ANTI-SUPERNATURAL BIAS

ANTI SUPERNATURAL BIAS

Many say the Bible is lying because it reports miracles, and everyone knows miracles are impossible. I was not an eyewitness to the miracles of Jesus reported in the Bible. I can not attest to their veracity directly. However, I am convinced of their truth, because I have experienced miracles myself, and because I have met the Author of them.

Some claim that if miracles occurred they could be scientifically demonstrated, and since they have not been, they do not occur. There is another possibility; miracles by their nature are not testable. They happen when God wants, not when we want. It is sort of like the Hawthorne effect. The very act of trying to scientifically study them renders them even more unlikely than they are normally. God has no interest in people trying to prove the existence of miracles. Why would He show up for the test?

Let's be clear about something. I do look on miraculous claims with some skepticism. I am able to calculate probabilities. I am not ignorant of natural law or the basis for most magicians' tricks, and yet I am convinced miracles are real. In fact, in my experience miracles are almost commonplace, but I can not show them to you, because you do not have eyes to see them. This, I realize, requires a good bit of explanation. Please be patient while I unfold it.

I once heard miraculous claims described by an analogy of a child found next to an empty cookie jar claiming an imaginary animal ate them. If something like that were to happen I, like you, would expect to find cookie crumbs on little Timmy's chin. Allow me to change two things about the analogy and it becomes more like what really happens. Let's make the child an adult to remove the suggestion of naiveté. Let's take away the cookies to remove the motive for lying. Now we have an adult that insists that he has been frequently visited by a purple unicorn who disappears whenever anyone else comes around. We ask him to capture the unicorn so we can see it. He explains that the unicorn is not tame, and can not be caught.

Well, the first thing to consider is hallucinations. This adult in all other respects seems sane. His blood and urine are free of drug residue. Besides, hallucinations do not usually cease, just because someone else comes around. Without a motive for lying, why would this adult be making a fool of himself? Probably you would dismiss it as a delusion. In the absence of corroboration, I would as well. However, in reality, miracles frequently have the confirmation of multiple witnesses, later similar events, and/or consequences in observable reality, which can not be easily explained except by the miracle.

When I say you can not see miracles, I am talking about your paradigms. Psychologists have done studies with scientists that show that when the scientists are doing experiments, they are much more likely to see the significance of data that confirms their existing theories, than they are data that tends to disprove them. Their paradigms have an impact on their ability to accurately assess phenomena, even though they are trained observers. This is a fact of human nature that we all have to struggle to overcome. I believe your paradigms make it difficult or impossible for you to see a miracle even when one happens right in front of you, let alone when you only read about it happening almost two thousand years ago.

Let me give you another example. I met my wife while we were in college. On our second date we went on a picnic beside a small river. While the others we were with were tossing a Frisbee, I sat with my date beside the river. I was a city boy, through and through. My wife, on the other hand, was raised in the country. As we sat there I saw a little river with some trees growing on the banks. Not so, my soon to be wife. She started showing things to me, which when she pointed at them and described them, seemed to appear before my eyes as if from nothing, even though I realized, they had been there all along. A pair of waterfowl swimming across from us, some squirrels and birds in the trees, large fish swimming below the surface, different kinds of trees that could be distinguished by the shapes and color of their leaves and texture and color of their bark, bugs skimming across the surface of the water, dragonflies on the hunt, etc. What had started out as a simple, peaceful, idyllic scene seemed to explode magically before my eyes into a kaleidoscope of new sensual experiences. But it was not magic. It was simply a lack of experience on my part.

My Christian life has been like that. It seems like as time has passed, I have encountered more and more miracles. I do not think that is really what happened. The more experienced I become, the more adept I am at recognizing miracles. So, although I doubt the numbers of them have really increased, it seems I am constantly surrounded by them now, but they seemed rare at first. I could tell you about 100's of miracles that have occurred in my life, but you would think I had been fooled, categorize them as coincidences, or believe I was trying to fool you. So, I will tell you of only two. I doubt if you will find either of them convincing, but it is necessary for me to expose them to you, in order for me to get to my final points.

I was raised by an atheist mother and agnostic father. As a young atheist, I used to delight in taking Christians' beliefs apart. My wife had been raised by Christians. When she got to college, rational, atheistic, professors attacked her faith. The argument that was a turning point for her is when they showed her, that almost all cultures had ancient flood stories. This made her suspect that the Noah story was just one more myth among many. This was her condition when I met her. I continued what her professors had started. It has always been part of our married life that I read aloud to her, while she sews or does her other crafty stuff. During our first several months of marriage, I read Ayn Rand and Bertrand Russell to her.

When I was in college I was a member of a sort of informal debating club. We met at the Student Union almost every evening during the week and argued about philosophy, politics, and/or religion. I was one rational atheist among several. In the last week of the Spring, 1972, semester we met for the final time. We were disappointed that only atheists were present. (The Christians were probably all wisely studying for their exams.) I volunteered to take the Christian point of view in order to not have to forego the pleasure of debating. We had a lively argument with me playing the role of a believer. Except for one time, I never saw any of them again. More on this later. Right now I am just trying to establish that I was a bona fide atheist.

On November 10, 1972, at sunset, I was an atheist. That evening, after my wife was asleep, I went into my backyard to think. For some time the emotional pain caused by the dissonance between who I was, and who I expected myself to be, had been intruding on my consciousness. I am aware of no particular event or thought that triggered it, but that night I came to believe my pathetic condition was permanent.

I wanted to be the self-reliant person my parent's raised me to be. I expected to stride through life victorious, like one of Ayn Rand's heroes. I sought for truth as plain as the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. I demanded of myself the qualities of honesty, integrity, courage and hope. I found that I could no longer imagine that any of my goals for myself were achieved or likely to become so. Instead, my life seemed to center around getting as much pleasure and comfort for myself as I could. The only things I could see that distinguished me from an animal were my opposable thumbs. And yet, I found within myself the overwhelming desire to be something more than that.

I saw in the Christians around me, like my sister and my father-in-law, a different kind of person. They were not self-reliant, but they were confident. They were not victoriously striding through life, but they were usually happy. Their notion of the truth seemed plain and certain to them. They did have honesty, integrity, courage and hope. Their honesty and integrity sometimes, though rarely, failed, but they had courage and hope in abundance, especially hope. Although they desired pleasure and comfort, the desire did not rule their lives, as it did mine. And yet, they believed in foolish nonsense like the miracles of Jesus!

Since my future seemed to offer me nothing but self contempt and continuous pain, it seemed to me that the only rational thing to do was to kill myself. I began to plan my suicide. But as I did, other thoughts began to occur to me for no apparent reason -- memories of words that various Christians had said to me over the years. I had also been extensively exposed to Moslems and Mormans, but at that moment, I remembered nothing of what they had said.

"For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Wasn't that my condition?

"The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life." Wasn't death what I was facing? Wasn't life what I wanted?

"For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life." How could I be enemies with someone who did not exist? If He did exist, I certainly regarded Him as a repugnant fool. How much more of an enemy could I be than if I belittled Him to the point of refusing to be aware of His existence? What could the "death of his Son" have to do with anything? It was complete twaddle. But I sure liked that "saved by his life" part.

"For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation." Insane! However, my choice was clear - insanity or death. I fully believed I was being completely irrational, but in a desperate bid to survive I said aloud, "Lord, if you are there, you can have my life. I'm through with it anyway." I meant every single word. I had decided I was willing to obey Him rather than die.

Much to my surprise Someone was there! I could not see Him, hear Him, or touch Him, but I was no longer alone in the darkness.

By sunrise, November 11, 1972, I was a Christian. Since then He has never failed me in any way, even though I have not always kept my end of the bargain. My sister, who had often been the recipient of my verbal persecution, described this event as a Saul into Paul miracle.

The pastor, who baptized me, after hearing my story, counseled me to read a lot of books. He did not specify which books. I follow that advice. In retrospect I realize that what I did that night was lay down my gods of logic and reason at the foot of the cross. But logic and reason still exist. They are God's tools, not His judges. I discovered in my reading that it was not necessary to be irrational to be a Christian. Although the evidence is not overwhelming it is sufficient for any rational person who wants to believe. (By the way, I explained to my wife that the reason most cultures have a flood story is because it really happened.)

A year or two later I went to a showing of a Christian film. Much to my surprise a fellow former member of the informal debating club was also there. She had been present at that final meeting we had. She thanked me for leading her to the Lord during that last debate. An atheist convinced another atheist to believe in Jesus Christ! I find that pretty remarkable. I was trying to make two points with these two miraculous salvations wrought by Jesus Christ. (1) Willingness to obey proceeds conviction, not the other way around. (2) Conviction is a function of the listener, not the speaker.

Jesus Christ is not Santa Claus or a genie in a bottle. He is not at our beck and call. He is not a tame unicorn. Answered prayer will never be proved by scientific experiments. Neither is He worried about proving His existence or His power. The Biblical perspective is that God's existence is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. The eyes to see miracles require a new kind of heart, a heart determined to obey Him.

You find the Biblical account unconvincing evidence of the Miracles of Jesus. That is not surprising. The Bible was not written for that purpose. It was written to declare His love for us, and to explain His requirement for obedience. I believe that if you are not convinced, it is because you have not yet decided to obey.

Although in His time here, there were a number of people that believed Jesus to be a miracle worker, it is pretty clear that the people that crucified Him had no such belief. Nor was the evidence of the resurrection and other miracles so compelling at the time that everyone became a Christian. Large numbers did, but large numbers did not. Why? You may try to make this division between the educated and wise on one side and the ignorant and foolish on the other. But the evidence does not support that then, or now. The simple truth is that people believe what they want to believe. When we learn to apply this fact to ourselves instead of just to people that disagree with us, we are a step closer to the truth.

You might ask, if people believe what they want to believe, how can anyone find the miracles of Jesus reported in the Bible convincing at all? It was just a bunch of people believing what they wanted to believe. There is a caveat. We do not come to believe things of which we are unaware. No one in Jerusalem in the first century came to believe that black holes exist, or that Santa will ride on Christmas Eve, or that Columbus discovered America, because they had never heard of these things. Many came to believe in a miraculous Jesus, and many others came to believe that Jesus was a charlatan and a hoax. Something extraordinary must have happened. What?

There is another caveat. There are some things about which we have no choice about our beliefs (unless we are insane). For instance, we share the belief that we can not fly by flapping our arms, but who among us, as children, did not try it at least once? Some things are so obviously true, that we must believe them, or so obviously false, that we can not believe them, no matter what our desires. For many things, though, the difference between the truth, and not the truth, is not so stark. We have a choice about our belief, at least, for a while. We could walk around believing that bullets can not hurt us, and as long as we do not meet a bullet, we are fine. One can walk around believing he is free to disobey God, and as long as he does not meet Him, he will be fine. In the first century many people came to believe that their lives were guided by Jesus Christ living in their heart. Millions believe that today. That does not mean that such a thing is true, or even that it is possible. But it does mean that it can not be put in the same category as flapping your arms to fly. It is not obviously false.

I find there is sufficient evidence for me to believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, but often not enough to convince someone else. It is entirely possible for an intelligent, educated, rational human being to believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ. Millions do. However, the evidence is not overwhelming, so, many rational, intelligent, educated people also do not believe in them. The difference can not be in the evidence, but must be in the person examining the evidence.

It is not sufficient to believe in God. As James says somewhere, the demons also believe and tremble. The key is a willingness to obey Jesus Christ. Willingness to obey is the key in maintaining our faith. Without obedience the Lord Jesus will show you none of His miracles. Without the encouragement of occasional miracles, the Christian way of life may begin to look pretty drab after a few years, and many fall away. A willingness to obey is also the key to understanding the Bible which reports the miracles of Jesus. Without a willingness to obey our understanding of the Bible becomes warped by the hardness of our heart. We begin to believe the fault lies with the Bible instead of our own disobedience. Many go astray this way.

If you do not accept the two salvation experiences described above as miraculous, I can not show you the other miracles Jesus has worked in my life, because you do not have eyes to see them. I can not make you understand the Gospel as I understand it, because you do not have ears to hear it. I believe if you do not have eyes to see, and ears to hear, it is because your heart is not prepared to obey Jesus Christ.

My paradigms, as restructured since November, 1972, make it difficult for me to see evidence against the miracles of Jesus. Do you have any idea what it is that your paradigms might be preventing you from seeing and hearing? I want to believe what I believe, because I want to survive, and because I want my life to have meaning. Do you know why you want to believe what you believe?

John 7:16-17 "So Jesus answered them and said, "My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me. If anyone is willing to do His will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak from Myself." NASB