Debate 3: Matt McCormick and

Russell DiSilvestro
 Suppose the almighty creator of the universe with the power
to control every aspect of reality had sought to achieve a
state where all or most normal, thoughtful adult human
beings could reflect on the evidence available to them and
come to the reasonable conclusion that he exists.
 Could such a being create a state of affairs where beings
with our powers of reasoning could consult the evidence
and arrive at a justified, reasonable conclusion that God is
real or that Jesus was resurrected from the dead?
 Could God have given Christianity a better foundation?
 Certainly.
 But he didn’t.
 IfGod had been in charge, the miracles
should have been better.
 Consider a few obvious improvements for
performing better miracles that would have
helped alleviate the various concerns that
undermine the miracles of Jesus for us.
 IfGod was interested in proving something
with miracles, here is a list of ten
improvements:
 Committed, zealous believers should not be the ones who evaluate, investigate, or
record miracles.
 We often manage to find what we’re looking for. The virtue of double blind
testing procedures in science is that they help us prevent undue influence by
wishful thinking, conflicts of interest, hedging, confirmation bias, and sloppy thinking.
 The person who deeply wants the conclusion to be true should not be the same
person who is investigating the evidence that might show that it is true.
 Many people claim that there are miracles happening on a regular basis now.
 It would be a relatively easy matter to have an independent panel of objective
evaluators, doctors in the case of a healing miracle, examine just the evidence
before and after an alleged healing without any leading or suggestive information
about what they are looking for. Just show them the X rays, or the diagnoses, or the
CAT scans before and after someone is alleged to have been healed of a brain
tumor, for example.
 If miracles are real now, it would be easy to prove it.
 In general, small samples of information are less trustworthy.
 The more evidence,the better. If a miracle were to occur, all other
things being equal, we would have better evidence if there are
more people who attest to it or more evidence to show it.
 A few emotional believers with a great deal of investment in the
cause of the miracle claim are not as reliable (or not reliable at all)
as a large group of diverse, autonomous people.
 If God has the goal of proving his existence through miracles, he’d
need to make them evident to a great many, well-educated,
skeptical minded people who do not already believe. And it
would certainly be within the abilities of an all powerful being to
do it.
 The larger scale a miracle is, the greater the possibility that
it can be corroborated, confirmed, cross-checked, and
witnessed.
 A small miracle—a spiritual leader making a golden ring
appear in his palm (which is an old magician’s trick)—is
going to be more difficult to confirm, more likely to be
faked, and less indicative of some real violation of the laws
of nature than a large one. Even a resurrection that
becomes know to a handful of dedicated believers is trivial.
 With small miracles, the rest of us are merely likely to get
hearsay, anecdotal evidence, conflicting stories, and poor
transmission of the information. A miracle that appears to
everyone could be vastly more effective.
 The power of suggestion, social pressure, and peer
expectation can be very influential in getting people
to believe that something special or extraordinary
has happened.
 Dozens of psychological studies have shown that it
takes very little prompting and only slight
suggestions to get people to fabricate stories, deny
what they have seen with their own eyes, and come to
genuinely believe something is a mistake.
 Any miracle claim is going to be up against this
psychological background that will create
challenges to its authenticity.
 Many of the miracles that people allege are idiosyncratic, local,
and selfish. High school football teams pray fervently for God to
help them win the upcoming game while the other team does the
same. A rap star gives thanks to God for the modest success of his
latest misogynistic and violent CD. A man at the convenient store
wins $500 with a lottery ticket and claims that his prayers have
been answered. Jesus turns water into wine or withers a fig tree.
 Even if God did play some role in these events, it’s difficult for the
rest of us to believe that the omnipotent and omniscient creator of
the universe takes such an active interest in the outcome of a
football game between the rival high schools in Hollister.
 Consider how baffling it would be if God had played some role in
the success of a rap album or the amount of wine at a party while
ignoring the genocide of millions of innocent people in Rwanda.
 Events that are merely fortuitous for the person considering them,
like having a baby, or surviving a car wreck (especially since
many babies are stillborn, and many other people die in car
wrecks), even if they really are the result of God’s violating the
laws of nature, they just aren’t going to be convincing to anyone
who thinks about it very much. These sorts of events don’t look
special at all when viewed from a distance. In fact, they appear to
be completely predictable and ordinary—every day there will be
some people who will survive car wrecks, especially with
seatbelts and airbags, and every day there are babies born,
especially when people have unprotected sex. Couldn’t I throw a
ball up into the air and just as well claim that its coming down is a
result of my divine powers and is evidence of my miraculous
powers? If it was going to happen anyway, can’t everyone equally
claim credit for it, and doesn’t that show that no one gets credit for
it as a miracle?
 Powerful feelings of awe, religious significance,
excitement, and enthusiasm themselves are not
indicators that something special has happened
in the world.We have too many examples of
cases where people got very worked up over
things that turned out to be mistakes, deceptions,
or just insignificant events. Recall that eclipses
have been treated in history as indicators of
profound supernatural significance. Presumably,
God would have the ability to do something
more than induce such feelings in people, and
he’d know how much those feelings cloud the
truth.
 As the first century Christians, living in the Iron Age, saw it, the world was
infused with magical and supernatural events. Their minds and lives must
have been overrun with spooky events, spirits, supernatural forces,
mysteries, and frightening possibilities.Virtually none of the facts about
nature that you take for granted were a part of their knowledge base.They
didn’t know that such a thing as oxygen exists, they didn’t know that
infections are caused by viruses, they didn’t know that it gets dark at night
because the earth is turning, they didn’t know what made water boil, and
they didn’t know that there are no evil demons.The vast majority of them
did not know how to read or write. The average life expectancy was 20-30
years because of their ignorance of medical science and basic hygiene
and public sanitation. If you were God and you were going to pick an
audience with the intention of proving your existence and communicating
your desires, you almost could not find a more gullible, easily impressed,
and more ignorant group. It would take surprisingly little to completely
stun them—a toaster would appear to be a wondrous, and miraculous
artifact from heaven.
 The placebo effect is well-documented in human beings.
When they have the expectation that they are getting treated
for a medical problem, the expectation itself has a
substantial effect on their state and their reporting of their
state. A minimum requirement for even the most modest
over-the-counter cold medicine is that it must demonstrate
effectiveness significantly beyond the placebo effect level. If
it does not, the FDA will not allow manufacturers to claim any
real capacity to treat illness. The effects felt in many putative
spiritual cures, alternative medical therapies, faith healings,
and alleged miracles are undoubtedly the placebo effect. If
you’re God and you’re performing miracles, you need to do
better than that. And presumably, you’d have the power, the
knowledge, and the will to do so.
 Stage magicians have devised ways, through entirely natural
means of trickery, to perform feats that are stunning for what
they appear to be. They make large objects like cars and
people disappear and reappear, they levitate, walk on water,
transport from one location to another. Even a resurrection
would be easy to fake.
 The ability of con artists and performers to do these tricks
casts substantial doubts on any alleged miracle that
resembles them.
 Wouldn’t it be perverse of God to bring about a real miracle,
but it was the sort of thing that is easily duplicated by a
teenager with a magic kit or a magic how-to book, and
thereby completely obscure its significance and
occurrence?
1. If God had sought a widespread level of
belief in his existence or Jesus’ divinity on
the basis of miracles, then he could have
brought about much better miracles that
would have achieved this goal.
2. He did not bring about better miracles that
achieved this goal.
3. Therefore, God did not seek a widespread
level of belief in his existence or Jesus’
divinity on the basis of miracles.
 Itisn’t reasonable to think that God
performed the miracles that Christianity
has been grounded on.

 And if it’s not reasonable to believe in

those, then it’s not reasonable to be a
Christian at all.
 The miracles upon which Christianity is
built are too small, obscure, poorly
attested to, inappropriate, easily faked,
insignificant, mired in psychological
glitches, and pedestrian to be attributed
to God.
 Christian miracle doctrine doesn’t make
enough sense from the inside for us to
accept it as plausible.
 from Divine Hiddenness, eds. Howard Snyder and Moser, pgs. 9-10.
 a. Maybe revealing himself is not a high priority. It is not something he wants. That would explain why
he doesn’t do it. It’s not that he can’t do it, he doesn’t want to.
 b. Remaining hidden enables people to freely love, trust and obey Him. Coercion is incompatible with
love.
 c. Being hidden prevents a human response based on improper motives like fear of punishment.
 d. Being hidden prevent humans from relating to God and their knowledge of God in a presumptuous
way.
 e. God's being hidden allows us to recognize the wretchedness of life on our own without God, and to
stimulate us to search for him with the appropriate attitude (contrition.)
 f. If he revealed himself, then it would not be possible to have the real risk associated with passionate
faith.
 g. If he revealed himself, then the temptation to doubt would be reduced or eliminated. Doubt makes
religious diversity possible and gives us opportunities to assist others and ourselves in building
personal relationships with God.

 But notice that none of these suggestions is compatible with the main thesis we are considering:
Objective reflection on the historical evidence justifies the conclusion that Jesus was resurrected.