The Case Against Miracles

by John W. Loftus

Now one might simply trust the anonymous gospel writer(s) who wrote this extraordinary story down, but why? How is it possible they could find out that a virgin named Mary gave birth to a deity? Think about it. No reasonable investigation could take Mary and/or Joseph’s word for it. With regard to Joseph’s dream, Thomas Hobbes tell us, “For a man to say God hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man.” [Leviathan, chap. 32.6] So it’s down to Mary. Why should we believe her? On this point believers are faced with a serious dilemma to their faith. For if this is the kind of research that went into writing the gospels, we shouldn’t believe anything else they say without requiring corroborating objective evidence. But if research was unnecessary for writing their gospels—because they were divinely inspired—why do gospel writers give us the pretense of having researched into it (see Luke 1:1–4)? Why not simply say their stories are true due to divine inspiration and be done with the pretense? Then the gospel authors would be admitting their tales lack the required corroborating objective evidence, which in turn means there isn’t a good reason to believe them. But let’s suppose these anonymous gospel authors were given the required objective evidence for the virgin birth. It doesn’t change a thing, for they don’t produce it or tell us about it! We’d still be forced to trust an anonymous ...

Genius— virgin birth!