The Gospels, Historians, and Presuppositions

A number of times I have been asked if I would be willing to accept the consensus of the "majority of historians" when it comes to various conclusions about the biblical gospels, including the time of their writing and their claims about the miracles of Jesus. On the surface, this seems like a reasonable request. After all, aren't historians the experts when it comes to understanding history? Shouldn't we accept their conclusions?

When it comes to most subjects of science, I accept the consensus of the majority of scientists. As a scientist myself, I am well aware that the scientific method provides a reliable method for determining the truth about nature. For instance, it is clear from the evidence that the climate on the earth is changing and becoming overall warmer. There are disagreements about the extent to which this is occurring and the role that human activity has contributed to climate change, but the evidence that the climate is changing and warming is strong, accepted by the majority of climate scientists, and accepted by me as a scientist.

Both scientists and historians have ground rules on which the practice of their discipline is based. One of the ground rules that most historians hold to is that miracles cannot be affirmed as historical events. In the lecture series "The Historical Jesus," the historian Bart Ehrman states, "Because historians can only establish what probably happened, and a miracle of this nature is highly improbable, the historian cannot say it probably occurred."¹ In a debate with William Lane Craig in 2006, Ehrman said, "Historians cannot establish [a] miracle as the most probable occurrence because miracles, by their very nature are the least probable occurrence."² 

The Nature of Evidence

In my daily professional life I am an experimental particle physicist. I currently analyze data taken with the ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. I probe data that includes collisions of billions of protons to look for patterns that indicate the existence of some unknown phenomena or that measure the properties of a particular physical process. I am currently studying the Higgs Boson that was discovered in 2012 and measuring certain aspects of its character to try to understand if it exactly fits our expectations or whether there may be deviations from our standard model. 

In my personal life I have twice been a member of a jury in both criminal and civil cases. As a juror, I was asked to analyze data presented by witnesses and experts to determine the probability that an event in the past occurred in a certain way. Both my profession as a scientist and my civil duty as a juror required me to examine evidence and draw the most logical and reasonable conclusions based on the evidence. However, the type of evidence available in the different circumstances have very different natures. 

There are some people I talk with, primarily religious skeptics, who don't seem to understand the difference between scientific data and legal/historical evidence; the data from a scientific experiment that allows the investigator to draw reasonable conclusions, and the evidence presented in a courtroom that also leads to reasonable conclusions about what occurred in the past. These data are of a very different type but both lead to reasonably certain conclusions. Scientific data cannot directly tell us what occurred in the past, for direct scientific inquiry requires reproducible experimental results. Past events are not reproducible. Legal historical evidence that is used in a courtroom consists of direct evidence and circumstantial, or indirect, evidence. 

The Logic of Christianity and Grace

As a professor of physics I will often work with undergraduate students and graduate students who are just learning the process of analyzing complex data from a high energy physics experiment. The students will show me graphs they have made and sometimes, with a relatively brief look at the graphs, I will know that the student has made a mistake somewhere in their analysis. There are a few ways that an obvious mistake may present itself. Some distributions should have a known shape and a major deviation from that expectation indicates a problem. If the results from different plots contradict each other then something must be wrong somewhere. Consistency across different data sets and different parameters is essential for a properly implemented analysis.

As a Christian who wants to know the truth, I have also analyzed the message and worldview of Christianity to see if it is consistent. If Christian doctrine contained actual logical contradictions, that would be an indication that Christianity has problems and is likely not true. Although I sometimes encounter people who think that the message of Christianity is contradictory, I usually find that those people have an incorrect view of the what is actually believed by Christians who are grounded in biblical doctrine. 

A Simulated Universe: Missing the Obvious

My children refer to many of my jokes as "dad jokes," a term that applies to the silly, kind of dumb humor common to us "older" dads. I do admit that my sense of humor was formed when I was a teenager in the 1970's and tends toward the kind of silly, ridiculous, sometimes witty gags typical of Monty Python, or maybe Peter Sellers in The Pink Panther movies. It may be embarrassing to admit that there are far too many Monty Python skits or Pink Panther dialogues that I can recite from memory and that will cause me to laugh out loud just thinking about them. Simply mention "the cheese shop" or "the staff interrogation" and I may launch into a poor British or French accent as I recite some of the "hilarious" dialogue. Given that you can tell a lot about a person from their particular sense of humor, there may be some of you who have now completely lost all respect for me as a scientist or as a human being. (That last line was meant as a joke and reflects my "dad joke" capabilities.)

Now most of the previous paragraph has nothing to do with this blog post. But in order to introduce the topic of this post I was trying to think of a situation where somebody completely misses the most obvious thing right in front of them, while focusing on other less favorable options. My mind wandered to a scene in the movie "The Return of the Pink Panther" where inspector Jacque Clouseau is reprimanding a "blind" beggar with an accordion and a "minkey" for a minor offense, while he is completely oblivious to a major bank robbery going on just behind him. Of course, I then had to watch the video clip of this movie scene on YouTube, which led me down a rabbit hole to a series of many other Pink Panther and Monty Python videos, (similar to the virtual reality rabbit hole I referred to in my last blog post, which does actually bring us to the subject of this entry.)

Here I follow up on my previous discussion about the hypothesis that we may live in a virtual reality universe rather than a physical universe. Such a scenario was proposed by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2003 paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" More recently a video by "Inspiring Philosophy" based on a 2007 paper by the informational computer scientist Brian Whitworth titled "The Physical World as a Virtual Reality" presents the same idea. Previously, I focused on some of the scientific ideas presented in that paper and showed that Whitworth doesn't seem to fully understand the science and that he selectively applies just those scientific principles that he thinks supports his hypothesis. But the biggest flaw in Whitworth's argument is that he doesn't even consider the possibility that there is a transcendent God who created the universe. Because he is oblivious to this obvious possibility, he completely misses the best option regarding the true nature of our universe.

Do We Live in a Simulated Universe?

Some time ago a reader asked me to look at a video by "Inspiring Philosophy" that discussed whether or not our universe might only be a simulation so that we might actually live in a virtual reality universe rather than a physical universe. That video was based on a 2007 paper by the informational computer scientist Brian Whitworth titled "The Physical World as a Virtual Reality." The reader's question, the video, and the paper sent me on a prolonged investigation as I read various papers on this provocative notion that we live not in an actual physical universe, but in some kind of computer simulation. The modern form of this argument was proposed by the philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2003 paper "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" It seems appropriate that I was sucked into the "rabbit hole" of the virtual reality hypothesis since one of the classic movies that proposed our world is just a computer simulation was the 1999 film The Matrix, which also referenced the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole in the dialogue when Morpheus is about to reveal to Neo the truth about their simulated universe and he says, "You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." This journey of mine investigating the rabbit hole of a simulated reality has taken some time and consequently, I have not written a blog entry in about a month.

In some sense I'm not sure that this post is warranted or relevant for my blog. The purpose of my blog is to discuss various aspects of the relationship between science, Christian faith, and objective thought. I don't believe that my investigation into this subject necessarily gives much insight or adds much to the many writings that discuss this idea. Most of the articles that I find persuasive actually debunk the idea that we are simply a simulated universe such as those by physicists Sean Carroll or Sabine Hossenfelder or by informational scientist Brian Eggleston, and you can follow the links by clicking those authors' names above to find good reasons to disregard the simulation idea. It seems to me that those who take the idea seriously are not so much the educated scientists, but popular tech figures like Elon Musk who has promoted and popularized the simulation idea. I tend to side with the vast majority of expert scientists who believe there is much more evidence against the idea that we live in a simulation, rather than the few computer scientists and popular figures who have promoted the idea as probable.

But since I have spent far too much time deep in the rabbit's burrow on this subject, I probably should devote some space here to discuss a few ideas and see if there is any way I can relate the subject to the broader theme of this blog: that of science and the Christian faith. Rather than focus on the philosophical aspect of the simulation hypothesis (after all, the modern resurgence of this idea came from a philosopher not a scientist), I will focus on some of the scientific aspects of the original video (which was actually entitled "Digital Arguments for God's Existence") and the paper by Brian Whitworth on which it was based. In my next blog post I will discuss some of Whithworth's assumptions that are biased, presumptuous, and erroneous, and show that once those assumptions are reconsidered, then the idea that there is a transcendent intelligent creator God actually best explains his data.

So You're Telling Me There's A Chance

In the movie Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd (played by Jim Carrey) asks Mary (played by Lauren Holly) what the chances are that a "guy" like her and a "girl" like him could end up together. When Mary gives him the unfortunate news that the chances are "one out of a million" he optimistically replies, "So you're telling me there's a chance. Yea!" What does it mean for there to be a chance? What does it mean for something to be possible? In a textbook I used as an undergraduate student, Thermal Physics, by Charles Kittel, one of the end-of-chapter problems asks what the probability is that 10¹⁰ monkeys (more than the entire population of people on the earth) typing on typewriters for the entire age of the universe could type Shakespeare's play Hamlet?¹ The calculated odds turn out to be 1 in 10^164,316. Perhaps the most profound part of the problem is its in-text title: The meaning of "never." I have talked with people whose understanding of probability aligns with that of Lloyd. They think that if the odds of something occurring are not identically zero, then there is a possibility that the event may occur. But from a scientific viewpoint, when the odds become small enough, that means "never." A commonly used cutoff in science for something that will "never" happen tends to be somewhere from about 10^-50 to 10^-100. So I guess maybe Lloyd does have a chance.

This is the final blog post in a series in which I have applied some general principles that are helpful for determining the validity or truth of a scientific proposition to certain claims and ideas proposed by a Christian world view. Because these principles can be used to assist in determining the veracity of any idea, then if Christian claims are true, they should hold up under such an examination that uses reasonable criteria to determine their validity.

Is it Falsifiable?

What is science? This is a question that scientists, philosophers, and others have discussed with no definitive conclusion. Common definitions of science require that a scientific idea be testable, falsifiable, and predictive. Many of the definitions of science are developed in order to distinguish science from pseudoscience. Pseudoscientific ideas are those that may appear to be scientific but fail some of the basic requirements of a scientific theory. They may be unfalsifiable, their proponents may consider only data that supports the theory and none that contradicts it, others may not be able to reproduce any of the results that might confirm the idea, or other such problems.

Although the claims of Christianity are not scientific claims, per se, the same tests that are used to help confirm the truth of a scientific theory can be applied to religious claims. Over the last several blog posts I have shown that the claims of Christianity can be scrutinized using some of these same criteria used to test a scientific theory and can be shown to have validity. For instance, the claims of Christianity do have external confirmation, can deal with counter-arguments, and are logically self consistent. In this blog post we address the seventh of eight criteria used to assess the truth of any particular hypothesis: "Can the hypothesis be falsified or confirmed with other data?"

External Confirmation Required

At every laboratory where I've done research there have always been at least two major experiments designed to investigate similar scientific questions. At CERN, where I currently do research, I am a member of the ATLAS collaboration, one of the two "general purpose" experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) constructed to explore a broad range of scientific questions with LHC data. The CMS experiment, which sits at the opposite side of the 27 km (17 mile) circumference tunnel, is also a general purpose detector designed to look at a broad range of scientific topics. Despite the fact that having two somewhat redundant experiments costs twice as much to build and maintain, this arrangement is optimal so that each experiment can corroborate the results of the other. New discoveries and measurements require external confirmation to affirm their validity, and so complementary experiments are established in order to provide the necessary verification.

There have been a few times during my career in particle physics that one experiment seemed to have evidence for a discovery of something entirely new, but was eventually shown to be wrong, partially because other experiments were unable to provide external confirmation. Such cases involve the false "discoveries" that quarks have substructure, that particles can travel faster than the speed of light, and that weird particles called lepto-quarks actually exist. (These things may still turn out to be true but the past experiments that seemed to have found them have all been shown to be incorrect.)

External confirmation is not only one of the requirements for determining if a proposition is valid or not in any scientific endeavor, but also in other arenas where claims about objective truth are made. In a series of blog posts I have been applying some of the same principles used in my scientific research to the beliefs and world-view of Christianity to investigate whether or not they seem to have objective validation. I have already addressed the questions (1) "Is the data logically self-consistent?", (2) "Is there enough evidence to support the hypothesis?", (3) "Is the hypothesis compatible with other known data?", (4) "Is contradictory evidence conclusive?", and (5) "Is something essential missing?". This blog post will address the sixth question, (6) "Is there External Confirmation?", while two future posts will discuss the final two questions,  (7) "Can the hypothesis be falsified or confirmed with other data?", and (8) "Are there other possible explanations that are more feasible?".

Is Something Essential Missing?

In 1989 two chemists, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons held a press conference to announce that they had discovered a process in which nuclear fuel would fuse together to create heat and energy in a small tabletop experiment. Their supposed discovery of "cold fusion" held out the hope of a cheap and abundant supply of energy for the whole world. Yet there were some immediate problems with the experiment. For instance, other scientists were not able to replicate the results despite following the recipe given by Pons and Fleischmann. But perhaps the most obvious hint that something was just not right was the absence of neutrons. In every type of nuclear fusion or fission, excess neutrons should be released. Pons and Fleischmann had originally claimed that their experiment produced excess neutrons, but when other experimenters saw none it became clear that they had not produced any either. When nuclear reactions occur, neutrons must be present. If they are missing then nuclear reactions are not taking place.

Over four previous blog posts, I have been discussing questions that scientists sometimes ask to determine whether or not a particular claim is true, and then asking those questions about the truth claims of Christianity to evaluate its veracity. One of those important questions is, "Is something essential missing?" If a certain required element is missing from a proposed explanation, then the explanation is likely to be not true. When it comes to truth claims from many of the world's religions and various world-views, I believe that there is an essential element that is present within Christianity, but missing from many other philosophies; thus giving credence to the Christian world-view. The issue has to do with human nature and human actions.

Challenge to Christianity: The Problem of Evil

Usually when scientists do multiple experiments to test a theory or model, there will be some experiments that seem to be just a little bit outside of the model predictions. There are almost always a few experiments that are in slight conflict or contradiction to the expectations, even when the model is otherwise well established as being accurate. In science these outlying experiments are often simply due to the nature of statistical analysis. For instance, one out of ten experiments is expected to be about three standard deviations from the average. Sometimes an outlier occurs because the measurement is not very accurate, so it appears to be far from the average but is still sensible given the uncertainty. Sometimes we don't have enough data to make definitive conclusions. In any case, it is important to evaluate if contradictory measurements have reasonable explanations or if they are a real problem for the model being tested.

This is the fourth blog post in which I am applying some of the same criteria that scientists use to test whether or not a theory is true to the claims of biblical Christianity in order to gain insight into whether or not Christianity has objective credibility. The first three questions that have been addressed were, (1) Is the data logically self-consistent?, (2) Is there enough evidence to support the hypothesis?, and (3) Is the hypothesis compatible with other known data? In this post we ask the question (4) Is contradictory evidence conclusive? Nothing is known to 100% accuracy, and every theory or model has some evidence that may appear to contradict the theory, those outlying experiments. But an idea that is valid will have reasonable explanations for those deviations so that the model remains credible.

One of the major challenges to Christianity is the problem of evil and suffering: how could a good and omnipotent God allow evil and suffering? I believe this may be the hardest philosophical question to answer, not just from a Christian worldview, but from any worldview.

Explanatory Power of a Biblical Worldview

As a professor of physics at a research university, I will often get unsolicited papers from non-scientists that propose an entirely different perspective on some known physical phenomena, maybe the electromagnetic force, or how atoms behave. In almost every case I can quickly glance at the paper and recognize that the proposal cannot be true. I may be accused of being arrogant or biased because I quickly dismiss these new ideas with apparently very little thought. But, in reality, most of these ideas can be readily discarded simply because they contradict known data and experiments.

For example, a student once came into my office with an idea that he had been working on since he was very young about how electricity might be described and modeled. It was apparent that, although his idea was clever and inventive, it did not coincide with some of the things we know about the electromagnetic force. Rather than squelch this student's idea outright I simply informed him that since he was a freshman physics major he would learn a lot about electricity during the next four years of college. I suggested that he compare what we know about how the electromagnetic force works with his model and see if his model was able to accurately describe what we know from experimental observation. If it didn't, he'd have to revise or reject his model. If it did, his model may be correct.

In any effort to determine if an idea is true or not, it is vital to compare the predictions of the idea with what is already known to be true. If an idea contradicts known truth, then the idea cannot itself be true.

Evidence for Christianity

If you flip a coin a number of times and 60% of the time the coin shows "heads" while 40% of the time the coin flip shows "tails" would you conclude that the coin is a fair coin that is properly and unbiasedly weighted? As the question is stated, there is not enough information to accurately answer it. For instance, if you flip the coin ten times, it is quite probable that the coin will be heads six times and tails four times. A six to four split should happen about 21% of the time, so such a pattern would not be unusual in 10 coin tosses. But suppose instead you flipped a coin 1000 times and it showed heads 600 times and tails 400 times. That is still a 6/4 ratio but the probability of this pattern appearing is 4.6×10^-11. Clearly a coin showing 600 heads and 400 tails is not a properly balanced coin. In order to make a definitive statement about the coin there must be enough data, or evidence, to support the hypothesis. (In reality, it seems to be impossible to make a "weighted" coin by adding weight to one side, but a coin can be made to land on a preferred side by bending it.)

This is the second installment in a series of blog posts dealing with some general questions that can be used to try to determine if a certain proposition is true or not. These principles can be applied to a scientific experiment or to the claims of Christianity to ascertain what conclusion is likely true. In a previous blog post I asked the question of whether or not the data was logically self-consistent. Regarding Christianity, I claimed that the Bible itself is a self-consistent book, and that the message of Christianity regarding the person of Jesus, the character of God, and the nature of humans is also self-consistent.

Is the Data Consistent?

Psychological experiments have shown that people tend to embrace evidence that confirms their already-held beliefs while overlooking evidence that conflicts with their beliefs, a phenomena called "confirmation bias." As a scientist who consistently analyzes data, not only must I be careful to avoid confirmation bias, but I must also take precautions against the opposite effect, which would be to bias experimental data with the goal of finding something new rather than just confirming what is already known. Many of the great discoveries in science have been made when the data shows an unexpected result rather than a confirmation of an already known effect. In short, it is important to be able to sift through the data in an unbiased way to try to determine the truth of a proposition. To assist me in this endeavor, I have developed an informal list of questions to ask that serve as a guideline to follow for determining the truth of an idea while trying to minimize bias.

In this blog I have regularly claimed that Christian beliefs are evidentially based, and not just a product of blind conviction. As a thinking person, a scientist, and a Christian, I have a desire to determine what is true about spiritual ideas and to try to avoid simple confirmation bias when examining evidence for Christian truth claims. Consequently, it may serve as an interesting exercise to apply the general principles I have developed for determining the truth of a proposition to certain spiritual claims and ideas. If the claims of Christianity are objectively true, then they should hold up under an examination that uses reasonable criteria to determine their validity.

Is the Evidence for the Big Bang Really Weak?

When I was a teenager and young adult I read a few books by Christians who wrote about the subject of science and Christianity. All of those books promoted a young earth that was only a few thousand years old and questioned the validity of scientific discoveries and ideas that led scientists to believe the universe and earth were billions of years old. As a young adult I did not really have the knowledge or resources to ascertain the strength or validity of their arguments. However, when I was working on my Ph.D. in particle physics I decided that if I were to eventually be a scientist, as well as a Christian, then I should do my own independent study of what the Bible says about science and the evidence from nature, and consider the strength of the arguments I had been presented. By that time in my life I had taken formal science, theology, and logic classes and had the tools to personally investigate the truth about this subject.

Every once in a while something will come up that reminds me of my journey as a young adult to find the truth and prompts me to share my findings with others. As I have stated in my last few posts, a reader of my blog directed me to a few videos by young earth creationists and reiterated some of the arguments they made about the scientific evidence regarding the age of the universe. As I watched those videos and read the questions posed, I was taken back to my days when I was first investigating these subjects. Though the subject and context are different, the statements made on the videos that tried to cast doubt on the scientific discoveries about the age of the universe follow the exact same pattern used by proponents of a young universe decades ago. If you are a Christian or non-Christian, young earth creationist or old earth creationists, and you want to know what is the truth, not simply be indoctrinated, then it is worthwhile to consider these kinds of videos and the validity of their arguments. As a Christian, I follow and worship the God of all truth, so I have no concerns about investigating the truth and seeing where it leads. Only someone who is so indoctrinated in their beliefs that they don't care about the truth would be reluctant to critique the evidence for their beliefs to see if it stands up to facts and reasons. So let's investigate some of the details and tactics used by speakers in these videos to promote a young universe in an attempt to understand both truth and the God of all truth.

Why The Universe? Critiquing Sean Carroll

When answering the question of why something exists one can certainly first appeal to the mechanism or cause for its existence. A painting exists because a brush applied paint to the canvas. By carefully observing how the paint is applied to the canvas we can learn quite a bit about technique and why the painting looks the way it does. Using radiation we can probe what lies underneath the paint to see rough sketches and changes to any underlying pigments. To some scientists, the mechanism of how the paint is applied to produce the finished product is the limit of what observations from science can tell us since science deals with laws and mechanism. But of course, there is much more to the story of a painting because there is an artist behind the brush strokes who created the painting with purpose, the real "reason."

When cosmologist Sean Carroll discusses "Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing" he claims, "The best we can ask is whether we can imagine laws of nature that fully account for how the universe behaves, even at the earliest moments."¹ As pointed out in my previous post Carroll's search for the cause of the existence of our universe has certain constraints and presuppositions that will restrict any conclusions. These include (1) his answer will be limited to mechanisms and cannot include reasons, (2) he is incorrect in assuming that finding a mechanism eliminates the need for a creator (3) he makes the false assumption that laws and mechanisms have the causal ability to implement, (4) he constrains all answers to the natural realm thus eliminating any supernatural creator, a priori. Despite these problems, I find Carroll's writings to be thoughtful and insightful and worth reading and critiquing. I also find that his ultimate answer requires a transcendent creator despite his insistence that it does not.

Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

If you search on the internet for the phrase, "Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" you will find a host of articles, many by philosophers but some by scientists, that discuss this profound question. The book by Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something From Nothing, which I have discussed in a previous post will probably appear near the top of your search engine. Last June, the cosmologist Sean Carroll added his name to the list of those writing about this subject with the article "Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?"¹ and a reader of my blog asked me to comment on Dr. Carroll's article.

In general, although Sean Carroll is an atheist, I find his writings to be quite reasonable and thoughtful, unlike some other atheist scientists whose writings and lectures indicate that they have done little research regarding the vast history of dialogue among deep thinkers in regards to these important philosophical and theological questions. In a previous post I highlighted one of Dr. Carroll's talks in which he honestly pointed out that almost all hypothetical ideas about the origin of our universe do not solve the problem of the initial low entropy state at the big bang, except for a small class of models that he favors. He objectively shows that most of the proposals that attempt to remove God from the origin of our universe flatly fail because they do not give the correct initial conditions.

At the beginning of the recent article Carroll points out that there are at least two ways to interpret the question of "Why there is something rather than nothing?" That question could be asking either for the mechanism or for the reason for our universe. On the web site philosophytalk.org a similar idea is developed when the author writes, "To get us started thinking about it, let’s distinguish between reasons and causes. When we ask why something is the case, depending on our purposes and what kind of explanation we seek, we might be asking for a reason, or we might be asking for a cause."²

Are Miracles Unscientific? Part 2

In "Are Miracles Unscientific? Part 1" several features of miracles were discussed. I defined a miracle as an exceptional action of God within the natural world, distinct from the usual processes of nature, for some specific purpose of God, which can have detectable consequences. I established that if there is a transcendent God who created the universe he could certainly intervene in unusual ways at times. Finally, I listed some different definitions of science including a broad definition based on the etymology of the word science, which means "knowledge" that would certainly admit miracles as a possibility. The last two paragraphs of that blog entry set the stage for this follow up entry on miracles. Because miracles are not repeatable events they cannot be established through a strictly controlled scientific experiment but can be reliably confirmed using a scientific and historical investigative method, in the same way other past events are established beyond a reasonable doubt.

Are Miracles Unscientific? Part 1

The question of whether or not miracles are scientific is a multifaceted question having to do with the definition of miracles, the definition of science, and the characteristics of God. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a miracle as an "extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs" such as "the healing miracles described in the Gospels." The second definition listed is "an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment" such as "the bridge is a miracle of engineering." Of course any controversy over miracles involves only the first definition, not the second. We can assume that the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” was not a miracle, though it was certainly an exciting and unexpected sporting outcome. I would define a miracle as an exceptional action of God within the natural world, distinct from the usual processes of nature, for some specific purpose of God, which can have detectable consequences.

Testing the Experts

A reader recently asked some important questions about how a non-expert can evaluate the opinion of the experts and determine whether or not the expert opinion has real validity. For instance, should the non-expert simply agree with the majority opinion of the experts? (You can find the discussion in the comments section within my post on The Grand Design.)

I have thought a lot about this question as has the reader who asked the questions, but I still don't have a definitive answer. So in this post, I will try to link together some diverse thoughts on this topic. Maybe my credentials as one of those "experts" in particle physics has helped me develop a worthwhile perspective.

Extraordinary Claims and Extraordinary Evidence

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is a phrase that was popularized by Carl Sagan but has its roots from at least the 18th century Enlightenment when the miracles of Christianity were being questioned by certain intellectual thinkers of the day. The most famous Enlightenment critic of Christianity was probably David Hume who wrote an essay called Of Miracles in 1748 where he states, "Suppose, for instance, that the fact, which the testimony endeavours to establish, partakes of the extraordinary and the marvellous; in that case, the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more or less unusual."

At first this statement may sound reasonable. For instance, I am more likely to believe you if you tell me you had breakfast this morning than I would believe you if you told me that you levitated off the ground this morning without anything holding you up. But does the fact that I believe you if you say you did something ordinary and I don't believe you if you say you did something extraordinary support the statement that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?" Actually, it doesn't. Although I may believe that you ate breakfast this morning, I must obtain supporting evidence if I want to actually determine whether or not that fact is true. If you have cleaned up your kitchen, such evidence may be hard to find. I might have to pump out the contents of your stomach, for instance to see what you ate and when you ate it. It is one thing to say that I believe you ate breakfast because it is an "ordinary" event, but it is quite another to actually find enough evidence to validate your claim. My point is that actual validation of any event requires sufficient evidence.