Write An Answer To The Common Side Response To Resurrection That Miracles Are Impossible?

Write an answer to the common side objection to the resurrection that “miracles are impossible!”

Nobody likes to be treated like an idiot; I certainly don’t, but Christians—and the religiously inclined—are often labeled as stupid, gullible, and “…a barbarous and ignorant people” for believing in miracles. We are often told that “science” has filled the gaps in our knowledge precluding the need to appeal to the gods to explain natural phenomena. There is no need to believe that Thor creates thunder—we now know through science that a thunder is the crashing noise after lightning due to the expansion of rapidly heated air. This argument may seem to disprove Christianity: if miracles don’t happen then Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead.

Let’s

If the skeptic is to assume that God does not exist, he has the burden of proof to show the truth of such inference. Otherwise, we would have to agree with atheist philosopher John Earman when he writes:

I acknowledge that the opinion is of the kind whose substantiation requires no philosophical argumentation and pompous solemnities about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proofs, but rather difficult and delicate empirical investigations…into the details of particular cases.

Events of this kind are better left in the hands of historians. We need to shed philosophical presuppositions and bias to focus on the facts. If God exists, he can act if he wants to, and all alleged miracles can be sifted through a historical mesh. Furthermore, legal defeaters can come in handy in miracle-claim analysis. In our legal system, when witnesses provide conflicting testimony, lawyers do not simply throw up their hands and go home. They try to overpower the opponents’ testimony—known as a rebutting defeater—or to sabotage and raise doubts on the rival’s evidence—known as undercutting defeater. Both of these defeaters are relevant in miracle assessment and can be used actively in historical research. Ancient documents claiming miracles can also be subjected to textual criticism, dating, archeology and general reliability as potential defeaters.