文档介绍：The Argument from Miracles:
A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
Introduction
It is a curiosity of the history of ideas that the argument from miracles is today better
known as the object of a famous attack than as a piece of reasoning in its own right. It was not
always so. From Paul’s defense before Agrippa to the polemics of the orthodox against the deists
at the heart of the Enlightenment, the argument from miracles was central to the discussion of the
reasonableness of Christian belief, often supplemented by other considerations but rarely omitted
by any responsible writer. But in the contemporary literature on the philosophy of religion it is
not at all mon to find entire works that mention the positive argument from miracles only
in passing or ignore it altogether.
Part of the explanation for this dramatic change in emphasis is a shift that has taken place
in the conception of philosophy and, in consequence, in the conception of the project of natural
theology. What makes an argument distinctively philosophical under the new rubric is that it is
substantially a priori, relying at most on facts that mon knowledge. This is not to say that
such arguments must be crude. The level of technical sophistication required to work through
some contemporary versions of the cosmological and teleological arguments is daunting. But
their factual premises are not numerous and are monplaces that an educated
nonspecialist can readily grasp – that something exists, that the universe had a beginning in time,
that life as we know it could flourish only in an environment very much like our own, that some
things that are not human artifacts have an appearance of having been designed.
Measured by this standard, the argument from miracles is not purely philosophical. Its
evaluation requires the patient sifting of a welter of details, the consideration of putatively
analogous events, the assessment of the probability or improbability