What if Christian miracles don't come from God?

In a recent podcast, Stand To Reason addressed the following question:

"All supposed revelation of religions involves a subjective experience of receiving that revelation, so how do we know the biblical authors (Moses, the prophets, etc.) were interpreting their experiences correctly as opposed to Mohammed or Joseph Smith?"

I don't know how much the questioner was thinking of something like a scenario in which Christianity is a demonic deception. But that objection comes up occasionally and doesn't get addressed much, so I want to take this opportunity to address it again. Go here for a couple of comments I wrote on the topic a few years ago, then read this one that I wrote shortly afterward. The second thread just linked also has some comments from Hawk on the subject. For a response to the notion that Christian miracles are just manifestations of human paranormal capacities, see here.

I've given a couple of examples above, namely demons and human paranormal abilities. But the same principles are applicable to other non-Divine sources (e.g., an alien trying to deceive us). A Christian just has to argue that God is the best explanation, not that no other explanation is possible.

Demonic deception

jay-dog asks an intriguing question in this post:

I have noticed that when presented with miracle claims from other religions, Christian apologists will suggest the possibility that they could just be attempts by demons to deceive us. However, couldn't people from other religions say the exact same thing about the evidence for the Ressurection? Here are some blog posts where I heard this idea and I wanted to get your response. Thank you.

Sorry I didn't read through the posts you linked to, but I think there's enough material in your question to address. Here are my thoughts on the question:

Did Jesus die for Klingons?

Christian Weidemann argues:

Every major religion on Earth could easily accommodate the discovery of (intelligent) alien life, with one exception: Christianity.

...Now imagine the universe is teeming with other intelligent civilizations. What is a Christian believer supposed to say? Claiming that Christ died only for us, while the rest of the universe is screwed, would be incompatible with God’s love. If, however, earthly Jesus died for the whole universe, myriads of extraterrestrial sinners included, we would have to accept a geocentrism even more preposterous than the spatial variant. Neither is there a way out by suggesting that other intelligent species may not have been “fallen.” This proposal amounts to a negative human exceptionalism that is totally unbelievable, given that alien species are subject to the same general evolutionary mechanisms as we are. Natural selection favours “selfish” traits.

What about multiple incarnations? Here another difficulty of traditional Christian doctrine comes into play: Christ has two natures—he is “truly God and truly man.” But how are members of completely different biological species (“truly man” and “truly Klingon,” let’s say) supposed to stand in a relationship of personal identity? Even worse, if the number of sinful species in the universe exceeds a certain threshold, God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously. However, no single person who is an embodied being with a finite nature, i.e. a “truly” biological organism, can be more than one such being at the same time. If, on the other hand, the incarnations were not personally identical, many different persons with a divine nature would result—too many even for a Christian. Finally: May extraterrestrial sinners have been reconciled to God by means different from a divine incarnation? Perhaps, but even if the Christian believer concedes alternative means of salvation she is stuck with the highly implausible geocentric claim that the incarnation, i.e. one of the most remarkable events in the history of the cosmos, happens just 2000 years ago on our planet, although myriads of other inhabited planets were also available.

Therefore, I conclude, the traditional Christian believer can’t make theological sense of extraterrestrial intelligent life.

(Source)

1. And this is from a lecturer in Protestant theology! With "friends" like these...

2. Why isn't it possible for Christ to have died "only" for humans? Suppose intelligent aliens exist, but suppose they likewise rebelled against God. So they're fallen too. In that case, why should God's "love" extend to rebels? What about God's justice? Is it "incompatible with God's love" if God doesn't rescue Satan and the fallen angels?

3. Is it "preposterous" if an "earthly Jesus" died for other extraterrestrials? What if other extraterrestrials in the universe are also human?

4. Weidemann assumes evolutionary mechanisms shape our morality, but that's highly contentious. He'd have to mount a case for this for a start.

Besides, just because an act is "selfish" doesn't necessarily mean it's sinful. It's selfish for me to walk on the beach alone when I could be having a conversation with a friend, but it's not necessarily sinful for me to do so.

In theory it's possible aliens could have evolutionarily "selfish traits". Such as caring more about themselves than other aliens. But that's not necessarily sinful. Just like it's possible humans might care more about other humans than other animals, but still care for other animals.

5. The multiple incarnations dilemma is an interesting one. Granted, I'm no philosopher or theologian, but I'll try to take a stab at this:

a. For one thing, why assume "God would be forced to incarnate himself simultaneously"? Why couldn't God incarnate himself sequentially?

b. What's more, even if the Son of God incarnated himself simultaneously, I don't see how this would be problematic if, as most traditional Christians believe, God is outside spacetime. Why couldn't a timeless God have multiple instances of himself at multiple points in the spacetime continuum? Take the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Lewis wrote about Aslan in Narnia as well as Maleldil in Perelandra. We know Lewis meant both to be the Son of God. I envision Narnia and Perelandra sort of (not quite) paralleling other worlds. (Indeed, consider whether God the Son could have become incarnate in parallel universes rather than other worlds within the same universe.)

c. I assume some form of Cartesian dualism is true. If so, then it's possible for humans to become disembodied. Our souls can be decoupled from our bodies (at death). We live on despite the death of our physical bodies. Meanwhile our corpses rot away; they become dust and ashes. At the same time, God promises his people new bodies in the world to come. As such, it's possible for our souls to inhabit more than one body. (As an aside, this likewise calls to mind scifi shows like Altered Carbon where people have their minds uploaded to a cloud, then downloaded to various bodies.)

Why couldn't something like this be true of the Son of God too? However an objection might be humans cannot possess more than one body at the same time. Perhaps a response could be that that's not necessarily the case for the Son of God. For one thing, he is omnipresent, unlike humans.

d. As far as the issue of identity, was the Son of God's pre-resurrection body identical to his post-resurrection body, given his pre-resurrection body died and deteriorated?

e. Weidemann floats the rejoinder that the salvation of extraterrestrials could have occurred with "alternative means of salvation" absent the incarnation (I agree). However, he immediately dismisses it because it means the Christian is "geocentric". However I don't see what's necessarily wrong with "geocentrism"? Why is it necessarily morally problematic for God to have saved Earthlings by having the incarnation (and crucifixion and resurrection)?

If anything, wouldn't the incarnation imply how far the moral rot in humans has spread that God the Son had to become flesh like us to save us rather than implying anything virtuous about humans? There's no room for pride in the criminal who had to have another pay for his crimes because he had no other options for restitution left to him.

Corduan on comparative religion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoYEztHpCxo&t=589s

Thoughts without a thinker

The self in Buddhism

1. The soul aka self doesn't exist in Buddhism. Only the non-self exists - the anatman. To my knowledge, that's the case in all major schools of Buddhism, viz. Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism.

2. What is perceived to be the "self" in Buddhism consists of a collection of states or a bundle of perceptions. These are like psychological states or perceptions. We can simply call them "aggregates". These aggregates are known as khandhas.

3. There are five khandhas: form/body, sensations, perceptions, mentations/cogitations, and awareness. These aggregates or khandhas are the entirety of what constitutes the self, but the reality is there is no "self". Afaik, it's not even that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that the whole is the sum of its parts.

4. Indeed, modern Buddhists often use the ship of Theseus to illustrate how the self doesn't really exist despite its aggregates or khandhas. We're atoms in motion, but these atoms in motion are constantly being replaced by other atoms in motion.

5. Suffering is caused by one being attached to or clinging onto (tanha) these aggregates. Suffering is extinguished (nirvana) when attachment (tanha) to these aggregates (khandhas) is relinquished.

Evaluation

Can you be sure?

From what I've read, in the history of philosophy the quest for certainty extends back at least as far as Plato. For Plato, as I understand him, the physical world is not an object of knowledge because the physical world undergoes constant change, which means the object of knowledge is in a state of perpetual flux. For Plato, the object of knowledge is abstract archetypes. 

This had counterparts in Indian philosophy. Take the stock example of whether a coiled object is a snake or a rope. In a land with a superabundance of kraits, cobras, and vipers, that question is of more than academic interest!  

Augustine baptized Plato by relocating archetypes in God's mind. Divine ideas.

Aquinas was more of an empiricist. Ockham was more skeptical regarding the fortunes of religious knowledge. 

Descartes renewed the quest for certainty, with austere results. Some Counter-Reformation apologists revived Pyrrhonian skepticism to deploy against Protestant theology, but that backfired. John Locke and Bishop Butler shifted to probability arguments.  

Is the quest for certainty a mirage? If you combine a Reformed doctrine of providence, which you subscribe to, with a reliabilist theory of knowledge (like Plantinga's proper function account), then special providence is a trustworthy belief-forming process. Of course, reliabilism is disputed, but every thing in philosophy is disputed. One objection to reliabilism is the Cartesian demon, but every epistemology is prey to that artificial thought-experiment.

It's necessary to distinguish between what we know and what we can prove. It may well be the case that no apologetic method can yield absolute certainty. That's due to the fact that not everything we know is reducible to proof. We know more than we can prove. 

There's a difference between certainty in terms of knowledge and certainty in terms of proof. Formal arguments suffer from that limitation.

I can recognize someone's voice on the phone. I couldn't begin to present a rigorous philosophical justification for my recognition. Not everything we know is susceptible to stringent analysis.

That said, I'd like to reframe the debate. In general, that's not how I assess Christianity. I don't begin with whether we can achieve certainty regarding the claims of faith. I think that's a worthwhile discussion, but it sucks up too much oxygen. 

Another approach is to look at the competition. And the competition isn't that impressive. I don't think it's hard to dispose of naturalism. That leaves religious options. The major religious options are Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism (although that's technically atheistic), neopaganism, and Taoism–along with some cults (e.g. Mormonism). In a sense, Judaism is a serious contender, but Christianity incorporates Judaism. Likewise, Christianity incorporates the "truth" of paganism (i.e. witchcraft) into its own worldview. What's evil and diabolical can still be true. 

My point is not to make the case here and now. My point, though, is that if by process of elimination, Christianity is the last man standing, then it's pretty irrelevant to ask whether it's a sure thing. If that's the only viable option, then whether or not it's a sure thing is beside the point.

To take a comparison, suppose I'm on the 40th floor of a skyscraper that's on fire. Suppose my floor has four doors leading to emergency exits. I try each door, but three of the four doors are locked. Suppose I'm unsure if the unlocked door leads to an emergency exit. What if I'm misremembering? What if I mistook it for another door? But if all the other candidates are locked, then my level of certainty is irrelevant. Even if they did lead to an emergency exit, they're not live options. The remaining door, the unlocked door, is the only viable choice. Even if it doesn't lead to an emergency exit, I'm not going to stand there, with flames licking at my heels, while I calculate the probabilities. 

Likewise, if the ship is sinking and there's one lifeboat left, I'll jump into the lifeboat. I won't sink under the waves debating whether the lifeboat is seaworthy. By default, that's what I'm left with. 

To Appreciate Christmas, Read The Quran

I want to expand on Steve's recent post about competing miracle claims. One way to falsify the ridiculous skeptical suggestion that Christianity's miracles aren't significantly different than the competing miracles of other belief systems is to set Christianity next to each of its primary competitors, one-by-one, and see how they contrast. Islam, the second largest religion in the world and, in that sense, Christianity's biggest competitor, provides a good illustration. Contrast Jesus' credentials to the lack of credentials for Muhammad. Contrast Biblical prophecy to the Quran's lack of anything comparable and the pathetic nature of Islam's attempts to come up with something comparable. Contrast Muhammad's credibility problems to the credibility of early Christian leaders like Paul and James (former opponents who converted upon eyewitnessing the resurrected Christ and died as martyrs) and Luke (a demonstrably reliable historian who goes into a lot of historical detail in his writings). Contrast the vagueness and lack of historical context, names of individuals, place names, etc. in the Quran to the large amount of such details in the gospels, Acts, Paul's letters, and other Biblical documents. And so on. The idea that the credibility of Christianity and that of Islam are comparable is absurd. The claim that the two are comparable undermines the credibility of the person making the claim.

I referred to how large Christianity and Islam are. Their size doesn't, by itself, prove that either is true. But it is a significant factor that should be taken into account. The fact that Christianity is the largest religious movement in the history of the world gives it a lot of plausibility as a candidate for a Divinely-revealed religion, more than any of its competitors. The vast majority of Christianity's competitors down through the centuries either don't exist any longer or are far smaller. The largeness of Christianity takes on even more significance when you consider how the religion's growth was so unlikely and fulfills some unusual prophecies. I wrote about this subject several years ago in a couple of posts at Christmastime (here and here). The opening of Isaiah's Suffering Servant prophecy (52:13-5) is especially striking. You wouldn't expect a Jewish Messiah to initially be rejected by most of the Jewish people, then become widely accepted among Gentiles, including Gentile rulers. (For more about the Suffering Servant prophecy in general, see here. Not only is Jesus' rejection by the Jewish people and influence on the Gentile world beyond reasonable dispute and something that continues to unfold in modern times, but other aspects of Jesus' life that fulfill the prophecy are also highly evidenced: his crucifixion, the earliness of the belief that his death was intended to make atonement for the sins of others, etc. Isaiah's prophecy is detailed enough to single out Jesus among the billions of people who have lived throughout history.)

You'll have a greater appreciation of Jesus and his prophecy fulfillments at the time of his birth and his other miracles if you contrast them to what we see in Islam and other competitors. The large majority of those competitors are on the ash heap of history while Jesus grows increasingly "great to the ends of the earth" (Micah 5:4).

Gorilla warfare

Sam Harris was right. Religion is dangerous. This is why religion must end. If it weren’t for religion, we wouldn’t have wars around the world. Religion lies at the root of human aggression. Just look at these religious fanatics on the rampage. Good thing we’re not related to them:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8400000/8400019.stm

http://kibalechimpanzees.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/why-do-chimpanzees-fight-with-their-neighbors/

Frodo at Westminster

Frodo is currently the Distinguished J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of Middle-Earth languages and literature at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he teaches upper division courses in Orkish, Entish, Hobbitish, Common Eldarin, and Primitive Quendian. 

Montgomery on China and Greece

Two articles from John Warwick Montgomery:

1. "A Critique of Chinese Religious Options"
   
2. "Greek Opposition to Evangelism"