The Biggest Bubble?

David Marshall made an interesting comment in the latest Apologetics 315 interview:

"I'm not a real big fan of inerrancy, because it's kind of like blowing up a big balloon and then asking the opponent to pop the Bubble, pop the balloon with a pin. Even if the Bible is without error, I wouldn't be a fan of the doctrine because I think it's bad strategy. The materialist, skeptics and atheists, they've blown up the biggest balloon of all and that balloon is materialism. They're saying that not one single miracle has ever happened in the history of the universe. Well I'm sorry but they do happen. And that's another contribution of missions. Working as a missionary in Asia, I found that God did sometimes answer prayer, sometimes the answers changed lives in amazing ways. Now of course there's all kinds of difficulties about proving that, and we can't use the scientific method to test a historical claim, but it's much more fun to make a positive argument for something than to defend against somebody else's attack".

There's two interesting comments here that are worth expanding on so I've highlighted them. One is the nature of historical events. By definition, Historical events happen once. And by definition, Science looks for repeatable patterns. So by mere definition, we can't expect historical events to meet the standards of scientific evidence. Does this mean that we can never have reliable evidence for Historical events? No, clearly not. Not unless you believe documents, writings, archaological findings, eye witness reports and all manner of historical data are all conceptually incapable of providing evidence for something.

The more interesting comment is the first bolded part where Marshall refers to Materialism as "The Biggest Bubble". Marshall is referring to what I call The Problem of Total Denial. To me, this is the single biggest problem for materialism and for naturalism. The problem is this: If they're consistent, Materialists and Naturalists must deny the many reported events and occurences in the world which do not fit into their paradigm. They must take many reports and then either deny that the event happened as it was described, or find a naturalistic explanation for it. I will write about this more in the future as I really want to develop my thinking on the issue. In the books I've read on Philosophy, Apologetics, the Historicity of Jesus etc, this is an issue that doesn't receive nearly enough coverage. It is truly underrated. I'm glad Marshall reminded me of it!