The Case against Miracles, by John W. Loftus, ed. Foreword by Michael Shermer. (Aberdeen U.K.: Hypatia Press, 2019, ISBN 978-1-83919-008-7). 564 pp. Softcover, $20.99.

I’ll begin with a reminiscence, if only because I can. Years ago, after lecturing at a small university, I opened the floor to questions. A young man who seemed far too formally dressed to be a student stepped up to the question mic and began, “Mr. Flynn, I am a professional apologist …”

Call me rude. I just couldn’t help myself. I cut him off with a downright buttery: “I’m so glad you’re here with us tonight!” Then I continued: “It’s great that we have a professional apologist in our midst. I’m delighted to see that this desperate need is finally being addressed. You see, Christianity has so much to apologize for, and the amateurs just haven’t been getting the job done.” I paused. “So, what is your question?”

You know that feeling when hours or days after having an argument, you suddenly realize what you should have said instead? Well, this was one time (and they haven’t come all that often in my life) when the perfect rejoinder occurred to me on the spot. Of course, I was riffing on the disparate meanings of two closely related words. Apology is saying you’re sorry. Apologetics is the discipline of composing intellectual defenses for one’s religion, especially pertaining to Christian defenses of their religion against disbelieving critics.

Christian apologetics has been a busy field for centuries. One of its better-known current practitioners is the apologist and well-known anti-atheist debater William Lane Craig (for all that, his work often impresses more by its showmanship than by its rigor). Fortunately, from the secular humanist perspective, there are also anti-apologists—experts who devote themselves to overcoming apologetic defenses, making the clearest possible case why one should not be a Christian.

One of the most prominent anti-apologists is John W. Loftus, the editor of this impressive anthology.

For those who don’t know of him, Loftus is a multi-degreed philosopher of religion who studied under the aforementioned Craig … and who later concluded that his Christian faith was untrue, becoming an atheist. In 2008, he launched what would become a definitive series of anti-apologetic works with Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity (Prometheus Books). Its first edition suffered some—by the standards of that time—egregious editing problems,¹ reflected in my April/May 2010 review titled “Christianity Refuted, English Merely Challenged.” Prefer the second edition (2012)—revised, expanded, and (to Prometheus Books’s credit) editorially corrected. Loftus then wrote or edited a life’s work worth of books, including The Outsider Test for Faith; How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist; Unapologetic; The End of Christianity; Christianity in the Light of Science; and several more. The Case against Miracles is the capstone volume in this astonishing output, and it’s an impressive achievement.

Loftus teams with fourteen other contributors to dissect the principal miracle claims on which most Christian apologists rely. What counts as a miracle? “A miracle is a supernaturally caused extraordinary event of the highest kind, one that’s unexplainable and even impossible by means of natural processes alone” (italics in original).

Loftus and his contributors challenge the validity of miracles from multiple angles. The first half of the book focuses on the inadequacy of miracle claims and the manifold flaws in the miracle accounts to which apologists most commonly appeal. Along the way, philosopher Matthew McCormick offers a stunning logical argument for why a perfect and transcendent god would not, and actually can not, perform miracles in the physical world. (It’s not as simple as “He’s God, he can do anything he wants.”) Theologian-historian Darren M. Slade and freethought author Edward T. Babinski offer complementary rebuttals to apologist Craig Keener, who authored an influential two-volume work in 2011 claiming that miracles affirming God’s hand upon the world continue today. The miracles of the New Testament—considered by many a linchpin of the Christian faith—receive detailed examination in the second half of the book, from the supposed wine miracle at Cana and Christ’s putative resurrection and ascension to Saul/Paul’s “miraculous” vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. (Spoiler alert: if among us today, Paul would almost surely merit a psychiatric diagnosis.) In a bracing digression, zoologist Abby Hafer demolishes creationism with a breathlessly irresistible torrent of reasons that evolution offers the only possible explanation for why life—flaws and quirks and all—is as it is.

Any thoughtful Christian whose conviction rests on the evidence of miracles who reads this book with an open mind will be hard-pressed not to abandon—or at least, profoundly rethink—his or her beliefs. Of course, true believers seldom approach works critical of their faiths with an open mind, which is why The Case against Miracles will probably be of greater value to secular students of religion and especially to those drawn to the challenges of anti-apologetics.

For all that The Case against Miracles is a definitive work, and a hefty one at more than 560 pages, I can’t help wishing it had been just a little longer. I would have welcomed more material on modern-day miracle claims and an article or two on the nuts and bolts of evaluating them. In a forthcoming article,² veteran investigator of paranormal claims Joe Nickell distinguishes between philosophical (“top-down”; more pejoratively, “armchair”) and investigative (“bottom-up”) strategies for examining miracle claims. The Case against Miracles consists largely of philosophical material; given the subject matter, this is unavoidable. The burning bushes and leper-healings of scripture—claims about the Exodus and the Resurrection and the miracles of Pentecost—must be considered at length. Because they are claims of events alleged to have happened millennia ago and for which scholars recognize that we have no eyewitness accounts, much less any physical evidence, there is no alternative but to probe them with academic tools such as textual criticism, philology, historical analysis, psychology, and the like. But some miracle claims are more contemporaneous. Craig Keener’s recent apologetic work in this vein merited two articles, and of those Darren Slade’s at least sets forth a checklist of techniques for conducting a more investigative analysis.

Still, a comprehensive volume on miracles might have taken greater notice of the Shroud of Turin, a focus of Christian miracle claims since the Middle Ages. Yes, most scientists are satisfied that it’s a medieval fake, yet numerous believers go on venerating it. Some present-day miracle claims may seem silly by comparison—“weeping” statues in churches, holy likenesses appearing on office-building windows or on a slice of toast, statues of Ganesh that seem to drink milk—but in their sheer number and their presence both inside and outside the Christian tradition they bespeak a huge accretion of misdirected belief.

Then there are the claims that straddle religion and the paranormal: mediums who pretend to talk to the dead don’t just line their own pockets; they offer specious “proof” for the existence of the soul and its ability to survive bodily death. Such “miracle claims of today” lend themselves more handily to direct empirical investigation than to philosophical analysis. To the degree that they undergird some believers’ faiths, they stand as fair game for apologetic and anti-apologetic consideration. The Case against Miracles would be an even more towering accomplishment had it extended itself a bit further in this direction.

Notes

1. In our present age of self-publishing and cash-strapped publishing houses, poor copyediting has become far more common.
2. Joe Nickell, “Examining Miracle Claims: ‘Top-down’ (Philosophical) and ‘Bottom-up’ (Investigative) Approaches” (FI, October/November 2021 [tentative]).