The objection sounds like science. Underneath, it is a conclusion smuggled in before the evidence arrives.
You have heard it at a kitchen table, in a comment thread, or from a coworker who was not trying to be cruel. “I just can’t believe in miracles. We know how the world works now.”
It is said with a certain calm. It has the tone of a settled matter, the way a man tells you the earth goes around the sun. And most Christians, when they hear it, do one of two things. They retreat into feeling — “well, it’s what I believe” — or they change the subject.
Neither is necessary. Because that objection, calm as it sounds, is not a scientific finding. It is a philosophical assumption wearing a lab coat. And once you can see the seam, you cannot unsee it.
State the Objection at Its Strongest
Let us not knock down a weak version. The serious form of this argument is more than three hundred years old, and it goes roughly like this.
A miracle would be a violation of a law of nature. Laws of nature are established by uniform, repeated human experience — every observation we have ever made, everywhere, always. A miracle report, by contrast, rests on the testimony of a small number of people, and human testimony is famously unreliable. People lie, exaggerate, misremember, and want things to be true.
So the evidence for the law is always vastly greater than the evidence for the exception. Therefore the rational man should always reject the miracle report, no matter how good it looks, because the alternative explanation — that the witnesses were mistaken or dishonest — will always be the more probable one.
That is a real argument, and it deserves a real answer. It is also, on inspection, a trap with the door welded shut before you walk in.
The Circle Hiding Inside the Argument
Watch the move carefully.
The argument says the laws of nature are established by uniform human experience. But how do we know human experience is uniform on this question? Only if we already know that every reported miracle in history was false. And how would we know that? By examining the reports.
Except the argument tells us not to examine the reports, because the uniformity of experience settles it in advance.
That is a circle. The conclusion is loaded into the premise. It does not weigh the evidence for the resurrection and find it wanting; it rules that no evidence for the resurrection could ever be sufficient. And an argument constructed so that no possible fact could count against it is not a finding of science. It is a rule about what will be allowed to count as a fact.
Notice what has quietly happened. The skeptic did not discover that miracles do not occur. He decided, before looking, that any report of one must be false — and then presented the decision as a discovery.
A Miracle Does Not Break the Rules
There is a second confusion buried in the word “violation,” and clearing it up helps more people than you would expect.
A law of nature is not a police officer that forces matter to behave. It is a description of how matter behaves when nothing outside the system acts on it. Gravity describes what a dropped ball does. When I reach out and catch that ball, I have not violated the law of gravity. I have introduced a new factor, and the law then accurately describes what happens to a ball in a hand.
Miracles work like the hand, not like an exception to arithmetic.
If God exists and made the system, then His acting within it is not a rupture of the order — it is the Author writing a line in His own book. The regularities remain exactly as described. Something simply entered from outside them. Which is precisely why the question of miracles is not finally a question about science at all. It is a question about whether anything exists beyond the closed system.
Rule that out at the start, and of course miracles are impossible. But you did not learn that from a microscope. You brought it to the microscope.
The Bible Is Not Naive About This
Here is what surprises people who have not read the accounts closely: Scripture never treats miracles as ordinary. The biblical writers are not credulous ancients who thought dead men routinely got up.
Joseph knew where babies come from. That is exactly why he planned to divorce Mary quietly.
The disciples did not greet the resurrection with a shrug. They refused to believe it.
“But these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them.” (Luke 24:11)
Nonsense. That is the reaction of men who understood perfectly well that this does not happen. Thomas demanded to put his hand in the wound. The eleven thought they were seeing a ghost until Jesus asked for something to eat and ate it in front of them.
The miracle accounts only carry weight because everyone involved knew the ordinary rule. A sign that violated nothing would signify nothing.
And when Paul stands before a Roman governor and a king, he does not appeal to feelings. He turns the objection into a question.
“Why is it considered incredible among you people if God does raise the dead?” (Acts 26:8)
That is the whole apologetic in one sentence. Not can dead men rise. Given a God who authors life, why exactly would raising one be the hard part?
The One Claim That Can Be Tested
Christianity does not ask you to accept miracles in general. It stakes everything on one, in public, in a datable year, under a named governor — and it invites investigation.
“And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain… And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins.” (1 Corinthians 15:14, 17)
No other religious system hands you the knife like that. Paul does not say the faith survives if the tomb was occupied. He says the whole thing collapses.
And then, in the same passage, he does something no legend-maker would ever do. He names living witnesses and effectively tells the reader to go check.
“After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.” (1 Corinthians 15:6)
Most of whom remain until now. That is a footnote with an address on it. Legends do not include verifiable cross-references while the witnesses are still alive to contradict them.
So the honest conversation is not about whether miracles are possible in the abstract. It is about a specific tomb, a specific weekend, and a group of frightened men who scattered and then would not stop talking, under threat of death, about something they claimed to have seen with their eyes.
Where the Real Resistance Lives
Now the confrontation, and it is gentler than it sounds.
Ask the man across the table a simple question: what evidence would change your mind?
If he can name something, you are having a real conversation and you should follow it wherever it leads. If nothing could possibly count — if every conceivable line of evidence is disqualified in advance because miracles do not happen — then the position is not the conclusion of an inquiry. It is the boundary of one.
Ask it of yourself too. That is only fair. A Christian who would believe anything is no more honest than a skeptic who would believe nothing.
But do not miss what Scripture says is actually at stake. The resistance is rarely a shortage of data.
“For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)
Jesus said the same thing more bluntly, in a story about a rich man begging for a resurrection to convince his brothers.
“If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.” (Luke 16:31)
He was not exaggerating. When He raised Lazarus in front of witnesses, the response of the authorities was not repentance. It was a plan to kill Lazarus too.
The Miracle You Actually Need
So argue well. Dismantle the circle. Show that the objection assumes what it claims to prove. Those are good and necessary things, and a man is not made a better Christian by being a lazy thinker.
But know the limit of the argument. You can win the debate about whether miracles are possible and still leave a man exactly where you found him. Because the deepest problem was never that the resurrection is unbelievable. It is that a risen Christ has authority, and authority requires surrender.
Which is why the miracle every one of us needs is not a sign in the sky. It is a new heart in the chest.
“Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26)
That is the miracle Christianity offers, and it happens every day in rooms with no cameras. Dead men getting up is not a foreign concept to the gospel. It is the whole point of it — first His body, then ours, and in between, a man who was spiritually dead standing up on the inside and walking out of his own tomb.
The universe was never a closed system. It has an Author. And He has walked into the story before.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist