Miracles as Reality: An Interview with Craig S. Keener

An Interview with Craig S. Keener on the Miraculous and his Recent Book, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts.

The Pneuma Review: As a New Testament scholar you have a great interest in the meaning of the biblical text but you also seem to have a great interest in miracles. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Craig Keener: Some estimate that 31 percent of Mark’s Gospel, or roughly 40 percent of his narrative, addresses miracles. To ignore the question of miracles is to ignore a hefty portion of the biblical text. Perhaps one-fifth of the Book of Acts addresses miracles, almost as much as the speeches, yet scholars often comment on the topic of the “speeches in Acts” while comparatively ignoring the miracles. I think this is a blind spot in our Western readings of the text since David Hume. Since Hume, scholars have often treated the miracle accounts in the Gospels as an embarrassment, neglecting them, explaining them away, allegorizing them in ways we wouldn’t do with most other narratives. Those are culturally circumscribed readings: when someone in the first century heard a healing report of Asclepius, for example, they understood that it was meant to invite faith in Asclepius’s power to help supplicants. Reports that the New Testament writers expected to generate faith are often treated very differently by scholars today, who are often captive to a very different worldview.

PR: How have the arguments of David Hume contributed to anti-supernatural thinking in the West?

Keener: Hume borrowed arguments of some earlier Deists against miracles, and some of the apparent gaps in his arguments are because he is taking some conventional Deist arguments for granted. In his own day, his essay about miracles was overshadowed by other works, especially one by Conyers Middleton. Deism eventually faded from fashion, but Hume’s prestige, based on his other essays, led to his miracles essay being widely influential. Many today do not realize the historic pedigree of their views, but their ready dismissal of the plausibility of miracles simply repeats Hume’s claim.

PR: What is the fallacy in Hume’s thinking?

Keener: There is more than one. Foundational is his argument from uniform human experience. The first part of Hume’s essay appeals to laws of nature, presumably extrapolated from human experience, in a prescriptive way that does not fit current understandings of laws of nature. In Hume’s own era, in fact, most English scientists speaking about laws of nature affirmed the reality of biblical miracles; it was not scientific evidence but Hume’s philosophic argument that eventually led much of culture to reject miracles, often (wrongly) in the name of science.

Reports that the New Testament writers expected to generate faith are often treated very differently by scholars today—scholars who are captive to a very different worldview.

The second part of his essay appeals to uniform human experience to rule out eyewitness evidence for miracles. Of course, as many philosophers have pointed out, this is a completely circular argument: humans don’t experience miracles, therefore humans who claim to experience them are incorrect, therefore there is no sufficient evidence for humans experiencing miracles. In constructing his understanding of uniform human experience, he dismissed miracle claims from other parts of the world; his other writings show that he was racist and pro-slavery, so his attitude is not surprising. He also dismissed miracle claims from the West when they came from religious people, whom he accused of bias and sectarian polemic. If his construction of uniform human experience was problematic in his own day, it should be completely rejected in our own. A Pew Forum survey suggests that roughly 200 million Pentecostals and charismatics in ten countries claim to have witnessed or experienced divine healing; roughly one-third of “other Christians” in these ten countries claimed the same. The survey did not even include countries like China, where some argue that half or more new converts to Christianity over a period of two decades became Christians as a result of “faith healing” experiences. Roughly half of U.S. physicians surveyed claim to have witnessed treatment results they considered miraculous. Whether or not one believes in miracles, and regardless of how many of these claims might represent actual miracles, one cannot make claims about “uniform human experience” excluding miracles without assuming what one hopes to prove.

This set the default often used today, even in dismissing medical documentation for miracles: no evidence is adequate to make the case, and any naturalistic explanation, no matter how weak (even, “Someday we’ll have an explanation”), is preferred to a miraculous explanation. In other words, the anti-miracle approach is not falsifiable, and therefore it does not even enter into dialogue with its detractors; it simply rules them out by fiat, assuming its intellectual superiority. To illustrate: one of my professors told me that he would not believe in God even if someone were raised from the dead in front of him. I asked him why he considered himself open-minded.

PR: What role did faith play in the healings and miracles you wrote about in the book?

Keener: Although the question you are asking was not part of the book’s focus, I did pay attention to the stories that were shared with me. Often miracles happened in the context of faith. I should also point out, however, that the majority of those I interviewed believed that God is sovereign and that faith does not necessarily guarantee a miracle. Miracle reports included instant healings of blindness and raisings from the dead, but those who shared these reports acknowledged that these events do not always happen. For example, one physician who reported that he witnessed a man raised when he prayed also reported that his own son died and was not raised when he prayed for him. A friend told me that he only ever prayed for two people to be raised from the dead. One was a boy brought to him by neighbors in a place where he was evangelizing; the boy returned to life. The other was his close friend; the friend did not return to life.

PR: Do you think that Christians in the West have greater difficulty accepting the reality of miracles than our brothers and sisters in the Majority World?

Keener: Certainly many of us do; I know that I did. I think that the legacy of Hume is a major factor in academia. In many disciplines we rule out divine explanations a priori; while that approach introduces does helpfully force us to rigorously explore natural causes, it sometimes screens out the best explanation (and often screens out compatible ones). Much of Western academia moves from that method, which from the start refuses to discuss divine explanations, to simply assuming that miracles have been disproved, but it is back to Hume’s circular argument. Most of the world does not share the frequent Western assumption that what we would call miracles cannot happen. It also seems that God lavishes miracles where they are most needed, among the needy physically and spiritually, particularly in places with the least exposure to the gospel.

PR: Your book contains accounts of healings and miracles that have taken place through the ministries of Pentecostal and Charismatic believers and through the ministries of non-charismatic believers. Could you speak briefly to that?

How to dismiss healing: no evidence is ever adequate and any naturalistic explanation, no matter how weak, is always preferred to “miracle.”

Keener: I recount a number of concrete examples of miracle claims from around the world. Some of these could be explained in multiple ways, so in chapter twelve I turn to some particular categories of miracle claims, especially the healing of blindness and raisings from the dead. In some of the reports of healed blindness, cataracts visibly disappeared during prayer. In some cases, we also have medical documentation, even of eye scarring disappearing. I received a number of reports of raisings from the dead, even from my own circle. This is significant because some people dismiss miracle claims as merely statistical anomalies. I don’t know how one would quantify the statistical probability of someone apparently dead returning to life specifically during prayer for raising in a given person’s circle. But whatever that improbability would be, it must be compounded ten times over if there are ten such accounts from my own circle (there are in fact more than that). I believe that the odds of coincidence are so low at that point that a skeptic might have to postulate that I am the only person in the world with such a coincidentally high incidence of these reports, and this is not true. Rather, the statistical coincidence argument has an abysmally low probability. Some, though only a minority, of these raising reports in my circle involve Pentecostals.

PR: What is the most significant thing that you have learned in the process of writing this book?

Some people dismiss miracle claims as being mere statistical anomalies—but the math doesn’t work for that.

Keener: For me personally, the book challenged my own unbelief. By unbelief, I don’t mean that I was not a believer in Christ or in spiritual gifts; but not every claim is accurate, and I was placing a heavy burden of proof on any particular miracle claim. In principle I did believe in miracles, but I was working with a fair degree of methodological skepticism toward individual accounts. I eventually had to surrender that approach to the burden of proof when the evidence that I found became overwhelming. There were too many sincere people reporting too many amazing occurrences. That forced me to go back and think about incidents that I myself had experienced or witnessed, such as a woman that I knew could not walk being able to walk after she had been prayed for. She continued walking thereafter. That is not quite on the level of raisings from the dead or cataracts disappearing, but both kinds of incidents fit a coherent worldview in which God sometimes does do miracles. Whether we describe this as “intervening” or believe that in most cases God works through nature (e.g., the Bible says that He blew back the sea with a strong east wind all night), God sometimes acts in ways that make a point to most open-minded people. The point got through to me and challenged some of the methodological skepticism I had picked up over the years.

PR: What do you hope will be the lasting legacy of this book?

Even the raising of Lazarus did not persuade everyone present.

Keener: I am under no illusion that my book will persuade the majority of those firmly entrenched in Humean convictions. In the Bible, even the raising of Lazarus did not persuade everyone present, and I have not raised Lazarus in front of anyone. But I believe that many people are open-minded enough to listen to evidence they had probably not heard before. I hope that the book will give more people the permission to tell their stories and more scholars the conviction to take a stand rather than thinking that this is just something we are not allowed to talk about in academia (or in certain circles of academia). Of course we must be gracious and dialogue with scholars who have different interpretations of the evidence; God does not coerce people. But I hope that this book will open new lines of research, with more younger scholars pursuing dissertations and other research on healing claims around the world. We can use such research in various disciplines such as theology, sociology, missiology, and we can certainly use input from medical professionals. The accounts are so abundant around the world that there is virtually no limit to what can be explored.

For Further Reading:

Excerpts from Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, by Craig S. Keener as appearing in Pneuma Review Fall 2013 PneumaReview.com/excerpts-from-miracles-by-craig-keener