Squaring the Culture

There’s a discussion going on in a Christian-oriented Yahoo group to which I belong, over whether American Christians have an obligation in Christ to resist tyranny, as described in the Declaration of Independence. For those who are not immediately familiar, the Declaration identifies the core rights of free citizens as established by God, and declares that government draws all its right to rule from the consent of the governed. It then makes it a duty of free citizens to identify whether a government has “a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,” and when that occurs, a duty “to throw off such government, and to devise new guards for their future security.”

The title of the thread makes reference to Romans 13, a passage that begins “Let every person be in subjection to the governing authorities…” Many American Christians regard that as the key passage defining their role as citizens of any nation. I argued briefly in the discussion that in America, we, the people, are the governing authority, and that entity which we call “the government” is actually our slave. It is the government, I said, that owes American citizens obedience per Romans 13, not the other way ’round. We may feel guilty about “rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” but in America, we, the people, are Caesar, and the government is not.

In response to that, some who are of a different mind posited a few passages that they claim define what Christ wants us as Christians to do with respect to the government. These were:

(1) “I urge that entreaties and prayers, petitions and thanksgivings, be made on behalf of all men, for kings and all who are in authority, so that we may lead a tranquil and quiet life in all godliness and dignity.” I Timothy 2:2.

(2) “No soldier in active service entangles himself in the affairs of everyday life, so that he may please the one who enlisted him as a soldier.” II Timothy 2:4, by which this fellow meant that in serving Christ, he feels it is a distraction to entangle himself in temporal matters, which truly do not matter in the Kingdom of God.

(3) “For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses.” 2 Corinthians 10:4, by which he means that our battle is not with things of the earth, but rather with spiritual forces.

My response to this was long, but a pretty comprehensive argument explaining why I believe Christians in America have a deep-seated obligation in Christ to resist tyrants, and to resist the current, incipient tyrant in particular. The rest of this post is what I argued.

First a definition: I spend most of the discussion talking about the “Kingdom of God.” To understand what I mean, you have to think of God as ruler of all universes, and then think of Earth as territory in rebellion against God, and being held against Him by spiritual forces with human complicity. God invaded this hostile territory from the outside in the person of Jesus, and established a beachhead for Himself through all those who obey Jesus. When I say that our purpose as Christians is to manifest the Kingdom of God, what I mean is that we are to widen the beachhead, extending the territory in which God’s will is done consistently. Since God’s intention for humanity is health, peace, prosperity, righteousness, and joy, those things should be plentiful wherever God’s Kingdom manifests. This is why, for example, Jesus spent so much time healing people when He walked the earth — He was extending the influence of the Kingdom of God. I frequently abbreviate the phrase “Kingdom of God” down to “KoG.”

This will be my Thanksgiving post, since what the Leydenites (they called themselves Pilgrims) were attempting to establish here on this continent was a manifestation of the Kingdom of God on earth. This is my tribute to them. Read on…

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As Christians, what is our purpose here on earth? To get to heaven? Nonsense. Heaven is an effect, not a goal. We’re already in heaven, in part, and the completion of that transition is inevitable.

Is our goal to be perfected? Yes, but surely firm obedience in the tasks to which He has put us in this life is part of the process by which we are perfected, right?

Is it to convert a lot of people to Christianity? Partly, yes, but Jesus did a great deal more than merely convert people, he taught them, healed them, delivered them, encouraged them, fed them, clothed them…

I see our task here on earth reflected in the following:

“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Matthew 6:10

The purpose of Christianity here on earth is to bring God’s kingdom into manifestation among men. We’re not here just to learn, nor just to be examples, but to produce the fruit of the kingdom of God wherever we are. That’s why the message is, and always was, “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Now, that creates an interesting conflict, because so much of what goes on down here is truly inconsequential. Christianity is not a political system, nor is it an economic system. Likewise, Christianity is not a self-help program, a mental health tonic, a get-rich-quick or get-rich-slow scheme… although there are truths available in the Kingdom of God that will affect your prosperity, your mental health, your self-esteem, your economics, and your politics. Different tangible matters here on earth have different relevance to the kingdom of God, and it becomes our task as His servants to discern correctly which are central, and which peripheral, and to behave accordingly.

For example, when Peter visited the Centurion at Caesarea and converted his whole household, the Centurion was not commanded to resign his military post. Why? Because military service, a secular and temporal task, is not incompatible with serving the Kingdom of God (KoG.) Most orders a Centurion would carry out would have been of little importance to the KoG, except insofar as the Centurion performs them with moral excellence (something God definitely requires of us whatever our station.) Some — say, the matters in which this Centurion was friendly to the local synagogue — may have been positively beneficial to the KoG.

However, it was certainly possible for that military commander to have received instructions that were flat-out contrary to the Kingdom of God — say, the murder of all male children in the region under the age of 2, or the murder of all Christians — and in that case, the Centurion would have had to refuse the order and accept the consequences, which would probably have been death.

We all have the same balance to strike. We all serve the Kingdom of God while performing temporal tasks that matter very little in eternity. I used to install system software at large corporations. Nothing I did impacted the KoG directly that I could see, but insofar as I was providing for my family, supporting the Church, representing Christ accurately among my co-workers, and performing my duties with honesty and excellence, I considered that I was doing what God wanted me to do.

But occasionally there are secular things with eternal importance, and as Christians, when we encounter them we have to stand firm and do what is right. If your employer is stealing, you have a responsibility within the secular system, but that responsibility also matters eternally, both with regard to your eternal soul and your employer’s. There’s no specific scripture that says “You must report your dishonest employer to the FBI,” but you most certainly have a Christian obligation to do something like that. If you just say “Sinners will be sinners” and turn a blind eye, do you really think God will be indifferent to that? I say not; I say, God demands that we be part of the solution. That’s what we’re here for — to undo the destructive works of satan among men on this lost planet. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth…”

So, what does that say about Christians and American politics?

All of us who live in America accept, as an obligation of enjoying the benefits of a free society, the responsibility to participate in its leadership. This is no different from “If a man will not work, neither let him eat.” II Thessalonians 3:10. If you enjoy the benefits of citizenship, you should pay the price of citizenship. That means participation in the body politic in whatever ways are required to ensure the continued peace and safety of the nation. No, you don’t have to volunteer for Ward Chairman if that’s not your thing, but you do need to stay abreast of current events and vote intelligently regarding them. Far too few of us take this responsibility seriously, and yes, I do think God notices.

It’s given that different people will see their responsibility differently; that’s part of what “free society” means. So what if you’re a Democrat and I’m a Republican? So long as we both participate honestly, civilly, with excellence, and in good conscience, we should be able to work out our differences, and even if we can’t, each of our conscientious activisms fulfills our Christian duties. In most political things, where the requirements of bringing the Kingdom of God to earth are either irrelevant or disputable, Christians may participate on either side, and God’s purpose is served by either.

But what if a political party in the US adopts as its core philosophy something that is utterly contrary to the Kingdom of God? not just a specific plank or bad policy, but a central philosophy? What if, for example, a party adopted the central goals of satanism, and used as the central theme of its platform “Be as satan, and Do As You Will?” spreading that theme through law, education, government, and civil society? What if a party stood primarily for the evangelistic spread of Islam throughout the US, intending to establish Sharia in place of the US Constitution and reducing all non-Muslims to “dhimmi” status? What if one adopted a theme of “Grasp for whatever you can, and to hell with the needs of others?” Does the combination of your devotion to the Kingdom of Christ and your citizenship in a citizen-governed system, confer on you a Christian duty to resist that which is explicitly ungodly in that party’s platform? I say that it does — and not only does this not constitute “serving the wrong kingdom,” the failure to judge this rightly and take appropriate action constitutes a failure to serve Christ properly. For our job here is to bring the KoG to earth, and resisting the spread of demoniacal systems is certainly part of that job.

What I perceive in modern America is that one party has been overtaken by a demonic philosophy that perfectly expresses the will of the serpent in Eden: “You will be as God.” It perfectly expresses the spirit of man at Babel: “Let us make a name for ourselves.” It perfectly expresses the vain notions of kings mentioned in Psalm 2: “Let us break [the LORD's] chains, and throw off [His Anointed's] fetters.” That philosophy is the philosophy of Utopian control — total control to produce a perfect society. I can imagine no better expression of satanic will for humanity, nor a better vehicle for him to destroy humanity. We saw this philosophy in motion throughout the 20th century, in Italy, in Germany, in Russia, in China, in Vietnam, in Cambodia, in Cuba… and watched it murder hundreds of millions of its own citizens. And everywhere it went, it systematically and specifically murdered the Church, because the spirit of this system is anti-Christ.

And even though we Christians, as American citizens, are the government, and have a civic responsibility to maintain the peace and safety of the nation, some here are telling me that they think the Christian has no obligation, as a Christian, to stand against this horror and say “It will not come here.”

I say “Crap.” No obligation could possibly be clearer. And no, I’m not serving the wrong kingdom. I’m serving the only kingdom that matters, the Kingdom of God. Because satan has moved through deceived men and women to increase his hold on the minds and hearts of men, to demolish their prosperity and safety, to increase their misery, to take their liberty and their lives. He’s doing it in a recognizable form, one whose effects we already know all too well. It behooves me as a servant of the living Christ to stand firm against it.

Notice what I have not said, because some here will mistakenly accuse me of saying them. I have not said that the Republican party represents the perfect reflection of Christ, or even that it reflects Him in any way. I have not said that every Democrat is a demoniac. I have not said that Christians cannot be Democrats, nor that Democrats cannot be Christians. I have not said that the US Constitution is the Perfect Christian Document. I have not said that we have leave to treat human beings in the deceived party as though they were less than human beings. I have not said that warfare in the spirit is an inconsequential part of this activism. I have not said that there are no other Christian imperatives in politics to which a Christian might, in good conscience, apply him or herself.

But what I have said is, there’s a distinctly ungodly philosophy afoot, centered in a political movement, and as citizens of the Kingdom of God who happen also to be citizens in a citizen-governed republic, we have a Christian obligation to stand up to it and defeat it decisively.

That’s my argument.

This clip from the 2007 movie August Rush features a song called Raise It Up. I like the emotion of the song, so you get to hear it.

If you haven’t seen August Rush yet, it’s worth seeing. A pair of musicians couple and produce a child, then fate separates them. The orphan, called Evan (later renamed August Rush), is a musical prodigy, and knows by faith that his music will call his family back together. It’s Evan that you see wandering into the church in the clip, which makes the song about orphaned kids that much more powerful in context. The story has strong elements of Oliver Twist, with Robin Williams playing a musically-minded Fagin, but the entire first half of the film plays like a self-important, overly serious version of Seredipity. It’s in the second half, as soon as Evan/August picks up a guitar and starts tapping and hammering, that the film takes off, and the music soars. The composer, Mark Mancina (who did the music for The Lion King), highlights themes from ordinary street noise throughout the film, and then we start to hear those themes in August’s music as his talent begins to develop. He brings them all together at the end of the film, when young August conducts the Juilliard orchestra playing his original composition, hammering home the movie’s theme: music is everywhere, you just have to listen. The script writers take themselves far too seriously, striving for profundity, falling short, and sacrificing plausibility and coherence in the process, but the music more than makes up for it.

The little girl with the amazing pipes is Jamia Nash. She was 10 when the film was shot.

I had a rare opportunity to watch the weekend political talk shows yesterday, and was particularly interested in the talk about President Obama’s trip to China, on which there was general agreement that he had obtained… nothing.

Back during the campaign, Charles Krauthammer observed correctly that President Obama is an academic. It’s not that he’s so deeply involved in academia, but it’s that his approach to the world is theoretical and ideological rather than pragmatic and practical. We’ve noticed this in his approach to remaking the US along neo-Marxist lines; it’s clear that he’s spent a lot of time, decades of time, ruminating and plotting and planning how he might remake American society if he ever obtained enough political power to execute his plans. That’s why, for example, he’s been attempting to make changes at lightning speed, which is a tactic. He’s been thinking about this for a long, long time. His first steps were planned to the hilt. He may be operating entirely out of a pre-envisioned playbook for the remainder of his first term. Whatever one may say about Mr. Obama’s administrative competence — and there are reasons to question it — he has a theoretical agenda borne out of years of rumination, and he knows how to execute it.

Obama’s domestic policies have not entirely met the challenge of practical politics yet. It’s one thing to get one’s people into place and declare several industries nationalized; it’s another actually to assess the results in the real world. Though the fiscal disaster is predictable, President Obama can still advise patience with some credibility (albeit shrinking credibility with the public.)

The same cannot be said about foreign policy. In foreign policy, Obama’s theories have already met realpolitik, and they’re not looking so very good.

The China trip is instructive. It was the Chinese who invited Obama to visit. Then, the Chinese team refused cooperation on every front; no help on Iran, no cooperation on restraining carbon production, no progress on human rights. Oh, and no questions permitted at the press conference. So, why did they invite him? Pretty simple: they invited him in order to snub him. They watched the Russians take a huge bite of him and decided to get a bite themselves. It was symbolic: we have power over him, he has no power over us.

The liberals on the Sunday shows all noted that the result is hardly a surprise given the times. After all, they temporized, China is holding all the cards just now. We need them to buy our debt. They don’t really need our help with anything, except for access to our markets — which they have. What none of these liberals admitted was that the reason the Chinese are holding all the cards has a great deal to do with Obama quadrupling our annual deficit during his first month in office, producing a deficit of $1.4 trillion or so for his first full year in office, and the US now projecting a total of a $12 trillion national debt. The issue is not that China is buying our bonds, it’s that they fear we can only repay in inflated dollars, and they might just stop buying altogether. In fact, that’s already happening — and the Chinese probably did not offer the President any hope on that front, either.

Of course, China is only the most recent in a series of international embarrassments, embarrassments with President Obama’s full cooperation. Russia gladly accepted our withdrawal of a missile shield for Poland and the Czech Republic, then immediately dismissed any possibility of sanctions against Iran. Obama offered Japan’s Emporer a bow that said “I acknowledge your great superiority,” then badly bumbled a question regarding the US’ use of atomic weapons in WWII. His Secretary of State failed to obtain a freeze on settlements by the Israelis, and consequently Palestinians will not cooperate with Obama’s attempts at a two-state solution in the middle east. Obama and Sec of State Clinton almost literally begged the UK not to release the Libyan terrorist of Lockerbie bombing fame, and lobbied Libya not to hold a public celebration for his return — and failed miserably. The Obama administration failed to convince a single nation to step up to help us house the detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay, for which reason President Obama will not close the base as promised. And of course there was the Olympics Committee debacle; apparently President Obama still has not learned to have the outcomes of trips planned before he takes them. I cannot recall a more unrelenting string of foreign policy failures in my entire adult life. But he did get the Nobel Peace Prize.

Obama replies to all this that his approach is deliberate, and that he has “restored America’s standing in the world.” He seems to base this on polls that show that people in the streets in Europe and elsewhere now believe America will “do the right thing in world affairs” where they did not under the Bush administration.

Of course, this raises a question regarding what is the goal of American foreign policy. I always thought the goal was the projection of American interests on the world stage; by this measure, Obama’s first year is a failure greater than any I can recall. Obama seems pleased that a lot of ordinary folks think we’re going to “do the right thing,” without any clear notion regarding what “the right thing” is and without any actual performance. This strikes me as choosing the approval of the crowd over the firm application of moral principle, something unsurprising for the narcissistic Mr. O but also something of which we should be ashamed. What do we care of the opinion of the entire world if what we’re pursuing is the liberty of enslaved individuals, the defeat of tyrants, and the prosperity of the poor? This is foreign popular opinion, and most likely reflects the philosophical disconnect between American core virtues and the vague, amoral socialism that infests much of the rest of the world. The notion that we “lost standing” under Bush is nothing but the assertion that we should let the prejudices of socialists around the world dictate American foreign policy. Of course we “lost standing”: Bush effectively prevented socialism from dominating the world for eight years.

Meanwhile, world leaders seem eager to allow President Obama to grovel before them while they feed him scraps. I would be, too, if I were one of them. But I would not give him anything for all his groveling, and neither will they. I’m sure world leaders will say as loudly as they can that they are glad to be dealing with the Cooperative Mr. Obama rather than the Uncooperative Cowboy Mr. Bush. I would, too, if I were one of them… but it would be a terrible mistake to take that as an “improvement of our standing in the world.” It’s not that; it’s glee at the deliberate self-crippling of a powerful adversary. They’re eating our lunch, they’re drinking our milkshake, and they will continue to do so. Of course they’re going to tell us they like dealing with President Obama.

President Obama’s academic ruminations seem to have convinced him that the reason foreign leaders resist our good intentions is that we’re arrogant with them, and by apologizing around the world, he can win their trust and cooperation. Moreover, he seems to think this will occur because of the force of his personality and their pleasure over his gracious presence. He could not be more wrong. Foreign leaders resist our efforts because our interests do not mate well with theirs. The assertion of American power according to American interests is not, and never has been, “arrogance;” it’s ordinary self-interest, and world leaders understand this, no matter what they may say publicly. The belief, on the other hand, that nations will fall in line simply because of the glowing aura of Obama’s personality, is arrogance too great to be believed, and narcissism too pathetic to permit to have any part in a real foreign policy. The man is a disgrace, and is deeply dangerous.

Meanwhile, because of the flaccid irrelevance of the US on the world stage, nations like Brazil are flocking to make nice to our enemies, while Iran feels comfortable enough to renege on agreements that might limit its nuclear capability. And whatever the man-in-the-European-street says to Pew Research, der Spiegel sounds positively nostalgic for a little of the ol’ Bush stubbornness. They seem to think it was strength.

Thursday we saw a flood of private email from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the UK dumped into the public view, (dis)courtesy of an unnamed hacker. The CRU, and specifically a scientist there named Dr. Phil Jones, is apparently at the hub of communication between scientists who have been defending the thesis, touted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC,) that human activity is severely altering the climate. Emails were directed to and from the authors of the original Mann Hockey Stick study (Mann, Bradley, and Hughes) and to and from the authors of the Yamal tree ring series (Osborn and Briffa) that were embarrassed so recently when the release of their raw data made it seem likely that they cherry-picked their data to manufacture the appearance of a late-20th-century upward temperature swing.

The publisher of the hacked emails observed:

We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps.

We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents

There’s dirt here for both sides. Hacking is criminal, and I deplore it. I am deeply disappointed in several of the climate skeptic web sites for having posted examples from the stolen emails; they should have been kept private. I have not linked to the sites that have published the emails, nor will I. I sincerely hope that the police catch the individual(s) who stole the emails and published them, and I hope they are prosecuted and punished.

At the same time, the progress of climate science has been crippled by the practice of these very scientists of publishing their results without making their data available to the public for the sake of peer review. At the very least, this practice saddles the scientists with the appearance that they have something to hide. If the research had been performed in a transparent fashion, with appropriate publication of data and welcoming critical review, it seems unlikely that any hacker would have bothered with their emails — or that any part of the public would read them so eagerly.

Having said that, it’s impossible at this point for the horse simply to be returned to the barn, so I’ve read a few of the emails, and I’ve read some analyses of them by skeptics who have browsed more or less the entire set. I’ve also read RealClimate.org’s denunciation of the whole affair, in which they basically say “See, there’s no smoking gun, no worldwide conspiracy, no Soros-funded monstrosity, no plot to erase the Medieval Warm Period, basically nothing to see.”

I’m sure RealClimate wishes this were true, but it’s not. The emails show a remarkably smug group of partisans who were clear about what results they wanted the public to see, who were willing to manipulate the peer-review and publication process in such a way as to exclude any serious alternative points of view, who were willing to delete email rather than comply with Freedom of Information requests in the UK (they have a law there similar to ours), and so forth. Most emphatically, what emerges is elitism — an attitude that says that a few people know how everybody else ought to live, and the rest need to be told how and made to shut up.

Of course, at its best, the process of science is far from… well, a science. It’s messy. It’s inexact. The results are frequently debatable. There are lots of different ways to view a data set, and they don’t all support the same conclusions. Hostility and competition are common. So, any set of emails among any set of researchers might expose discussions regarding how small adjustments to techniques might produce different outcomes.

But that’s just it. What’s evident here is a pattern. They want the outcomes they’re angling toward. These outcomes comport well with their politics and their attitudes. The question becomes, which is leading, and which is following? As Dr. Roy Spencer observed, some in the field work very hard to make sure their responses to research are fair and objective, because it is so very easy to fall into partisanship:

The defense posted at RealClimate.org actually reinforces my point. Do the IPCC scientists assume that this is how all climate scientists behave? If it really was how the rest of us behave, why would our eyebrows be raised up to our hairlines as we read the e-mails?

If all of this sounds incompatible with the process of scientific investigation, it shouldn’t. One of the biggest misconceptions the public has about science is that research is a straightforward process of making measurements, and then seeing whether the data support hypothesis A or B. The truth is that the interpretation of data is seldom that simple.

There are all kinds of subjective decisions that must be made along the way, and the scientist must remain vigilant that he or she is not making those decisions based upon preconceived notions. Data are almost always dirty, with errors of various kinds. Which data will be ignored? Which data will be emphasized? How will the data be processed to tease out the signal we think we see?

Hopefully, the scientist is more interested in discovering how nature really works, rather than twisting the data to support some other agenda. It took me years to develop the discipline to question every research result I got. It is really easy to be wrong in this business, and very difficult to be right.

Skepticism really is at the core of scientific progress. I’m willing to admit that I could be wrong about all my views on manmade global warming. Can the IPCC scientists admit the same thing?

It takes discipline to approach scientific data without letting preconceptions dictate the outcomes, and it appears that the authors of the now-public emails lack that discipline. The boys at Power Line attend to specific emails with lawyerly precision, and decide “Politics, not science.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air says the same. I’m inclined to agree.

The scientific basis of the IPCC’s claim of anthropogenic climate change has been called into question. Economy-altering decisions are being made on the basis of a process with no appropriate peer accountability; this must stop. The IPCC process must become totally transparent; publication of papers without publication of the data on which the paper rests cannot be accepted.

The sad thing about the affair is that nothing that has been revealed is the least bit surprising to those of us who have been skeptical all along. It’s been plain from the outset that the goals of this effort were political rather than scientific. And let’s be candid; how can anybody expect real science to trump sycophancy when there’s a river of financial gravy running through every government-funded research lab in the world, and all one has to do to get on the gravy boat is to make one’s findings comport well with the Official Government Narrative? The leftist talk about a few thousand dollars of “Corporate Social Responsibility” donations from oil companies (who are far from being the only companies making such donations) has always been laughable; the donors have no connection to the researchers in such instances, whereas the influence of government expectations on the allocation of tens of billions of research dollars is direct and obvious.

Progressives routinely hijack science to make the case for their next aberrant social experiment, playing with the numbers improperly in order to give their social experiments a scientific patina. They’ve done it with DDT, with homosexuality, with smoking, with domestic violence, with child-rearing, with abortion, and with any number of other topics. Their goal is always to make individuals among the general public think they’re being “unscientific” if they disagree with progressive dogma. They hit the Million-Dollar-Jackpot with climate change, and have been angling full-tilt toward global progressive governance since they managed to convince a sizable percentage of the public that giving away their liberties to progressive Science Gods is the only way to prevent a global disaster. It never made sense, and it makes even less sense today. The emails make it appear that some scientists who are true believers in the progressive agenda, can no longer distinguish the difference between a search for truth and the pursuit of their partisan political goals.

The US Senate will be facing the first procedural vote on the Senate’s version of ObamaCare tonight. We must contact key Senators and urge them to vote “No” on cloture immediately, and I do mean right now.

The bill is following the pattern of deception already marked out by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In this case, 2000 pages of bill have been introduced as “H.R. 3590, “To Amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyer’s credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes.” Yes, you read that correctly. Immediately following that heading is Sen. Harry Reid’s amendment to the bill, striking the enactment and replacing it with the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” It was introduced Wednesday, and the first cloture vote will occur tonight. They do not intend for the public to be well-informed, because they know perfectly well that they are jamming the measure down the throats of a hostile public. The will of the people means nothing to tyrants.

A “no” vote on cloture means that the Republicans’ filibuster will continue, and the Senate version of the bill will not be considered on the Senate floor. It will essentially kill the bill in the Senate until the Democrats can muster enough votes to obtain cloture and vote for consideration of the bill. There are bypasses being considered in the event that cloture is not obtained, but we’ll cross those bridges when we come to them.

Please contact by whatever means available the following Democrats in the Senate, who are known to be somewhat less than friendly to Reid’s disingenuous measure.

• Mark Begich (D-AK)
o Email: http://begich.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=EmailSenator
o DC Phone: (202) 224-3004
o DC FAX: (202) 224-2354
o State Phone: (907) 271-5915

• Blanche Lincoln (D-AR)
o Email: http://lincoln.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
o DC Phone: (202) 224-4843
o DC FAX: (202) 228-1371
o State Phone: (501) 375-2993

• Mark Pryor (D-AR)
o Email: http://pryor.senate.gov/contact/
o DC Phone: (202) 224-2353
o DC FAX: (202) 228-0908
o State Phone: (501) 324-6336

• Michael Bennet (D-CO)
o Email: http://bennet.senate.gov/contact/
o DC Phone: (202) 224-5852
o DC FAX: (202) 228-5036
o State Phone: (303) 455-7600

• Joe Lieberman (D-CT)
o Email: http://lieberman.senate.gov/contact/
o DC Phone: (202) 224-4041
o DC FAX: (202) 224-9750
o State Phone: (860) 549-8463

• Evan Bayh (D-IN)
o Email: http://bayh.senate.gov/contact/
o DC Phone: (202) 224-5623
o DC FAX: (202) 228-1377
o State Phone: (317) 554-0750

• Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
o Email: http://landrieu.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm
o DC Phone: (202) 224-5824
o DC FAX: (202) 224-9735
o State Phone: (504) 589-2427

• Jon Tester (D-MT)
o Email: http://tester.senate.gov/Contact/
o DC Phone: (202) 224-2644
o DC FAX: (202) 224-8594
o State Phone: (406) 728-3003

• Ben Nelson (D-NE)
o Email: http://bennelson.senate.gov/contact-me.cfm
o DC Phone: (202)-224-6551
o DC FAX: (202) 228-0012
o State Phone: (402) 391-3411

• Mark Warner (D-VA)
o Email: http://warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=Contact
o DC Phone: (202)-224-2023
o DC FAX: (202) 224-6295
o State Phone: (804) 739-0247

• Jim Webb (D-VA)
o Email: http://webb.senate.gov/contact.cfm
o DC Phone: (202) 224-4024
o DC FAX: (202) 228-6363
o State Phone: (804) 771-2221

I am emailing a letter that reads as follows. Whether you want to write in as incendiary a fashion as I have chosen is entirely up to you. I do not know whether my approach is a good idea or not. It does express precisely how I think and feel about this proposal. I offer it as my thoughts, and as a possible model for yours.

I urge you to vote “no” on cloture regarding the Senate’s version of the national health insurance bill. The bill itself appears to be deceptively titled “H.R. 3590, To Amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyer’s credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes.” Immediately following that heading is 2000 pages of Sen. Harry Reid’s amendment to the bill, striking the enactment and replacing it with the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

Please consider carefully what is at stake if you vote for cloture on the Senate version of the national health insurance bill:

The House and Senate versions of this bill constitute a massive removal of the liberties of free citizens in a crucial area of their lives. Moreover, it represents an alarming new threshold in fiscal irresponsibility, by urging to spend trillions at a time when the dollar is in such grave danger that we can no longer finance our debt without inflating the currency. Does anybody really believe that national health care can be produced without massive spending increases?

Large numbers of citizens have responded throughout the summer of 2009 to what they perceive as massive removals of liberties by the Obama administration in a series of demonstrations called “Tea Parties.” Contrary to Democratic party myth, these are not organized by the Republican party, they are for the most part actions by citizens concerned for the loss of their liberties. Those losses, though, pale before those to be lost by passage of the health bill, and by the loss of prosperity that will surely attend such an irresponsible increase in federal obligations.

Passage of the”Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” will constitute such an enormous loss of liberty that many of these citizens, plus some who have not taken action yet, will remove the consent by which they participate in American government, and will be forced to take action to find new guards for their future security. You may recognize the phrase “find new guards for their future security,” and the notion that governments only govern by consent of their citizens — both are found in the Declaration of Independence. For a number of us, government takeover of health care will be the final straw, and we will no longer be able to consent to being governed by this government.

I do not know what form the removal of consent will take. I can guarantee you, though, that it will be unpleasant for all, and will mark the death of the United States as a cohesive republic.

This is not to be taken as a personal threat. I have no quarrel with any individual Senator. We are peaceful citizens, and do not want trouble. But we will not live under tyranny. This bill is tyranny.

Please consider carefully what is at stake if you vote in favor of cloture.

Lindsey Graham is not my favorite Senator by any means, but he demolished Erich Holder in this 4-minute exchange in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Listen:

The lawyers over at Power Line Blog have a pretty good analysis of this that, not coincidentally, concurs with my layman’s opinion. Holder’s attempt to defend the absence of Miranda rights for Osama bin Laden on the basis that his guilt “is so overwhelming” would not survive 5 seconds of scrutiny in any court in America, nor should it; he offered it because he was on the spot and had nowhere to hide. He was on the spot because Graham was clearly correct: if US courtroom standards apply to the 9/11 plotters, then they apply to all such detainees. Holder can’t have it both ways.

The Obama administration’s argument that they’re genuinely offering Kalid Sheik Mohamed a fair trial and full rights according to the rule of law is contradicted by their claim that the outcome is certain. If the outcome is certain, the trial is a show trial like the show trials of the Stalinistas in the 1940s’ Soviet Union. If KSM has full rights, the outcome cannot be certain. The juxtaposition of those two claims — rule of law, outcome certain — is the consequence of the Holder Justice Department having decided beforehand on other grounds that they were going to try KSM in federal court, and then justify the decision by whatever means they needed to manufacture.

So, on what other grounds did they decide that they were going to try KSM in federal court? I believe John Yoo, former Bush administration counsel and favorite whipping-boy of the insane left, gives us a clue when he describes what happened when we tried Zacarias Moussaoui in an American court:

For a preview of the KSM trial, look at what happened in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested in the U.S. just before 9/11. His trial never made it to a jury. Moussaoui’s lawyers tied the court up in knots.

All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him. The case became a four-year circus, giving Moussaoui a platform to air his anti-American tirades. The only reason the trial ended was because, at the last minute, Moussaoui decided to plead guilty. That plea relieved the government of the choice between allowing a fishing expedition into its intelligence files or dismissing the charges…

Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the “blind Sheikh”), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be.

Leftists historically love to use courtroom rules as a vehicle to produce documentary evidence regarding government “misbehavior” as they perceive it. This was the motivation behind the dozens of lawsuits filed against phone companies for cooperating with the Bush administration in eavesdropping on possible terrorists, as I discussed here more than a year ago.

Is there documentary evidence that leftists desire to be made public related to Kalid Sheik Mohamed? Oh, you betcha. They’re already investigating the CIA, but you can be sure that KSM’s attorneys are going to bring up the manner of his interrogation in order to invalidate his confession. What will follow will be a public trial of the Bush administration’s interrogation policy, carried out in the pages of the New York Times by reporters already known to be hostile to the Bush administration. Also, I’m willing to bet that the choice of venue was influenced by the Justice Department’s knowledge of the judicial habits of the panel of judges in that district; they’re expecting liberal interpretations of evidence rules requiring government disclosure. Count on it.

Is that the goal? To be sure, trying KSM and the other 9/11 plotters as criminals has been the misguided aim of the ACLU and other hard leftists for years. They claim to be defending the rule of law. The ideologically-driven selectivity of their idea of the rule of law notwithstanding, I accept this as at least a plausible goal of some of the less-well-informed dupes of the neo-Marxist left.

However, the better-educated of these folks harbor ulterior motives. If they attempted publicly to try Bush administration officials, they would surely trigger violent reactions, fueled by accusations of attempting to criminalize policy differences. They do want to criminalize those policy differences, as I discussed here and here, but I think they also fear the repercussions. So, they’ve chosen a less direct route; they’ll try the 9/11 plotters, but in a forum that allows those plotters to turn the trial into a trial of the Bush administration. That way, they can pretend they’re defending the rule of law while continuing to vilify the good men who protected us from terrorist attack from 2001 through 2008.

Never believe what leftists say about their intentions, especially when their defense is so utterly lame in the face of easily predictable questions.

Among Christians there is a general understanding that when one engages in activity that will be effective in extending the Kingdom of God, the demons put in overtime to harass and discredit that person. If that’s what’s going on here, Sarah Palin might just presage the Second Coming, ’cause the effort the Disappearing Press is putting into discrediting Sarah Palin is truly astounding. I watched the full-court Press against Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and frankly, those pale before the assault on Sarah Palin.

Today’s installment appears in the headline that appears above an AP story in the New York Times:

FACT CHECK: Palin’s Book Goes Rogue on Some Facts

Oh, please.

In the first place, can anybody honestly still imagine that the New York Times has enough credibility left to lecture anybody in the universe regarding factual accuracy? Young Pinch Sulzberger has long since turned the Grey Lady into a scandal sheet for the left, and nobody but the left bothers to read it anymore. In addition to a half-dozen real scandals in which award-touting journalists turn out to have concocted their stories out of thin air, the Times has become reliably unreliable on several topics, engaged in borderline treason by publishing illegally-obtained documents during wartime, and utterly squandered a reputation for journalistic integrity. The economic demise of the Times is not just about the Internet: of all papers that could have survived the changing times, the New York Times could have, if only it had maintained the reputation for journalistic integrity that it had earned under previous leadership. The Times sank itself by sinking into partisan mediocrity.

Even the headline by itself might constitute a departure for journalistic integrity: “Fact Check,” capitalized, calls to mind a specific organization which does have a reputation for accuracy, but the organization is not the New York Times, nor is it the Associated Press. Were they fishing for credibility by attempting to identify with the Annenberg Foundation?

In the second place, neither the Times nor the AP has even begun to pay a tenth of the attention to Barack Obama’s past actions, let alone his current foibles, that they routinely spend poring over Palin’s mayoral term in Wasilla, Alaska. These slobbering lapdogs of the progressive left need to stop examining small-town mayors and start doing their damned jobs. They are gaining obscurity, and they deserve it.

And in the third place, the details of the alleged misrepresentations are just too silly to be believed. These guys are insane.

Consider the first complaint:

PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking ”only” for reasonably priced rooms and not ”often” going for the ”high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.

THE FACTS: Although travel records indicate she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) overlooking New York City’s Central Park for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in October 2007.

There’s nothing in “THE FACTS” that falsifies the statement made by Ms. Palin. She says she did not often go for high-priced hotels. They produce one instance where she used a high-priced hotel. Once is not often. The air quotes around the word “often” indicate that the reporter is aware of the tendentious nature of the complaint; he’s fishing, and he knows it.

Consider the second:

PALIN: Boasts that she ran her campaign for governor on small donations, mostly from first-time givers, and turned back large checks from big donors if her campaign perceived a conflict of interest.

THE FACTS: Of the roughly $1.3 million she raised for her primary and general election campaigns for governor, more than half came from people and political action committees giving at least $500, according to an AP analysis of her campaign finance reports. The maximum that individual donors could give was $1,000; $2,000 for a PAC.

This constitutes an incredibly lame attempt to make ordinary campaign metrics seem extraordinary. Why the arbitrary line at $500? Is that an unusually large donation? Isn’t it necessarily the case that a small number of large donations will overshadow the sum of a large number of small donations? How does that falsify Palin’s claim? And why no comparison to other politicians’ campaigns? Did Palin receive larger-than-average donations, average, or smaller-than-average? We’re not told. The AP either does not know, or worse, does know but is omitting the facts because they validate Palin’s point.

It gets worse as it goes on. One of the “PALIN/FACT” comparisons takes her to task for not mindlessly swallowing President Obama’s mealy-mouthed retraction of his frank admission that cap-and-trade will bankrupt electric utilities who stick to coal. The AP insists that Palin is playing fast and loose with the facts because she does not buy the faux “research” from leftist think tanks that minimize the cost of cap-and-trade. They claim her reputation for taking down corrupt politicians is jeopardized by the fact — drum roll, wait for it — that she asked for a zoning variance to sell her house, two months before the end of her mayoral term. They try to pretend that the fact that she praised John McCain’s ability to bring disparate parties together to accept the Bush Treasury bailout, means that she can’t object to Barack Obama’s repeated use of nationalization to solve economic problems (notice that she didn’t even say that the Bush bailout was a good idea; she just praised McCain’s negotiating skill.) They claim it tortures the facts for Palin to say “Reagan showed us how to get out of a recession” and then proceed to recommend killing the estate tax, because Reagan did not actually eliminate the estate tax. And so on. It’s drivel.

The only objection in the entire article that can withstand even momentary scrutiny from an objective observer is that Palin apparently said Ronald Reagan faced a worse recession than the one that appears to be ending now. AP argues that the current recession is far worse. I’m inclined to think that the current recession is not ending now, and will prove to be worse. So, AP manages to raise an interesting quibble to a debatable economic assessment, one that does not lend itself easily to claims of fact. Not a very impressive achievement, considering that their headline claim is that Sarah Palin lacks the AP’s concern for facts.

It’s just another slime piece in a year-long deluge of slime pieces, from two organizations — the Associated Press and the New York Times — that have, sadly, given themselves over to hurling slime for their political masters.

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UPDATE, 11/18: Incredibly, it turns out that AP actually assigned 11 individuals to fact-check all 432 pages of their advance copy of Palin’s book in order to write their silly diatribe. The level of obsession they demonstrate regarding Ms. Palin has not diminished. All the more reason why this article is genuinely shameful; that many individuals should have been able to come up with much better material, if such good material actually existed. The fact that they devoted so much manpower to the task and came up so incredibly empty, speaks volumes about Palin’s character. One wonders what they might have dug up had they devoted this many staff to finding falsehoods uttered by Joe Biden.

It’s nomination time for the 2009 Weblog Awards. I’ve nominated Plumb Bob Blog (yes, I’m allowed to do that) in the categories Best Conservative Blog, Best Small Blog (blogs with Technorati ratings between 100 and 200), and Best Religious Blog. However, if you want to give PBB a little boost, feel free to visit those threads and add your approval for this blog, in one of two ways:

1) Visit the category, find the nomination for Plumb Bob Blog, and press the little green plus sign at the bottom of the nomination post. That will increase the score for that nomination.

2) Visit the category, scroll down to the bottom of the list of comments, and leave a comment yourself nominating this blog and specifying the URL here.

Clicking on the links below will take you directly to the three categories. The categories, again, are:

Best Conservative Blog
Best Small Blog
Best Religious Blog

Also, feel free to nominate the blog anywhere else you think it might apply. For that matter, go ahead and use my links to nominate some other blog. I’ll never know.

AP reports that President Obama has rejected all the strategies proposed by his national security team, and is asking them to clarify how and when American troops will turn over the theater to the Afghan government.

I suspect that we’re looking at the consequence of leftist meme-creation. Leftists invented “no exit strategy!” as a sound bite with which to criticize the Iraq war, hoping to capitalize on the residual fear of quagmires from the Vietnam era. As with every meme created by the left with which to bludgeon the culture, leftists quickly came to believe their own invented sound bite. Now every leftist in America knows that it is folly — folly into which conservatives, who are of course far less intelligent or enlightened than liberals, are prone to fall every time — to engage in any war without a clear exit strategy. Consequently, Obama, who Knows Better™, is insisting on such an exit strategy before he takes further action.

“No exit strategy” was never sensible criticism. War is an unpredictable enterprise. Enemies always make an effort to foil our expectations. Military leaders make plans for victory, but the plan is the first casualty of the conflict, and has to be adjusted. It does make sense to think about what happens after the conflict, and both political and military leaders have always done so (including the Bush administration, by the way — in addition to being brainless, “No exit strategy” was also a lie.) But planning in detail what will happen at the end is time wasted; it’s impossible to know before we get there.

However, Barak Obama is nothing if he is not the formal assertion of leftist intellectual superiority. He is aiming to correct swiftly all the known errors of conservative and capitalist thinking, as conceived by neo-Marxian loons like himself. What leftist intellectuals have been ruminating over for a century, Obama will execute. And then we’ll all see what we’ve known all along — that neo-Marxian intellectuals are practically incompetent, are completely out of touch with reality, and that their intellectual superiority was never anything but hubris of the most laughable sort.

The Huffington Post article suggests that Obama feels that the military has deliberately presented him nothing but a greased slide into accepting Gen. McCrystal’s recommendations, and the President is pushing back in order to get real alternatives. It’s not impossible; that’s not even inconsistent with my more jaundiced scenario, above. He may be looking for more pleasant alternatives than behaving like George W. Bush, and there may be no such alternatives. It has always been possible that President Obama might be taught something useful about the real world by the realities of foreign policy.

In previous installments I’ve established

• that there’s a need for explaining why Christianity is the most reasonable position for an educated, skeptical individual to take (see the post here);
• that there exists such a thing as absolute truth, and that truth claims may be made about religion just as they can about any other topic (see the post here);
• that using the Cosmological Argument, the scientific fact that our universe had a beginning establishes that something like a Theistic God must exist (see the post here);
• that using the Teleological Argument, the anthropic principle establishes that the universe was designed for life, which requires a designer something like a Theistic God (see the post here);
• that using the Moral Argument, the fact that we all recognize that some things are more morally acceptable than others requires that a universal moral standard exists outside of ourselves, requiring a moral God (see the post here);
• that the summation of the Cosmological, Teleological, and Moral arguments gives us a composite picture of what the theistic God must be like, and that that composite picture is remarkably similar to the God of the Christian Bible, but not quite similar enough for a positive ID (see the post here);
• that if God exists, then miracles are neither impossible nor disproved nor violations of nature (see the post here);
• that Hume’s objection that we can never accept any event as a miracle proves too much, and leaves us questioning every event in history (see the post here.)

This installment will discuss under what conditions we ought to call an event a miracle, and consider why miracles occur.

When Are Miracles Credible?

So, are miracles credible, then? Not so fast.

We cannot dismiss miracles out of hand simply because they are rare. Moreover, there is no particular reason to refrain from calling events “miracles” just because Naturalists, who discount the possibility of miracles a priori, will not accept that label. However, we also cannot accept every miracle claim as equally probable.

We have already met a couple of reasons why a report of a miracle might not be credible: the reporters might be untrustworthy, or the scientific principles surrounding the event might not be understood. We can add to this that some followers of great men seem painfully eager to attribute astounding acts to them in order to justify their devotion, or to draw attention to themselves, or just because they like a good story. So, certain types of claims automatically raise our suspicions. (We should also note, though, that some opponents of great men seem painfully eager to discredit them, a characteristic of modern skeptics to which far too little attention has been paid.)

Examples of these occur among all of the world’s religions, including Christianity. Today, some Buddhists associate miracles with the Buddha’s birth and parts of his life. In one such story, after his own enlightenment, Gautama rose into the air, shooting out flames from the upper part of his body, and streams of water from the lower part his body, and walking in the sky.(1) However, since Gautama’s own teachings argue that craving the power to perform miracles constitutes entrapment in meaningless, temporal matters, it seems unlikely that he would have used such displays of power to impress his followers. Furthermore, since Gautama never claimed either deity or any special connection to deity, it is difficult to understand how “enlightenment” produces power to perform such feats. The most likely explanation for these stories is that later disciples added them to embellish their own devotion, although it is not impossible that something unusual occurred (more about this in a moment).

Some Muslims, likewise, report miracles associated with Mohammed; for instance, some haddith (tradition) suggests that Mohammed split the moon to convince some unbelieving people to believe in him. The problem with a report like this one is that many, many people from Mohammed’s day watched astronomical events, some of them from the same part of the world, and they would have recorded a remarkable event like the moon splitting if it had occurred. Also, the Qur’an reports Mohammed himself claiming to perform no miracles, saying “Signs are with Allah only, and I am only a plain warner.”(2) Consequently, the best explanation for the moon-splitting is that later disciples added the account to enhance Mohammed’s reputation.

And to be fair, there are many, many similar stories within Christianity. One such tale claims that a volcanic eruption ceased miraculously when several pagans ran to the Sepulchre of St. Agatha and held up the burial cloth that covered her tomb.(3) It may be impossible to verify this account, but the best explanation seems to be a combination of superstition and coincidence. The Catholic Church, understanding the eagerness of some to attribute miracles, sets a very high standard of proof before actually calling an event a miracle (however, not as high as Naturalists set it.)

Wilfried Corduan, in his article “Recognizing a Miracle,” explains how certain stories have greater explanatory power than others depending on the context.(4) For example, he considers a cup of coffee sitting next to him as he writes. How did the cup get there? He offers several theories:

1. His wife set it there next to him;
2. A Boy Scout, doing his good deed for the day, sneaked into the house and placed it there;
3. A scientist on the other side of town, who is experimenting with teleportation, transferred the cup from his own laboratory;
4. Aliens placed it there, laced with a drug that will cause him to be transported to their ship;

…and so forth. The first explanation obviously has better standing than the others (Anthony Flew would like this explanation). However, what if Corduan is a bachelor? Suddenly, the “wife” explanation has no better standing than the others. The standing of an explanation varies depending on the context.

When establishing that a miracle has occurred, then, context is everything. For example, if I were to receive an unexpected check in the mail in the amount of $4,395.16 from the estate of a relative I did not know I had, I would be mystified and pleased, but I would not call it a miracle. But what if I were doing volunteer work at an orphanage, and the orphanage had defaulted on several months’ worth of mortgage payments, to the effect that they were facing foreclosure due to arrears of precisely $4,395.16? And what if I had been praying to Jesus, along with the rest of the staff at the orphanage, for that specific amount of money? Suddenly the explanation “Jesus answered our prayers” gains a great deal of credibility. I would not call this proof that a miracle had occurred; however, I would call the “answered prayer” hypothesis the best-fit explanation. In a case like this, the explanation that says “Jesus answered our prayers” possesses what Corduan calls “prima facie presumption.”

Prima facie presumption for a miracle only occurs in contexts where people have reason to expect a miracle. This might include instances where a prophet is making unusual declarations, and the miracle would confirm his authority to make that declaration. It might include instances where people who are identified with a God have needs that only that God can meet. And, it might certainly occur when someone claiming to be the real God appears among men as one of them, and makes claims that He has authority to perform miracles and to raise Himself from the dead. In those circumstances, if an event occurs that lacks a sound explanation, “miracle” is an explanation that holds great explanatory power. In some settings, “miracle” has to be the prima facie presumption when no immediately obvious explanation can be found.

However, even when we have established that an unusual event has occurred, it might not be of a type that we should call miraculous. If a horse mysteriously appears in my living room, it would be very strange, but I would not call it a miracle – unless I had specifically been praying for a horse. Reports of Hindu shamans capable of remarkable works of power are common. Some claim to be able to walk on water, while others walk barefoot over hot coals without being burned, and still others lie on beds of sharp nails but suffer no puncture wounds. These feats have been performed on camera. Interestingly, these men do not regard their own feats as miraculous; they claim to achieve them by their own concentration, and would be dismissive of claims that they are using any power other than what is inherent in themselves. Assessing what these might be is beyond the scope of this essay, but it should be enough to say that if the people performing these acts do not claim that God is involved, we have no reason to claim it, either. The occurrence of such events should be confirmable, but might not be considered miraculous, just inexplicable. If the practitioner is not claiming deity or any particular authority, and there is no reason to infer the presence of deity, “miracle” should not be the prima facie presumption.

So, now we have come back to the question of what constitutes a miracle. Just saying “unusual event, not conforming to the pattern of nature” will not do. There has to be some connection to God, or at least to something holy, before we would ordinarily call an event a miracle. And in order to assess that connection, we need a sound understanding of the character of God, in order to assess whether “God” is even plausible in the picture. However, once we have established the connection to God, confirmed that we are in conformity to His character, established that the event actually occurred, and confirmed that we know enough of the natural circumstances to rule out natural causes, we have sufficient basis to call an event a miracle.

So, let’s revise our definition of a miracle in the light of that more complete understanding:

miracle: an event in nature for which the willful intervention of God is the best-fit explanation, the occurrence of which does not conform to the expected and well-understood pattern of events in nature, and which produces an effect that is consistent with the understood character of God.

There, that’s better. We do not have to call ghost stories, levitation of shaman, or every healing of a farmer’s goat in response to prayers to the Blessed Virgin, miraculous. We do have to call Jesus rising from the dead miraculous, if the evidence is sufficient to establish that he did, in fact, rise from the dead. The particulars of that claim are examined in the writings of Gary Habermas and other Christian apologists.

And if that miracle occurred, there might be others – including the healing of certain goats, perhaps. We just have to examine the circumstances and the evidence.

Why Do Miracles Occur?

Miracles in the New Testament are referred to using the Greek word semeion, meaning “signs” (from semaino, “to give a sign,” “to make known.”)(5) So, at least one of the major reasons why God performs miracles is as a sign; that is, to confirm the authority of a person or group of people, to indicate something that He is doing. In particular, we notice that the Apostle Paul claimed that Jesus “was declared the Son of God with power by the resurrection from the dead.” (Romans 1:4) Paul assigned to himself the authority of an Apostle by reminding the Corinthian church, “The signs of a true apostle were performed among you with all perseverance, by signs and wonders and miracles.” (II Corinthians 12:12) By these, we confirm that at the very least, miracles served the role of identifying God’s appointed messengers in the early church. We should keep this in mind when, later in this series, I post material confirming the accuracy of Old Testament prophecy regarding the Messiah, for instance, or the evidence supporting the claim that Jesus’ tomb held his corpse at one point, but later was empty.

However, to say that miracles occur solely as signs is incorrect. The Incarnation was miraculous. The primary purpose of the Incarnation was that someone of sufficient worth could atone for the sins of all men, which cannot be called a sign of anything. The Incarnation also gave us an example of what sort of people we are supposed to be – again, not a sign, an example. Also, the resurrection, while it certainly did occur as a sign of Jesus’ deity, also serves as the means by which converted believers are separated from their sins (see Romans 6:1-13). Consequently, we have to add that miracles may achieve God’s purposes, whatever those happen to be. Consider:

… God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16

If the basic purpose of the miracle we call the Incarnation was for God to express His love by redeeming us from destruction and making us eternal, then it follows that God may perform whatever miracle He needs to perform in order to fully effect our redemption. (Paul actually says something very similar to this in Romans 8:32.) That would include signs that convince us, but might also include healings that restore us, prophecies that encourage us, or really, any other act we may or may not be able to imagine, so long as it effects our redemption.

A difficulty occurs when we admit that God may in fact do anything He likes, any time He likes, so long as it is consistent with His goal of redeeming us. The question becomes not, why does God perform miracles, but rather why does He not perform more of them? There is not one of us who might not benefit from a miracle at some time or other. We don’t want Mom to die so soon, or we don’t want to die ourselves. We don’t have the money to replace the car, so we don’t want it to break down, even though we have not maintained it so well. We haven’t earned enough to pay for the home of our dreams, but there it is, the home of our dreams; can God do a miracle and let us have it?

An immediately obvious answer is that our convenience does not necessarily effect our redemption. Perhaps letting Mom go is the outcome that will produce the most holiness for the largest number of people; if the goal is the redemption and maximum holiness of as much of humanity as possible, then we must defer our particular needs to the sovereignty of God, who sees everything and works all things according to His will.

The revealed pattern in history is not so full of miracles as we suppose. The miracles in the Old Testament occur in clusters, one group surrounding the Exodus from Egypt and the conquest of Palestine, another other surrounding the ministries of Elijah and Elisha in the Northern kingdom of Israel, and yet another surrounding the ministries of the prophets. There are certain miracles that occur in isolated places and times – a donkey rebuking a prophet in human speech, a city destroyed by fire from heaven, a battle prolonged by the sun being suspended in the sky – but these are rare and episodic.

However, this is not the way of the New Testament, which is full of miraculous events, and limiting the miraculous seems inconsistent with the character of God, who longs to draw all men into fellowship with Himself, and who created nature ready and waiting for God Himself, nature’s husband and master, to implant it with miracles, like a bride’s womb.

Another way of asking why there are not more miracles might be this: if redemption is the goal, why does God not perform such miracles as to convince even the most hardened atheist, so that all of them will be redeemed?

The correct answer to this conundrum is that miracles may not be the best way to convince the unbelieving. Miracles are impressive, true; but in practice, the miracles God performed in Egypt, as documented in the book of Exodus, did not convert Pharoah or the Egyptians. They were impressed, but they were not saved. Nor did those miracles bring any of the nations that heard of them into obedience to God. The surrounding peoples heard of the events, but among them, only Rahab and the Gibeonites approached Israel asking for mercy and inclusion; the rest resisted, and perished.

Human beings are stubborn creatures, and unbelievably adept at self-delusion. Every event in our natural world is either directly or indirectly an act of God, but it is not just atheists, it is Christians who wonder why we cannot see God. One might answer, where might you look that you cannot see Him? But we go on refusing to see. And if we cannot see God in the expected events of nature, what makes us think we would we see Him any better in unexpected events like miracles? Does the mere fact that the event is unexpected, necessarily mean that we will see what we choose not to see?

It does not. In fact, the previous installment in this series discusses the philosophical works of David Hume and Anthony Flew, to the effect of establishing what they consider credible reasons to look directly at any miracle of God and declare, “I do not see the hand of God here.” Miracles truly only convince those who are already available to be convinced, which makes a further point: redemption is for those who are willing to be redeemed, and those who are condemned, are condemned because they have chosen condemnation. God does not overrule free will, even the will to be damned.

Jesus establishes that the choice to refuse to see the miraculous constitutes a basis for judgment against people in some cases:

Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles had occurred in Tyre and Sidon which occurred in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. Matthew 11:21

Some imagine that Jesus is condemning them for failing to recognize the Son of God, but that is not what He says; He says the miracles would have been enough to produce repentance. God pronounced judgment on those who did not recognize the miracles and respond to them. If the appearance of miracles prefaces a possible judgment, and people actually deceive themselves in such a manner as to make them impervious to miracles, then perhaps God withholds miracles in order to give people more time to repent.

Many people say they would like to see a miracle. It would probably be closer to the truth to say that many people would like confirmation that their lives matter to God, but that these same people are terrified beyond words that God will demand something of them they are not willing to give. They are correct, but not in the way they think; God does not demand, but the circumstances of our world are such that unless they repent, they will perish, just as a natural consequence of their condition. It takes grace to change, and grace is available for the asking, but most will not ask – and probably, most will never see a miracle, either.

Miracles are possible. Nature is designed to receive them, and God is able and willing to produce them. None of the reasons suggested by skeptics are sufficient to dissuade Christians from calling events “miracles” that fit the proper definition of a miracle. Not every claim of a miracle is believable, but in some contexts “miracle” is simply the best fit to the facts. We might have more of them if we were more holy, ourselves, but ultimately, God is the one who decides when a miracle fits His plan of redemption, and uses neither our curiosity nor our convenience as the criterion to determine when a miracle is called for. He performs miracles to point to authentic messengers, but ultimately, He performs whatever acts will best achieve our redemption, including, if necessary, miracles.

We’ve arrived at the end of the theoretical arguments about God. Next, it will be time to consider whether the God that we’ve proved to exist has actually performed miracles in our world, in such a way that we can use them to determine which of the various theistic positions is the most correct.

Next time, we begin examining the question, “Is the New Testament true?”

Notes

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Gautama_Buddha.
(2) Surah 29:50.
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Legend#Miracle_tales_of_relics.
(4) Corduan, Wilfried, “Recognizing a Miracle,” in In Defense of Miracles, Geivett & Habermas, eds., InterVarsity Press, Downer’s Grove, IL, 1997, chapter 6, pp. 108-109.
(5) Online Bible Greek Lexicon, http://www.onlinebible.net/, copyright 2009, Larry Pierce, Winterbourne, CA.