In this post I’m going to explore the oddity of believing only in Christian miracles. It seems problematic to me that Christians only believe in Christian miracles. After all, miracle testimonies aren’t exclusive to any one religion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Muhammad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Gautama_Buddha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Joseph_Smith
So the question for Christians is: why do you believe Jesus healed people and Moses parted the Red Sea but not that Joseph Smith healed people and Buddha walked and spoke immediately after birth?

I’m going to try and show that Christians are usually justified in believing in Christian miracle testimonies if they already believe in God and therefore believe the prior probability of the Christian miracles occurring is fairly high- much higher than that of non-Christian miracles. In other words, they believe Christian miracle testimonies because they’re already Christians. Because of this, I think miracle stories are a little disappointing: because they are only believed by Christians and can’t give someone a reason to be a Christian.

I think my argument against the Christian would be something like this:

If you believe that Christianity is true, you must believe that Christian testimonies about miracles (i.e. those found in the Bible) are true but miracle testimonies from other religions are false.
You believe Christianity is true.
Therefore, you must believe that your testimonies about miracles (i.e. those found in the Bible) are true but miracle testimonies from other religions are false. (1,2 MP)
In order to be justified in believing that Christian miracle testimonies are true and non-Christian miracle testimonies are false, you must have adequate reasons for believing the probability of the Christian miracles happening is much higher than the probability of the non-Christian miracles happening.
You lack such adequate reasons.
Therefore, you are not justified in believing that Christian miracle testimonies are true and non-Christian miracle testimonies are false. (4,5 MT)

A couple preliminary notes:
First of all, my arguments talk about probability. I’m borrowing this from Larry Shapiro’s Argument Against Miracles which I’m also posting about. Check out this video on Bayes’ Theorem to learn about prior and conditional probability or to check and make sure I’m using it correctly:
https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/wi-phi/wiphi-critical-thinking/wiphi-fundamentals/v/bayes-theorem
Second, my argument targets mainstream Christian beliefs, which include beliefs such as: Jesus was raised from the dead, Moses parted the Red Sea, Christianity is true, Christian miracle accounts are true, other religions are false and their miracle accounts are false, etc… I’ll consider objections to those claims if anyone raises any, but I’m not interested in individual and unique takes on Christianity. I would like to avoid debating these points because I think they distract from the main point of this argument, which is that it is the difficulty in believing in miracle testimonies from just one religion (I use protestant Christianity as the example because I’m most familiar with it).
Third, I know I’ve jumped the gun a little and assumed premise 5 is correct. I just wanted to show my argument beforehand so my objective is obvious to the reader. I think this is the most important and contentious part of my argument. Now I’ll try to defend premise 5 by responding to the objections I anticipate.

I think Christians can argue their miracle accounts are more probable in two ways, by arguing that:

Christian miracles have a significantly higher prior probability than non-Christian miracles.
Or
Christian miracle testimonies are significantly more reliable/accurate than non-Christian miracle testimonies.

Both of these, if they’re true, would increase the conditional probability that Christian miracles happened and non-Christian miracles didn’t. I’ll present a couple of objections along these veins and try to show they’re unsuccessful.
For the first kind of objection, I’ve thought of a couple reasons a Christian could give to show Christian miracles have a higher prior probability. One option is to say the miracles themselves are different, like Professor Dave Blomberg says here: “But there are no stories from the ancient world (or the modern world, for that matter) of people known to have been real human beings, which began to circulate during the lifetimes of their followers, in which those individuals died completely, rose bodily to life again, and were declared to have atoned for the sins of the world.” Check out this link for more on that: https://www.namb.net/apologetics-blog/the-credibility-of-jesus-miracles/ . I don’t find this argument particularly compelling, since it seems to argue something like this:
If Jesus’ miracles are unique, then they probably happened.
Jesus’ miracles are unique.
Therefore, they probably happened (1,2 MP)
Of course, many religions have unique miracle stories, and uniqueness obviously doesn’t increase the probability of something occurring, so I reject premise 1. In general, I am skeptical that a strong argument can be formulated that Christian miracles are of a different sort from non-Christian miracles, and this difference gives them a higher prior probability.
Perhaps the best way to argue that Christian miracles have a higher prior probability is to argue first that a god exists through arguments such as the Ontological, Teleological, and Axiological arguments. If then one can successfully argue that this god is the Christian God, then the prior probabilities for Christian miracles will be higher.
My objection to this is that miracles cannot then stand on their own. In my eyes, this declaws miracles- they are supposed to give you reasons to believe in God, but they only succeed if you already believe it’s probable that God exists. That seems like a bad result to me.

For the second kind of objection, they’d have to show why Christian miracle testimonies are more reliable. It doesn’t seem like we can say a witness to a Christian miracle is somehow more reliable than a witness to a non-Christian miracle, so I don’t think that’s an option.
Another route a Christian can take is to claim that there were more independent witnesses to the Christian miracles, and with each witness the conditional probability rises until it’s most likely that the miracle happened. Prof. Blomberg in the link above argues that Josephus and the Talmud corobberated Jesus’ miracles even though they were Jewish and didn’t have skin in the game like Christian witnesses and gospel-writers did. Choosing arbitrary values and plugging them into Bayes’ Theorem, you could understand the math behind this situation to be something like this: suppose your prior probability that Jesus actually being raised from the dead is 10%. If you think the gospel-writer is only 60% reliable since they’re highly invested in the resurrection and therefore biased, then their account only increases the conditional probability of Jesus’ resurrection to about 14%. But then when you hear that Josephus also reported this miracle, and you think he’s 80% reliable since he doesn’t stand to gain by reporting the miracle, the conditional probability increases from 14% to 39%. If enough witnesses report the miracle, the conditional probability increases to a level high enough to justify believing in it. The argument behind this objection would be something like this:

If there are enough reliable witness testimonies to a miracle, then you are justified in believing the testimonies.
There are enough reliable witness testimonies for Jesus’ miracles.
Therefore, you are justified in believing in His miracles (1,2 MP)

I have a few issues with this sort of objection that appeals to a large number of independent witnesses. What about Christian miracles with relatively few witnesses? What about miracles with only biased and therefore less reliable witnesses, such as those only seen by the disciples (e.g. Jesus walking on water)? If we use Bayes’ Theorem to determine what we’re justified in believing in, should we refrain from believing in those miracles since the conditional probability doesn’t get high enough? This follows from the argument above by denying premise 2, and I think it’s a bad result for the Christian. Also, what about non-Christian miracles that had many witnesses? This example won’t be an issue for the large number of people who believe Catholics are Christians, but for protestant Christian, what about the miracle of Fatima and the dancing sun, which was witnessed by over 30,000 people? Or what about Joseph Smith healing a crowd of people? These follow premise 1, after all. I guess a Protestant Christian’s prior probability that a non-Christian miracle occurred has to be astronomically low in order that this many witness testimonies fail to increase the conditional probability high enough to justify believing they occurred. If this is so, you run into the problem I presented above, where the prior probability of the miracle occurring can only be high if you already believe in God and so you don’t need miracles to convince you anyway.
I’ve tried to argue that miracle testimonies do not give reasons for believing in God, starting from the worry that lots of religions have miracle testimonies. I’ve tried to argue that, if you believe in Christian miracles but don’t want to accept that other miracles happened, you can only justify this if you already believe in God, thus stripping away any convincing power of miracles. Sorry for the long post, and thanks for your time and objections.