Do You Know the Time?

This is me preaching to the camera in my garage again for whatever it is worth. :-) This video is looking at Romans 13:11-12.

On Miracles and David Hume (part 2)

Again, David Hume’s argument against miracles can be broken down into two parts. Part 1 being the ‘in principle" or philosophical argument and part 2 being the "in fact" or historical and evidential arguments. The focus of this post is on part two of Hume’s argument. The basis of his argument is that if "in fact" a miracle is claimed to have taken place in the past and we wanted to actually weight the evidence and not use probability (see part 1) then we still should not believe the claims of the witnesses for a few different reasons. 1) We cannot trust the reliability of the witness because people who report these miracles tend to be uneducated, uncivilized, and even barbaric. 2) It is the nature of humans to gossip and exaggerate. 3) There are conflicting religions that claim miracles, so they in turn cancel each other out.

As stated in part one, Hume tries to evaluate the credibility of a miracle, not by weighing the actual evidence, but by probability or the number of testimonies. Francis Beckwith gives a good analogy of this in his article History and Miracles. He gives the example of a woman being charged with murder, and there are five upstanding citizens who were eyewitnesses. Now the defense attorney who is a proponent of Hume’s logic, goes out and gets 875 people to testify that, not only did they not see the murder, but they can’t even imagine this woman doing something like this because in the past they have seen that she is an upstanding person herself. The defense attorney then asks the jury to make their decision based on the fact that 875 testimonies say they have never seen her murder anyone (but did not see the event in question) verses five who say they saw here do it. It is clear that just because 875 people had never seen her murder anyone nor even think that she would do something like that, does not mean she didn’t do it. It is at this point that Hume brings his "in fact" argument into play. He proceeds to say that the witnesses are not trustworthy because they are uneducated, uncivilized, and even barbaric. On top of that, people have the tendency to gossip and exaggerate so they probably made up the story without any real evidence because it is what they wanted to believe.

What Hume does, is say that whenever there is miraculous claim there is always plenty of reason to question the witnesses education, reputation, and integrity. The problem is he never sets any kind of standard for what and educated man who lives in a civilized society looks like. Colin Brown points out that maybe educated and upright men, are men who do not believe in miracles and follow suit with Hume. Anyone outside this description is obviously uneducated and uncivilized.

Hume’s lack of listing qualifications of what a civilized educated person is, leaves the door wide open to say every time a person claims to be a witness to a miracle, this person must be uneducated. Clearly this statement by Hume does not do anything to prove that all witnesses to miracles have been both uneducated and uncivilized, but is merely a statement of his personal prejudices.

The next statement that Hume makes is that it is so pleasurable to tell a piece of news and be one of the first ones to spread it, leads people to gossip or exaggerate the claim without any evidence. Hume also adds that this is especially true in religious cases because people want to support their case. A wise man, in Hume’s mind, should never believe any of these claims because of this principle.

Francis Beckwith makes a point that when it comes to believing in the historicity of a miraculous event; it does take more evidence to believe it than it would a non-miraculous event. He gives the illustration of receiving a report that your friend’s father, who had passed away, came back to life and went to lunch with your friend. You would obviously need more evidence to believe that report then you would need to believe your friend went to lunch with his father who never passed away and lives in the same house that he does. You would need more evidence, but the fact, that as a general rule, many people have the propensity to exaggerate does not mean that your friend’s report is not true.

If we cannot believe anything out of the ordinary because people tend to exaggerate in order to strengthen the case for their belief system, then it seems Hume fails his own test. He states that no miracles have ever occurred and that all witnesses to miracles are not credible. By his own rule I should not believe until I have further evidence, because he could be exaggerating just to support his own belief in naturalism. After all, it is a pretty miraculous claim to say that you know throughout history that every witness to a miracle was uneducated and uncivilized.

Hume also forgets about witnesses to miracles that do not want to believe what they see because it represents everything they are against. Saul of Tarsus is a good example of this. He was on his way to persecute Christian when Jesus Christ, who had been crucified and resurrected, appears to him. It would have not been in Paul’s best interest to report this miracle. Also, he had absolutely no reason to exaggerate this event because it could only do damage to his cause.

The final section of Hume’s "in fact" argument is that if two competing religions both claim that they have miracles to support their religion, then they must cancel out each other. For example if Christians claim that their God became a man, died, and was resurrected, and the Muslim’s claim the same thing, then these miracles must cancel out each other. Ron Nash states that this is probably Hume’s strongest point in the "in fact" argument. Nash then proceeds to state, that when it comes to the core miracles of the faith like the resurrection, there are no other religions that claim and event like this so they do not cancel out each other. There may be other types of miracles like healing that seem to cancel out each other, but this does not mean that at least one or maybe even both of them actually took place. Nash also points out that God’s goodness is not restricted only to believers and that there is not reason why God could not reveal His power and glory to an unbeliever, even if this person belonged to another religion.

In conclusion Hume’s "in fact" arguments do nothing to prove that miracles have not taken place. The only thing it really does is warn us to be careful when looking at the claims of a miracle, but this is something most people already knew.

-Doug Eaton-

On Miracles and David Hume (part 1)

David Hume in his article “Of Miracles” has made what appears to be a strong case against miracles. His article is continually read on college campuses and is still held as one of the strongest arguments against miracles. Almost all the arguments against miracles that were to follow are merely restated versions of Hume’s arguments. In fact, David Hume touted his own argument as the definitive argument that will be used by all wise and learned men as long as the world endures. This argument can be broken down into two parts, the “in principle” argument and the “in fact” argument.

Part I, the “in principle” argument, is the argument that is philosophical in nature. It deals with the repeatability of and event and the laws of nature. The argument can be broken down as follows.

1). A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.
2). Firm and unalterable experience has established these laws.
3). A wise man proportions his beliefs to the evidence.
4). Therefore, the proof against a miracle is as complete as any argument from experience can be.

Part II, the “in fact” argument deals with the historical and evidential nature of a miraculous claim. Hume does this through 1) questioning the reliability of any witness of a miracle by looking at his lack of education and/or his uncivilized environment, 2) appealing to the nature of humans to gossip and/or exaggerate, and 3) having claims of miracles from competing religion cancel out each other.

The “in fact” argument will be explained in greater detail and critiqued in a second post on this topic. The main focus of this post will be to critique the “in principle” argument set for by Hume.

When looking at the four part “in principle” argument as cited earlier. Norman Geisler sites two possible interpretations, the hard and the soft. The hard interpretation could be broken down as follows. 1) Miracles by definition are violations of natural law. 2) Natural laws are unalterably uniform. 3) Therefore, miracles cannot occur.

Looking at it in this way Hume simply begs the question. The question to which we are seeking an answer is can a violation in a law of nature occur? Hume says no because they cannot be violated. Hence he is begging the question. It is doubtful that this is the argument that Hume was trying to make so the softer view is probably more realistic. The softer view can be broken down as follows. 1) Miracles are rare. 2) Natural laws are regular occurrences. 3) There is always more evidence for the regular than the rare. 4) A wise person will always go with the greater evidence. 5) Therefore a wise person would never believe in a miracle.

When looking at Hume’s argument in this light, miracles are not ruled as impossible, instead, they simply cannot be believed in even if they do occur. This argument is based on what is know as the “repeatability principle” which says that evidence for something that occurs repeatedly will always outweigh the evidence for those events that do not repeat regularly. To refute this argument, I will summarize four refutations given by Norman Geisler.

1) The assumption of uniform experience- Hume uses uniform experience against miracles claiming that natural laws have not been broken in the past, but he would need to have a form of omniscience in order to understand all the laws of nature and know that they have not been broken. Since he does not have this knowledge, he cannot say they’ve never been broken. Maybe he was only speaking of the uniform knowledge of a person who has never seen a miracle, but this rules out the experience of someone who has seen a miracle. Either way Hume gives no reason why we should believe the experience of uniformity over those who claim to have experienced a miracle.

2) Adding evidence verses weighing evidence- Really what Hume is doing here is stating that people should base their belief on probability rather than evidence. For instance, he says that it is more probable for a man who died, to stay dead, than it is for him to be resurrected, so we should believe the higher probability even if a resurrection did take place. But if we use this kind of logic we could never believe a rare event if it was within the laws of nature. For example, suppose we have a shopping center with a staircase, and it is said to be the safest staircase ever made. Thousands of people walk up and down it everyday, and no one has ever fallen down it. If we extend Hume’s reasoning to this scenario, and one day we heard the testimony of many eyewitnesses say someone fell down the staircase, we would not be wise in believing it because more people have walked up and down the staircase without falling then those who have fallen. We should not believe the story of someone falling, because it goes against the probability of regardless of the evidence.

3) Evidence for the past cannot determine the present- Hume is telling us that a wise person will believe that miracles will never happen. If there is someone who is trying to show evidence for an alleged miracle, the wise person should come with the presupposition that the claim is false, based on the evidence of the past which is infallible. This type of reasoning is fallacious because even in science things that are repeatable could alter in the future. We are not guaranteed that the sun will rise tomorrow simply because it always has. Sure the probabilities are high that it will, but it is not a guarantee, and if we were to notice a 48 hour period without seeing the sun rise. We would not be unwise to think that something had altered the normal rising of the sun, simply because every other day of our lives it rose. There are also anomalies in nature, which have no supernatural connotation, so to state that a person should never believe and exception to a repeated event hurts Hume’s case.

4) Confusing the basis of knowledge and the object of knowledge- Hume also confuses the basis of knowledge with the object of knowledge when he says that the evidence for what is repeatable is always greater than the evidence of what is rare. For example, we will use a great piece of art to show this type of confusion. We realize that a piece of art is great because we have seen many great pieces of art by many great artists. This is the basis of knowledge. We also know that the production of great art is a repeatable event, but this is not the object of knowledge. The object of knowledge is a single piece of work (e.g. the Mona Lisa). This single piece of work will never be repeated, it is a one-time event. When we have evidence of something being miraculous, we must not confuse the basis of knowledge with the object of knowledge. The basis of knowledge for a miraculous event is when we see something take place outside the laws of nature, and we realize that some higher or more intelligent force cause it. This is the repeatable, but the object of knowledge is the single miracle, which will never be repeated.

After careful review of Hume’s “in principle” argument, we see that he did not prove that miracles cannot take place, but he actually helps us define what a miracle is.

-Doug Eaton-

On Defending the Resurrection of Jesus

When refuting arguments against the resurrection, it is important to know the core facts that most scholars believe about the events surrounding Jesus’ death. There are usually at least four core facts that are held by Christian and non-Christian scholars.

1. Jesus was crucified and died
2. Jesus’ tomb was found empty
3. The Apostles believed they had experiences with the risen Christ.
4. Christ’s disciples were radically transformed after these experiences.


1) Jesus was crucified and died- Virtually every scholar holds to this proposition. They believe that Jesus was actually crucified and that He did in fact die. Rarely is this fact contested. The idea of the actual crucifixion being a conspiracy is not one generally held. He was nailed to the cross and died.

2) Jesus tomb was found empty- The first point that this core fact insinuates is that Jesus was actually buried. William Lane Craig, in his article The Empty Tomb of Jesus, goes into great detail and gives us five points why scholars believe this. 1) There are many early sources that attest to the burial of Jesus. 2) Even skeptical scholars agree that it is unlikely that Joseph of Arimathea was a Christian invention due to the fact that he was a Jewish Sanhedrist. Christian’s were at odds with the Sanhedrin, so why would they create a story of a Sanhedrist doing what was right in burying Jesus. 3) The story of the burial is simple and is not trying to conjure theological reflection and it is non-apologetic. 4) It is also believed because this type of burial was the custom in dealing with the death of a Holy man. 5) Finally, this is the only burial tradition that existed, which means it would have been completely out of character to do something different. The belief in the burial is important because it is needed to believe in an empty tomb. He had to be buried and they had to know which tomb he was buried in to find it empty. Why it was found empty is where scholars differ.

3) The apostles believed they had experiences with the risen Jesus- Again most scholars will agree that the apostles has some type of experience which they believed was the risen Jesus, but they do not agree on what the actual experience was. Some say it was a hallucination; some say it was the ghost of Jesus, and others believe it was the physical resurrected body of Jesus. These issues will be covered in the arguments against the naturalistic theories about Jesus’ death and resurrection.

4) Jesus’ disciples were radically transformed after these experiences- We can look at the example of Peter who denied Jesus three times in fear of his life during the events that lead up to the crucifixion. After these experiences with the risen Christ, he went on to be the leading spokesperson for the resurrection of Jesus. He was later crucified and would not back down even if it meant death. In fact, all of Jesus’ disciples were killed for their belief, except for John who was dipped in boiling oil and survived.

Virtually every scholar holds the four core facts listed above. In light of these four facts there have been three naturalistic arguments, which try to explain that Jesus did not rise from the dead. They are 1) the swoon theory 2) the hallucination theory, and 3) the stolen body or conspiracy theory.

1) Arguments against the swoon theory- The swoon theory is the argument that Jesus never really died on the cross, he merely went into a swoon, a kind of coma or unconsciousness, and later he was revived by the cool of the tomb. The first thing we notice is that this theory violates core fact #1 that Jesus was crucified and died. It also violates core fact #4, Jesus disciples were radically changed after the experiences of seeing Jesus. This raises the question, would the disciples have been radically transformed at the sight of a half dead Jesus? The swoon theory is not a highly regarded argument because of these violations, but in order to not commit the bandwagon fallacy, let us look at a few other reasons why this is not possible. A) Kreeft and Tacelli in the book Handbook of Christian Apologetics, point out that Jesus’ body was totally encased in a winding sheet (we know this from the burial tradition mentioned earlier). How could a half dead man escape a virtual straight jacket? B) We know that a swooning corpse could not have overpowered the Roman guards. C) Who moved the stone? D) Kreeft and Tacelli also make a great point that he swoon theory actually turns into the conspiracy theory, because the disciples attest to a resurrected Jesus who did not swoon. The conspiracy theory will be addressed later. E) Finally, a swooning Jesus would have had to eventually die, so where is His body?

2) Arguments against the hallucination theory- the hallucination theory is the theory that the disciples did not really see a resurrected Jesus, but merely hallucinated. This would explain why the disciples were radically transformed, because they actually thought they saw a resurrected Jesus, but this violates core fact #2, Jesus’ tomb was found empty. If the disciples were hallucinating whey didn’t the Romans take them to the tomb and show them the body when the disciples began preaching. This would have stopped them in their tracks. Kreeft and Tacelli bring up some other arguments also. A) There were too many witnesses. At one point Jesus appeared to 500 people at on time. Did they all have the same hallucination? B) One of the criteria that doctors say is needed hallucinations of this type is that the people expect to see what they see. The disciples didn’t expect to see Jesus. In fact, when they did see him they still didn’t believe, which lead to Thomas touching His wounds, and hallucinations do not have material properties. C) Jesus ate. Hallucinations do not eat. At one point the disciples sat down and ate with Jesus. If this was a hallucination, then either a hallucination (Jesus) ate actual food, or the disciples ate hallucinated food. It is clear from all the details of the appearances of Jesus that they could not have been hallucinations.

3) Arguments against the stolen body or conspiracy theory- This is the idea that the disciples stole the body in order to make people believe Jesus had actually resurrected, but this violates core fact #4 the disciples were radically transformed. How could a group of men go from being men who feared for their lives to men who would die for their beliefs if they knew that their beliefs were a lie? Another argument is that this goes against the character of the disciples. These were honest upright men who would have had to violate their core beliefs to pull this off.

Some might say that it was not the disciples who took the body but the Romans, but we have already shown earlier that if it were the Romans, all they would have to do in order to put a stop to the disciples preaching would be to produce the body. This also violates core fact #3 that the disciples believed they saw a resurrected Jesus. If the Romans had taken the body then they disciples would have had hallucinations, and we have already shown that this does not work.

Up to this point there has not been a plausible naturalistic explanation for the resurrection of Jesus, which leaves us with the alternative that he did raise physically from the dead.

-Doug Eaton-

HE IS RISEN!

Our Faith is not in vain!

We are no longer in our sins!

Those who have died in Christ are with Him!

We are the least to be pitied because our Hope is not in vain!
(1 Cor. 15:13-20)

Through Christ’s death and resurrection, our regeneration is insured. He rose from the dead to bring us new life, for the same power that raised Christ from the dead is raising us also (Eph 1:18-20). For we have been buried with Him by baptism into death and raised through His resurrection so we can walk in newness of life (Rom. 6:4,11).

Through Christ’s death and resurrection, our justification was insured. As His word says, He was put to death for our trespasses and raised for our justification (Rom. 4:25). In the resurrection God the Father gave His Amen to Christ’s propitiating work.

Through Christ's death and resurrection we are promised that we too will be resurrected in bodies that are imperishable (1Cor. 15: 42-44). For He is the “first fruits” of many brethren (1 Cor. 15:20), as His word promises, “God hath both raised up the Lord, and will also raise up us by his own power (1 Cor 6:14).” Be not dismayed though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day (1 Cor. 4:16). And yet even though the outward man perish now, we to can cry out with Job, “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God (Job 19:25-26).

Happy Easter!

Doug