Evaluating Two Shorter Miracle Accounts 2

This is the second, shorter, section of my discussion of the miracle accounts of Jesus raising Jairus' daughter and healing the woman with the issue of blood. Here I discuss potential naturalistic competitors for a miraculous explanation and how well they hold up if the externally observable facts occurred as told in the Gospels. Note that I'm asking how much these accounts themselves support a miraculous explanation without bringing in other evidence we have about Jesus' ability to work miracles. I conclude that in the case of the woman with the issue of blood we do need to rely somewhat more on our other evidence that Jesus was able to work miracles, though this is a rational and historical way of proceeding. The reason that we need to do so is that, even granting the externally observable facts, we don't have follow-up information showing that she was truly relieved of her symptoms for a significant period of time. However, there is an interesting confirmation in Jesus' claim that someone touched him for healing and the woman's admission that she did so. In the case of Jairus's daughter, the chief naturalistic competitor would be the theory that the girl was not really dead. In this case the naturalistic explanation does not seem to explain the facts well, however. Even if all brain activity had not ceased, one wouldn't expect her to wake up immediately, when she had previously (one presumes) had no pulse or visible breathing, and be able to walk just when Jesus took her by the hand and spoke to her in a simple fashion.  This sort of evaluation shows how we can try to evaluate miracle accounts while separating out the various strands of our evidence and being neither credulous nor hyper-skeptical.  

Originally uploaded to YouTube Nov 16 2020