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| Praying at Redeemer |
Christianitytoday.com interviews Craig Keener on his new, 2-volume, 1100-page book Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Here are a few bullets.
- "Many scholars dismiss miracle stories as not historically plausible, arguing that they arose as legendary accretions. I was familiar with [contemporary] reports of miracles taking place. There must be thousands of such reports. It was inconceivable to me that people would say eyewitnesses can't claim to have seen such things."
- Hume addresses the matter of miracles "in a circular way." Craig says: "Blaise Pascal's niece was instantly and publicly healed of a running eye sore. Hume cites the documentation for that, which most people would say was pretty good, then dismisses it by saying we know that miracles don't happen. It's a circular argument: We know that miracles don't happen because it's the common experience of humans that miracles don't happen. [That's called, in logic, the fallacy of "begging the question."] It was Hume who first spoke of miracles as violations of nature. But Christians don't believe that the Legislator is subject to any of the laws of nature."
- "To dismiss miracles because they run against uniform human experience is an ethnocentric argument."
- Tom Stafford: "What do you want to accomplish with this book?" Craig: "Primarily, to challenge scholars who dismiss miracles in the Gospels as legends and not historically plausible. Eyewitnesses say these kinds of things all the time. I also want to challenge the bias that says these things can't be supernatural. I believe God does miracles, and I don't see why we scholars are not allowed to talk about it."
- Craig is a radical scholar! Stafford: "You're trying to break open the naturalistic tradition of writing history that scholars have followed for centuries." Craig: "I understand the historical paradigms within which we work, and I'm able to work within those by bracketing out certain questions. But I wonder who made up the rule that we have to bracket out those questions, and why we are obligated to follow such rules."
I'm reading through Miracles now. It includes much documentation that Craig (and I) find credible.
