Investigating the miraculous

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, December 10th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: encountering the supernatural. It’s something author Lee Strobel has looked into, something that happened to him.

STROBEL: Here I was 12 years old, I had a vision, a dream unlike any that ever had. The angel told me something that day I did not know: That salvation is not something we earn. It’s a free gift of God.

But he says he felt embarrassed by the experience. That’s a feeling he believes most Americans—even Christians—feel about the supernatural.

STROBEL: We want neighbors to know, oh, we're just like you. Yes, I believe in Jesus. Yes, I go to church. But any weird stuff like miracles or demons or angels, or any of that weird, you know, and I think we impoverish ourselves theologically and spiritually, by suppressing the evidence that God is still active in this world.

Strobel is an investigative journalist with degrees from the University of Missouri and Yale Law School. He also spent time as the legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. He became a Christian more than 40 years ago after setting out to disprove Christianity, and he’s since written bestselling books like The Case for Christ and The Case for a Creator.

MAST: But most recently Strobel turned his attention to the supernatural, particularly the evidence that God is still active in the world. It’s the premise for his latest book Seeing the Supernatural, and a new movie called The Case for Miracles that comes out early next week.

I spoke with Strobel recently to find out more about where his research led him.

Here’s that conversation.

Lee, it’s been pretty well documented that younger people right now are more open to the idea of the supernatural than older people are, or than younger people of previous generations. I’d like to start there and ask: why do you think that is?

STROBEL: Well, it's a good question. I think maybe they feel like they've been lied to by so many people. They've been misled by so many people. The Internet has all kinds of stuff on there you can't trust AI, who knows what's AI and what isn't advertising and so forth trying to lure them. And I think they want something that's solid and anchor for their life, and something they can rely upon and build them a future on.

MAST: Well, you’ve written a lot about miracles. I want to know, what’s the most common misunderstanding people have about modern miracles?

STROBEL: Well, I think a lot of people will attribute things to being a miracle when it's really not, you know, oh, I got a parking place here. Oh, it's a miracle. Now, probably not. Sometimes miracles are just big coincidences. Sometimes it's fraud, somebody trying to fool you. Sometimes it's the placebo effect, where you think you're going to feel better and all of a sudden you feel better. Could be a misdiagnosis. Oh, I don't have cancer anymore. Yeah, but the original diagnosis was wrong, so. But having said that, there are cases, and this is the ones we deal with in the movie that are well documented, where we have solid medical documentation, where we've got multiple incredible eyewitnesses who have no motive to deceive, where there's no natural explanation, and where it takes place in the context of prayer, when you've got those four things, and I think we can have confidence that God has intervened supernaturally in a life.

MAST: Go a little deeper for me. What are you looking for as you evaluate—you’re an investigative journalist by trade—what are you looking for as you evaluate the validity of someone’s claim of having experienced a supernatural event? What—in other words—what do you see as a responsible way of doing that?

STROBEL: Yeah, I think let's delve into it. Let's look at what is the medical data? So, one case for instance that we investigated involved a woman named Barbara. What was her diagnosis? Well, we have documents from the Mayo Clinic showing she had multiple sclerosis. We have multiple eyewitnesses who talk about her being in hospice on the verge of dying, curled up like a pretzel, virtually blind. One lung collapsed, a tube in her throat so she could breathe. Hadn't walked in seven years, or muscles had atrophied. That's well documented. And then 450 people began praying for her, and she hears a voice from the corner of her room that says, “My child, get up and walk.” And she rips the tube out from her throat. She jumps out of bed, and she's instantaneously 100% healed of the effects of multiple sclerosis. Two doctors were so blown away by this, as one doctor said, this is medically impossible, and two of them ended up writing about it in books that they wrote. One doctor, after she was healed, said later, I saw her walking down the office or down the hallway toward my office, and I said, Oh, she must have died. This must be a ghost. This can't happen. This is medically impossible. So we look at those kind of things, medical documentation, solid, credible eyewitnesses and no natural explanation. Show me another case where someone is instantaneously healed of multiple sclerosis after people pray for them. I mean, it's pretty amazing.

MAST: I think people may want to know, who do you appeal to theologically to make sure as you research this and look into things that you don’t veer too far astray?

STROBEL: Yeah, I mean, I have people in my life who are theologians, who review this kind of thing, like, for instance, for my book, The Case for miracles, I sat down for hours and hours and hours with Dr. Craig Keener, who is a theologian and historian at Asbury Seminary and has written multiple volumes about miracles, you're probably the world's leading expert on miracles, so I tap into people like that who have the theological expertise to be able to validate these cases that have. No other natural explanation other than you know what? Maybe God did do something supernatural here.

MAST: What about downsides or dangers as people explore the evidence for the supernatural?

STROBEL: Yeah, let's not be gullible. It bothers me when Christians jump too quickly to a conclusion that a miracle has happened. Sure, maybe it's within, of course, the providence of God. Maybe he allowed something to occur. But a miracle is defined as Jesus, as God supernaturally intervening in his creation. Richard Pertil, the great philosopher, described it as a miracle, as an event brought about by the power of God, that's a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history. So let's look at those cases that there's an interruption of the ordinary course of nature. That's a pretty high standard to try to determine if a miracle has taken place.

MAST: I want to know, beyond that, which case in Seeing the Supernatural keeps coming to your mind even now?

STROBEL: Well, one of my favorites is a woman who is blind with an incurable condition, juvenile macular degeneration for a dozen years, she went to a school for the blind. She learned how to read braille, and she married a pastor, and one night, they're getting ready to go to bed, and he puts his hand on her shoulder, and he begins to cry and begins to pray and says, Lord, I know you can heal my wife. I know you can do it, and I pray you do it tonight. And with that, she opened her eyes and saw her husband for the first time. And her vision remained the rest of her life. She lived another 50 plus years, and now four medical researchers documented that case and publish it in a peer reviewed medical journal. When I talk about these cases, I footnote 'em and I footnote the actual articles that have been published in these medical journals, if anybody wants further investigative evidence for what took place.

MAST: Lee Strobel is the author of Seeing the Supernatural and appears in the new movie The Case for Miracles, which is based on his book by the same name. Lee, thank you so much for being with us.

STROBEL: My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.