Evidence and Faith: What Thomas Discovered about Miracles & Belief (pt. 1)
The Bible provides lots of evidence for miracles in the form of written testimony. Jesus performed tons of miracles, in front of lots of people, and they copiously wrote down what they saw and heard. They wrote it down so we would read it and believe in Jesus. The Bible’s eyewitness testimony is strong evidence designed to generate and build our faith in Jesus Christ.
Working in tandem with His miracles, the Bible also records Jesus’ startling claims about Himself. Jesus claimed, not just to be a good man or teacher, but to be the eternal, all-knowing, and Almighty God. He claimed to be of the same nature as God, without beginning or end, and to be worthy of our worship. Of course, any lunatic or crazy person can claim to be God, but Jesus backed up His claims to divine Sonship with undeniable, nature-busting miracles. Jesus’ plentiful miracles were performed in front of people, who recorded what they saw, so there would be no doubt that Jesus is the Son of God.
These proven miracles put Christianity in a category by itself. No other religion compares with Christianity in the number of miracles, the power of miracles over nature, or the reliable eyewitness testimony confirming those miracles. Christianity simply has more miracles, better miracles, and more evidence confirming these miracles than all other religions. Jesus’ claims and the evidence to back them up, dwarf that of any other religious leader — modern or ancient.
That means that Christianity must be taken seriously. It is no mere speculative philosophy or man-made religion. Its claims are backed up, and as such, are worthy of our faith. At the very least, the matchless miracles Jesus performed provide a swath of evidence no one can rightly ignore. Every truth-seeker should carefully consider Jesus and the Bible.
That is what Nicodemus did. Nicodemus was a religious man. He was a ruling Jewish teacher living in first century Israel. In a conversation with Jesus, he rightly concluded in John 3:2, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher; for no one can do these signs (miracles with meaning) that You do unless God is with him.” Nicodemus knew that throughout human history, miracles served to authenticate genuine spokespersons for God. The Jewish people, in particular, were trained by God to look for miracles so they could know who was truly speaking for God. (See for example the tests of a prophet in Deuteronomy 18:20-22; 13:1-5.) If someone did not do miracles or if they contradicted the other prophets like Moses who also performed miracles, they were not to be believed.
That’s why miracles are rare! They are not done often in history, otherwise they would be commonplace and lose their evidential weight. That’s why we don’t see them going on to the same degree today. For no one today is bringing new messages from God as when the Bible was being written. In other words, God is not confirming any new prophets today, because He has spoken finally and completely in His Son. The life and meaning of Jesus have already been fully conveyed to the world through Jesus’ handpicked apostles. (See Hebrews 1:1.) Only when new messages were coming from God into the world, did God need to confirm those messages with miracles.
Jesus’ miracles confirmed Him, not just as a prophet, but as the Son of God, for they were beyond anything known to man up to that time and since. John 7:31 is an example of the effects of His miracles on the people, “But many of the crowd believed in (Jesus); and they were saying, 'When the Christ comes, He will not perform more signs than those which this man has, will He?’” And I adore the words of the healed blind man to the stubborn leaders of his day in John 9:30-33 “Well, here is an amazing thing, that you do not know where (Jesus) is from, and yet He opened my eyes. We know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is God-fearing and does His will, He hears him. Since the beginning of time it has never been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.”
Today the arguments skeptics foist against the reality of miracles do not hold water. For example, some claim miracles are impossible by definition. They believe that scientifically minded people discount them immediately. They think of all claims of miracles as fairy tales and leave it at that. Of course, we may ask …”By whose definition?” That argument is essentially a cop out, and it reveals an unwillingness to deal with the evidence for miracles! Miracles are only impossible by definition if God does not exist, or if God has to follow some arbitrarily assigned rules, such as the law of nature — a silly proposition, since God made nature in the first place, and He designed the way nature functions. To claim that the laws of nature forbid miracles is hardly logical, since nature does not make nature’s laws. Whatever biological, chemical, or physical laws are embedded in nature, One greater than nature made them. Obviously, if God is greater than the universe, then He can do supernatural acts, i.e. miracles. Put another way, once you concede that Almighty God exists and created everything, miracles cannot be denied. In fact, they should be expected at critical times. For God is restrained by nothing, and beholden to no power outside Himself. Nature does not control God; God controls nature and its laws. He can write the laws, change the laws, or suspend the laws. Nothing is impossible with Almighty God!
Others object, “But I haven’t seen a miracle, nor do I know anyone who has, so I don’t believe in them.” That is not sound reasoning either. The whole point of miracles is that they are very rare, otherwise they lose their value as special acts of God with meaning. Even in Bible times miracles did not come regularly or often. What we must do with any claim of the miraculous, is to investigate the reliability and consistency of the eyewitness accounts. If they have credibility, they are to be taken seriously. If not, they can be discarded. But to discount miracles totally, is a prejudice approach, not science.
Still others object, “But people are naive, especially the ancients, and they will believe anything! So we can’t trust their eyewitness testimony.” However, how do we know the ancients were not more skeptical than moderns? I would grant that many folks, both past and present, have believed in miracles that were not real. Often people want miracles to be true, and their bias leads them to accept the supernatural where it has not occurred. We do not support religious zeal without knowledge. But skepticism in the face of consistent testimony is just as naive. Many people, even ancients, refused to believe things that have plenty of evidence. Many in modern times disbelieve claims without even investigating them. Their skepticism is biased. Affirming that many or even most miracle claims are phony is not the same as saying that they all are phony. That is a logical fallacy easily refuted. For example, to say most commercials on TV exaggerate their product is not to say that all do. Or to say most car salesmen are dishonest is not the same as saying they are all dishonest. Veracity and believability can only be decided case-by-case, not with prejudice against the existence of miracles.
The question of the reality of miracles does not come to us in a vacuum. It is not as if God has left us without testimony of His powerful handiwork. Creation itself, that we gaze at everyday, cannot be explained by natural processes alone. We have this world and our own extremely complex bodies as testimony of the miraculous. The universe is a miracle! So are the plants, animals, and humans in it. These things did not, and could not, make themselves. The notion of macro evolution (where species progress beyond their kind of species) is a religious belief not something proven scientifically. We neither see that kind of evolution occurring presently, nor can we see the record of that in the past, nor is there a proven vehicle to allow for that kind of evolution. The only thing we see or find in the fossil record is variations within a species. That’s not molecules to man evolution. Some who believe in evolution are finally admitting this. Mutations have been shown to be inadequate as vehicles for constructive change. The fossil record denies the development of higher species from lower species, famously failing to produce all the millions of transitional forms Darwin predicted we would eventually find.
And, to any fair observer of nature, all we see hardly could happen by accident. To believe the universe is a meaningless accident takes so much faith you must deny that all the design you see in nature is not really design at all. You are asked not to believe your own eyes and logic. If it looks like design, we are told we have to say to ourselves, “it’s not really a design but an accident.” We are asked to believe that all the vast DNA information encoded in living organisms does not have an intelligent source. This kind of faith is immense, for it asks us to believe something contrary to evidence. Creation, even in the smallest parts of our bodies, is far too complex for even our best computers to figure out. That sure sounds like design. God’s natural universe is filled with wonder and mystery. If God can create the universe, what is the big deal about a few hundred miracles to confirm Jesus as His Son? Turning water into wine, healing a leper, making the lame to walk, multiplying loaves, removing viruses — these are small energy movements upon nature compared to the creating of all things in the beginning.
Indeed miracles must be taken seriously, especially in the case of Jesus.
With that in mind, we turn to consider faith and miracles in John’s gospel, the fourth eyewitness testimony of the life of Jesus in the New Testament. John 20:24-31 picks up in the midst of the time Jesus was appearing to His disciples following His crucifixion and His bodily resurrection from the dead (a miracle). By this time, the other disciples had seen Jesus’ resurrection body, but Thomas was the only disciple who had not. This is the record of how he had his faith confirmed.
Verses 24-31: “But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples were saying to him, ‘We have seen the Lord!’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see in His hands the imprint of the nails, and put my finger into the place of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not believe.’ 26 After eight days His disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been shut, and stood in their midst and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ 27 Then He said to Thomas, ‘Reach here with your finger, and see My hands; and reach here your hand and put it into My side; and do not be unbelieving, but believing.’ 28 Thomas answered and said to Him, ‘My Lord and my God!’ 29 Jesus said to him, ‘Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed.’ 30 Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; 31 but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in His name.”
So do we need evidence to help our faith or not? It is a great question, and one frequently debated in Christian circles. When we talk to others about Jesus should we give them evidence to help their faith, or should we just tell them to believe? This passage plunges us right into the relationship between evidence and faith. Here we discover an intriguing interplay between them. Clearly our faith is not based on evidence alone. The Word of God is to be believed because of what it is - the trustworthy, inspired word of God. Nevertheless, God provides abundant evidence to aid our coming to faith and growing in faith.
Let us consider together Four Truths about Evidence & Faith …