“Michael Shermer, a well-known atheist, says miraculous claims always have a natural explanation.”

This is so ironical, that’s why the problem exists. There’s a natural world explanation (the world of appearances) and a purely personally explanation always. The synchronization of inner and outer world content is the ‘miracle’. The difference between psychosis and personal revelation is found in William James, its comforting to know that he recognized that a thin veil of language separates the world of appearances from another world. The doubleness of life has been well established. That’s one reason for the word ‘synchronicity’ to have been made up, or ‘meaningful coincidence’, a term that is quite accurate, strings of events that happen over decades are very convincing. Science doesn’t go there. Personally I wouldn’t abandon string theory. Biology with its cell which demands “replicate thyself” and the atom are synchronized already in every movement by a living organism. And everything seems to be alive on some scale.

The irony is that the ‘medium is the message’ to re-use a quotation from Noam Chomsky. Any idea that has the extension through Time that religion has, must have some basis and some reason for it’s continuation. The word ‘miracle’ is so inappropriate in the present because everything was once a miracle.

Occam’s Razor doesn’t necessarily state that the simplest explanation is true, it states that once all extraneous material is removed, the details that remain are enough to reveal the facts. A movie is an example, isn’t it?

It’s so sad that the question of whether Jesus was real obscures the fact that the story of that life contains new ideas that no other religious leader revealed: “There is a father in heaven”, there is another world than the physical world, a kingdom and it is within you.” That doesn’t require proof of any kind other than can be found by comparing the content of that messenger to other ‘messengers’ from that hidden world. There are differences. Love as we think of it wants what it wants. There must be a scientific basis yet to be recognized for ‘do unto others as you would have done to you’ and’love your neighbor as yourself.

In the past 25 years I’ve witnessed and received miracles both physical and mentally apprehensible,every one on the planet has received something that was fantasy less than 50 years ago.

The recognition of new information has almost always occurred in one mind that went against the tide of the ‘status quo’. The greatest irony is that every person’s life contains the unexplainable kind of incidents that happen only to an individual, that can convince that person they are being related to and directed uniquely, not merely as a speck but as an individual ‘viewing point’ on the planet. The collective itself is very difficult to convince

I think that it can make a big difference. Most Christians think that they have theological, moral, and historic backing for their faith. Once Christians grasp both the complete lack of historic evidence for JC and the positive evidence that he’s just a myth, they lose a leg of their tripod. Cognitive dissonance can ensue. Some will question their beliefs and realize the many lies that they’ve been fed. This is what happened to Dan Barker (of FFRF.org). He was a fundie evangelist preacher who started to question the historicity of JC. In his own words, he threw out all the bath water and found that there was no baby. This started him down the path to atheism, and he’s now a great evangelist for rational thought. His book “Godless” is excellent. http://www.ffrf.org/books

See also (by Dan Barker):
“Debunking the Historical Jesus”
http://ffrf.org/fttoday/2006/march/barker.php

Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?
http://www.ffrf.org/about/bybarker/rise.php

For many more articles, see “Christian Historicity” at
http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Debate.html#hist

For the purpose of scientific evaluations, a miracle can be defined as follows:

‘A miracle is an event or an occurence beyond the level of being objectively understood or deciphered by an individual or a group of individuals, at a given time or situation’. (Reference: Psychosomatic Structure of Miracles – Dr. P K Narayanan)

The other “historical reference” that people often use is in the writings (about 93 CE) attributed to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. This is also an obvious forgery.

I checked out the website for Bart Erhman’s course, and he seems to not deal with these problems.

I repeat, there is no reliable evidence that Jesus ever even existed. The epistles and gospels were explicitly not written by eyewitnesses, and no first century historian even referred to Jesus.