The Case for Miracles

by Lee Strobel

  “We also know that throughout church history, God has focused on different people groups in various eras. There have been great awakenings in Asia, South America, Europe, the United States, and Africa. For whatever reason, today God is reaching out to multiple people groups that have one thing in common: a huge proportion of the people are Muslim. I don’t know what he’ll do next.”

  As I chatted with Doyle, I had to confess that I felt a tinge of jealousy toward people who have had Jesus dreams. I’ve followed Christ for several decades now. I’ve delved deeply into the Scriptures. I’ve felt God’s presence, guidance, and power in my life. But to have a vivid and vibrant dream of talking with a white-robed Jesus and hearing his voice offer love, grace, and acceptance—well, I have to admit that would be awesome.

  “Do you envy them?” I said to Doyle as we were wrapping up our conversation. “Do you wish Jesus would appear to you in a dream?”

  “Wow,” he said, just thinking about the prospect. “Who wouldn’t want an encounter like that? Yeah, it would be incredible. But I’ve got the Scriptures to tell me about Jesus; I have his Spirit to affirm and guide me; and I know I’ll see him face-to-face someday.”

  His face looked content. “Yes,” he said finally, “that’s enough for me.”

  A Kitchen, a Sandwich, an Angel, a Prophecy

  Of the thousands of dreams I had as a youngster, I only carried one of them into adulthood. That’s because it was the most dramatic—and puzzling—dream of my early years. I’m still amazed by its clarity and vibrancy, as well as the emotional impact it had on me at the time. While it wasn’t an encounter with Jesus, it was a dream in which I spoke with an angel—and received a prophecy that came true some sixteen years later.

  When I was about twelve years old, prior to my move into atheism, I dreamed I was making a sandwich for myself in the kitchen when a luminous angel suddenly appeared and started telling me—almost in an offhanded manner—about how wonderful and glorious heaven is. I listened for a while and then said matter-of-factly, “I’m going there”—meaning, of course, at the end of my life.

  The angel’s reply stunned me. “How do you know?”

  How did I know? What kind of question is that? “Well, uh, I’ve tried to be a good kid,” I stammered. “I’ve tried to do what my parents say. I’ve tried to behave. I’ve been to church.”

  Said the angel, “That doesn’t matter.”

  Now I was staggered. How could it not matter—all my efforts to be compliant, to be dutiful, to live up to the expectations and demands of my parents and teachers. Panic rose in me. I couldn’t open my mouth to respond.

  The angel let me stew for a few moments. Then he said, “Someday you’ll understand.” Instantly, he was gone—and I woke up in a sweat. This is the only dream I can recall from my childhood.

  Over the years, I came to reject the possibility of the supernatural and even God himself, living as an atheist for a long period of time. But sixteen years after that dream, the angel’s prophecy came true.

  In a church meeting in a suburban Chicago movie theatre, I heard the message of grace for the first time that I really understood it. I couldn’t earn my way to heaven through my behavior—it was all a free gift of God’s grace that I needed to receive in repentance and faith.

  The moment this clicked for me, a vivid memory came into my mind—it was the angel who had foretold that someday I would understand the gospel. Ultimately, it was this good news that went on to change my life and eternity.

  Was my dream a supernatural intervention? Would it qualify as a miracle? I’ll leave it to you to make your own judgment. But in a small way, I can relate to some of these stories of dreams and visions coming from the Middle East.

  A Dream, a Vision, a Bible, a Baptism

  Our world is more knit together than ever before; in fact, the global oil industry has connected the city of Houston, Texas, where I live, to many locales in the Middle East. So perhaps it’s not surprising that while I was working on this chapter, I encountered a Jesus dream in the church where I serve as a teaching pastor.

  The story involves Rachel, a petite and soft-spoken mother with an olive complexion and a kind and gentle demeanor. She lives with her husband and child in an upscale suburb, where I’m sure her neighbors could scarcely imagine her upbringing as a devout Muslim in a Middle Eastern country where Christianity is forbidden.

  When she was twenty-two years old, she was hounded by some personal difficulties. One night before bed she called out to God, “Please send me one of your prophets who will release me from this miserable feeling. I badly need comfort and guidance.”

  That night she had a dream of being in some sort of movie theatre, where the projector cast an intensely bright light. Suddenly, there was a man—Jesus. “At first, it seemed like a portrait, but the portrait was not still,” she said. “He was looking at me with very kind, concerned eyes. It was as if he could feel my pain and my sadness.”

  She said Jesus spoke to her, but the words weren’t as important as the emotion they evoked: a deep and profound sense of relief, comfort, affirmation, and joy. Then his face disappeared. “My eyes opened, but I was sure I was never asleep,” she said. “I was in that room with him.”

  By age thirty, she was married and had moved with her husband to Texas. One day while talking with a neighbor, she blurted out, “I would like to study the Bible.” To this day, she’s not sure where that comment came from, but eventually, she ended up studying the gospel of John, verse by verse, with a friend who is part of our congregation.

  Of course, John’s gospel begins with the sweeping affirmation of Jesus not as a mere prophet of Islam but as God himself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”11 And John features a revolutionary statement by Jesus that would shake the foundation of Rachel’s Islamic training: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”12

  As she began studying the gospel—and before she knew anything about baptism—she had a vision. “I saw a man with a book,” she said. “I was standing with him in water. I saw my friend holding my arm, and we were both looking at the man with the book open in his hands. The man was looking into the horizon with tears running down his face, and I knew that this man loves Jesus very much.”

  The duration of the vision, she said, “was fast and not fast. I could see details, but it only lasted a few minutes.” She had never seen the man’s face before.

  When Easter came, her friend brought her to our church. As they sat in the auditorium waiting for the service to begin, Rachel suddenly saw a man walking down the aisle.

  “Over there—that’s the man!” she exclaimed. It was the man from her vision—a pastor named Alan, who presides over baptisms at our church. She had never met him before, but there he was, right in front of her.

  By the time she closed the last page of John’s gospel in her Bible study, Rachel put her trust in Jesus as her forgiver and leader—a joyous occasion in her life, but not one she dared to share with her husband.

  So one day when he was out of town, a private baptism was arranged. “We all went into the baptismal pool,” she said. There they were: the man who loves Jesus, reading from an open Bible, and her friend at her side—just as foretold.

  “The vision was coming true in front of my very eyes,” she said. “When the pastor spoke, tears streamed down my face. I asked him to keep me longer under the water so I could feel every moment of it.”

  A dream. A vision. Tom Doyle’s words sprang to mind: “Personally, I don’t think God has put the supernatural on the shelf.”

  PART 4

  The Most Spectacular Miracles

  CHAPTER 9

  The Astonishing Miracle of Creation

  An Interview with Dr. Michael G. Strauss

  Geraint Lewis creates universes for a living.

  That is, he uses supercomputers to tinker with leptons, quarks, and the four fundamental forces
of nature to build exotic simulations of what alternate worlds might look like. He has discovered that it’s daunting to pose as a creator, even for someone with a doctorate in astrophysics from the world-renowned Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge.

  “Playing with the laws of physics, it turns out, can be catastrophic for life,” he wrote. “Often, the catastrophe is boredom. The periodic table disappears, and all the astonishing beauty and utility of chemistry desert us. The galaxies, stars and planets that host and energize life are replaced by lethal black holes or just a thin hydrogen soup, lonely protons drifting through empty space, and a bath of tepid radiation. These are very dull places indeed, and not the kind of place that you’d expect to encounter complex, thinking beings like us.”1

  On the other hand, creating an actual universe from nothing, while fine-tuning it to provide a flourishing habitat for human beings, is a primary job description of God—at least, if the very first verse in the Bible is true: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”2

  Without a doubt, creatio ex nihilo would be the most extraordinary miracle ever performed, persuasively establishing the existence of God and automatically making every other supernatural intervention that much more plausible.3

  How so? Here’s an example. When noted Christian apologist William Lane Craig was a teenager, he doubted the virgin birth. Why? Because it would have necessitated a Y chromosome to be created out of nothing in Mary’s ovum, since she didn’t possess the genetic material to produce a male child.

  “But then,” he said, “it occurred to me that if I really do believe in a God who created the universe, then for him to create a Y chromosome would be child’s play!”4

  In short, if God created the laws of nature when he spoke the universe into existence, then it would be easy for him to occasionally intervene in order to perform miracles of all sorts, from the truly astounding (like raising someone from the dead) to the more subtle (like supernaturally encouraging someone in the midst of a struggle).

  In my interview with him, skeptic Michael Shermer said he prefers other explanations for the origin and fine-tuning of the universe—and certainly cosmologists and physicists have postulated their fair share of alternate models and theories.

  Maybe the universe didn’t have a cause. Perhaps there was never an absolute beginning for everything. Possibly there are a multitude of universes, each with randomly selected laws and constants of physics, and so it’s not surprising that one of them—ours—happened to hit the habitability jackpot.

  Can we ever know for sure whether the universe and its precisely calibrated conditions for life are a cosmic accident or a miracle of staggering proportions? And what about Shermer’s objection that if God created the universe, then who created God?

  A famous cartoon depicts two scientists chatting at a blackboard. In chalk on the left is a complicated mathematical equation, followed by the words “Then a Miracle Occurs,” which leads to another exotic equation on the right. Gesturing toward the miracle reference, one scientist says to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”

  Can Christians be explicit about how the cosmological evidence points toward a supernatural, miracle-working Creator? Or should we shrug our shoulders, as Shermer suggests, and concede, “We don’t know” where everything came from?

  I was anxious to get knowledgeable responses to Shermer and to build on the scientific evidence that I had compiled for my earlier book The Case for a Creator, so I zipped an email to a popular and impressively credentialed professor of physics. The result was a sit-down interview in his house not far from the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman.

  The Interview with Michael G. Strauss, PhD

  Like Shermer, Michael George Strauss is an ardent bicyclist, riding four miles to his office at the university and then pumping for twenty more miles on a circuitous way home. Asked if he rides for exercise or fun, he replied, “Yes.”

  Maybe that’s one reason he looks so much younger than his nearly sixty years. His brown hair, worn slightly over his ears, is resisting gray, and his unlined face and clear blue eyes give him a fresh, boyish appearance.

  Strauss first became interested in science as a youngster, when he lived in Huntsville, Alabama, where NASA built the first stage of the mighty Saturn V rocket that later took astronauts to the moon. There’s still enthusiasm in his voice when he says, “They’d light those boosters to test them, and—wow!—the whole town would shake!”

  Strauss graduated valedictorian from high school and later studied science and theology at Biola University. While pursuing a graduate degree in physics at UCLA, Strauss became fascinated by quantum mechanics and subatomic particles, joining a high-energy physics experimental group doing research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

  Later he received his doctorate in High Energy Physics at UCLA, penning his dissertation on the scintillating topic, “A Study of Lambda Polarization and Phi Spin Alignment in Electron-Positron Annihilation at 29 GeV as a Probe of Color Field Behavior.” (I’ll give you a moment to process your regret over the fact that he beat you to the topic.)

  Strauss joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma in 1995 and is currently the David Ross Boyd Professor of Physics, having earned several awards for teaching excellence. For fifteen years, he conducted research at the Fermi National Accelerator Center. These days, he performs research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, smashing protons together to understand, among other things, the properties of the top quark, the fundamental particle with the highest mass.

  He collaborated on one of two experiments that used data from the collider to help discover the Higgs boson, the so-called “God particle,” in 2012, which was the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics. (The reference to a deity does not reflect any divine characteristics of the particle itself but was coined primarily because it was so difficult to find. Ironically, the particle’s namesake, Peter Higgs, is an atheist.5) Now Strauss is among those on the hunt for evidence of higher mass Higgs bosons.

  Interestingly, Strauss’s study of the world’s tiniest particles has become more and more relevant to understanding the origin and order of our vast universe itself. This is because when the collider hurls protons together, the resulting energy density is so high that it simulates what the universe was like a trillionth of a second after the big bang, helping lead to new insights into the study of cosmology.

  That’s what I came to discuss with him: Does the origin and fine-tuning of the universe point to God as the creator of quarks, leptons, Higgs bosons, and other building blocks of nature? We sat down to chat in the front room of his house.

  Seeing God in Everyday Nature

  “When I go to the lab, I don’t expect to see the supernatural,” he told me at the outset. “If miracles happened all the time, we wouldn’t be able to study the usual way nature works. But just because something works a certain way most of the time with natural laws doesn’t mean there can’t be exceptions.

  “In fact,” he continued, “I was just reading an illustration of this.6 Suppose aliens observed our traffic lights to understand how they work, and they figured out what red, yellow, and green mean. Suddenly, a vehicle with flashing lights and a siren comes screaming through the intersection, breaking all the rules. Does this mean the standard rules are no longer valid because there’s an occasional exception? Of course not.”

  I was about to ask a follow-up question when Strauss jumped in with an interesting theological observation.

  “By the way, the Bible says it’s through the natural processes of nature that we most commonly see evidence for God, not just through his miracles,” he pointed out. “Romans 1:20 tells us that God’s invisible qualities are clearly seen—through what? Through what he has made.7 And Psalm 19:1 says, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.’ So, frankly, we don’t necessarily need miracles to find evide
nce for God; it’s right there, embedded in the natural processes he has created and that we, as scientists, are studying.”

  It was a good reminder that when protons collide and explode into even tinier particles, scientists are getting a glimpse into the incredible complexity and wonder of God’s creativity, just as we detect his supernatural qualities when we watch an awesome thunderstorm sweep through the countryside or gaze at a multitude of stars winking in the night sky.

  “Nevertheless,” I added, “ambulances might scream through our lives every once in a while. What about you? Have you had an experience that you can only explain as a supernatural intervention of God?”

  “Well, only is a strong word for a scientist,” he began. “So probably not. But there are a lot of things I believe even though I’ve never personally experienced them. For example, I believe DNA has a helical structure, but I’ve never seen that myself. When I hear credible people talk about something that can only be explained supernaturally, I don’t need to experience it myself to believe something supernatural has occurred.”

  Implications of an Expanding Universe

  Going back to the ancient Greeks, most philosophers and scientists believed the universe is eternal, and that suited a lot of them quite well.

  “Many scientists are philosophical naturalists, believing that there’s nothing beyond the physical world,” Strauss said. “If the universe has always existed, then that’s quite consistent with their philosophy. Most of them know that if the universe did, indeed, have a beginning and is continuing to expand, that would have big theological implications.”

  When Albert Einstein came up with his general theory of relativity in 1915 and applied it to the universe as a whole, he was aghast that it showed the universe should be either growing or collapsing. His solution: add a fudge factor to his equation to “hold back gravity” and thus stabilize the universe—a move he later conceded was the “biggest blunder” of his career.8