Abstract

God, at least as an active agent, is excluded from today’s scientific worldview -- including the worldview of the humanities. This creates a gulf between a godless science and believers in God’s active presence in the world, a gulf that I argue is unbridgeable. I resist four temptations to take easy ways out of a real dilemma: whether to accept or dismiss this and similar miracle accounts. The first is to explain evidence and refuse to consider the events about which the evidence reports; the second, to deny that reports of miracles represent a problem since biblical actors and authors lacked Hume’s concept of inviolable laws of nature; the third, to become resigned to a putative epistemological gap that renders impossible any dialogue on religion with actors from the early modern period; the fourth, to restrict our studies to asking what the events meant to the historical actors without passing judgment on the truth value of their beliefs. I suggest that when doing historical researc