PILLAR FOUR: MIRACLES DON’T HAPPEN.

To atheists.

1. If God does exist, then miracles should be no problem. Creating the world and the universe is in itself such a “miracle” that anything else is small potatoes. What is remarkable about changing water into wine? God caused water to turn into ice and grapes into wine, and we think nothing of it. Parting the Red Sea would be no problem for One who created the Red Sea in the first place.

2. Indeed miracles rightly considered are not so much as supernatural as part of nature itself. If they do indeed happen, they are, therefore, “natural.” They just don’t fit into the usual observed patterns of the way things happen. Yet neither does an eclipse, but we call it natural. True, an eclipse is a result of inevitable physical forces, but can we truly say a “miracle” is not a result of inevitable physical forces according to God’s plan? We don’t actually “see” the physical forces leading to an eclipse either, but only the result.

3. Many of the Biblical miracles occur during the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt as recorded in the first 5 books of the Bible. There have been attempts to explain some of these miracles naturally. The burning bush might have been a type of red bush in the region that looks like it is on fire. The plagues might have been the result of a volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean region. When Moses was in the Sinai for years earlier, he perhaps discovered a hidden spring that could come forth from a struck rock. The manna and quail are natural phenomena occurring in the Sinai. The Red Sea was really the shallower Sea of Reeds. Though these explanations may serve to validate the historicity of the Bible, they don’t account for God’s speaking from the bush, the providential timing of the plagues, how a volcano could cause only the first born to die, the fact that Moses “sinned” in striking the rock instead of commanding the water to appear, and that the waters of the sea, no matter how big it was, parted and then closed over the Egyptian army.

4. Thomas Jefferson rewrote the Gospels without the miracles of Jesus. But Jesus without the miracles, especially His resurrection, is not the Son of God and would only be a forgotten minor teacher and not the person who more than any other has significantly affected the last 2000 years.

5. The most unbelievable miracle in the Bible is the day the sun stood still in the Book of Joshua. Supposedly so the Israelites could continue their surprise attack on the Amorites, the sun didn’t set for a day. However, for the sun to not set—to “stand still”—the earth would have to stop rotating. If that were to happen, the centrifugal force would destroy everything in the world; there would be tsunamis, floods, earthquakes. Granted God could maybe make all the natural adjustments to prevent that destruction, why would He go to such an extreme merely to defeat one army. Elsewhere He caused disease or even the enemy killing themselves to give the Jews victory. But the Hebrew verb that is translated “the sun didn’t set” could equally be translated as “the sun didn’t rise.” The Israelites had marched all night to catch the Amorites by surprise under the cover of darkness. What actually happened was a hailstorm that destroyed much of the Amorite army. Because of that storm, the sky would have remained dark, as though the sun hadn’t risen. A similar thing happened when Washington crossed the Delaware and failed to arrive before sunrise as planned. However, a providential snowstorm occurred, continuing the “darkness” beyond sunrise. There is possibly another relevant detail to the Joshua story. The Bible says the event was recorded in the Book of Jasher, a lost fanciful work—that is, the Bible is perhaps acknowledging that the event was not historical. The point of all this is that one can’t point to this one seemingly absurd miracle and use it to dismiss all the miracles in the Bible.

6. Why doubt the miracles of the Bible when miracles have been happening to many thousands of ordinary people for at least the last 20 centuries? Over 30 years ago a man in our church was diagnosed with inoperable cancer. The elders prayed for him. When he went for his checkup, the cancer was totally gone and never came back. He lived to almost 90 and died a year ago. In fact, miraculous healings are among the most common miracles. They take place at revival meetings, they occur at Lourdes, where they are carefully authenticated (as are the miracles performed by candidates for Roman Catholic sainthood), and sometimes they occur “out of the blue” to individuals, usually after prayers.

7. You can find records of actual miracles—healings, visions, voices of “God,” angels, extraordinary prayer-related “coincidences”—in The Chicken Soup for the Soul series of books or Guideposts’ Mysterious Ways magazine or in the best-selling Eric Mataxas’s book Miracles. Lee Strobel’s The Case for Miracles (2018) tells of a young woman who had MS for 16 years. She even went to the Mayo Clinic, but her body kept deteriorating until she was blind, had only one lung, couldn’t walk, had oxygen, a tracheotomy, a catheter, an ileostomy, and was put on hospice, expected to die soon. One day, with some family present, she heard a man’s voice (though there was no man in the room) telling her to get up and walk. She believed it was the voice of God, so she managed to get up and was completely healed, including given a new lung—for at least 35 years! This was not an unauthenticated case (two of the doctors wrote about it). It was not a case of remission, misdiagnosis, psychosomatic symptoms, or the placebo effect. Without actually reading these sources, you would naturally be skeptical. But it is very hard to be skeptical when reading these honest accounts.

8. For some reason Roman Catholics occasionally have their own unique type of miracles: stigmata, weeping statues, visions of Mary. Religions other than Christianity don’t seem to have miracles (except in the Jewish Old Testament). That Mohammed split the moon in two, ascended into the heavens on a mule, and that Gabriel removed his heart and filled it with wisdom are not even believed by Muslims. (The face of Jesus in a sandwich or of Mary in an oil puddle are not really miracles. It could just as well be Abraham Lincoln or Willie Nelson or Madonna instead of the Madonna).

9. I met a man, Dick Armstrong, who had years ago gotten his dream job as PR man for the then new Baltimore Orioles. But while driving on a highway, he heard a clear voice telling him to become a minister. Though he rarely went to church and had never considered being a pastor, he quit his job, went to seminary, and became a successful pastor, seminary professor, and was involved with the Christian athletes association. All because of the “voice.” Larry Poland, who was in my class in college and has, among other things, a ministry to the Hollywood movie industry, tells in his book Miracle Walk of an agnostic Jewish movie mogul who twice saw a vision of Jesus that changed his life. In his book Poland records 27 (!) miracles that have happened in his own life.

10. Angels. Judging by the numerous accounts of supposed “angel” appearances in recent years, these supernatural beings don’t appear with halos and wings but could be in overalls and baseball caps, nurses’ uniforms, or business suits. They are “mysterious strangers” that appear usually in moments of crisis, like an auto accident, but no one else ever seems to have seen them. Years ago my pastor was in a hospital in great pain, and a blonde “nurse” came into his room and comforted him until he fell asleep. The next morning when he asked about her, he was told no such person was on the staff.

11. Coincidences that are more than coincidences. In 1984 my wife was to have part of her stomach removed. Because of chronic migraines, she had taken large quantities of an aspirin product, resulting in 22 stomach ulcers. Early on the Saturday morning before her scheduled operation on Monday, she called me from the hospital and said she had this overwhelming fear she would die on the operating table. She asked me to pray that she would find some comfort in the Bible. I prayed. Soon she called me back in an exuberant mood. She had stuck her finger in the Bible in the Book of Samuel where it said, “Speak, Lord, your servant listens.” That didn’t help, so she tried again, and her finger lit on Job 33:19. It said the speaker was on a bed of pain—as was my wife. Food was repulsive to him—as it was to my wife because of the ulcers. His bones could be seen—my wife had lost so much weight that her ribs could be seen. It said he’d be brought close to the pit (death) but a ransom had been paid that would redeem his soul from the pit, and he would live to see the light. That promise plus the specific relevance of the details for her situation completely changed her mood.

12. Now the rest of the story. On Monday one of the surgeons was a Christian, and she had him pray for her and for him. Midway through the operation he stopped, sensing something seemed wrong. He lifted the stomach and found a 23rd ulcer, a concave one that had not shown on the X-rays. Had he continued the surgery, he would have cut it, and she would have bled to death on the operating table (he said). The doctor called that ulcer a “pit.” I counted at least nine “coincidences” in all. If she had instead been miraculously healed as a result of all the prayers for her, I would have found that less of a miracle than that she could stick her finger in a book of over a thousand pages and place it on a passage that seemed to have been written especially for her some 3000 years ago.

13. In his book When God Winks at You, Squire Bushnell records cases where people have had extraordinary coincidences happen to them. Some are trivial, some are dramatic and religious, if not supernatural. The most amazing one is about Ken Gaub, an itinerant minister who was wondering if he should change his ministry. The incident happened some years ago when there were still pay phones and telephone operators. He and his family had stopped at a diner in Ohio. Ken went out walking by the gas station when he heard the pay phone ringing. He answered it and found it was a person-to-person call to him from Harrisburg, PA. The woman had heard him on TV once, was planning to commit suicide, but decided to call him. A phone number came into her head—the one for the pay phone. He was able to talk to her, and she didn’t kill herself. Later she and Ken actually met. It also convinced him to continue his ministry as it was. This is not the kind of story it would occur to someone to make up. Why would he? Nor is it merely coincidence. How could it be? Is it a miracle? There certainly seems to be the hand of God in it.

14. There is plenty of evidence for seemingly miraculous occurrences even today, so atheists need to somehow tamper their disbelief in miracles and include that possibility in their worldview..