Bill Rob Bowman has written a paper comparing the Apostle Paul's encounter with Christ on the Damascus Road

and Joseph Smith's encounter with two personages he claimed to be God, the Father, and Jesus.

And that started Mormonism.

It would take us hours to critique Joseph Smith's vision and defend Paul's, but let's look at some of

the contrast that Bowman offers. This is often used by skeptics to try to show that the Christian

is in the same boat as the Mormon, despite the theological differences between the two.

If one can dismiss Joseph Smith's alleged encounter,

then one can dismiss Paul's Damascus Road experience. What are some of the initial considerations

for dealing with things like that, Bill? I think this is in principle a good objection,

and it will depend upon a close examination of the evidence in each case.

Historically, Kevin, skepticism about biblical miracles was influenced much more by Conyers

Middleton's book on counterfeit Catholic miracles than by Hume's famous essay.

Middleton argued that there are spurious miracles down through church history attributed to saints and

statues and relics and things of that sort, which nobody

believes really happened. And yet, the evidence for many of these would seem to be just as good

as the evidence for the biblical miracles. And so the result of Middleton's book was to undermine the credibility of the biblical

miracles. Dale Allison, in his most recent book, The Resurrection of Jesus, employs the same

sort of objection to cast doubt on the testimony to Jesus' empty tomb.

He claims that there are reports of so-called rainbow bodies in Tibetan Buddhism,

where Buddhist monks disappear from their tombs.

They evaporate, leaving only their hair and fingernails in the coffin.

He also gives a story from Pope Gregory the Great of someone whose tomb was found empty

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