What to do when apologetics and miracles don't work?

This was previously posted at my personal blog here.

I have spoken to many Christians who think Christian apologetics is a waste of time. I've also spoken to many Christians who think that the gospel must always be accompanied by signs and wonders. If I'm honest both apologetics and signs and wonders are in short supply in the Christian church which is a shame because both have biblical support and practical merit.

For instance if you're speaking to someone and they ask you whether there is any evidence that Jesus rose from the dead or whether you can know that God exists then it makes sense to provide a reasonable response since there exists persuasive responses, that is apologetics.

Equally if the person you are talking to has some physical impairment and you feel led to pray for their healing then it makes sense to do so, it would make no sense to offer an apologia for signs and wonders it requires demonstration God willing (if you're a cessationist then just skip this bit).

Many Christian's objection to apologetics is that if they only saw a miracle they would believe as if words are cheap, however doesn't faith come by hearing (Romans 10:17), and didn't Paul seek to persuade people of the truth of the gospel throughout the book of Acts (Acts 17, 18:4, 19:8, 26:22, 28:23 etc)? Needless to say it is just as possible that witnessing a miracle will be interpreted as something else (depending on world-view) or its full implications may be wilfully ignored. One only has to look to the ten lepers Jesus healed (Luke 17:11-19) and see that only one came back to give praise to God, the nine were healed yet they showed ingratitude to God by not acknowledging his healing. Didn't many people in Jerusalem see Jesus crucified, know of his empty tomb and see him alive and resurrected and still doubt?

When Paul speaks to King Agrippa he offers a persuasive case for the gospel including his own testimony and yet King Agrippa mocks Paul by suggesting that he thinks he could so easily persuade him (Acts 26). He hears a persuasive case for the gospel from the Apostle Paul and yet he still rejects it.

What this all means that it is perfectly possible that someone will reject the gospel when they are presented with a persuasive case for it and that someone could also reject the gospel even when they have seen seen something miraculous.  This being the case doesn't mean that we should stop praying for the sick or that we stop preparing and equipping ourselves with a good apologetic case for the gospel, it just means God is sovereign and he can and does use a variety of ways to bring us to know his love and forgiveness. 

Keep preaching and keep praying.

Has Science killed God?

A few weeks ago I gave a talk at my church on the title 'Has science killed God?'. I am certainly no specialist in this area but hopefully Christians will still find enough in there to help them feel more confident in God and about the nature and role of science. But just so you know, science has not killed God!

Let me know your thoughts and I would be happy to pass on my notes by email if you would like them.

Has Science killed God?

What Is Evidence? - Tim McGrew

Thought I'd share a piece from a philosopher and friend, Tim McGrew, from the Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Tim has done a tonne of work in Epistemology, the Historical Jesus and Philosophy of Religion, and shares a number of insights here, especially with regard to the common sceptical claim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

Check the whole piece out here, and feel free to read through this taster:

"Another common slogan, also popularized by Sagan, is that Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Much depends, of course, on what counts as extraordinary, both in a claim and in evidence. It cannot be simply that a claim is unprecedented. At a certain level of detail, almost any claim is unprecedented; but this does not necessarily mean that it requires evidence out of the ordinary to establish it. Consider this claim: “Aunt Matilda won a game of Scrabble Thursday night with a score of 438 while sipping a cup of mint tea.” Each successive modifying phrase renders the claim less likely to have occurred before; yet there is nothing particularly unbelievable about the claim, and the evidence of a single credible eyewitness might well persuade us that it is true.

The case is more difficult with respect to types of events that are deemed to be improbable or rare in principle, such as miracles. It is generally agreed in such discussions that such events cannot be common and that it requires more evidence to render them credible than is required in ordinary cases. (Sherlock 1769) David Hume famously advanced the maxim that No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish (Beauchamp 2000, p. 87), which may have been the original inspiration for the slogan about extraordinary evidence. The proper interpretation of Hume’s maxim has been a source of some debate among Hume scholars, but one plausible formulation in probabilistic terms is that

P(M|T) > P(~M|T) only if P(M) > P(T|~M),

where M is the proposition that a miracle has occurred and T is the proposition describing testimonial evidence that it has occurred. This conditional statement is not a consequence of Bayes’s Theorem, but the terms of the latter inequality are good approximations for the terms of the exact inequality

P(M) P(T|M) > P(~M) P(T|~M)

when both P(~M) and P(T|M) are close to 1. There is, then, a plausible Bayesian rationale for Hume’s maxim so long as we understand it to be an approximation.

It does not follow that the maxim will do the work that Hume (arguably) and many of his followers (unquestionably) have hoped it would. Hume appears to have thought that his maxim would place certain antecedently very improbable events beyond the reach of evidence. But as John Earman has argued (Earman 2000), an event that is antecedently extremely improbable, and in this sense extraordinary, may be rendered probable under the right evidential circumstances, since it is possible in principle that

P(T|M)/P(T|~M) > P(~M)/P(M),

a condition sufficient to satisfy the rigorous condition underlying Hume’s maxim and the slogan about extraordinary events. The maxim is therefore less useful as a dialectical weapon than is often supposed. It may help to focus disagreements over extraordinary events, but it cannot resolve them."