George Pell on The argument from miracles

As a senior Catholic prelate, George Pell treated miracles not as embarrassing relics of a pre-scientific age but as essential elements of Christian revelation. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ stood at the centre of his apologetic: if Christ did not rise, Pell acknowledged, then the entire edifice of Christian faith collapses. But he maintained that the historical evidence — the empty tomb, the appearances to the disciples, the rapid growth of the early Church — pointed strongly toward a genuine miraculous event.

Pell was also a defender of the Church's formal miracle-verification process, including the medical investigations required for canonisation. He argued that the Church was not credulous but rigorous in evaluating miracle claims, subjecting them to scientific and medical scrutiny before accepting them. This institutional caution, in his view, distinguished Catholic engagement with miracles from popular superstition.

In debates with atheists, Pell tended to avoid defending every miracle claim in the Bible and instead focused on the Resurrection as the one that mattered most. His argument was that if God exists and created the natural order, then suspending that order on occasion is not logically problematic — it is simply a question of whether the evidence in any particular case is sufficient.