Jamey Hecht

That is, the whole weight of science is the prima facie evidence against a miracle's having occurred. Carl Sagan's remark "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is germane and, incidentally, can be formalized by a use of Bayes' theorem. This doesn't mean scientific laws are always correct. Whatever evidence exists that a certain phenomenon miraculously violates a particular scientific law is evidence as well that the scientific law in question is simply wrong. If before the invention of the telephone, for example, someone heard the voice of a friend who was hundreds of miles away, one might consider this a miracle. The evidence for this miraculous event, however, would also be evidence that the physical law that the event appears to violate (regarding how fast sound travels in air, let's say) is wrong or doesn't apply.

Either everything has a cause or there's something that doesn't. The first-cause argument collapses into this hole whichever tack we take. If everything has a cause, then God does, too, and there is no first cause. And if something doesn't have a cause, it may as well be the physical world as God or a tortoise.

Why did He create the particular natural laws that He did? If He did it arbitrarily for no reason at all, there is then something that is not subject to natural law. The chain of natural law is broken, and so we might as well take the most general natural laws themselves, rather than God, as the arbitrary final "Because." On the other hand, if He had a reason for issuing the particular laws that He did (say, to bring about the best possible universe), then God Himself is subject to pre-existing constraints, standards, and laws. In this case, too, there's not much point to introducing Him as an intermediary in the first place.

The undermining disanalogy in this response is that a sighted person's observations can be corroborated by the blind. A sighted person's directions, for example, to take eleven steps and then to turn left for eight more steps to reach the door of the building can be checked by a blind person. How can an agnostic or atheist learn anything from someone who simply claims to know there is a God?

A bit more than forty years ago, in the full glare of the modern media, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we have only a hazy idea of the motivation of the killer or, possibly, killers. And a bit more than thirty years ago, the Watergate controversy erupted before a phalanx of cameras and microphones, and we still don't know who ordered what. And only a few years ago, well into the age of the Internet, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked, the United States responded by invading Iraq, and we have yet to learn the complete story of the attack, the training of the attackers, the lead-up to the war, and so on.

Because of its momentous nature, people searched for a suitably momentous reason for the assassination. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unprepossessing nobody who seemed ill suited for the job of giant-slayer. There had to be something more, and maybe there was, but one added reason for the intense fascination with other possibilities was the charming [sic] superstition that significant consequences must necessarily be the result of significant perpetrators.

Assume for the moment that compelling historical documents have just come to light establishing the movie's and the Bible's contentions that a group of Jews was instrumental in bringing about the death of Jesus; that Pilate, the Roman governor, was benign and ineffectual; and so on. Even if all this were the case, does it not seem hateful, not to mention un-Christian, to blame contemporary Jews?