The Big Question 66: Are Miracles Real Or Not?
May 18, 2021 2140
Radio Version:
Are miracles real or not?
One of the reasons why people laugh at Christianity is the idea of miracles being real. I mean, how could the sea part and let people through on dry land? How could someone walk on water? How could water turn into wine and how could? And here’s the biggie. How could someone rise from the dead?
I have a hunch that some time in our lives we’ve all secretly wished for a miracle. Whether you call it a miracle or not. Am I right? Like when someone we love has received terrible news from a doctor.
So how about miracles? Can they be real or not? Whether you believe in miracles or not logically goes hand in hand with whether you believe in a higher power. And specifically, a higher power who intervenes in this world against the ordinary course of events and even against the laws of nature.
So basically, this becomes an issue of whether you believe in God or not. If you believe in God, then you believe in miracles. If you don’t believe in God, then you don’t.
This just breaks people up into two camps. It doesn’t really help us answer the question of whether miracles are real or not. The way to deal with this question is that you have to look at the evidence. That makes sense, doesn’t it?
The English philosopher G.K. Chesterton once said that believers in miracles accept them, rightly or wrongly, because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them, rightly or wrongly, because they have a doctrine against them. The fact that you’ve never seen the miracle doesn’t mean that there’s no evidence for it.
Just as the fact that someone in the middle of India may never have seen snow doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. You have to look for the evidence. The fact that things normally happen a certain way doesn’t mean that they will always happen that way, in the same way that a massive solar flare would suddenly change things up pretty dramatically on Earth. You have to look at the evidence.
So let’s look at the evidence of perhaps the most important miracles in the Bible, the miracles of Jesus. Well, the evidence for his miracles is really very strong.
We have the historical testimony of the gospels. We have the many witnesses of Jesus miracles. Almost all of them were done publicly, including when Jesus fed 5000 people out of the few loaves and fishes. When Jesus raised Lazarus in front of hundreds of people.
And then there’s the more than 500 people who saw Jesus alive after his resurrection. If these reports of the miracles were false, the gospels couldn’t have been written within the lifetimes of these people as they actually were, since they would have been easily disproved and dismissed.
Yet the miracles of Jesus couldn’t be dismissed because there were so many eyewitnesses. There was evidence. So are miracles real? The evidence is there. The eyewitnesses definitely thought so. So much so that they staked their lives on the one who did them.
And I reckon you can too.
Dennis penick
Nov 15, 2023
But do mircales happen today? And where are the stories if they do happen?