Miracles — Really? — What Would It Take to Believe the Impossible?
David Hume said miracles are never rational to believe. Is he right? Let's look at the philosophy, the evidence, and the honest problems.
Walking on water. Raising the dead. Turning water into wine. A virgin conceiving. An empty tomb.
If you’re reading this as a skeptic, your reaction is probably something like: Come on. We live in the 21st century. We know how the world works. Water doesn’t become wine. Dead people don’t get up. These are stories from a pre-scientific age told by people who didn’t know what we know.
That’s a completely reasonable starting position. So let’s take it seriously.
Hume’s Argument (Stated Fairly)
David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, made what many consider the definitive argument against miracles. Here’s the core of it:
A miracle, by definition, is a violation of the laws of nature. We have uniform, universal experience that the laws of nature are never violated — that’s what makes them “laws.” Therefore, no amount of testimony should ever be sufficient to establish a miracle, because the evidence for the law of nature will always outweigh the evidence for any particular exception to it.
In other words: whatever happened, it’s always more probable that the witness was mistaken, deluded, or lying than that a miracle actually occurred. The improbability of the miracle will always exceed the improbability of the testimony being wrong.
That’s a powerful argument. It’s been enormously influential. And it has real problems.
The Circularity Problem
Here’s the thing about Hume’s argument that philosophers have been pointing out for over two centuries: it’s circular.
Hume says we should evaluate miracle claims against our “uniform experience.” But whose experience? If miracles have actually occurred, then our experience isn’t uniform — some people have experienced miracles. Hume is essentially saying: “Miracles don’t happen because they don’t happen.” He’s defining the conclusion into the premise.
Philosopher John Earman (himself no friend of religious apologetics) wrote an entire book — Hume’s Abject Failure — arguing that Hume’s argument against miracles is logically flawed. Earman isn’t arguing that miracles happen. He’s arguing that Hume’s method of ruling them out doesn’t work.
The real question isn’t whether miracles violate our expectations. Of course they do — that’s what makes them miracles. The question is whether we can rule them out before looking at the evidence, or whether we have to actually examine the evidence on its own terms.
If you decide in advance that miracles can’t happen, then no evidence will ever convince you one has. But that’s a philosophical commitment, not a scientific conclusion.
The Big One: The Resurrection
I’m not going to do a full treatment of the resurrection evidence here — that’s its own enormous topic and we’ve given it a dedicated deep dive elsewhere. But I need to touch on it, because the resurrection is the miracle that Christianity lives or dies on.
who was declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
Paul says Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God in power… by his resurrection from the dead.” If it happened, everything changes. If it didn’t, Christianity collapses (Paul says as much in 1 Corinthians 15:14).
Here’s what makes the resurrection different from most miracle claims: the evidence is unusually strong for an ancient event.
We have multiple independent sources. We have a creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 that scholars — including skeptical ones like Gerd Lüdemann — date to within a few years of the event. We have the otherwise inexplicable transformation of the disciples from terrified fugitives to people willing to die for their claim that they’d seen Jesus alive. We have the emergence of a movement centered on a crucified Messiah — which, in the Jewish context of the time, should have been a non-starter.
“Men of Israel, hear these words! Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved by God to you by mighty works and wonders and signs which God did by him among you, even as you yourselves know,…”
Peter, preaching in Jerusalem just weeks after the events, appeals to things the audience witnessed — “as you yourselves know.” He’s making a public claim in the very city where the events happened, to people who could check.
None of this constitutes proof. But it constitutes evidence that deserves serious examination rather than a priori dismissal.
Modern Miracle Claims
“Okay,” you might say, “ancient miracles are one thing. Nobody can check those. What about now? If God does miracles, why don’t we see them?”
Well — a lot of people claim we do. And dismissing all of them as deluded or dishonest requires its own kind of faith.
Craig Keener, a New Testament scholar, spent years researching this question and published a two-volume, 1,172-page academic work called Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. It’s not a devotional book. It’s a scholarly tome published by Baker Academic, filled with documented cases from around the world — healings, resurrections, and other phenomena reported by credible witnesses and sometimes accompanied by medical documentation.
Is every case iron-clad? Of course not. Keener himself acknowledges that. But the sheer volume of testimony, from diverse cultures and contexts, from people with nothing to gain and everything to lose — at some point, dismissing all of it requires a stronger commitment to philosophical naturalism than the evidence warrants.
Then there’s Lourdes. Since 1858, the Catholic Church has investigated claims of miraculous healings at the Marian shrine in Lourdes, France. The investigation process is rigorous and deliberately skeptical — cases go through medical commissions, require extensive documentation of the condition before and after, and typically take years to evaluate. Of the thousands of claimed healings, the Church has officially recognized only about 70 as miracles. They’re not rubber-stamping every claim. They’re applying serious medical scrutiny.
Are those 70 cases proof of miracles? Not necessarily. Spontaneous remissions happen. Medical knowledge has limits. But some of these cases involve documented conditions (advanced cancer, severe neurological damage, loss of vision) that resolved instantaneously, with no medical explanation and no relapse — in some cases for decades afterward.
At what point does “there must be a natural explanation we haven’t found yet” become its own article of faith?
The Honesty Clause
Now let me be the person who says what needs to be said: a lot of “miracle” claims are garbage.
The faith-healing industry is riddled with fraud. People have been manipulated, exploited, and told to throw away their medication because God healed them — and they’ve died because of it. Televangelists have staged fake healings. Congregations have been emotionally manipulated into “seeing” things that weren’t there.
This is real, and it’s wicked, and Christians should be the first people to call it out.
The existence of counterfeits doesn’t disprove the genuine article — nobody counterfeits something that has no value. But it does mean we need to be careful, skeptical, and honest. Not every warm feeling is the Holy Spirit. Not every recovery is a miracle. Not every coincidence is divine intervention.
The question isn’t whether some miracle claims are false. Obviously they are. The question is whether all of them are. Whether the entire category can be dismissed — across every culture, every century, every context — without any exceptions.
What Would It Take?
Here’s a question worth sitting with: what would it take to convince you that a miracle had occurred?
Be honest with yourself. If the answer is “nothing could ever convince me” — then you’ve made a philosophical commitment, not a scientific judgment. You’ve decided that the natural world is all there is, and no evidence could ever change your mind. That’s a worldview, not a conclusion drawn from evidence.
If the answer is “well, if I saw one with my own eyes” — that’s reasonable. But then what? Would you trust your own experience, or would you assume you were hallucinating? How would you know?
Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”
Jesus said to Thomas, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” That’s not a rebuke of evidence-seeking. Thomas asked for evidence, and Jesus gave it to him. But then Jesus points out that at some point, the evidence has to work through trust. Not blind trust — Thomas had years of relationship with Jesus as context. But trust nonetheless.
The Philosophical Ground
Here’s where I think the real conversation needs to happen. The question of miracles is ultimately a question about the kind of universe we live in.
If the universe is a closed system — matter and energy operating according to fixed laws, with nothing outside it — then miracles are impossible by definition. There’s nothing to intervene. The laws are all there is.
But if there is a God who created the universe and its laws, then miracles are the easiest thing in the world. An author can break the “rules” of their own story whenever they want. The laws of nature are not God’s cage — they’re His pattern, His usual way of operating. A miracle isn’t a violation of nature. It’s the Author stepping into the story.
The question of miracles, then, is really the question of God. If God exists, miracles are possible. If miracles are possible, the evidence for specific miracles becomes worth examining.
And if the evidence for the resurrection is even halfway decent — and scholars across the spectrum agree that something extraordinary happened — then the implications are staggering.
Not Certainty, But Honest Inquiry
I’m not asking you to believe in miracles because a book told you to, or because your parents did, or because it feels good.
I’m asking you to stay open. To examine the evidence without predetermined conclusions. To recognize that “I don’t understand how this happened” is not the same as “this didn’t happen.” To distinguish between healthy skepticism (show me the evidence) and dogmatic skepticism (no evidence could ever be enough).
The universe is stranger than we think. Quantum mechanics alone should cure us of the idea that reality always behaves in intuitive, mechanistic ways. If particles can be entangled across light-years, if observation can change outcomes, if the fundamental fabric of reality is far weirder than our everyday experience suggests — maybe our confidence that we know what’s “possible” deserves a little more humility.
Miracles — really?
Maybe. The honest answer is: look at the evidence and decide for yourself. But decide based on what you find, not on what you decided before you started looking.