The argument from miracles in Christianity
Christian apologetics stakes its strongest miracle-based case on the resurrection of Jesus — a claim defended with historical, analytic, and Bayesian tools against Hume's standing objection that no testimonial evidence can establish a violation of natural law.
For Christianity, one miracle carries more weight than all others combined: the resurrection of Jesus. Paul concedes the stakes in 1 Corinthians 15:14 — 'if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.' Since the New Testament itself, the resurrection has been positioned as the decisive miracle, and almost the entire Christian argument from miracles is an argument about this one event.
Modern Christian apologetics defends the resurrection with a trio of tools. Historical: William Lane Craig and N.T. Wright point to the minimal facts — crucifixion, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, disciples' transformed lives — that, they argue, most secular historians accept and that are best explained by actual resurrection. Analytic: Richard Swinburne's The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003) builds a Bayesian case, multiplying low prior with high explanatory likelihood to argue the resurrection is probable. Philosophical: Plantinga and others push back against Hume's standing objection that no testimony can establish a violation of natural law, arguing that Hume's argument begs the question against the possibility of divine action.
The secular response, after Hume, has been that even if the resurrection is barely possible, the cost of believing it — given the uniform experience that dead people stay dead — outstrips any testimonial evidence one could adduce. Bart Ehrman presses this in How Jesus Became God: historians qua historians cannot affirm miracles, because historical method requires probable rather than miraculous explanations. John Loftus and Richard Carrier pursue the argument further, suggesting that the evidence for Muhammad's miracles, the miracles of Catholic saints, and the miracles of Hindu gurus is, by the standards Christians apply to competing traditions, no weaker than the evidence for the resurrection. The Christian answer is that the resurrection is qualitatively different — a claim that remains, on both sides, philosophically contested.
- William Lane Craig— Minimal facts apologetic for the resurrection
- N.T. Wright— The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003)
- Richard Swinburne— Bayesian resurrection argument
- Bart Ehrman— Historical-critical skeptical rejoinder
“And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”
“Historians cannot deal with miracles. This is not because they are opposed to the possibility of miracles — it is because the historical method is designed to yield probable past events, and miracles are, by definition, improbable events.”