Miracles, Proof and Persuasion

Today’s spiritual salvo steps boldly into the realm of evidence and persuasion. Here, I offer you a series of lessons that every aspiring marketing genius should be acutely aware of.

Several years ago my brother flipped 180 degrees, from card-carrying conservative Christian to near atheist. Gave me a massive jolt.

His most penetrating question of all was:

“Perry, I’ve got a master’s degree from a hard-core conservative seminary, I’ve learned Greek and Hebrew, I’ve studied the New Testament inside and out… and I don’t see a lick of text in the New Testament that even suggests that miracles were supposed to ‘go away’ after the disciples died.

“So, Perry…. WHERE’S THE MIRACLES???”

<GULP>

I’d *heard about* a lot of miracles but I couldn’t think of a single one I’d witnessed first hand. He charged that all miracles were frauds. He challenged me that if I investigated miracles, I’d discover they were all a big puff of smoke.

I knew he was exactly right about the Bible. Nowhere is there any indication that miracles are supposed to stop.

His question slammed me like a bucket of bricks. I knew that as long as Christians preferred to believe that miracles stopped with disciples, they’d never have to face up to the possibility that Christianity might be a scam.

This question rattled my bones. Thus began my quest.

What unfolded is quite a saga. It runs from 2002 right to the present. You can read all about that quest at www.coffeehousetheology.com/miracles and I encourage you to read it right now. Fascinating stuff.

In time, I found LOTS of evidence to counter my brother’s assertions. In fact after a couple of years he completely backed down from his position. So now I’d like to share with you how I go about proving something that some people are profoundly resistant to ever believing.

The difficulty of this makes an incredibly powerful case study that any marketer, regardless of religious belief, should pay attention to. As well as any Christian, regardless of their interest in marketing.

There are many forms of proof:

1. Personal testimony (social proof)
2. Repeatable scientific experiment (scientific proof)
3. Expert testimony (reliance on respected human authority)
4. Mass testimony (something is so widely and consistently attested to that the lack of credibility of any one witness becomes irrelevant)
5. Peer review (independent experts screen out wacko claims)
6. Media testimony (repetition / reinforcement by established news channels)
7. Sacred testimony (reliance on Divine Authority)
8. Rational proof (step by step logic or mathematical reasoning)
9. Measurement (abundance and precision of documented results, with numbers)
10. Personal experience (what you saw with your own eyes, felt or experienced)
11. Visual demonstration (live or video; video is admissible in court because edits are easily detectable)
12. Damaging admission (credibility through imperfection)
13. Corroborating evidence (consistency of multiple unrelated sources)
14. High-cost zero-benefit testimony (person has nothing to gain and everything to lose by testifying to the truth of something)
15. Skeptic’s testimony (person became convinced despite long-standing prejudices)
16. Throwaway comment (information from an unrelated context lends unexpected credibility)
17. Silence of skeptics (people who *should* produce loads of counter-evidence strangely have nothing to say)
18. Mass denial of skeptics (you present undeniable proof, yet they boldly assert the opposite… simply because they don’t like it)

This article takes pains to include every one of these elements. Most of my stories have at least two or three of them. If you want an exercise in recognizing constructing proof, I suggest you match each one of these dozen miracle stories up with the above elements. You can’t do this for your own product, service or belief system if you don’t see the elements first.

*Most* people don’t have much trouble accepting the possibility that miracles exist. I haven’t looked up the statistics but I bet you the number is somewhere between 80-90%.

If you have a conversation with a group of people in a context where it’s safe to share “really weird stuff”, it won’t take long for the most amazing stories to emerge.

I’ve found two kinds of people who dogmatically deny the possibility of miracles:

1. Atheists. For some, no quantity of evidence will budge them. The most common retort I hear is, “Why doesn’t God heal amputees?” Their logic seems to be: “God doesn’t heal everybody… therefore God never healed anybody.” Then they categorically refuse to examine any evidence at all. (Regarding amputees, I include links to a thoroughly documented case of a Spanish man whose amputated leg grew back in 1640.)

Some forms of evidence are more solid than others. Many atheists flat out will not believe any miracle story that is not accompanied by rigorous documentation. So with atheists in mind, I’ve been painstakingly careful to include:

• A book by a MD that includes X-rays, doctors’ reports and documentation of 10 miracles
• A report in a peer reviewed scientific journal about blind and deaf being healed in Mozambique
• An unedited 13 minute video from 2010 where a woman well known to be paralyzed for 22 years stands up and walks
• News media reporting of miraculous events
• Damaging admissions – healing prayers NOT answered. We’re not painting a romanticized picture, we’re telling it like it is

Most atheists, upon carefully examining this page, fall silent and disappear. Which is a form of proof in itself.

2. Extremely conservative evangelical Christians. Some give me a lot of heat over this.

What I’ve found is they almost always believe miracles are *possible*. What they don’t believe is what the Bible plainly says: that some people are gifted by God with healing power. They generally won’t acknowledge that fully 98% of the miracles in the Bible are enacted by teachers, healers or prophets exercising their spiritual authority. Very few miracles in the Bible occur when God just suddenly decides to independently intervene for His own mysterious reasons.

I get considerably more resistance from the Christians than from the atheists. Very often Christians attribute these miracles to Lucifer. Which is just amazing, because Jesus said attributing God’s power to Satan was the unpardonable sin – blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.

This should not be surprising because Jesus’ fiercest opponents were all deeply religious people. I’ve actually found an interesting similarity between atheists and some Christians. The well-known Christian author John MacArthur cites the work of militant atheist James Randi in making his case against modern-day miracles. (Does anything about that strike you as odd?)

Someone asked me why it was so much easier to heal people in India than the United States. Mark 6:5 comes to mind:

“And because of their unbelief, Jesus couldn’t do any miracles among them except to place his hands on a few sick people and heal them.”

Above all, this demonstrates how powerfully belief colors perception. The eyes can only see what the mind is prepared to accept.

Tricky aspect of miracles: It’s not possible to mathematically or scientifically prove, in the most ultimate rigorous sense, that something was a miracle. Someone can always hypothesize that there’s some other perfectly rational, scientific reason for what happened, even if they have no idea what that reason might have been.

The believer can just as easily counter that those rational mechanisms were still ordained by God. So round and round it goes.

At least once somebody acknowledges that the blind person can now see, we’ve escaped from the realm of denial.

The believer can also point out that the blind person started seeing while somebody was praying for him – not while he was, say, brushing his teeth or eating a burrito at Taco Bell.

I can’t tell you how many ways my faith projects – www.cosmicfingerprints.com, www.coffeehousetheology.com – all my reading, exploring and debating – have honed my skills as a marketer. I would go so far as to say 1/3 of my marketing education came from my efforts to integrate the concrete and the spiritual.

My #1 philosophy of copywriting is:

“You never have to make up anything to have a great story because truth is stranger than fiction.” This comes from the Bible, which presents every single person with utterly unvarnished honesty. Every single character in the Bible – Adam, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, David, Solomon, John the Baptist, Peter – is presented as-is. No puff pieces about any of them.

Jesus Christ stands in utter contrast to all of them. He is the flawless Lamb of God. The imperfections of all the others highlight Jesus’ perfect character like nothing else ever could. Jesus is the superhero that every human secretly craves. He’s also unafraid of controversy, unconcerned with political correctness.

He demonstrated that if you want to be effective, you must polarize people. In John 2, the Jews said:

“What sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?”

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

They replied, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken.

I hope I have polarized people on the subject of miracles. And for any who claim to follow Christ and yet deny that miracles are for today, I ask you: “Where and when did anyone in the Bible ever say they were going to go away? Please show me, in context.”

Please read my long-form sales letter that attempts to convince you that Jesus wants to heal you. See my proof. Go to www.coffeehousetheology.com/miracles

I’d love your comments on this essay on proof and persuasion. Post them below.

Perry Marshall

P.S.: A person who really wants to get to the bottom of this will spend hours reading every one of the 5000 words and watching every video. They’ll buy every book and follow every link. They’ll read the many hundreds of comments and trace every thread. A person could easily spend 10 hours on this one article. Hey, didn’t Jesus say “Those who seek will find”?

They’ll ask questions on the blog. They’ll hunt for more. Then they’ll attend a healing conference somewhere. Some of ’em will get healed.

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