Miracles are impossible

A law of nature tells you what a physical system will do if it is left alone. Gravity says a dropped apple will fall. If you reach out and catch it, gravity has not been broken. You have added a cause the law did not account for, and the law, applied to the new situation, still holds. The law was always a description of what happens when nothing else intervenes.

A miracle, as Christians use the word, is that kind of addition, not nature malfunctioning: a claim that a personal agent outside nature, God, acted in a particular moment for a purpose. The Christian writer Amy K. Hall puts it this way: “By definition, a miracle does not happen as a result of a naturally repeating cause that can be measured and studied.”

So the laws of nature cannot settle whether a miracle has happened. They tell you what to expect when only natural causes are at work. Whether only natural causes are ever at work is a different question, and it is not one the laws answer.

To show that miracles are impossible, you would need to know that nature is never acted on from outside. No experiment can show that. Science studies nature from within, and a careful scientist can investigate everything in the world without knowing whether anything exists beyond it. The claim that nothing does is a philosophical position, usually called naturalism.

That creates a problem for the argument. “There is no God, because miracles are impossible” and “miracles are impossible, because there is no God” cannot both be doing the work. If the impossibility of miracles rests on naturalism, it cannot then be used as evidence for naturalism.

This does not mean your doubt is unreasonable. If you have good independent reasons to think there is no God, then you will rightly judge miracles to be very unlikely, and that is a consistent position. But then the case against miracles is only as strong as the case for naturalism, and science has not established naturalism. If you are uncertain whether God exists, as many readers are, you cannot rule miracles out in advance.

Hume argued that the uniform experience of humankind stands against any miracle, so no testimony could ever outweigh it. The difficulty is in the word “uniform.” Experience is uniform against miracles only if every report of one is false, and that is what the argument was supposed to prove. Testimony that a miracle happened is part of human experience. Hume’s argument counts all the ordinary cases as evidence and rules the reported exceptions out before examining them.

The same principle would make it irrational to believe in any event without precedent, however strong the evidence for it. Science accepts singular events, including the origin of the universe itself, when the evidence points to them.

The philosopher of science John Earman pressed this point hard enough to title his book on the subject Hume’s Abject Failure (2000), arguing that Hume’s case does not work even on its own terms. None of this makes miracles likely. Hume’s own principle, proportioning belief to evidence, requires looking at the evidence for a particular claim rather than declaring the answer beforehand.

A miracle, if one happened, is a single past event. You cannot repeat it in a laboratory, any more than you can repeat the assassination of Julius Caesar. Singular past events are investigated by historians, who weigh testimony, ask when and by whom it was recorded, and look for the explanation that best fits the agreed facts. History gives probabilities, not proofs, and that is all this page claims.

Christianity rests on one such claim above all others: that Jesus, after his execution, was raised from the dead. Paul, writing in the mid-50s AD, passes on a summary he says he had himself received, listing people to whom Jesus appeared, including a group of “more than five hundred,” “most of whom are still living” (1 Corinthians 15:6). He states the stakes plainly: “if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is worthless, and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14).

The Christian historians Gary Habermas and Michael Licona built their case for the resurrection on facts that most scholars accept, whatever their beliefs: that Jesus was crucified, and that his followers soon afterward sincerely believed he had appeared to them. Whether those facts are best explained by a resurrection is the question worth arguing about.

The laws of nature do not rule out miracles, and neither does Hume’s argument. Nothing here shows that any particular miracle has happened.

Most miracle claims still deserve the doubt you bring to them, and Christians should apply the same scrutiny to stories from their own tradition. If someone tells you a statue wept last week, you are right to want more than their word.

It follows that the question cannot be closed in advance. If you are open to the possibility that God exists, then a miracle is possible, and a claim like the resurrection has to be judged on its evidence. Christianity, unusually, invites that test. Instead of asking you to believe a private experience, it points to a public execution under a named Roman governor, and to claims made soon afterward in the city where it happened.