.”
The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Medical School, was a ten-year, $2.4 million clinical trial of the effects of prayer on 1,802 cardiac bypass patients at six hospitals.6
Patients undergoing cardiac bypass surgery were broken into three groups. One group was prayed for by intercessors and a second group was not, although nobody in either group knew for sure whether they were being uplifted in prayer. A third group was prayed for after being told they definitely would receive prayer. Then researchers tracked the number of complications from the surgeries.
“The results were very revealing,” said Shermer. “There was no difference in the rate of complications for patients who were prayed for and those who were not. Nothing. Zero. And, in fact, those who knew they were being prayed for had more complications. This is the best prayer study we have. So when you get beyond anecdotes and use the scientific method, there’s no evidence for the miraculous.”
I lifted my hand to stop him. “Nevertheless,” I said, “these kinds of prayer studies have intrinsic problems. For example, you can’t control people praying for themselves or having family and friends who were praying for them.”
“That’s true,” Shermer said. “But you have to admit that this study is the best one we have, and it fails to support all of these anecdotes that claim divine intervention. And it’s funded primarily by the Templeton Foundation, which is certainly friendly toward religion and faith.”
He gestured toward me. “That’s not good for your side, Lee.”
“Still,” I said, “miracles are a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature. They’re onetime events. Doesn’t that make them difficult to investigate scientifically?”
“Yes, it’s difficult. But we have to remember that it’s okay to say, ‘I don’t know what happened.’ Bodies are super-complex systems. The fact that you don’t know why something occurred doesn’t mean anything miraculous, supernatural, or paranormal happened. It just means, ‘I don’t know.’”
A “Knockdown” Argument?
David Hume, then a twenty-three-year-old bookworm, did something radical in 1734: he stepped off his career path, left his native Scotland, and headed to France to live an austere life of thinking and writing. He returned three years later, bearing his three-volume opus, A Treatise of Human Nature.
When it was published, though, it failed to garner the attention Hume coveted. Instead, as he would lament years later, it “fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.”7
Ultimately, after more years of work and rewriting, Hume would emerge as an influential philosopher, economist, and historian, perhaps best known for his skepticism about faith and miracles. He is now regarded as “one of the most important philosophers to write in English.”8
It was Hume who declared, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”—a phrase Shermer has hailed by saying, “Better words could not be found for a skeptical motto.”9
Hume devoted Section X of his Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, written in 1748, to the topic of miracles. For Hume, miracles were a violation of natural law, yet natural law is always and unalterably uniform. Therefore, no amount of evidence would convince him that God had intervened. Indeed, any explanation made more sense than a miracle occurring.
Hume declared that there has never in history been any miracle that has been sufficiently established as being true, having occurred publicly, and having been witnessed and reported by people of unquestioned integrity and reputation.10
Scholar Graham H. Twelftree points out that there are different interpretations of the various arguments that Hume sets forth in his works. One is that he was saying miracles are simply impossible. Another is that the evidence against a miracle always exceeds the evidence for it. A third is that the standard of proof to establish a miracle claim is so high that it cannot be met, and hence miracles are irrational. Regardless, Hume immodestly predicted that his case against miracles would provide an everlasting check on superstitious delusions.11
When asked why he’s personally skeptical about miracles, Shermer invariably invokes Hume.
“His classic argument still stands today: Which is more likely, that the laws of nature be suspended or that the person telling you the story is mistaken or has been deceived?” he said. “Misperceptions are common. People make things up. We have a lot of experience with this. It could be an illusion, a hallucination, a mistake—whatever. All of that is more likely than a miracle.”
“So you consider Hume’s thinking to be persuasive?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. I think his treatise against miracles is pretty much a knockdown argument. Everything else is a footnote.”
“Why,” I asked, “do you think Christians believe in miracles? Are they gullible?”
“It has nothing to do with education or intelligence. When I was a Christian, little things would happen and I’d think, God caused that. I’d ignore stuff that didn’t fit that pattern. This is confirmation bias: you find confirming evidence for what you already believe, and you ignore the disconfirming evidence.
“The power of expectation is strong,” he added. “Take a group of people through an old theatre in London and say, ‘This place is haunted.’ Take another group through and say, ‘We’re renovating the theatre; tell us how you feel about the look of the place.’ Even if the two groups hear the same noises or see the same sha
dows, they’ll interpret it differently based on what they expect.”
“Do you think this kind of expectation affects people at healing services in churches?”
“Much of that is psychological, I’m sure. I don’t think the leaders of Pentecostal churches are fraudulent. I think they really believe that the power of God is at work. But when people expect to feel better, often they do. That’s the placebo effect. They feel better—for a while. But there’s rarely any documentation that these so-called healings are permanent.”
“How do you define faith?”
“It’s believing something when there’s no evidence for it,” he said. “If there were evidence, it wouldn’t be faith. You don’t take the germ theory of disease on faith; you don’t believe on faith that HIV causes AIDS. You accept that because there’s good evidence for them. I’d say that believing something when there isn’t good evidence would be a category of faith.”
I was tempted to point out that biblical faith is taking a step in the same direction that the evidence is pointing, which actually is rational and logical. But this wasn’t the time for a debate; there was still much ground to cover in his case against miracles.
CHAPTER 3
Myths and Miracles
The Bible records about three dozen miracles performed by Jesus of Nazareth, although the gospel of John says that these are just a sampling of all the wonders he wrought.1
“If we open the Gospels at almost any place, we cannot avoid encountering the miracles and the miraculous,” observed Graham Twelftree, the noted New Testament professor.2 Even the liberal Jesus scholar Marcus Borg said, “Despite the difficulty which miracles pose for the modern mind, on historical grounds it is virtually indisputable that Jesus was a healer and exorcist.”3
I wanted to explore these biblical miracles as I continued my conversation with Shermer. Still feeling stiff from my long flight to California, I stood to stretch my legs and then leaned casually on the back of my chair.
“Let’s talk about Jesus,” I said. Shermer nodded, apparently eager to do so. “How do you evaluate the credibility of the New Testament accounts of his miracles?”
“I think this, in part, is a reporting problem,” he replied.
I gestured for him to elaborate. “How so?”
“Well, how accurate are these stories? People say five hundred witnesses saw the resurrected Jesus, but do we have five hundred sources? No, we have one source that says five hundred people saw him. That’s different than five hundred independent sources. How reliable is that one source that gets passed down and passed down—you know, like the telephone game. Decades after the fact, it’s written down by proselytizers who have a motive.”
He shifted in his seat, sitting up straight as if he were just getting started. “Besides,” he added, “they’re not thinking of historical accuracy in the way we do today. In ancient times, the point of history wasn’t to record what actually occurred; rather, it was to make a point. What Jesus really said and did in sequence wasn’t that significant to them. That’s why so many details differ.
“It’s clear,” he continued, “that the gospels are cobbled together, edited, redacted, refined—the whole Bible is like that. All of this goes a long way toward explaining why these particular stories evolved and developed over time as it became more and more important to solidify the Christian faith as the One True Religion rather than one faith among many.
“We’re talking four centuries before the church said, ‘These are the canonical books, that’s it. All these other apocryphal books are out.’ Why? What’s wrong with the Gospel of Thomas?4 Or the other ones? To me, they’re indistinguishable.”
I sat back down and took a sip of water as I pondered my next question. “Do you think other mythologies and mystery religions, like the stories of Osiris and Mithras, influenced the writers of the New Testament?”5
“Yes,” he answered, “I think there was diffusion across cultures with myths in the Mediterranean world, where there were oral traditions getting passed down.”
“If the gospels didn’t intend to report actual history,” I said, “then what was their purpose?”
“Take the story of Jonah and the whale. Forget whether a person can live inside a whale or not. That’s not the point of the story. The point of the story is redemption, starting over. These are homilies. They’re myths. In a way, asking if they’re true misses the point. The real issue is what they represent. For Christians, it’s, ‘I get a lot out of the story because it helps me deal with tragedy and pain in my life.’ That’s the point of the story. And by the way, I think atheists miss that too, because their focus is on, ‘Did it really happen? We’re going to debunk this nonsense. It’s trash.’ I think everybody is missing the larger picture, the mythic character of it. Myths are important.”
“Do you believe Jesus existed?” I asked.
In the back of my mind, I was recalling the cover story on that topic in a 2014 edition of Skeptic magazine. Its seemingly reluctant conclusion: based not on the New Testament but on two references by first-century historian Titus Flavius Josephus, Jesus was deemed to be historical, though “barely.” Then came this caveat: “Ultimately, however, the historical Jesus is so imbued with mythic characteristics as to render his historicity moot.”6
“Yes,” said Shermer, “I accept that Jesus lived.”
“Can we know much about him that’s reliable?”
“Details of his life are pretty thin,” he responded. “For instance, what was he doing during his childhood?”
I said, “One of the events Christians consider important is the resurrection. The apostle Paul says in First Corinthians 15:17 that if it isn’t true, then Christianity crumbles.7 It seems to me this is a historical issue that can be investigated by skeptics. Did Jesus live? Was he executed? Was he reliably encountered afterward? Aren’t those three facts that can lead us to a conclusion?”
“In my opinion, he existed and was crucified,” came his reply. “But then there’s an ontological leap—was there a miraculous resurrection? You know, sometimes people see or hear voices of their lost loved ones because they want to. They miss them. They’ve spent decades with the person, and they hear them in the other room: ‘Oh, that’s right. He’s dead. But I heard his voice.’ Maybe something like this happened. Or maybe it was a partially concocted story that emerged after decades of thinking, writing, and talking. After all, stories of resurrected deities were not uncommon; they were floating around in the milieu of the day. I can easily see how this could be adopted over a long period of time. And then there’s the Jewish problem.”
“What do you mean?”
“Culturally, Christians are brothers with Jews. You believe in the same God and much of the same Holy Book. So why don’t they accept the resurrection story? Are they just not thinking clearly enough? Have they not examined the evidence properly? You’re talking about some really smart people. Even Muslims don’t accept it. Allah is supposedly the same God as Yahweh, but they don’t think Jesus could have been the Son of God. They think that’s not just wrong, but blasphemous.”
Shermer wasn’t done. “Why do the accounts of his resurrection appearances vary? Why the discrepancies?” he asked. “Again, it’s because the details weren’t very important. I think the point of the death and resurrection story is destruction and redemption. It’s starting over. It’s rebuilding. I think the message is that it’s up to us to create our own heaven here. The kingdom of God is here. It’s now. It’s you. It’s in your heart. It’s up to you to build a better life for you and your family and friends and community. Not in the next life—in this life.”
“And you think the resurrection was a metaphorical teaching created to make that point?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“Who do you think Jesus was?” I asked.
“He was probably a moral teacher, fairly advanced for his times. He seemed to be open to women’s issues. There’s Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad—they
’re all great moral teachers who had different roles at different times. No one is above the other. No one is God. Muslims have their own supernatural beliefs—Muhammad went to heaven on a flying white horse. That’s no more crazy than rising from the dead. They’re equally improbable. Which one is right? Why are 1.2 billion Muslims wrong?”
“But,” I said, “why would Jesus have been executed just for being a moral teacher?”
“The Romans were fairly tolerant as long as you paid your taxes and recognized Caesar as God, and I think, in part, that’s where Jesus got into trouble—not recognizing Caesar as God,” he replied. “People were executed right and left for all kinds of things back then. It’s what people did before modern sensibilities.”
He paused and then said, “Look, the messiah myth has recirculated through different cultures over the years. The belief in a returning Messiah who offers redemption—that’s one of the limited number of responses to the hardships of the human condition. It may be a fictitious narrative, but it represents something deeply meaningful. It’s a quest for hope. For purpose. For a second chance. For a new kingdom in this world.”
He shook his head. “Not for some imaginary world to come.”
The Miracle That Started It All
The granddaddy of all miracles is the creation of the universe from nothing. If Genesis 1:1 is correct when it reads, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” then lesser miracles become more credible. In other words, if God can command an entire universe and even time itself to leap into existence, then walking on water would be like a stroll in the park and a resurrection would be as simple as a snap of the fingers.
“Christians point to cosmology as evidence for the existence of God,” I said to Shermer. “Science tells us the universe began to exist at some point in the past, so what could have brought everything into existence? Whatever it is, it must be powerful, smart, immaterial, timeless or eternal, and so on—all of which are attributes of God. What’s wrong with that argument?”