A Response to John Loftus' Challenge

“Excuse me? I thought the idea of the plagues was that God was doing something miraculous. If God could turn an entire river into Blood, He certainly could have made it blood without the ability to coagulate! Somehow, the author had no problem with God intervening with the entire water system of Egypt at once, but not creating something that is physically impossible to exist. Curious. If God made water into Blood, he was stuck with all the properties of Blood.”

“I have seen the argument that the crossing of the Reed Sea was done at the time of a tsunami, and the reason why the water had receded. Did God cause the tsunami? Or was it good timing? Or was it a natural event that people attributed to God? (The timing is all off, anyway. It would take more than 30 days for 2 Million to cross a sea, and no tsunami lasts that long.)”

“Then they use the fact that all this water is there to give natural explanations for fossils, continents, and mountains forming. Couldn’t the fossils also miraculously appear? Occasionally we mix and match parts of natural/supernatural. Like God supernaturally calling all the animals into the Ark, but naturally fitting them in, and then supernaturally causing them to hibernate, rather than require food.

Even Christians understand the problem of fitting all the provisions and animals on the Ark, so they begin inserting “miracles” as necessary to resolve the problem. Re-define “kinds” so as to require supernatural evolutionary rates. Or have the animals all shrink. Or have “pockets” of fresh water for some fish to survive. As the natural explanation is being given, if there is a speed bump, simply interject a “miracle.” Shoot, the whole thing is a miracle, what is wrong with a few nudges of miracles along the way?”

“The problem comes in that we no longer can determine how much was a miracle, and how much was not. If it was ALL a miracle, why the silly charade of having a flood, a boat and a dramatic rescue? Easier to kill all but a few humans and animals with God’s laser-beam eyes.”

“For some reason (that the Christian enthusiastically admits they cannot even hope to explain) the God must be mixing and matching natural and supernatural events. Either there is some limitation in which he is bound by some laws, or the humans are picking and choosing which parts to label “miracle” and which to not by arbitrary means.”

“Another common natural/supernatural event is the Resurrection. We all agree that a person that is dead for 2 days does not come back to life. That is a supernatural event. But then Christians insist on Jesus having a very natural body. One that walks, talks and eats. (Luke 24:42-43) Not so natural to fly, so that one gets chalked down to the miracle bit. (Acts 1:9)”

“I am often told that just because one account doesn’t say something happened, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Hey, I can play that game too! Just because the angel doesn’t say it, the angel could have muttered under his breath, “Come see where he lay…(until about two seconds ago, when I had to open the stone, because Jesus forgot his key again. Had you come in here a bit quicker, you would have seen him teleport out of here naked!)”

“By the time the Gospel of Peter was written, it was made even clearer that Jesus needed that rock moved to get out. The Gospel of Peter has the stone rolling away by itself; two angels come down from heaven, go into the tomb, and bring Jesus out. We know that actually happened, because it was recounted as something the centurion said, and early Christians would have been too fearful to quote testimony from a living Roman Soldier. (I hope you understand the sarcasm of that last sentence after reading such claims from apologists.)”

“Moving the stone for a “look-see” would not make a whit of difference to his followers. There would not have been any need to connect an empty tomb to the miraculous personage appearing before them.”

“No, I do not assume miracles cannot exist. I am having a hard time, though, hearing Christians agree as to what is a supernatural miracle, and what is good timing, and what is natural. If Christians cannot agree what is a miracle, why should I assume that what some particular Christians claim is a miracle—really is?

Jesus needing a rock to move, because naturally he could not leave without it, and later teleporting sounds exactly as to how humans create myths.”

The above are select quotations from Mr. Dagood's article "Which Part Fits in Which Slot Again?" on Debunking Christianity. Now if the reader was wondering why I picked them out of all the available paragraphs, it is because I wanted, in the sparse time available to me (I am in the last year of college and the academic schedule can be really unforgiving), to point out the one mistake which drives the entirety of Mr. Dagood's article.

I would definitely like to address each and every problem he raises concerning miraculous events. In fact I would like to thank Mr. Dagood and all his cohorts for challenging my faith, since he is giving me opportunity to behold more and more of the unsearchable glories of God. But I simply do not have the time to do so. Thankfully, others before me have addressed the same issues (including the creationists Jonathan Sarfati and John Woodmorappe on the Ark and ironically, John W. Loftus' old mentor William Lane Craig on the historicity and resurrection of Christ).

Having laid that aside, I would now like to get to the core of the argument, and that can be found in the introductory statement made by Mr. Dagood:

“In discussing miraculous occurrences as recounted in the Bible, we often see apologists swing back and forth as to what part of the miracle was actually supernatural, and what part of it was natural. Obviously, God could use both to his advantage, having the foresight to utilize an opportune moment and make it look like a miracle, yet there would be no way for us to tell.

How does a Christian come up with a system, by which we determine God just had good timing, as compared to God actually intervening? There is no way.”

The first paragraph alone contains a serious error only proponents of Open Theism, Natural Theology or hardline Arminianism would have a hard time trying to debunk (which, ironically, seem to be the type of Christians the article is aimed at—he references believers who either insist on or try to suggest naturalistic explanations for miracles, in particular), and neither of those three systems qualify as sterling examples of orthodox Christianity because they harbor unbiblical presuppositions about God's sovereignty.

Basic Biblical Fact: God does not “foresee” opportune moments. The God of the Bible is not the god of the Deists who wound up a clockwork universe and left it to run by itself. The author presupposes that such and such “opportune” moments happened INDEPENDENTLY of God's will, something the Bible never teaches at all. This error perpetuates itself all throughout the article in a concerted effort to try and blur the line between what is miraculous and what isn't.

But the truth is, God holds all things together in the entire universe moment by moment and personally orchestrates every single event, whether miraculous or “natural”. He controls the tiniest atom and the largest galaxy. In fact, even Satan's actions are bound by His decree (Job 1:6-12, 2:1-7). All the thoughts and intents of men's hearts (ref. Luke 2:35) are ultimately known by him because of the hidden script of Divine Providence, written before time began; hardening in their selfwilled pride those whom He will harden, and delivering by humility those whom He will deliver (Rom. 9:14-15).

The only reason the birds of the air do not perish for lack of food is because He feeds them daily. (Matthew 6:26, Luke 12:24, Job 38:41) The one reason the constellations do not misalign is because He guides them with His hand (Job 38:31-33). The stars themselves exist and die by His mighty power (Isaiah 41:26). Individuals, communities and nations develop at the utterance of His Word and perish at the blast of His nostrils (Job 4:8-10, Psalm 104:29-30) .

My God is the God who changed water into wine (John 2:1-11) and sticks into snakes (Exodus 4:1-5, 7:8-13). He is the God who commanded water to hold weight under His feet (Matthew 14:22-33, Mark 6:47-52, John 6:16-21) and the raging storm to cease (Matthew 8:23-27, Mark 4:35-41, Luke 8:22-25). He is the LORD Almighty in battle (Psalm 24:8), who controls vast armies of angels and men alike for His purposes, and disposes of them as He wills (2 Kings 6:17, Jeremiah 22:7, Isaiah 10:5-19). Nothing is exempt from His control as if they operated on their own...not even dice (Proverbs 16:33).

In short, there is no such thing as a system for determining which is a miracle and which isn't, nor is there a need for it, because God upholds all things by the power of His hand (Hebrews 1:3). Which goes to mean that the skeptic who types out blasphemies against the Lord and His people is only able to do so by what he himself would consider a miracle, and he had better repent and believe in the Gospel or perish.

This is a classic example of skeptics charging us with the “God of the Gaps” fallacy, yet they do not realize that they themselves cannot escape a similar charge when they (by virtue of a skewed humility) attribute events to “chance”. Doing so presupposes that the human will know for certain in the future how such an event occurred using his own faculties and any instruments developed to gather data about such events, and that these phenomena are ultimately natural in origin.

However, the sober fact is that random chance simply does not explain things any better than a god of the gaps invocation could. We are merely finite and fallible OBSERVERS of a vast universe which we do not completely understand, which means that all our knowledge of reality is ultimately unjustified when we set our own observation and reasoning up as the final arbiters of truth (just because we observe something does not guarantee its reality, universality or constancy—something even the atheist will agree with). And even if we were able to know the hows of every single subatomic action and reaction, it is still impossible for us to know the whys and wherefores of such details.

Earlier I referenced blurring the distinction between miracles and natural events. Keeping in mind the above statement, the fallacy of this line of thinking may be made more fully known: how does one absolutely determine if a phenomenon is indeed “natural”, i.e. a uniform occurrence within nature? If it observes the laws of nature? But how do we know that the laws of nature are self-attesting and absolute in themselves (a greater problem surfaces if we were to ask how such laws came to be and if they are even independent of any higher governance)? Because we haven't seen anything that contradicts them? Then that makes it all relative to us, doesn't it?

You know what that means? It means that, in the atheistic universe, WE are gods, even though we cannot justify that selfsame idea!

Because of this, all the naturalistic atheist, with his naturalistic biases, can ever hope to declare from his limited observations is that we are trapped in a universe which never planned us and doesn't give a hoot about our presence on what they themselves would consider an insignificant speck in a vast ocean of stars and interstellar junk that exists for no particular purpose. Which only leads him to embrace such arrogant and self-destructive beliefs as existentialism or even nihilism.

Furthermore, this article exhibits another common attitude all men hold: the unhealthy fear of God's sovereignty. The entirety of the writing treats God as if he was some sort of arbitrary agent who may just suddenly decide to do this and that on an unfounded whim—a belief that is so profoundly ignorant of the fact that God makes decisions according to His Divine Nature. Our God is a God of order, not of chaos and confusion (1 Corinthians 14:33); this immediately and overwhelmingly refutes the notion that God is arbitrary. Yet considering the treatment of moral justification and the problem of evil by the Debunking Christianity fellows, I am not surprised this even comes up.

And yes, Mr. Dagood. I would heartily agree with you that Jesus appearing before His disciples isn't enough to convince them. In fact, you seem to have missed the one verse stating that they all thought they had seen a ghost. Mary Magdalene was so hardened in her grief that she thought the resurrected Christ was a gardener. It took Jesus spiritually opening the eyes of the two disciples traveling on the road to Emmaus just to get them to recognize Him. Thomas went down in history as one of the foremost empiricist skeptics of his time.

As R. C. Sproul Sr.--in his work “Who is Jesus?”--has bluntly put it: Joseph didn't need to be a skilled biologist to know that babies don't come from the stork. Same goes for people who all their lives have seen that once living creatures die, they stay dead (and we have seen how dependent humans can be on their own finite knowledge).

Yes, Mr. Dagood. The human heart is just that hard, because God has given us over to our selfish desires in His anger, due to our sin of rebellion (Romans 1:17-32).

This points out yet again the false presupposition the whole article ultimately runs on, yet cannot even justify: that the human being is the final reference point for all truth, simply because he is. If that does not sound exactly like the premise of the lie made to Adam in the Garden, then I do not know what does.

Atheists demanding to know how miracles could have come to be, and then writing them off as mythical simply because they in their limited and fallible human knowledge cannot understand the intricacies thereof, sounds exactly like unfounded arrogance.

Repent, and believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ; for the Kingdom is at hand.