Here we interact critically with the volume The Miracle Myth: Why Belief in the Resurrection and the Supernatural Is Unjustified (Columbia University, 2016) by University of Wisconsin philosopher Lawrence Shapiro, who contends that even if miracles occur, proper epistemological justification is unattainable. In addition, he argues that the historical evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is deeply problematic. We engage Shapiro’s philosophical and historical arguments by raising several significant issues within his own arguments, while also briefly providing some positive reasons to think that if a miracle did occur, one may be epistemologically justified in believing it.

In this paper I discuss Nancey Murphy’s nonreductive physicalist perspective on personal identity and eschatological resurrection offered in her recent work, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? I argue that if we take Murphy to be presenting actual metaphysical positions on these issues, it is very difficult to see how they go together coherently. Contrary to Murphy’s explicit claim to be presenting metaphysical criteria for personal identity, I argue that it appears she is instead offering an epistemological or psychological account of identity. I conclude that Murphy may need to modify or reject either her criteria for personal numerical identity or her view of the resurrection in order to consistently hold the other. Alternately, she could view this inconsistency as a failure of the underlying physicalist assumptions of her “scientific research program” and thus reject her physicalist assumptions altogether.