Well, it’s that time of year again. Regular church attendees are going to have to share their pews with people who have finally decided to make it out for their second service of the year. Their belief that Jesus bled and died so they can gain eternal salvation might be unshakable, but it apparently isn’t all that motivating, considering how little these believers seem to do in response. Nevertheless, they can at least be counted on to show up for a retelling of Jesus’s miraculous birth.
But what version will they hear? More than likely, they’ll hear a “Hollywood” version of the tale that incorporates the most exciting elements of the two versions that we read about in Matthew and Luke. A quick Google search turned up this one, which illustrates my point perfectly. But what if someone tried to tell the full version? A version that included every detail that both Matthew and Luke provide?
Honestly, it just can’t be done. I had wanted to attempt it here, but there’s just no practical way to do it. For example, the version I linked to above goes like this:
The Standard Tale
- Mary’s visited by an angel who tells her about the pregnancy (Luke)
- She and Joseph live in Nazareth of Galilee, but are forced to travel to Bethlehem in Judea for a census commanded by the Roman authorities (Luke)
- They’re unable to find normal accommodations and are forced to room in an area intended for livestock. Mary gives birth there and is visited by local shepherds (Luke)
- Wise men far to the east see a star that somehow signifies the birth of the Jewish Messiah (Matthew)
- They travel for an unspecified period until they reach Jerusalem, where they inquire about the child (Matthew)
- These inquiries reach Herod, the ruler of the region, and he asks the wise men to send back word to him once they find the child, so Herod himself can also pay his respects (Matthew)
- The wise men make their way to Bethlehem, find the family, bestow their gifts, and return home via a different route (Matthew)
- An angel tells Joseph to hightail it out of Bethlehem, because Herod’s sending a posse to wipe out all the children 2 years old and under in an effort to stamp out Jesus (Matthew)
- Joseph and his family flee to Egypt and remain there until an angel tells him it’s safe to return, because Herod has died (Matthew)
- Joseph intends to go back toward Bethlehem, but after finding out that Herod’s son is in charge, he takes the family to Nazareth in Galilee (Matthew)
So what’s wrong with this story? I mean, it’s very cohesive, and it makes for a compelling tale. What’s not to like? Its only real problem is that the very books of the Bible that provide its details, contradict its overall narrative.
Two Very Different Stories
Let’s go back to Luke’s version. After Jesus’s birth and the visit from the shepherds, we don’t read about wise men or Herod’s animosity. Instead, Luke 2:22 says that after the days of Mary’s purification were over, the family went to Jerusalem. The “days of purification” are referring to Leviticus 12:1-4, where the Law of Moses stated that a woman was to be considered “unclean” for 40 days after giving birth to a male child. So when Jesus was about 40 days old, Luke claims that they all traveled to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices as thanks for his birth. While there, two elderly people see Jesus and begin proclaiming praise and prophecies concerning Jesus. And there’s no indication that an effort was made to keep any of this quiet, which is very different in tone to what we read in Matthew. Finally, in Luke 2:39, we read “And when they had performed everything according to the Law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
The synopsis we looked at earlier incorporated most of Matthew’s version of the story. As we just read, his story ends very differently from Luke’s. However, it’s also significant to note that Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary are from Nazareth. Matt 1:18 through the end of the chapter talks about Mary’s pregnancy, even though she and Joseph had never slept together, but it never specifies where they’re living. Chapter 2 begins with the sentence “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, behold, wise men from the east came to Jerusalem, saying, ‘Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?'” Of course, it’s possible that Matthew still knew they were originally from Nazareth and just doesn’t bother to tell us that or divulge how they got to Bethlehem in the first place. But there are three context clues that point against such a possibility. First of all, regardless of how far the wise men had to journey, it likely took them quite a while to make the trip. When Matthew says “the east” he certainly doesn’t mean “east Jersualem,” and travel being what it was back then, any journey would have taken considerable time. The second clue is that Herod supposedly kills all the male children of Bethlehem who are 2 and under. So it’s unlikely that we’re supposed to still be thinking of Jesus as a newborn. Finally, Matthew says that when the family was able to leave Egypt, Joseph wanted to go back to Judea (where Bethlehem is). But after finding out Herod’s son was ruling, he became afraid and “went and lived in a city called Nazareth” (Matt 2:23). This is a very strange way to refer to Nazareth, if it’s where Joseph and Mary were already living.
So Matthew gives no indication that Joseph and Mary were just visiting Bethlehem. He never mentions a manger; instead, he references a house that they were staying in. He never talks about the shepherds from the fields, but has wise men who visit the child. He includes a story about Herod slaughtering a town’s children, though no other historical or biblical source ever mentions this. He claims that the family flees to Egypt until Herod’s death, that they want to return to Bethlehem, but finally settle in “a city called Nazareth.”
Luke, on the other hand, says that Nazareth is their home town, and they’re only visiting Bethlehem. He has no story about wise men, but does talk about shepherds from the fields that visit the newborn Jesus. Instead of Herod attempting to hunt them down and a subsequent flight to Egypt, the family travels straight to Jerusalem, where Herod lives. And there’s no effort to keep Jesus’s identity secret while they’re there, as two elderly prophets begin proclaiming who he is. And after making their sacrifices, the family simply goes back home to Nazareth, far from Herod’s reach (not that Luke indicates Herod’s even interested).
Can These Stories Be Put Together?
The main sticking points between the stories are the flight to Egypt and the trip to Jerusalem. On the one hand, Luke is very clear about his timeline: Jesus was only about 40 days old when they went to Jerusalem and then went home to Nazareth. Matthew doesn’t give specifics on how old Jesus was when the family was forced to flee to Egypt, except that it must have occurred before he was 2 years old.
Could the trip to Egypt have happened before the trip to Jerusalem?
No. First of all, considering all the details Luke provides, why would he have left out such an important event? Secondly, this means Herod would have needed to die within the 40 day purification period, but Matthew tells us that this still wouldn’t have been good enough, because Joseph was determined to avoid all of Judea while Herod’s son was reigning. There’s simply no way he would have felt safe enough to travel directly into Jerusalem. That just makes no sense.
Could the trip to Egypt have happened after the trip to Jerusalem?
No. Luke 2:39 is clear that the family went straight back to Nazareth after their trip to Jerusalem. And considering Luke claimed that Nazareth was already their home, why would they have needed to go back to Bethlehem anyway?
In fact, Luke’s claim that the family was from Nazareth creates a lot of problems for Matthew’s account. Nazareth was far outside of Herod’s reach. So if Herod really had hunted Jesus in Bethlehem, the family could have simply gone back to Nazareth rather than flee to Egypt. But this isn’t a consideration in Matthew’s account, because for him, the family has never been to Nazareth until they simply can’t go back to Bethlehem anymore, even after Herod’s death (Matt 2:23).
Additional Problems
I don’t want to spend too much time here, but for completeness sake, I need to mention a couple of historical issues. Both Matthew and Luke say that Jesus is born during the reign of Herod the Great. Historians usually place his death in 4 BCE, which means Jesus would have been born sometime before that. However, Luke says that Mary and Joseph had traveled to Bethlehem, because Quirinius, the governor of Syria, had commanded a census. However, Quirinius didn’t become governor of Syria until 6 CE — 10 years after Herod’s death. You can find additional resources about these two issues here.
Finally, Luke’s claim is that this census required Joseph to travel back to his ancestral home of Bethlehem, since he was of King David’s lineage. But David would have lived some 1000 years before Joseph. It’s ludicrous to think that the Romans would have cared about such a thing, or that they would have wanted their empire to be so disrupted by having people move around like that for a census. It would have been an impossible feat and would have made for a highly inaccurate, and therefore useless, census.
What Do We Make of All This?
The easiest way to understand why these accounts have such major differences in detail is to understand why either writer bothered with a story about Jesus’s birth at all. You have to remember that the writers of Matthew and Luke didn’t know one another and didn’t know that they were both working on the same material. They certainly didn’t know that their books would one day show up in the same collection. Both of them were working with two basic facts: Micah 5:2 seemed to prophesy that the Messiah would come from Bethlehem; Jesus came from Nazareth (John 1:45-46).
Since those two facts were at odds with one another, it’s easy to see how both writers would have been compelled to explain how Jesus could be from Nazareth but still be from Bethlehem. Unfortunately for them, close comparison shows that both versions simply can’t be true.
How would people react if they showed up for church this weekend and were presented with the full details from both of these stories? I like to think it would spur many of them into deeper study. That it would possibly make them question some of the things they’ve been taking for granted. But 2016 has been pretty demoralizing when it comes to the number of people who seem concerned about what’s true, and I’m not sure how many of them would see this information as a call to action. I know there are people who can be changed by facts. Perhaps there aren’t as many of them as I once thought, but I know they’re out there. And with the way information spreads these days, I’m sure they’ll eventually find the facts they’re looking for.
Finding Truth 
I don’t know a lot about statistics, probabilities, Bayesian analysis, etc, but it seems to me that if we’re going to open up the possibilities to the supernatural (ie: God heals), we don’t know enough about all the possible explanations for it to be useful at all. It could be a specific religion’s god, like Yahweh, or some unknown god(s), or the Force, or any number of things. So it wouldn’t really tell us much. It would be way too easy to get a false positive.
Perhaps we could set up such an experiment to simply tell us if the healing (or other event) is occurring via some supernatural process vs a natural one. But even then, we don’t know all the possible natural explanations that might account for such a healing (or whatever event we’re trying to explain). There are still lots of things about the human body, willpower, illnesses, bacteria, etc that we don’t understand. Once again, we’d be at a high risk of reaching a false positive.
On top of that, as Asimov observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
That might make it seem like I think it’s impossible to accept a miracle, but that’s not exactly how I feel. I think I could be persuaded that they happen. But let’s remember the kinds of miracles talked about in the Bible: fire from Heaven that shoots down on command to consume a water-logged sacrifice, the sun standing still [sic], the earth swallowing people whole, trees killing people, humans turning into pillars of salt, people coming back from the dead, those born lame suddenly walking, those born blind suddenly seeing, sticks turning into snakes, limbs being withered then restored immediately, etc, etc, etc. What miracles today come anywhere close to this? As Gary and others have continued to mention, why won’t God heal amputees?
That’s why I’m not currently persuaded by miracle claims.
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Hi Eric. I can relate to a lot of what you’ve been writing in your last few comments here regarding miracle claims. I wrote a post a while back where I said that it’s stories like these that keep me curious about some kind of hidden agencies that we’ve yet been unable to figure out how to detect conclusively. So when you write “it ought to be enough to make us at least very suspicious” I have to say that I agree and that it does and has always made me suspicious. So while I’m not a believer like you, I do understand very much why you believe (and have even written so in comments here on other posts and even mentioned that to Nate while on XBOX live). In fact miracle stories like these from friends that I trust were one aspect of what drew me to convert to Christianity many years ago.
I noticed you wrote to Jon that you can’t understand why he disbelieves. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “can’t understand”. Maybe you just meant that you are unable to agree with his disbelief, and in that case there probably won’t be much to say to get you to “understand”. But if “understand” means that you can get our reasoning even though you disagree then I think there may be some hope in that respect. Maybe it’s a long shot, but I’ll try to help a little.
In this particular case regarding why we disbelieve that these miracle claims are due to something beyond natural causes, I think Jon’s link to Stephen Graham’s website may help more than you realize. It looks like you only read his latest post on his blog but there are a lot of other posts where Graham gives a little detail regarding hist stance on miracle healings which may help a little bit in understanding. You are right that he gets a bit too cheeky at times, but I think the things he says actually go a long way in gaining an understanding of why people are skeptical of these things. A couple of thoughts here:
– Graham believes in God and wrote “God might heal. In fact, he might heal all the time.” This doesn’t mean you should agree with him, but I do think it at least takes some edge off the claim that people don’t believe in these miracles just because they are against miracles or because they prefer not to believe.
– I think this statement of his also may help a little bit in understanding: “I have come across very few cases of alleged healing that weren’t incredibly easily explained in natural terms. Healing claims are rarely investigated and medical evidence often never sought or offered by those who claim to have been miraculously healed. Instead we find one or a combination of the following at work: misdiagnosis, orthodox medical treatment, placebo, exaggeration, misunderstanding, rumour, anecdote, the body’s own healing ability, the Chinese-Whisper effect, or plain old fraud.” [that list is actually a combination from 2 very similar quotes on his blog].
I realize that you are very confident you’ve found and wrote about stories that rule out everything on that list, and maybe some of them do, but I think the core of why a lot of people (even believers) remain unconvinced still has to do with what he wrote. Taking the Barry Dyke skiing incident you wrote about above as an example, you may not agree, but I think at least 1 of those things Graham wrote about could possibly apply in that case.
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“even UnkleE (I’d guess) would be skeptical of someone’s claim that they were healed by an Idol, or Allah, or satan or whatever else (correct me if I’m wrong, UnkleE).”
Just to clarify, I am initially sceptical of all miracle claims. I don’t rule them out a priori but I want to see some evidence before I’d consider accepting them. I don’t privilege christian claims over Muslim or occult claims, I think they all require good evidence, which most don’t have (even if they did in fact occur).
I have read up on quite a lot of stories, mostly ones that seem from the start to have some chance of being true. Mostly these have been christian stories, though I have read a few Muslim ones. But if the evidence was good enough, I’d accept the claim as “possible” or “likely” regardless of the religion or none of the reporter. For example, I am not Catholic, and I am in principle doubtful that the Virgin Mary ever appeared to anyone, but I accept that some Catholic miracles stories, even ones that supposedly involve Mary, have good evidence. But accepting that a miracle may possibly have occurred doesn’t mean I necessarily accept the explanation given – lots of phenomena have been given wrong explanations at first – think of light, genetics, etc.
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Hi Howie, thanks for those comments. We are agreed about quite a bit I think, which may be a little surprising, but good.
I think I understand and accept what you say about alternative explanations. But I think there are many cases that those explanations seem to be unlikely if not completely ruled out. Except of course, if you consider the supernatural to be impossible, then even very unlikely other explanations will be preferred.
Let me give an example. I have written about an experienced heart surgeon working in a hospital emergency team in Florida, who obviously had all the best medical equipment available, who, after the expert emergency team had worked on a heart attack victim for 40 minutes with no response, and signs of death on the man’s skin (and we can assume no signs on the relevant medical equipment), pronounced the man dead. But the doctor, a christian, was prompted in his mind (he believes by God) to pray for the man, which he did, then applied the electric paddle thingos again and the man recovered.
The story was reported in several news sources, the doctor has verified the story as has the man who was pronounced dead and recovered. We can assume that the team and the doctor had the sort of equipment that Stephen Graham requires (I imagine that would be standard and that fact could be checked) and it is hard to see that any of that list of alternatives would apply. It seems obvious that the man was pronounced dead via proper procedures, and either it was a miracle, or an extremely unusual medical occurrence where the loss of all the vital signs was not irrecoverable.
I have recorded another somewhat similar story, this time about an Australian doctor who was about to be pronounced dead, but his wife prayed for him. I have written to this doctor, obtained some of the medical records and verified that this isn’t an urban myth or something. In this case we can probably say that the doctor wasn’t dead (the treatment occurred in a small country doctor’s surgery, not a major hospital, and the decision to pronounce him dead may not have been as well-based) but the doctor makes the point that he “should” have had brain damage, but didn’t.
Now my point is that there are many unbelievable stories, many others that Stephen Graham’s arguments clearly apply, but there are some that defy easy explanation. When a highly unusual recovery occurs despite our best medical understandings, after prayer I think a reasonable person would agree that this is prima facie evidence that a miracle may have occurred, unless the bar is set so high that no evidence is considered to be enough.
Where we set the bar is an individual choice, but I think it is unfair of sceptics, or Stephen Graham, to argue that it is lack of evidence when it is subjective bar-setting, that leads to scepticism. Just my perspective on it.
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“Let me give an example. I have written about an experienced heart surgeon working in a hospital emergency team in Florida, who obviously had all the best medical equipment available, who, after the expert emergency team had worked on a heart attack victim for 40 minutes with no response, and signs of death on the man’s skin (and we can assume no signs on the relevant medical equipment), pronounced the man dead. But the doctor, a christian, was prompted in his mind (he believes by God) to pray for the man, which he did, then applied the electric paddle things again and the man recovered.”
Sounds truly amazing, doesn’t it? But think about this: What about all the cases where this doctor has performed CPR on people, and prayed for them to recover, and they did NOT recover? Do you really believe that this is the only time that this Christian surgeon has ever prayed that a person whose heart has stopped beating would recover? I doubt it. I would bet that he ALWAYS prays for recovery and healing for EVERY patient he comes into contact with.
So what I am saying is this: If every time that this heart surgeon has prayed for a person’s non-beating heart to start beating again—and it does— that would be truly amazing! But that isn’t what this story is claiming, is it? What this story is claiming is that ONE time out of the hundreds if not thousands of times that this surgeon has prayed for someone’s non-beating heart to restart beating and this time it really did restart beating after an extended period of time of not beating. But unless Christians can prove that no one has ever recovered a heart beat 40 minutes after losing it, how on earth can Christians jump to the conclusion that this resuscitation was due to the surgeon’s prayer and not due to random chance and re-application of the electric paddles?
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Gary, you need to think about what statistic we are measuring. The number of people who were prayed fro and DIDN’T get healed is only relevant if we are measuring the success rate of prayer. Which we are not. I never mentioned that statistic.
What I am saying is this. Sometimes, not very often, but sometimes, an apparent healing occurs which defies medical explanation, and that is a clue we should consider rather than write off. This is (I suggest) one such case. It is like trying to discover a cure for cancer or a moon around pluto. it doesn’t matter how many failures we have, one success is the answer we are looking for.
As in every case, we need to define the question to define the data we need. You have addressed a different question.
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“Now my point is that there are many unbelievable stories, many others that Stephen Graham’s arguments clearly apply, but there are some that defy easy explanation. When a highly unusual recovery occurs despite our best medical understandings, after prayer I think a reasonable person would agree that this is prima facie evidence that a miracle may have occurred, unless the bar is set so high that no evidence is considered to be enough.”
Most people in western countries recover from most hospitalizations for such typical maladies such as pneumonia, heart attacks, and even strokes. So praying for people to survive these illness has a very high probability of success regardless of which god you happen to pray to (or not pray to). So if you prayed to your god for Aunt Millie to recover from her terrible bout of pneumonia…and she did…was it a miracle???
Now, what about the really bad stuff? If every time that a Christian prayed for healing of a severe, terminal disease a healing occurred this would be truly amazing and would be clear evidence of the effectiveness of Christian prayer. But even Christians admit this is not the case. Most prayers for healing of a severe, terminal disease are not answered with a healing. The overwhelming majority of devout, faithful Christians who pray for healing of severe, terminal diseases DIE from those severe, terminal diseases.
If truly unusual recoveries occurred more frequently among Christians this again would be good evidence that Christian prayer is effective. But life insurance statistics due not bear this out. Morbidity and mortality rates for Christians are no different than for persons of other religions or for persons of no religions. Rare recoveries happen to people of all religions and to atheists.
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Hi Erik,
I’m not ruling out the possibility that the surgeon’s prayer had something to do with the patient’s recovery, I’m just pointing out that if he always prays for every patient to recover, and most don’t, then my bet is on the electric paddles and not with the prayer as being the key to this particular patient’s recovery.
If, instead of praying and using the paddles forty minutes later, the surgeon had only touched the man’s head and ordered him in the name of Jesus to stand up and walk…and he did…THAT would get my attention. The fact that the paddles were used, takes out any mystery to the situation, for me at least.
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You’re still answering the wrong question. I’m not suggesting that every recovery from any mild illness or treatable condition is evidence for an answer to prayer.
I’m saying that if a recovery defies medical evidence and expectations, and if the patient was prayed for, it is sensible to accept the possibility that the two events are connected since no obvious medical explanation is available. Even one such event is evidence of something, many such events is good evidence of something.
That is the argument I am making, not either of the two arguments you have argued against so far.
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1. We don’t know “he always prays for every patient to recover”, that is your assumption. But it is irrelevant, because that is again addressing an argument I am not making.
2. So, if a patient is treated by an expert medical team in an emergency room in a hospital in the US, and an experienced heart specialist pronounces him dead, are you saying it is not unusual that he could be given treatment subsequent to that and recover fully?
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I think we may be one comment behind each other, Erik.
I admit that there are some miracle claims that are hard to explain from a medical stand point. The only thing I can say is that rare recoveries do happen. Some patients with terminal cancer who should be dead are still alive. Physicians don’t know why but they are. Some of these people are Christians. Some are Muslims. Some are Jews, Hindus, and atheists! Rare recoveries are just a fact of life. Could there be a “Being” who once in a great while picks someone with a fatal disease to recover from their fatal disease? Yes. But that means that he/she/it at the same time allows millions of others to die from that same disease. Until we have better evidence, I prefer to believe that these few, random recoveries are based on random chance not on some god playing Russian Roulette with people’s lives.
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“So, if a patient is treated by an expert medical team in an emergency room in a hospital in the US, and an experienced heart specialist pronounces him dead, are you saying it is not unusual that he could be given treatment subsequent to that and recover fully?”
If a fifty something year old male comes into an ER in a major city in the US in cardiac arrest I would bet that the medical staff is going to spend at least 40 minutes if not more working on him before giving up. Don’t quote me, that is a guess off of the top of my head.
Yes, it would be unusual for someone to resume a resuscitation effort once it has been called off. However, I suppose if a cardiac specialist happened to walk into the ER just after the Code had been stopped, it could be restarted if he insisted, but it would be unusual. (The patient would probably have to be his patient.)
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Hey Eric. I personally feel that your response here is very reasonable and I don’t really have a problem understanding why these things increase your own confidence levels in your worldview. As I mentioned before it’s claims like these that cause an adjustment to my own confidence levels about naturalism even though they aren’t enough to make me believe the way you do. If I may, I’d like to offer some further points. I’m sure my points won’t move your confidence levels, but my hope is that I can move you from feeling that skeptics have no reasonable case at all for doubt to a point where you can at least see that it might be reasonable. In other words I’d like to convince you to be just a little less judgmental about the skeptical viewpoint.
I’d like to segue a little to a story of something that happened at work a week ago. We had some hardware come back that was exhibiting some very strange behavior in the circuits that my team had designed, and the project lead called about 20 of us into daily meetings to resolve it. Several of us thought we knew what the problem in the design was but the data was not matching what we expected given our guess of the problem. However the data was also looking a little like the tester had made a mistake in data collection. When I brought this up I admitted that it was a long shot but I asked the tester if she had properly set up the test and she said she had double and triple checked the settings and was sure the data collection was correct. The project lead was wondering if I was falling into confirmation bias because I wanted the data to fit our guess of the problem. It took 3 days of me requesting further investigation before they agreed it was worth a look, and finally on the fourth day the tester came back and said that she had actually set up the test wrong. She presented the new data and the whole team agreed that the data matched what we would expect given our original guess of what was wrong in the design.
During those 4 days, everyone on the team was asking very probing questions and during the time that none of us had any good natural explanation for the data nobody ever suggested that we might be dealing with something supernatural because of the fact that we couldn’t come up with a natural explanation.
Now dealing with hardware is obviously much easier than dealing with human physiology especially since we can’t go back and run tests on the human like we could on our hardware so it’s not a very good analogy, but I just wanted to explain the mindset of people who think and live everyday operating skeptically and who see it cause progression toward greater understanding of reality in a natural way. While it may seem very obvious to others that we are being “biased” because we ask very probing skeptical questions, there are reasons given our experience that we ask these questions. There are also reasons we have for doubting that the answers will end up being supernatural.
So could some skeptical questions be applied in your heart surgeon case? I believe some very reasonable questions could be asked: Have the “proper procedures” for a death pronouncement ever changed over time? (I am pretty sure the answer is yes) Could our current “proper procedures” for death pronouncement have some flaws? (I don’t know but it’s a good question). Have there been other cases where people were declared dead with proper procedures only to find out later that they were actually still alive even with no prayer offered at that moment? (not sure, but I do remember reading of cases like this in the past). Are there other cases where a prayer is offered on someone declared dead that didn’t work? (very likely yes) Do we know for sure there wasn’t a small mistake made in the procedures of declaring death? (hard to tell). There’s another part of the story that creates at least some reason for skepticism – the fact that the revival happened after final use of the electric paddles. It seems there was still some final natural action that was part of the revival process. If we had a team of scientists I’m sure they could come up with some other interesting observations and questions as well.
But no matter how one answers those questions, if one trusts the overall story, which I do, I think an honest skeptic would admit that there is at the very least a strange coincidence that occurred. What are the natural chances of that occurring across all the millions (or billions?) of death stories that have happened in history? That seems to me very difficult to calculate, so this is why I leave open the reason for suspicion of naturalism in cases like this. But I honestly don’t see why I would set my confidence levels for supernaturalism to a very high level because of stories like this.
I would also agree with you on not wanting to resort to “naturalism of the gaps” as much as not wanting to resort to “supernaturalism of the gaps”. But I do believe there is at least some precedent of history as well as everyday experiences of very strange unknown occurrences becoming less unknown the more we understand the natural workings of the world we live in. Does this mean I’ve set the bar too high? Maybe, and while it’s true each individual decides on their own where the bar is set I believe history in scientific studies can guide us on where the proper place is to set that bar. Scientists and philosophers of science and epistemology have some feel for that but it’s not very precise.
It’s also important to note that your “wrong explanation” response to Catholic miracle claims can be fairly applied to your examples as well.
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Gary,
Based on your latest comment, we can agree that the case i talked about is pretty unusual. Doctors don’t usually try to resuscitate once a patient has been pronounced dead. And for good reason, because they’re dead. But on this occasion that did happen, and the doctor prayed and the patient, against the odds, recovered. This is the data we have before us.
So then we come to how to explain this unusual occurrence. And it isn’t my business to argue how anyone else should explain it once we agree on the facts. So I’ll just briefly comment on your explanations.
“Rare recoveries are just a fact of life.”
But rare recoveries after prayer are interesting evidence.
“Could there be a “Being” who once in a great while picks someone with a fatal disease to recover from their fatal disease? Yes. But that means that he/she/it at the same time allows millions of others to die from that same disease.”
Yes, that is true. And it is a difficulty for theism, which I have always admitted. It is part of the larger “problem of evil”. But it is a different question to the one we are discussing here. (But of course worth discussing and arguing over in its own right.)
“Until we have better evidence, I prefer to believe that these few, random recoveries are based on random chance not on some god playing Russian Roulette with people’s lives.”
That’s your choice. But they aren’t totally “random” recoveries, they are recoveries after prayer, rare perhaps, but not really random. I conclude differently, but I have no argument with you here, each of us has to choose.
Thanks.
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Hi Howie, thanks for your thoughts. I always appreciate that you so often try to find a way to bring disagreeing people closer.
I’m sorry if I seem judgmental about the sceptical viewpoint. I don’t feel that way. I have long pondered why people like Nate and I, who often think quite similarly, come to such different conclusions. And I have suggested in this discussion that one reason may be that we are looking at the evidence through different frames. Sceptics often want “proof”, by which they usually mean scientific level evidence. I am not critical of sceptics personally for this, but I think it is the wrong methodology. For if none of the hypotheses can be assessed at a scientific level, and a sceptic takes the sceptical view, they have actually rejected on view that lacks scientific level evidence but held another. Now I know the standard position is to say “I’m not taking a view”, but I think they still are.
So I think a better methodology is to go with an explanation that is more probable than any other. And if only one viewpoint has an explanation, that by definition is the most probable, or at least the least improbable. On various questions, different viewpoints will score better, and then we have to balance them all.
Your work example is very interesting. But in the end you used time tested procedures – you considered all the hypotheses and tested the one that seemed most obvious until you showed it was faulty. I would endorse that for the questions we are discussing.
“It’s also important to note that your “wrong explanation” response to Catholic miracle claims can be fairly applied to your examples as well.”
Yes I agree. That is why I don’t claim that healings prove christianity, only that they suggest that a non-naturalistic explanation is possible, even likely, when the cumulative evidence is considered.
Thanks again.
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No it isn’t sensible at all. Not in any shape or form.
All it suggests is simply a lengthening of odds: for example, a one in hundred thousand recovery to a one in a two hundred and fifty thousand recovery.
Consider: If I were a devout believer and also a golfer who had never made a hole in one on the par three fourth hole after thirty years playing the same course decided to pray for five minutes before driving off with my seven iron, and lo and behold my ball bounced once on the green and ran directly into the hole. Would you truly consider this a miracle? Attribute it to divine intervention from a deity? And not any old deity of course, but the one I fervently believed to be the creator of the entire universe. And in this case Yahweh/Jesus?
I hope you realise, unklee, this is what you are trying to get everyone to accept here. Whether we are discussing golf or heart attacks. Dandruff or dreaded disease, polio or parking spots, hernias or hard-ons.
You are plainly stating that there is no reason we should not consider divine intervention for your heart attack patient/golfer and specifically divine intervention from your god.
Meanwhile, as your Christian heart surgeon was praying, in the adjacent ward, or a nearby hospice or a local clinic, a fifteen year old girl just died from cardiac arrest due to a very rare form of heart disease, even though a dedicated team of highly-trained specialists had been working their backsides off to save her. And it just so happens that this team was made up entirely of atheists.
What should make you sick to your stomach is that if this recovery-from-prayer were in any way true it would indicate a capricious and vile god.
What is worse is that you would align with such a god.
However, in truth, all it really suggests is your lack of integrity and that you are simply playing disingenuous, toady games.
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If some people get better after prayer, it still leaves the greater number where prayer has no effect. This is the key point to me, that in most cases after prayer there is no difference, thus it seems to me that it is not prayer that is making the difference rather it must be something else (perhaps sheer chance).
As an example, if a miracle is seen as a 1 in a million event then in America there are 50 million people prayed for each year then there should be around 50 ‘miraculous’ events per year.
Human nature is very bad at understanding probability we tend to underestimate the probability of extreme events occurring. Thus many an answer to prayer is just a statiscial outlier result.
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Peter, I shared this with unkleE a year ago when he brought this miracle thing up then. Here is a New York Doctor who believes it will be commonplace to bring people back to life and he has already done it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2381442/Dr-Sam-Parnia-claims-corpses-soon-revived-24-hours-death.html
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@kcchief1, thanks for the link. I noticed the key issue is to preserve the person’s body in such a way that the brain and other key organs are not damaged in the intervening period.
Contemplating this it makes sense to see life as being tied to the body, not a separate soul/spirit. If the body can be revived then life returns. Sean Carroll has argued that there can be no immortal soul as life/consciousness is inextricably linked to the human brain.
Some people claim out of body experiences, where they suggest they have seen their own body from above. I have pondered at times whether we might have more than the five senses known to science..
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A few short years ago people would have thought what Dr Parnia is doing would be a miracle. The more we learn, the more we can explain.
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Eric,
If you are correct that Christian prayer occasionally evokes miracle cures, shouldn’t we see some statistical difference in the cure rates of Christians and non-Christians? Or at least shouldn’t we see a higher incidence of rare unexpected health recoveries among Christians than among non-Christians?
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Unklee
Do the variety of experiences people have with magicians or psychics point to something supernatural? Or do they just point to our capacity to fool and be fooled? I think human psychology provides plenty of explanation for these experiences.
Perhaps a better analogy here is alien visitation or abduction. There are thousands and thousands of stories claiming these things have happened. But while I cannot disprove the existence of intelligent, advanced aliens who have visited earth and encountered or abducted humans, I find natural explanations (hallucination, misinterpretation, fraud, etc) are adequate to explain the stories and far more compelling than alien visitation and abduction.
Alien visitation and abduction has not been conclusively disproven, but there is not element of such stories that cannot be adequately explained by what we know about human nature and psychology.
This is why I mentioned the experiences attributed to “mutually exclusive religions.” If “A” and “Not A” produce the same spiritual experience, then the experience cannot be said to be a reliable source of knowledge. Now, you might perhaps argue for some sort of universalist deity that gives spiritual experiences to people regardless of their spiritual beliefs, but that implies a Trickster God and it undermines the “knowledge” value of such spiritual experiences.
Sex and drugs produce spiritual experiences, as well. Is it because God uses those things to communicate knowledge to humans? Or is it just because those things produce mental and emotional responses in our brains? I think the latter is a perfectly adequate explanation for what humans experience under the influence of sex or drugs. You would need to show me a substantive reason why those things are inadequate explanations of the feelings humans have during sexual or drug experiences.
I actually agree with this, but I don’t think it is at all inconsistent with naturalism. Lots of natural outcomes are unlikely. Spontaneous remission of cancer is very unlikely…and yet it happens. If somebody only has a .01% chance of recovery, then recovery is not a miracle. It’s a rare, but natural, outcome.
About 1.7 million people in the US get cancer every year. I don’t know how common spontaneous remission is, but if only .01% of those cancer patients experience spontaneous remission, then that means there will be 17,000 unexpected, seemingly miraculous, “cures” every year.
I think it would be more difficult to find people who don’t have anybody praying for them. When close to 100% of sick people have somebody praying for their recovery, then it’s hardly surprising that recoveries will be credited to the prayers.
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KCChief1
Eh, I’d be very, very reluctant about citing Sam Parnia. I looked into him a couple years ago after a Christian had urged me to look into studies suggesting that some Near Death Experiences provided veridical evidence of the supernatural. In particular, I was pointed to his then-recent study, which the Christian claimed was persuasive due to its large sample size (2060 cardiac arrest events). Except, well….read this excerpt from the study.
So the study only had ONE patient with a potentially relevant, veridical experience. But if you read further into the study, you find that the patient only described ordinary emergency room activities that he would have seen immediately before consciousness and immediately after regaining consciousness, as well as a doctor he had seen at the hospital before the interview was conducted.
While I’m certain that the medical field is getting better at extending potential resuscitation times, I’m skeptical of Parnia.
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@Jon, “Eh, I’d be very, very reluctant about citing Sam Parnia.”
Not sure why I should be skeptical of him. I have read many articles about him, and never got the impression his focus was in an afterlife. His main focus is keeping people who have clinically died in a state where they can be repaired and brought back to life.
Maybe I’m missing something here ?
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For instance, end stage, metastatic, pancreatic cancer. There are very few, if any, known, complete cures from this disease. If Christian prayer is effective, shouldn’t medical researchers notice a strange phenomenon that even though most people do not recover from this disease there are a handful of documented cases of full recover, all of which involve prayer to Jesus for healing?
But to my knowledge, no such medical evidence exists of such cases. All we have are anecdotal Christian claims of such cases. Why is that?
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