Can a Thinking Person Believe in Miracles

Mark 5 through 8 is thick with miracles. A legion of demons is driven into pigs. A woman is healed by touching a cloak. A dead girl gets up. Five thousand are fed, then four thousand. Jesus walks on the lake. A deaf man hears. A blind man sees, in stages. For many modern readers, and for many Christians in their quieter moments, these chapters raise the obvious question. Can an educated person, who trusts medicine and physics and has never seen a loaf multiply, believe that any of this happened?

Let the objection be stated at its strongest. It goes something like this. Miracle stories are common in the ancient world. Every religion has them. People in the first century did not have our understanding of natural law, so events that seemed miraculous to them may simply have been misunderstood, exaggerated, or invented. Moreover, we now have an enormous, consistent body of evidence that nature operates by regular laws, and no comparably strong evidence that these laws are ever suspended. When a report of a miracle conflicts with the whole of our experience of how the world works, it is always more probable that the report is mistaken than that the miracle occurred. A thinking person should therefore reject the miracles of Mark, however much they may admire the teaching.

That is a serious argument, and it deserves a serious reply rather than a dismissal. Here is one, taken in steps.

First, the argument quietly assumes what it needs to prove. It says miracles are maximally improbable because our uniform experience is against them. But whether our experience is uniform is exactly the question. If God exists and has acted in history, then experience is not uniform; it includes those acts. The argument only works if one has already decided that there is no God, or that God never acts. That may be true, but it is a premise, not a conclusion, and it should be argued for rather than smuggled in. Put another way, the question is not whether miracles are likely in a universe without God. Of course they are not. The question is whether this is that kind of universe.

Second, the objection overstates what a scientific understanding of nature rules out. Science describes what happens when nothing outside the system intervenes. It does not, and cannot, say that nothing outside the system ever does. If I drop a book, it falls. If someone catches it, the law of gravity has not been broken; a further agent has acted. The Christian claim is not that Jesus disproved the regularities of nature but that the one who authored them acted within them. The feeding of the five thousand does not require that bread ordinarily multiplies. It requires that the Creator of wheat can do quickly what he ordinarily does slowly in a field. Belief in regular natural law is, if anything, a Christian inheritance; it was the conviction that the world was made by a rational God that encouraged early scientists to look for order in it.

Third, the comparison to other ancient miracle stories does not do the work the objection wants. It is true that miracle reports exist in many cultures. It is also true that the Gospel accounts have features that distinguish them. They are early, written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. They are restrained. Mark does not describe Jesus turning stones to gold or flying; the miracles are acts of compassion and signs of who he is, often with a command to keep quiet. They contain embarrassing details a fabricator would omit: the disciples' persistent stupidity, Jesus's inability to do much in Nazareth, the Gentile mother who gets the better of him in argument. And they are woven into a narrative that ends in the public execution of the miracle-worker and the claim, made at great personal cost, that he rose. The existence of other stories does not tell us whether these particular ones are true. Each report must be weighed on its own evidence.

Fourth, the objection tends to treat first-century people as credulous in a way that is not fair to them. They knew perfectly well that dead girls do not get up and that bread does not multiply. That is why they were amazed. Mark records their amazement repeatedly, and the amazement only makes sense if they shared our expectation of how things normally go. The point of a miracle, for them as for us, was that it did not fit. A person who thought such things were ordinary would not have bothered to write them down.

Fifth, consider the alternative explanations honestly. If the miracles did not happen, then either the earliest Christians invented them, or they sincerely misremembered, or the stories grew in the telling. Invention is hard to square with the fact that the same people were willing to die for the claim. Misremembering is hard to square with the specificity and the number of witnesses named, some of whom, like Jairus, could be asked. Growth in the telling is the most plausible naturalistic option, but Mark is the earliest Gospel, written within a generation, and its miracles are already fully present and, if anything, more blunt and less polished than the later accounts. The legendary process, if there was one, had very little time to work.

None of this proves that the miracles happened. Historical evidence does not deliver proof in that sense for anything. What it does is remove the objection that a thinking person must reject them. A thinking person may weigh the evidence and conclude that the most likely explanation of Mark's stories, of the empty tomb, and of the church that followed is that something happened which does not fit a closed system. That is a reasonable conclusion, held by many careful people, and it is not a failure of intelligence.

Mark himself seems aware of the question. In chapter 8 the Pharisees come and demand a sign from heaven, and Jesus sighs deeply and refuses. He has just fed four thousand. The problem was never the lack of evidence. It was a heart that would not be moved by any amount of it. Then, in the boat, he asks his own disciples whether they still do not understand, and rehearses the loaves and baskets with them. The miracles were not meant to be spectacles. They were meant to be understood, to lead to the question Peter finally answers at Caesarea Philippi: you are the Messiah.

If you are a believer troubled by this question, it may help to know that doubt about miracles is not a sign that you are losing your faith. It is a sign that you take the world seriously, which is a Christian thing to do. Take the evidence seriously too. Read Mark slowly, with the eyes of a witness rather than a skeptic or a devotee, and ask what kind of person the stories describe. The honest answer to the question who is this, asked in the boat in Mark 4 and answered in Mark 8, has never required anyone to stop thinking. It has only required them to follow the thought all the way to its end.