Demythologizing Bible Miracles Creates Absurdities

What drives science reporters
to undermine the Bible?

There’s a long-standing tradition by modernists to “demythologize” Biblical miracles, claiming that they have a natural explanation. For those having an anti-supernatural bias, the explanations can seem more scientific. Often, though, the alternative explanation can appear less logical than the miracle – in effect replacing one kind of miracle with another.

Study suggests Jesus’s ‘miraculous catch of fish’ may have had a less-than-miraculous explanation (4 Nov 2024, Phys.org). Reporter Bob Yirka summarized a paper in Water Resources Research (a journal of the American Geophysical Union, AGU) that tries to explain away two accounts of a “miraculous catch of fish” told in the Gospels. In the first, Jesus turned two fish into enough to feed a crowd of 5,000 people (not counting women and children). In another, the resurrected Christ told the disciples to cast their nets on the side of the boat after having fished all night and caught nothing, and they hauled in a multitude of fish.

Yirka offers no criticism of the naturalistic hypothesis, writing that a team of researchers

found that lake conditions during the time of Jesus were similar to those that lead to modern fish die-offs, suggesting the miracles were merely coincidental events.

Sea of Galilee at Tabgha, near where the miraculous catch of fish is thought to have occurred. (DFC)

But Yirka did not give the details of conditions required. According to the paper, windy conditions of the Sea of Galilee infrequently cause stratification of the water column, resulting in blooms of toxic microbes, such that fish become deprived of oxygen. Mass kills of fish at those times wash up on the shore. Details are given in the paper for those curious about this hypothesis that six scientists think explains (or explains away) the miracles. How often do these conditions exist? The scientists studied one occurrence in 2012.

The phenomenon of fish-kills caused by upwelling of internal waves is infrequent in Lake Kinneret. During 34 years of work at KLL, the last author recalls this phenomenon only two other times, once in April 2007 co-occurring with a massive bloom of the dinoflagellate Peridinium gatunense and once in the early 1990s (exact date not recorded). Since 2012, no such observations have been reported. The reason is the rarity of meeting several prerequisite conditions: (a) strong winds that induce internal waves and result in upwelling of water from 12 m depth to near the KLL shoreline, (b) timing such that the upwelling occurs shortly after the onset of thermal stratification, when the surface mixed layer extends to a shallow depth, (c) timing such that the hypolimnion is already anoxic, (d) coincidence of schools of fish with the nearshore region where the upwelling takes place and (e) fish which are sensitive to low dissolved oxygen levels.

The authors conclude that “It is possible that similar fish-kill events, or even only concentration of live fish near the shore in an event of partial upwelling, happened at the same site on the shore of Lake Kinneret already two millennia ago.”

To believe the naturalistic explanation, one would have to accept multiple rare events occurring by coincidence at exactly the time of the miracle accounts in the gospels, and that these occurred within the three years of Jesus’ ministry. The miracle accounts, written by eyewitnesses, surprised seasoned fishermen who should have been intimately familiar with rare fish kills. Moreover, in none of the miracle accounts did people collect fish along the shoreline. In the feeding of the 5,000, the people were seated on a hillside away from the shore, and watched Jesus as he divided two fish into enough to satisfy the crowd. Why did the crowds want to crown Jesus king as Messiah if this had been a somewhat infrequent but routine occurrence?

In the post-resurrection account, Peter cast a net upon Jesus’ order after the disciples had fished all night and caught nothing. The net was so full of live, flopping fish that it was about to break, and the disciples struggled to lift up the load into the boat. Peter, who knew fishing as a career, was motivated to worship at Jesus’ feet and acknowledge his own sinfulness. Another major problem with the naturalistic account is that fish that die from algal blooms are toxic! What fisherman would ever eat a poisoned fish that was found dead along the shore, or distribute it to others as food? Wouldn’t the crowds have started vomiting and complaining?

If the disciples knew about mass fish die-offs along the shore, wouldn’t they have said, “Never mind, Jesus, we found a bunch of dead fish on the shore here.” Instead, they were astonished and worshiped. They followed Jesus and ended up as martyrs dying for their message that Jesus, whom they witnessed alive after his crucifixion, was the Lord of glory, and all must repent and turn to him for forgiveness of sins.

It takes more faith to swallow the naturalistic story than to believe what the eyewitnesses tell us in the sacred writings.