From Left to Right: William Goold, Mike Peterson, Joseph Okello, Jerry Walls.
An overview of The Case for Miracles
Chapter One, the introduction, identifies the scientific view that rejects belief in the supernatural. This view is referred to as methodological naturalism among scientists and philosophers. It gives reasons why the book takes a historical approach in its defense of miracles.
Chapter two provides an outline of how belief in God dominated the thinking patterns of ancient and medieval philosophers, and how this way of thinking provided them with grounds for belief in the possibility of the occurrence of miracles. We get an overview of the theistic vantage point of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, the Biblical writers, Augustine and Aquinas, among others.
Chapter three argues that the views of reputable scientists like Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Robert Boyle incorporated the supernatural in their theories of knowledge. It observes that these thinkers did not find anything wrong with factoring supernatural entities in their ways of knowing about the world.
Posing for a snapshot with friends shortly after graduation.
Chapter four identifies deism as the first movement that began to call into question the validity of belief in supernatural interventions of our world. It also notes that even with the rejection of the supernatural, deism still subscribed to belief in the existence of God. In this chapter I argue that the deists are inconsistent in holding, on the one hand, that the Supernatural Creator God exists while on the other, rejecting His supernatural activity.
Chapter five zeroes in on the views of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher. Hume is widely regarded among naturalistic philosophers as the first person to deal a decisive blow against belief in miracles. But this chapter shows that Hume was not the first to formulate his attack. This chapter then argues that Hume makes a mistake similar to that of the deists, namely: he is willing to believe that God created the universe, but rejects the claim that miracles happen—a view that I consider inconsistent.
Chapter six then focuses on the view that is widely regarded by scientists as putting the final nail in the coffin of Christianity. My contention in that chapter is that neither Charles Darwin nor the earlier naturalists succeeded in ruling God out of the equation of the universe. My contention is that Darwin’s view, along with those of subsequent Darwinists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould, are fundamentally flawed.
Another snapshot with friends.
I conclude in chapter seven by observing that neither Hume’s epistemology nor Darwin’s evolutionary theory succeeds in ruling God out as the Creator of the Universe. If this is so, then the claim that miracles do happen is a very real and live possibility for the believer in God.
The purpose of this book is to provide believers with reasons for holding that their faith in God is something that can be intellectually sustained.