Thinking Christian on why Muslims convert to Christianity

Apparently it has something to do with seeing God work miracles, at least in many cases. We had some discussion of present-day miracles several months ago here.

Is this a first-hand report of a raising from the dead?

One of the complaints about the case for Jesus' resurrection is that none of the Gospel writers were there on the scene.

But what about this report? It certainly sounds as if Luke was there.

Acts 20: 7-12.

7On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking until midnight. 8There were many lamps in the upstairs room where we were meeting. 9Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When he was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. 10Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. "Don't be alarmed," he said. "He's alive!" 11Then he went upstairs again and broke bread and ate. After talking until daylight, he left. 12The people took the young man home alive and were greatly comforted.

Miracles and Missionaries a redated post

A redated post.

J. D. Walters raises an interesting point in his discussion of miracles. People often say "If God performed miracles back in Bible times, why doesn't he perform them now." J. D. says in fact that there is an

- abundance of modern miracles (I don't know where you get your information, hallq; you need to spend a few years working with missionaries in Africa and China) .

What about modern miracle claims? Should we be so quick to conclude that God isn't performing miracles today? Maybe J. D. can elaborate.

More dialogue with anonymous

My claim was, I hate to have to repeat myself, that no naturalistic reconstruction of the events surrounding Christ's life, death, and resurrection is likely to work. However, I am not attempting to prosecute irrationality charges against skeptics. That is not my point. You can, as a skeptic, absorb my point without being irrational. If one's conviction that nothing supernatural ever happens carries enough epistemic weight for you, then you inability to tell the story of Jesus shouldn't bother you a whole lot. When we think about issues like this, we have to take into account the totality of the relevant evidence and we have to not simply throw away our initial intellectual predispositions; our subjective Bayesian priors. Given my priors, I'm willing to give the miraculous a chance, and I think the evidence, all told, is sufficient for me to believe it. See this Infidels paper I published back in '98.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/miracles.html
In particular I said:
If my foregoing discussion is correct, opponents of, say, the resurrection of Jesus cannot appeal to a general theory of probability to prove that anyone who accepts the resurrection is being irrational. It is also a consequence that different people can reasonably expected to have different credence functions with respect to Christian (and other) miracle claims. If you want to convince some people that Christ was resurrected, you have a much heavier burden of proof than you have in convincing others. It must be noted that there is no way, on the model I have presented, to show that everyone who denies the Resurrection is irrational, or engaged in bad faith. Of course, one can still believe that unbelievers disbelieve because of "sin" or "suppressing the truth," or what have you. But given the legitimate differences that can exist concerning the antecedent probability of the miraculous, I don't see how such charges can be defended. So the lesson here, I think, is that both apologetics and anti-apologetics should be engaged in persuasion, not coercion, and that the attempt to ground irrationality charges against one's opponents is a misguided enterprise.[22]
Nevertheless, if we have a phenomenon, and one side says "I wouldn't have expected this evidence, but based on my assessment of the total evidence, I'm going to assume that the explanation exists even though I don't know what it is, and the other side says "If we accept my position, then we do have an explanation," then if the second party is right, it scores a point against the mystery-maneuvering opponent. If that's the situation with the problem of evil, then I have no trouble saying that the atheist scores a point with that argument. A point, mind you, not game, set, and match.
I would further add that "supernatural" claims only contradict science if there is no hope of coming up with "laws of supernature" that govern the activities of God. I don't see why this is impossible in principle, though it may be difficult to come up with in practice.