The Sean McDowell Show - The Latest Evidence for Modern Miracles

Episode Date: November 30, 2024

What's the evidence miracles really happen TODAY? How reliable are the accounts? In this video, I talk with NT scholar Craig S. Keener about his latest book: Miracles Today. We explore the evidence and take live questions. READ: Miracles Today by Craig S. Keener (https://amzn.to/3EVdqGi) WATCH: A Guide to Experiencing the Miraculous (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-JOeevGRoM) *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/

Do miracles really still happen today? Do the blind see? Do the deaf hear? Have they ever been recorded on videotape? And in fact, is there evidence to believe that the dead have risen again in our time? Well, our guest today, Dr. Craig Keener, is one of the world's experts on miracles. And he believes the answers to those questions is yes, that miracles in fact do happen today. And we're talking about his book that at the time of this recording is out in about a week called Miracles Today. Dr. Keener, thanks for writing an awesome book. I love it. I was sharing a ton of it with my wife last night.

And thanks for coming on the show to share what you researched and what you learned. It's always great to be together with you, Sean. Well, thanks, my friend. That means a ton. And let's just jump right in. We've got a lot of people curious about what you found in this book. And you start with a story that I had not heard before, where when you had become a Christian, although you had formerly been an atheist, you become a Christian and you believed in miracles, but didn't really expect to see them in your own life. And you had an encounter with two women who were both named Barbara. What was that encounter and how did that change your worldview?

Yeah, they weren't both at the same time. But the first one, I just link them together in the book because they're both named Barbara. But the first one, I was helping in a nursing home Bible study. My little brother was there with me. It was, yeah, I think I'd been a Christian for just a couple years, and I was back from college, and there was this woman named Barbara who always said, I wish I could walk, I wish I could walk. And finally one day, the Bible study leader, who was a seminary student, walked over to her, grabbed her by the hand, lifted her from the chair and said, in the name of Jesus, rise up and walk.

And I was horrified. You know, if faith is a bias, I definitely cannot be accused of it in this case. I thought she was going to fall on the ground. And, you know, looking at her face, the expression on her face, I think she was equally horrified. She thought she was going to fall on the ground too. But he walked her around the room. And from then on, she could walk. She came walking to the Bible study and saying, I love my Bible study. I love my Bible study. So that got my attention. Well, the other, the other story about Barbara, about Barbara maybe well I can tell you that one too. Okay. She was, no this is not one I was present for but

Barbara Comiskey Snyder who just I think she just passed away like a week or two ago from COVID. But that's, yeah, that's not part of the story. But, you know, with all of us that eventually sooner or later, we're going to pass away. But Barbara had multiple sclerosis. And she had been from this for like 15 years. Her physical condition had been deteriorating. She had a really severe case of it. And she'd spent about half of those 15 years in the hospital. And her doctors had told her parents, she won't be back again.

You spend your last moments with her at home, but she won't be back here again. You know, you spend your last moments with her at home, but she won't be back here again. She was on a ventilator because her diaphragm was paralyzed. She was, you know, all her muscles were paralyzed. She says her hands were curled up like, you know, she was curled up like a pretzel. Her hands were curled up so much that every couple months they'd have to uncurl her hands just to get the dead skin out. She'd gone blind from this as well. When suddenly she heard a voice saying, my child, rise up and walk. Well, she couldn't. I mean, she couldn't move her muscles, but she springs out of bed. And the first thing she notices is that her feet are flat on the floor the first thing she notices is that her

feet are flat on the floor second thing she notices as her hands are uncurled third thing she notices that she's seeing these things and so she she starts saying dad dad and her dad thinks it's her sister so he's like wait a minute I'll be there and she realizes no I don't have to wait. She runs out to him. Now, usually when somebody is healed of something, if they've been in this condition for a long time, their muscles are atrophied. So it would take a long time. But in her case, God even took care of that. I mean, she was running, dancing around with her father.

They went around dancing outside on the she says uh she could feel the the hot patio on her on her feet and in this case we have the the the records from her doctors i mean two of the doctors wrote about the story and two of the doctors so three of the doctors all together but two of the doctors I interviewed and heard from them personally this was a miracle it can't be explained any other way and this was 1981 so there was no recurrence of this well I see a comment where somebody says this is just a discussion of experiences, but not medical journal reports.

We're going to get into that and some of the documentation you put very carefully in your book. But and and how can you? I mean, the doctors who were her doctors all report this. So it is medically documented. If you if you want to say it has to be in a journal. Well, a couple of them did publish this. So it is medically documented. If you want to say it has to be in a journal, well, a couple of them did publish this. That's true. Well, we'll come back to those. Now, you wrote in 2011, a decade ago, an 1,100-page, two-volume academic set on miracles. How does

this book, again, Miracles Today, how is this book different from that, and why write it? Well, a lot of people were making claims based on the first book, both positive and negative, that the book itself didn't actually make. But to be fair, you know, 1,100 pages, most people aren't going to read 1,100 pages. So people who said they liked the book, people who said they didn't like the book and didn't actually read it I can't blame them too much so this book is is a lot shorter it's just 300 pages and but I didn't want to make it just a rehashing or recycling of the first book so I didn't go into all the same philosophic discussion is in the first book I tried to make it more readable and also about

70% of it is new so some of it is summarizing what was in the earlier book but the majority of the not all of them but the majority of the the healing accounts are new hmm now tell us just, we don't want to go too far philosophically, but what do you mean by a miracle? Because I talk to people, it's used for like God revealing himself in nature, which is supernatural, but I don't think we call that a miracle. Sometimes we throw a miracle around in sports like that was a miracle play. Okay, extraordinary, but not really a miracle. What do you actually mean by a miracle? how do you define it in the book there's god's um yeah i define it differently from hume uh hume david hume kind of set the the tone for the modern discussion of it uh with a violation of nature. Most of the miracles in the

Bible can't be defined as violations of nature. So, you know, the very thing he was arguing against, his definition doesn't even address. But the way it's usually been defined through history is God's extraordinary action. So not the kind of thing he does all the time. That is divine action, general divine action, like what you said about in nature. I mean DNA, you can't get any more spectacular than that in terms of the information content and so on. But we call it special divine action because it's something out of the ordinary. If people can't see God's design all around them in nature, which they should be able to see, but if they can't see it, God also has these smaller things that can get

our attention. Craig, I see comments here about people saying, what about miracles being videotaped? What about amputees getting limbs growing back? We're going to talk about both of those just so you know. But I read an article you wrote in Christianity Today maybe a couple years ago, and you talked about miracles, but you talked about when they don't happen and even shared kind of some personal struggles you've made public. So how do you make sense of the times that God doesn't do miracles? And you say in the book that most people who pray for healing don't actually get healed. It still seems to be an exception. So how do you make sense of most times that God doesn't answer a prayer or do a miracle? The things that aren't exceptional, that we wouldn't call them

special divine action. I mean, the things that God does all the time, the ways he blesses us with air to breathe and food to eat and so on. I mean, for those things that we consider normal, those are God's gifts too. But the things that God does special, obviously, are things that he doesn't do all the time. So if he did do them all the time, we wouldn't call them special divine action. We'd say, well, that's just the way God works in nature. Or we'd say, that's just the way nature works. In the Bible, God didn't always heal everybody either. Sometimes we think he did, because obviously the Bible is more wanting to convince us about the reality of miracles,

which we need to be convinced of more easily than that sickness and death are in the world. We don't need to be convinced of that so much. But sometimes, just as a matter of course, it reports that. I mean, Elishisha was sick of the sickness with which he died second king says and it doesn't make any deal about it like this is this is not to be expected and yet when he died there was a corpse thrown into on top of his bones and the bible says the corpse came back to life so it's not like it's saying there was something wrong with elisha that he was sick of a sickness. No matter how much faith or power anybody has in their life, like, for example, a lot of the first century apostles, they've been dead for a long time.

Sickness and death are a reality in the world, and miracles aren't meant to do away with those. But what they're meant to do is to get our attention and to show us a foretaste of God's promise of a world to come when there'll be no more sickness and there'll be no more death. So people can't just say, well, you know, you talk about pie in the sky, promises for the future, but you don't have that now. Well, we don't have the fullness of it now. And if the fullness of it came now, it would be bad news for everybody who wasn't ready for Jesus to come. So God is patient toward this world. But in the meantime, he gives us these signs in the world as reminders of his promise. Hmm. So how common are miracle claims today? I remember when I read your two-volume set about a decade ago. And by the way, I read all of it except for the footnotes and the stuff at the end.

I read it carefully for the class I teach on the resurrection, and I teach out of it. I was amazed that you said hundreds of millions of people worldwide believe they've seen or personally experienced a miracle. And at one point you say, I'll just be conservative, let's say tens of millions of people. And of course you say some are attested more than others. But how common are miracle claims today? Yeah, differentiating between miracle claims and documented miracles i mean how how do you okay there are different levels of documentation but in terms of claims yes there's

there's hundreds of millions that was a 2006 pew forum survey that was done of just pentecostals and charismatics in 10 countries and there were a couple hundred million of those. But then they also, as a control group, cited other Christians, and about 39% of those other Christians, if you don't like Pentecostals or Charismatics, 39% of the other Christians claim to have witnessed or experienced divine healing.

So nobody would say all those are explicable only as miracles, but you can't just start with the premise, well, we know miracles don't happen, so if somebody claims a miracle happened, they're all nuts. That's Hume's argument. Uniform human experience gives us the starting point that we shouldn't believe anybody who claims a miracle. And actually, we don't have uniform human experience in that point when you've got hundreds of millions of counterexamples. What about doctors and how many doctors believe in miracles? I cited one of the statistics from the book earlier today, and someone on Twitter pushed back and said, well, I was looking for the article, and the number that you gave is only doctors who believe in, let me make sure I get this right, acknowledging surprising results from

treatment. So it's not really a supernatural miracle. So clarify how many doctors believe, and if we're really talking about supernatural miracle or just some awesome treatment. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And thank God for awesome treatments. So if it were just if it were just awesome treatments, I think we have probably closer to 100 percent of doctors instead of like 70 some percent. But in terms of those who actually claim to have witnessed miracles, it's over half. And of course, that excludes those who wouldn't use the term miracle to describe anything. Now, the context of that question, it comes right after another question that was asked to doctors. How many of you believe that miracles still happen today the way they did in biblical times? So with that context, I think it suggests something in terms of miracles.

But if a doctor doesn't believe in divine miracles, then all they can say is, okay, here's something that was medically inexplicable, and at least they can say that. I mean, that's what their medical competence is for. It's not, being trained in biology doesn't qualify you to always necessarily explain the cause of something, neither does being trained in theology for that matter. But it does qualify you to say, okay, this is the way it was before, this is the way it is afterwards, and to venture, you know, whether it's a cause that we know, or something like that. I did cite in the book, one doctor, there's a book that's a collection of doctors' accounts of miracles. And one of the doctors in there said, I'm an atheist.

This patient was an atheist, but they, you know, they were dying of this, and they visited the Greek Orthodox monastery, and a priest there prayed for him, and he was healed in a way that I can only describe as a miracle. And he's still an atheist, but he's like, I don't know what happened. I don't have an explanation for this, but I know it's true. And actually, one of the authors who's done a lot of work on the medical documentation of Catholic miracles related to the saints, going through the dossiers there, Jacqueline Duffin, last I knew, she claimed to be an atheist, but she said these are miracles in terms of being inexplicable and in a theistic context. Well, you talk a lot about the role of worldview in terms of how people process and make sense of miracles, and I think that's really, really helpful. Now, I've got one more question before we start to jump into some of the miracles, and the first one I asked you about I think was probably the miracle that most kind of amazed me, that gave me pause.

I went to my wife and I was like, look at this. This is a pretty remarkable claim. Before we get to that one, you have a section in the book about the question, is it only Christians who see miracles? And you push back on that and you say no because actually a high percentage of conversions around the world are tied to miracle claims. Talk about that if you will. Sure. And there are miracle accounts in other religions and there are good theistic and Christian explanations for that, but regarding your particular question, yeah, around the world

there are millions of people who didn't start with Christian premises, who actually ended up abandoning centuries of ancestral tradition, sometimes at great social cost because they were convinced of a healing that took place in the name of Jesus. So this isn't just like, oh, I sneezed and I don't feel like sneezing now. This is like, you know, not the kind of thing that they were ordinarily used to in their traditional religious healing experiences or what they were used to just in things that normally get better these were dramatic enough that millions of people became believers through this just to take one example around the year 2000 there was a report from within the china christian council which is affiliated with the threeelf Church in China, the government approved, or yeah, the government

tolerated, I'm not sure how you put it, but where they said that half of all conversions in the previous 20 years had been due to what they called faith healing experiences. And some estimates from within the house church movement, and especially in rural areas, go as high as 90%. Now, there's no way to check out exactly what percentage it is. But we're talking about millions of people. I think he said it was like 90%, 80 or 90% of conversions in Nepal to faith in Christ are due to people being healed or spirits being cast out of them. It's fascinating to me that you have a section talking about the obvious healings in the time of Jesus, in Acts, in the early church, during the time of Augustine.

This has been a consistent kind of drumbeat through the history of the church as a whole into the modern time. Well, let's start talking about some of these. And a question I've seen in the chats a couple of times, and I've really wondered myself until I read your book, is do healings ever actually get recorded? Not fake ones, real healings that can be demonstrated. Have they actually been recorded not fake ones real healings that can be demonstrated have

they actually been recorded yeah now you're talking about recorded on video like on video recorded yes yeah yeah yeah a number a number of cases that's happened some of the people have talked with and actually but but what you said about fake ones yes there are fake ones on videos too. If you have enough money, you can fake anything pretty much. But this is one where Delia Knox, she was injured in a car accident. She was paralyzed from the waist down for 22 years. And there are all sorts of old videos of her from her wheelchair. I have

interviewed so many people and actually even more recently met somebody else besides the ones I noted in the book who knew her when she was in her wheelchair, who would help push her wheelchair up the ramp into the van where she was traveling as a gospel singer. So she was known as a paralyzed gospel singer, paralyzed from the waist down. And there were people who tried to heal her, you know, lifted her from the wheelchair and she'd plop back down. And she went through all the abuses that people would do. But one day she was in a church service after 22 years. She was praying for somebody else when all of a sudden feeling came back to her legs that she hadn't felt for 22 years.

And so she had them pray for her. And the people on either side of her, they helped her up, and she started walking. Now, they were holding her up. So some of the critics of the video, and it was caught on video because it was a service, some of the critics of the video, they said, well, you call that walking? Because they were holding her up, but she was moving her hips under her own power. Well, her muscles were atrophied. But because sometimes people say okay well

how can this be a miracle your muscles would be atrophied if you've been paralyzed so God does it different ways but she's you know a month later there's another video of her and she's visiting her home church and she walks in under her own power and is laying hands on other people and

praying for them and again I know people who know her. I've interviewed her sister and others. So how, and her former pastor, how was this responded to? Well, one of the critics responded by saying she must have faked being paralyzed for 22 years so she could claim a healing. Now, if that's the best argument that you can come up with I mean who in the right mind is gonna not that everybody's in the right mind

but I mean who even in halfway there's gonna fake it for 22 years that's a pretty steep price to have to pay so where can this be viewed? Does somebody search on YouTube? Do they have to track down a DVD? Where can this actually be viewed and seen? You could, I guess you could Google it. I do have the links in my book. I know links aren't always permanent, but as far as the last time I checked them, they were still at the same place. You can find them pretty easily by Googling it.

Now, if you ask me if I remember the link from memory. Oh, no, that's fine. Say her name one more time again just so we've got it. It's Delia, D-E-L-I-A, and then Knox is K-N-O-X. Okay, excellent. One of the sections, again, that surprised me or it interested me greatly, I hadn't given a lot of thought to this, was the section on miracles by Catholics. And you make a point that you can differ with Catholics on some theological issues but still believe miracles happen within the particular Catholic Christian faith. So talk about at Lourdes where some of those miracles take place, but also how carefully,

and this really surprised me, how carefully many of the Catholic scholars are to affirm a miracle. And if I got the numbers right, it was out of a thousand cases they confirmed seven which i think is what point seven percent so what happened at lured and talk a little bit how catholics assess miracles i think it was out of seven thousand it was seventy so so about one percent okay okay but still that's uh and a lot of the ones that didn't make it, you look at the evidence for them, it's like, why didn't this make it? But they had, one nice thing about Lourdes is it's very carefully documented. we had like in some circles today there were people just claiming miracles all over the place and selling gimmicks and and things like that and so when the reformation came some of the reformers were like you know you catholics you have all these fake miracles so in response to that in

the counter-reformation catholics were really careful in terms of what they would accept as miracle claims. And sometimes I think their criteria are actually even too stringent in places like Lourdes. So you have, it has to, it has to, oops. Oh, you're good. I got to pull, I lost it just for a second. Let me pull you right back. Keep going. That was my bad. Oh, oops. Oh, you're good. I lost it just for a second. Let me pull you right back. Keep going. That was my bad. Oh, okay.

Thanks. So you have, first of all, they have to have all the evidence from before, and they have to have all the evidence from after, and that's reasonable to expect. Then it goes through a panel of physicians, and the physicians are from, they're not all Catholic, they're not all Christian, they're not all theists, and they have to be able to endorse this as something that's medically inexplicable. Well, you know, some people are going to, they, even if we don't have an explanation for it, it's explicable. It's just that our explanation is we'll have an explanation

someday. And so they dismiss it. But these are just the ones that make it through those medical bureau panels. And then also the theology panel has to say that this also fits that so they're they're very very careful uh with their their process yeah that blew me away that they'd far rather err on the side of not recognizing a miracle than recognizing a miracle that turns out to be fake um and you document and walk that through. Now, one of the questions that come up, I've seen a few times the comments I've had myself, are there any actually medically attested miracle claims where we have like the x-ray or we have the doctor's testimony? Like talk about maybe as a whole how many there are and then maybe give one example that you think is a compelling case.

One book that was published decades ago by Richard Kasdorf, it includes the medical documentation, it includes the names of the doctors who reviewed it, which today you'd probably get in trouble for the HIPAA laws, but I think he clearly got their permission anyway. But one of the cases in there was of Lisa Larios, who had metastatic hip cancer, and it had actually eaten away her bone. She just knew she couldn't walk. She didn't know it had metastasized and that she was dying. But her mother took her to a healing crusade. And whatever you think of healing crusades or healing meetings, it doesn't really matter because nobody actually laid hands on her or prayed for her there. It was

just in that atmosphere of faith, the person up front said, I feel like God is healing somebody's hip cancer. She didn't even know that she had hip cancer per se. She just knew that she couldn't walk. Something was wrong. Her mother knew, but she didn't know. Suddenly, she jumps out of her wheelchair and starts running around. And you say, that's just adrenaline. But I mean, she was completely healed from then on. And the medical documentation, the x-rays, shows that not only was she healed of the cancer, but where her hip bone had been eaten away, it grew back. I mean, it was instantly back. And Dr. Kasdorf also reports that when they, I think it was the Merv Griffin show or something like that, where they were

being interviewed for this, it was the night before they were all having dinner together and the rest of them were going up to their hotel rooms on, I forget, the 11th floor or whatever. And she said, no, I'm going to take the stairs. And she ran up all those flights of stairs just to celebrate. There are a number also since, that one was also in my 2011 book, but there are a number that have been published in medical journals since then. Now, medical journals usually deal with what's replicable and miracles by definition aren't replicable. I mean, sure, you can't say completely unique if other miracles have occurred, but you also can't say you can predict when and where they'll occur so that kind of study is is inappropriate to studying miracles as it is studying any individual event in history you you can't replicate everything you can't kill somebody again to find out how they died but uh but in terms of case studies with extraordinary outcomes,

like not just the things that are unusual, but the things that can't happen on their own, cataracts instantly disappearing and so forth, those sometimes get published in journals. And there have been some of those published recently. There was a few years ago, there was one with a woman who was blind. She'd been blind for 12 years, and she and her husband, they were Baptist Christians. They didn't know about, I mean, they believed that God could do it, but they didn't know of any miracles ever happening. But he just prayed for her one night, God, please help my wife. And suddenly she could see. And the before and after documentation is available. And this happened

like two decades ago or more. And she remained sighted cited so there are plenty of case studies of things like that a mutual friend of ours elijah stevens who interviewed you for uh the send proof documentary on miracles sent me that case i can't remember if it was 2019 or 2020 but two cases of documented in medical journals miracle claims. And his goal over the next decade, if I remember correctly, is to get 100 peer-reviewed claims, which is pretty exciting to see if that happens. Now, in the New Testament, we hear the claim that the blind will see, the deaf will hear, the lame will walk, and the dead will rise again. Are you confident saying that these kinds of miracle claims are still being attested today

as in New Testament times? Sure, yeah. As long as you're defining rising from the dead, the Lazarus kind and not the Jesus kind. Got it. Yes, I teach the class in the resurrection at Biola, and I'm careful to make that distinction, so I'm with you. Well, then let's dive in. You have one or two chapters where you talk specifically about blind receiving sight. Maybe talk about the number of cases that you've seen and maybe one or two that just comes to mind that you think is significant yeah well there are scores of those i think i think it's safe to say hundreds of those

but but i i haven't i haven't followed up on hundreds of those so fair enough probably just scores. And one of them that actually, even people I know, I mean, one of my students, he just finished seminary here. He was in, I think it was Zambia or somewhere. And he and a friend, they were like, I wonder if God would still do miracles if we pray. We've heard about them. But they stopped, and somebody called them over and said, can you pray for this woman? She's blind. And they prayed for her, and they were kind of nervous praying for her. And when they finished, nothing had happened.

And so they said, okay, well, time to go. And they said, no, no, no, pray for her again. And they said, okay, well. They prayed for her again, and suddenly okay well they prayed for her again and suddenly she starts shouting that she can see and they're like uh wait a minute are you sure we're like they didn't believe it initially until she could prove that she could see but um but what one case where i interviewed the person andrea and Anderson and this one was caught on video she is a member of a church in Saskatchewan I think or Ontario somewhere but she

she'd been blind for 12 years like the person I mentioned before in her case she was blind some of these are due to macular degeneration, but hers was due to diabetes. And she still has diabetes. That part wasn't healed. But somebody was walking through the church preaching, a guest minister, and he stopped where she was and said, you blind spirit, I command you to come out of her. Now, I said I don't necessarily agree with the theology behind all Catholic healings. I don't necessarily agree with the theology behind all Protestant healings either. But God did it. I mean, he said to her, okay, now look at me.

And she tells me that she was thinking, well, I can turn to you, but I can't look at you. I can't see you. And she turned and she could me that she was thinking, well, I can turn to you, but I can't look at you. I can't see you. And she turned and she could see him. And so he has her, you know, how many fingers am I holding up and stuff like that, you know, from increasing distances. And, you know, her doctor didn't know what to do with it. Her pastor still keeps her white cane in his office.

Really? Yeah. Wow. Her only problem right after that was for a few weeks, it took time for her eyes to adjust to all the stimuli. She'd go into a grocery store, and she'd be overwhelmed with all the different colors and things because she wasn't used to seeing for 12 years.

So the blind will see, and then the lame will walk, or those with disabilities will walk. You did share one story earlier, but maybe if you think of another story that you can think of as somebody walking, and are these as common? You said probably hundreds as blind get inside as well. I think these may be more common. Of course, there are a lot of different reasons for being unable to walk. So I mentioned Lisa Larios. I also mentioned, well, both Barbaras

couldn't walk for different reasons. There are of some more of those but then the ones that are coming to my mind right now are the more of the blind ones being healed but there's just lots of lots of examples no that's great your book is full of so many stories marlene who had cerebral palsy uh and she was she was pretty much paralyzed through most of her body, except she could talk. And so she had this vision that God was going to heal her on such and such a date in a particular church. But that was like, it was getting towards like it was a few days away, and she was like, oh boy, you know, I'm still here at the Mayo Center. And so she, with what ability she had to talk, she got a nurse who could understand her halfway to turn, to open to the yellow pages where there was a list of churches and Marlene's eyes fixed on one she said call them and so it ended up the pastor came brought her to the church that

night there were only a handful of people there they'd never seen a miracle like this but you know she was confident no God's going to heal me if you pray, because she believed God had told her that. Not everything everybody believes they hear is actually right, but in any case, they prayed. She started walking, and within an hour, she's running around the church. Wow. That was, again, decades ago. She's been healed all that time. She runs a flower shop in Missouri. Interesting.

Lots of examples, yeah. That's amazing. One of the things your book is like, you describe this place in California and this place in Missouri. It wasn't just out there. You give names and places and documentation that people reading this can follow up and check for themselves, even if they're skeptical. Now, let's get to one of the more... Follow up with her. Make sure you buy some flowers. There you go. Good plug. Very kind. She deserves you to buy some flowers for her. Now, we talked about the blind seeing, those with disabilities walking. I imagine this might be

one of the more controversial claims in the book. I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, that the dead rising again, not resurrecting, but people actually coming back from the dead. First off, how common are these claims? And maybe give one or two examples that come to mind that you think are really well attested. Yeah. You don't want to deal with the, to skip the deaf and the and the lepers oh you know what actually we're gonna come back to those okay all right good I'm glad you're ready oh yeah with it with the dead being raised you know the one that really got my attention and this one is in the in the first book but there been a lot of

things that have come to my attention since then. But this was the one that got my attention just because it was so close at hand. And that is that I'd heard this story from my wife, but when I was actually able to interview the person, is it all right for me to use an old story as well as some new ones? Sure. Yeah, if you think they're well tested, go for it. So this one was of Antoinette Malambe. She said that her two-year-old daughter was bitten by a snake and she found the daughter not breathing and there was no medical help available in the village. So she strapped the child to her back, ran to a nearby village where a family friend, Coco N'Gomo Moise, was doing ministry.

And, you know, Coco Moise prayed for her. She started breathing again. The next day she was fine. And now I had the opportunity to interview Antoinette Malambe. So I'm interviewing her and trying to get more of the details. And I said, how long was it that she wasn't breathing? So she had to stop to think to get from one village to the next and so on. She said, that would have been about three hours. And, you know, five, six minutes with no oxygen, irreparable brain damage starts in. But I was like, okay, well, this really got my attention because I know that there was no

brain damage. Therese, the daughter, has a master's degree. She just recently retired from ministry. And her mother is my, or was my mother-in-law. And Therese is my sister-in-law. But not to doubt one's mother-in-law. But we did check with Coco and Gomo Moise, who were still alive at the time, and he also confirmed the story. So we have multiple independent witnesses in that sense. Therese doesn't count. She was two years old, so she's not going to remember.

Sure, sure. But in terms of medical documentation, most people don't know how to get medical documentation and in many parts of the world you can't get it. Like I mean, again, there was no medical help available in the village. Makes sense. If there had been, there might not have been a need for that kind of miracle in Therese's case. miracle in Therese's case but Sean George is a consultant physician at Kilgourley Hospital in Australia and he knows how to get medical documentation

because he's a doctor and he certainly had access to the medical documentation in this case because he was the one who died. He had a heart attack, and while he was having a heart attack, he read his electrocardiogram reading, which is probably one thing you don't want to do when you're having a heart attack, because then he went into full cardiac arrest. This, you know, he just stopped there at an outpatient clinic. He wasn't at the Coe Gurley Hospital yet, and so they were doing their best to revive him with what equipment that they had. There were, I forget how many, I think it was like over a thousand chest compressions, 13 shocks, and so on.

And he has all the records. In fact, he has them posted online. So it's public knowledge. And this went on for like an hour and a half. So again, five minutes with no oxygen. He's flatlined for an hour and a half. There's nothing they can do to get him back. Finally, his fellow physicians from Calgurley arrive. His wife was also a physician, Sherry Jacob arrives. And they're like, okay, Sherry, just say your goodbyes to him. There's nothing more that can be done. And she knelt down beside the bed he was lying on and just cried out to God and suddenly the heart monitor sprang to life and the doctors were like well let's get to work I mean they knew what to

do at that point but it's like all his systems had already been shutting down you know and his brain certainly should have been completely gone but and one of them said afterwards that he thought this was the worst thing that could possibly happen because she's going to have to decide, you know, when to, when to unhook him from stuff because all they were doing, all they could do was pump air into him and, and so on. But, uh, three days later, he awoke, no brain damage, read his own chart. He's back to work. And his colleagues, I think one or two of his colleagues were Christians. Another was a Muslim.

Another colleague or two were Hindus. They all agree this was a miracle. Very powerful. How many of these have you come across? Is it a handful? Is it as many as like hundreds? Give us a quantitative sense. I wouldn't say hundreds. I mean, I'm not saying that there aren't hundreds. Actually, there are reports of way more than that. It's just the ones that I've been able to look into I know in Mozambique they report over a hundred there in the past decade oh wow yeah where there's where there's less access to medical help there's more need for direct divine intervention but also you have less access to medical

documentation so that's why I chose the one with Sean George or certain other ones. That makes sense. Now, I want to ask you about, I've seen a comment here, and this is one that skeptics raise frequently, is why don't amputated limbs grow back? Now, answer that in light of, we see in the New Testament, the leprosy being healed, which destroyed certain limbs at times. So do we still see things like leprosy being healed today, even though the disease has been nearly eradicated as far as I understand? And if so, why wouldn't we just, why wouldn't God just, you know, videotape a limb just growing right in front of us and make it crystal clear and end this debate? Yeah. Leprosy in the New Testament was actually different in definition from the kind of leprosy today.

It wasn't Hansen's disease. I mean, it could include Hansen's disease, but it wasn't primarily Hansen's disease. But we do have cases of Hansen's disease being healed. I have a couple reports of that from India, from eyewitnesses. One of them from a professor there in India whose father was a pastor, and he was crossing ethnic and caste boundaries, where he washed the foot of Selvan, a leper. And this was somebody that she and her family knew for years.

So she knew him before and afterwards. So he washed the man's leprous foot, and the next day Selvan came and visited them, and his foot was no longer leprous foot and the next day Selvan came and visited them and his foot was no longer leprous. Brought about a lot of people coming to faith in Christ. Sure. There are cases like that, a lot of cases where you have goiters visibly disappearing and again some of the people reporting this are people with PhDs and so on. So, you know, Hume said no educated person would ever say this. You know,

that's not really true. It may have been true in his circle, but it's not true everywhere today. But in terms of limbs growing back, I did get a report. I don't remember if it was before or after I finished the book. I think it's just mentioned briefly, but where in one meeting they were praying for people. I had multiple witnesses talking about fingers growing back that had been, that were missing. I don't know. I don't think they were amputated. I think they were from an accident. But in terms of documented cases, there's one of an auto mechanic where Bruce Renata, he was working under a diesel truck. The axle gave way. It came down, crushed him to maybe close to an inch to the ground. It's hard to imagine somebody surviving that. He may be the only one actually who has survived that, but his survival was considerably at risk despite medical intervention because it took a miracle for him not to bleed to death alone, but so much of his small intestine was gone, he couldn't digest food. And a friend of his felt led to come and pray for him.

And when the friend prayed for him in the name of Jesus, he felt like a jolt through his body. And after that, he could eat fine and digest fine and the the doctor who was covering this case reports on it it looks like his small intestine has more than doubled in length hmm medically you know a small intestine it can grow wider in an adult but it doesn't grow longer so this is like you know an appendage growing back and the only way to to measure it precisely would be to cut him open and unravel this his small intestine sure which kind of is counterproductive since the miracle made him able to live in your cut you know a small intestine it would kill him yeah but um but there was enough where where it's

visible and and the the doctor was able to to provide the documentation that that this guy was was healed and um and bruce actually has gone around praying for other people to be healed and one of the people he prayed for was a young man with gastroparesis that he'd had since he was a little boy and i think like a baby and he'd never been able to eat a normal meal he had a feeding tube a jujostomy feeding tube but he was completely healed that night that Bruce prayed for him. After, I don't know, 18 years or whatever of being in this condition, I interviewed him as well as Bruce. And he, you know, actually there was a medical journal article done on this, which I think Elijah probably also has.

I've got one more question for you, and then I see a couple questions in here I'd love to go to. What about miracles that we don't see? If I remember from your first two-volume set, you described like walking on water, and I think food multiplication, and certain kinds of nature miracles. What New Testament miracles do we not see, or at least see in the quantity that we do others? Yeah, we don't see too much walking in water. I interviewed a couple people who shared with me their experience of that. They didn't know they were doing it when they did it. But the people who were watching them knew because they knew how deep the water was.

But they both said if they'd known that they were walking on water they might have sunk but uh both of them were from indonesia where it makes sense there's a lot more water but obviously jesus rising from the dead to a new order of existence eschatological resurrection that isn't something we're going to expect until he comes back the creation of the world um that that is pretty unique virgin birth is is unique okay don't know anybody who can claim that today but uh but there are a number of other miracles including nature miracles so stilling of storms food a number of other miracles, including nature miracles. So stilling of storms, food multiplying, a number of cases of that. One of them was given to me by the Anglican Bishop of the Horn of Africa.

He's actually from Canada, and he's back teaching in the U.S. now. He's a professor. But he shared with me there were like 100 refugees came to their place where they were, and they only had enough food. Like they had enough crackers to feed maybe 12 people, and so all they could do was pray and start giving out the crackers. All 100 people ate, and everybody was still hungry, had seconds. So that was pretty cool okay i've also

interviewed other people who are witnesses of those things obviously you don't have medical documentation of food multiplying because it's not a medical thing and for for walking on water you don't have medical documentation but um for storm stillings sometimes we have meteorological documentation. There are cases of that. There's one that I saw back in the 1990s. But I've also had some of my students share things like that with me. One of my doctoral students, who now has his PhD, was sharing something like that where he was on a ship in the midst of a storm. It was actually the edge of a cyclone. And things were going really badly. The captain's chair broke and people were really panicking.

And the captain pointed to somebody, a teenage young lady in the back who had a Christian T-shirt on. And some of their up front said, you get down here, pray. And she prayed and the storm stopped. And I guess the moral of that is you don't wear a Christian T-shirt unless you're willing to pray. Okay. All right. Sounds good.

I've got a pastoral one for you. And this is a tough question, admittedly, but I know you've thought about this and can give some thoughts. But this comes from Samuel Park. He says, Dr. Keener, I've been praying and crying out to God day and night, and my year's been filled with sign. I've lost hope that the Lord will ever heal me. How should we respond when God seems unwilling and we've just suffered so long and cried out? He doesn't seem to respond and answer our prayers. Yeah. He doesn't always do what we ask. My wife and I, we went through a series of miscarriages. And she's from Africa, and in an African context, it's even particularly devastating. I mean, it's devastating anywhere,

but there are things where it doesn't happen the way we pray. At the same time, it doesn't hurt to keep asking. I'm working on a commentary on Mark right now, and just today I was working on the Syrophoenician woman, and Jesus basically blows her off, and she doesn't take no for an answer. She hangs in there. And sometimes God, like with Delia Knox, I mean, 22 years.

She was pretty much giving up hope. Sometimes she still had it, but it wasn't like at the beginning. And God healed her. What we do know for sure that's promised to us is that these signs where God does it for anybody, it's a reminder to all of us. It's a gift to all of us because it's a reminder of God's promise that someday we're going to be completely whole. Our bodies will be resurrected. Sometimes God says no for our sake. I mean, James and John, we want to be on either side of you in the kingdom. And this is Mark chapter 10.

And in the context of Mark's gospel, you know, preaching of the kingdom early in the gospel, and then toward the end of the gospel, the climax of it is Jesus is crowned king of the Jews and enthroned on a cross, and the kingdom motif of Mark's gospel climaxes in the crucifixion. So when Jesus says to James and John, are you ready to drink the cup from which I drink, be baptized with the baptism with which I'm baptized? Sure we are, they said, just like Peter says, and I'll never deny you. Well, if they had been, it wouldn't have been two robbers crucified in his right and his left.

His right and his left in his kingdom in Mark's gospel climaxes on the cross. Sometimes it's good for us when God says no. But, you know, when they said, we want you to do for us whatever we want. But in the case of blind Bartimaeus, Jesus says, what do you want me to do for you? He offers it to him and then he heals him instantly. So there's no one size fits all with this. And yet we know that God is with us. And that's part of the message of the cross, because miracles, they're signs of that future glory. They're reminders of God's promise, reminders of his compassion. New Testament miracles are almost all benevolent miracles. But in the cross, we see that even in the midst of the darkness, even in the midst of injustice and things that we don't understand, God is still

at work to bring about his purposes. So we can know that God is with us. We don't have to be healed ourselves to know that. But again again there's nothing wrong with continuing to ask him but just just know that even now it's not it's not it doesn't mean it's a lack of faith it doesn't mean it's a lack of god's compassion even now god is with you last question for you craig this comes from jose and then we'll wrap up he says, how would you respond to skeptics who ask, why doesn't God do miracles for everyone rather than some? And I presume the idea would be if he just do more miracles, more people would believe. Why does he only show some instead of everybody?

Faith requires a commitment. It requires a step of loyalty to God. And he gives us enough evidence to invite us to believe, but he doesn't compel us to believe. And actually, again, what I said earlier about special divine action and general divine action. I mean, the miracles I report in the book, including raisings from the dead, including nature miracles, are in a sense small, if I'm allowed to say that. Maybe I shouldn't say that. I mean, look at DNA. Look at the universe around us. If God does it for everybody, we ignore it. We only pay attention when it's special divine action, some of us. So God has already given us miracles for everybody in the sense life itself is a gift. Having it to begin with is a gift. And the miracles are just special things to get our attention.

That's how they were used in the Gospels and Acts. And that's how they've normally functioned through history. And that's usually been from Augustine to Aquinas and so on. That's usually been the understanding of them through history too. Special divine action meant to get our attention. Craig, your book is fantastic. I want to commend it to viewers again. It comes out next week.

It's called Miracles Today. And if you are a skeptic and you don't believe, this is definitely a book I would say check out. Follow the links. Follow it up. It's the single top volume I would recommend on miracles, and there are some other very good miracle books that are out there. If you're a believer and want to be encouraged in your faith,

definitely pre-order a copy of Miracles today and write a review for Craig as well. Don't forget to hit subscribe to the channel. Here's some of the shows we have coming up soon. We have Phil Yancey coming on. He's had a huge influence on my life to talk about some apologetic issues, but the power of grace. We have Steve Miller coming on. He did a show on near-death experiences a while ago here and has a new fresh argument from deathbed

experiences pointing towards God. We have a newly minted PhD student come on who's done his dissertation on the deity Christ. So we're going to talk about what he thinks Ehrman misses in the case, Bart Ehrman does does in the case for the deity of Christ. All that is to say, we've got some great shows coming up. Make sure you hit subscribe. And our program, I think I told you this last time, Craig, our Biola Apologetics program is fully online. So if you've ever thought about studying apologetics at the top-rate apologetics school, Biola,

take a look below. We would love to have you. Craig, thanks again so much for coming on and hanging out for a minute just so I can say goodbye to the rest of you. Friday I'll be posting a recent talk I gave on cancel culture. Friday morning we'll be premiering it. It's, I think, a timely and one of my favorite talks that I put together in a while. So some of you have said we enjoy the interviews, but we want to hear you present some stuff. So if that's how you feel, if you don't, just tune into the interviews. But if you want to hear from me, I'll be posting that Friday, my thoughts on cancel culture. So God bless you

all. We'll see you soon.