Science and Miracles
Keener, Craig S. Miracles: The
Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Grand Rapids: Baker
Academic, 2011.
Blomberg, Craig L. Can we still believe
the Bible?: An evangelical engagement with contemporary questions. Grand
Rapids: Brazos Press, 2014.
1. Towards understanding the meaning of miracles.jpg)
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Miracles are a supernatural work of God. All
the miracles had a purpose—to prove that God is like no one else, that He has
complete control of creation because He is its source, and to convince us that
if He can do all these miraculous things, nothing in our lives is too hard for
Him to handle. He wants us to trust Him and know that He can do miracles in our
lives as well.
Craig Blomberg opines that Philosophers of
science stressed that the miraculous by definition lies outside the bounds of
science because it cannot be tested or experimentally reproduced in a
laboratory. Miracles, in other words, should not be defined as the violation of
the normal laws of nature or of the universe but as involving their temporary
suspension or transcendence.
2. Examination of the case against the miracles
in the Bible
Miracles in the Bible came to be doubted or
skepticism arises with the rise of Enlightenment in Europe during the 17th
century, this thinking changed dramatically in the light of about the account
of creation, the ten plagues of the Exodus, the day the sun stood still, or
perhaps some of the healing miracles of Jesus and Apostle. Many Philosophers
strongly rejected miracles in the Bible such as Spinoza and Hume vehemently
opposed miracles event in the Bible. Even Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976) tried to
‘demythologise’ the teaching of Jesus by stripping away the miraculous. He went
so far as to say: It is impossible to use electric light and the
wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and
at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.
Miracles should not be excluded a priori from
historical research. Neither science nor philosophy gives us valid reasons for
doing so. The only serious objection to the biblical miracle accounts is the
one of literary form. Do they closely enough resemble bona fide myths or
legends to be classified similarly? The closest parallels to New Testament
accounts consistently prove to be post-Christian in origin; very few pre-
Christian pagan miracle stories are at all similar. Old Testament miracles, on
the other hand, often postdate their ancient Near Eastern parallels. Here the
closest parallels come in contexts suggesting that the biblical counterparts
are attributing to Yahweh what other people groups ascribed to numerous
different gods. The purpose of the miracle stories is to counter the suggestion
that any god but the Lord of Israel exists; only real events, not just mythical
stories, could accomplish this. Other Old Testament miracles consistently fall
into one of just a handful of categories, making it unlikely that the biblical
narratives comprise random, fictitious accounts of the supernatural inserted
into blander stories for sensationalizing purposes.
New Testament miracles most centrally point to
the arrival of God’s kingdom and therefore of God’s king, Jesus the Messiah.
The miracles in the Gospels and Acts closely parallel each other and often find
their meaning when one recognizes Old Testament backgrounds as well. It does
little good to believe in miracles in Bible times but not to be open to them—or
to any of Paul’s more supernatural gifts of the Spirit—today. Those who still
defend cessationism risk quenching the Spirit (contra 1 Thess. 5:19) and
inappropriately closing themselves and others off from the full range of
blessings God might have for them and from potentially the greatest amount of
effective service for his kingdom. Without swinging the pendulum to the
opposite extreme and embracing the various abuses of the charismata or trying
to imitate the Spirit’s work in one’s own strength, cessationists really should
cease trying to limit God in how he chooses to work in his world today. It is,
in essence, a form of antisupernaturalism for all the postapostolic eras of
Christianity. The position is inconsistent with belief in a living and active
God, amounts to a practical deism, and smacks of humans trying to usurp God’s
sovereignty by dictating what his people can and cannot do with respect to
spiritual giftedness.
Oxford scholar G. B. Caird long ago remarked
regarding Luke, the first Christian historian:
Luke has often been accused of credulity
because he has packed his narrative with signs and wonders, but it would be
more in keeping with the evidence to commend him for his faithful reproduction
of one of the major constituents of early Christianity. For the Epistles bear
their concurrent witness that the preaching of the Gospel was everywhere
accompanied by exorcisms and healing and by other forms of miracle.
Craig S.Keener argues that one should not a
priori reject the possibility of eyewitness testimony behind reports of cures
and signs in the Gospels and Acts; whatever miracles mentioned are purely
written from the eye-witness account and no doubt it involved a divine
activity, even if one were to remain skeptical about miracle claims one would
not need to reject the rest of the testimony of the Gospels and Acts regarding
other events.
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