Miracles and Christian History

Dateline: April 19, 2000

"MIRACLES & CHRISTIAN HISTORY" > Page 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6

Religious History

Many of the worlds religions, although they have tales of origins and such, do not seem to recount events that are likely to be, or even intended to be, understood as 'historical' events in the normal sense of the world. Jupiter's giving birth to Aphrodite from his head, or the dialog between Krishna and Arjuna in the Bhaghivad Gita, or the stories of Coyote in Native American folklore are instances of mythologies with no apparent expectation of historical belief.

It should thus be noted that arguments for the validity of so many of these religions do not rely upon any historical claim. For example, the arguments for Buddhism or Taoism or even Confucius' Analytics do not rely on the actual occurrence of some historical event. Instead, each of those religions/philosophical systems appeals to what the reader/listener can confirm from their present, personal observations of the world and intelligent reflection on those observations.

However, Christianity is different. Christianity makes the claim that the events described in its adopted canon are verifiable (at least in principle), historical events. Christianity's validity thus rests in part upon the idea that these events happened in real time to real people.{1}

This commits the Christian to an epistemology (theory of the grounds and limits of knowledge) which requires that there be a 'real world' external to the individual. Moreover - and more importantly - the Christian is also committed to the proposition that this real world behaves itself in an orderly, predictable fashion. In other words, that the present is indicative of the past, and (in the philosophical/logical sense) necessarily so.

I'll unpack that last bit.

Human Knowledge

Humans are finite creatures of finite apprehension and reason. In order that such a being be able to claim knowledge of anything beyond her immediate sense impressions, a number of things must be true. First, the sense impressions must be reliable, i.e., the same 'thing' in the environment must be (the vast majority of the time) the cause of the sense impression each time so that a reliable 'mapping' of sense data to external reality can be made.

This external reality must be not only stable, but follow discoverable 'rules' or patterns of interaction. The basketball on the basketball court, if the game is to be played, must bounce the same way each time, and when thrown, follow a predictable trajectory. If our gadgets, including ones as simple as a lever, are to be usable they must work predictably according to rules we can discover.

And those rules have to stay the same. If the rules of the electrical phenomena that Maxwell's equations describe didn't stay very constant, it would not be possible to build the CRT on which you are reading this, nor manufacture the integrated circuits that make the computer itself work.

But even more importantly for the present discussion, if the rules were prone to change, then any book purporting to describe a past similar to the present would be immediately and obviously wrong. In addition, it would be prima facia absurd for it to claim that there are any rules which hold permanently if all our experience said that the only general rule was that no rules stayed the same for any length of time.

It would be impossible, then, for there to even be such a thing as 'history' if you could never trust the experience of any other to have anything in common with your own experience - and that necessarily includes any written document purporting to describe things of another place and time. This category of course would include scriptures claiming to be historical in nature.

Thus one of the philosophical pre-commitments of the (orthodox) Christian is to something congruent with if not in fact identical to 'realism' or 'naturalism.' It does not matter if, as theological sophistication is gained, the stability is ascribed to God.

Logically and epistemologically, since the predictability of the world is a prerequisite for the possibility of any human knowledge, it follows that it is also a prerequisite for any human knowledge statements regarding 'God.'

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