Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts

by Craig S. Keener

hardly inductive. Scholars identify various problems with his approach; I will address the first of these at some length before turning to others. First, as I shall show later in the book, there is no such uniform experience against miracles; whether or not one trusts the claims of tens of millions of people that they have experienced miracles, so many claims, at least some of them substantive, offer a rather vigorous challenge to simply assuming a “uniform experience” against miracles.[296] The uniformity argument essentially rejects all miracle reports, which are inconvenient to the uniformity premise; yet such reports are very widely claimed, an observation that I shall document at greater length in subsequent chapters. Far from the spirit we normally associate with intellectual inquiry, a priori rejection of all these claims declares victory by fiat rather than by fair exploration. An argument that a miracle is never probable enough to allow any evidence to be cited in support of it must circularly presuppose that miracles have never been known to happen. Should testimony that would otherwise be accepted as reliable be rejected for an event because it is extremely unusual by the