The Deeper Reason Why Skeptics Should Scoff at Christian Miracles
Authentic religion and the crassness of Christian literalism
If you’re an atheist, ask yourself what it would take to convince you that Christians are onto something, that God and miracles exist, that Jesus really was God, that he rose from the grave, that the Bible is essentially correct, and that if we don’t trust in God’s plan, we’ll end up in Hell forever.
Be honest and imagine whether, regardless of the apparent miracle you might witness, you’d find yourself reaching for natural explanations.
David Hume thought you’d do just that because that’s what you should do. The evidence for natural explanations is vast, encompassing all the mundane experiences that many billions of people throughout the history of civilizations have had and that testify to a natural order. We’re talking about trillions of observations of causally ordered events that are at best ambiguous as evidence for religions, because they happen the same way for everyone, regardless of what we say, believe, or do. Gravity, space, and time work the same for everyone.
The scientific atheists Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers have clashed on this question of whether anything could or should change a skeptic’s mind about religion. Coyne said that if Jesus…
