December 18, 2025 ā¢ 10 mins
Can miracles actually be proven—or do they always require blind faith? In this episode, bestselling author and former skeptic Lee Strobel joins the podcast to explore the evidence behind modern-day miracles and his upcoming film, The Case for Miracles (in theaters December 15–18).
Drawing from peer-reviewed medical journals, eyewitness testimony, and global research, Lee explains how science, reason, and faith intersect when it comes to supernatural healing. The conversation tackles hard questions about unanswered prayers, the purpose of miracles, and why reports of miraculous healings appear more frequently in certain parts of the world. Whether you’re a believer, skeptic, or somewhere in between, this episode invites you to examine the evidence—and decide where it leads.
Highlights
-
Can miracles be scientifically documented or investigated?
-
The definition of a miracle—and what it isn’t
-
A medically verified case of instant healing from blindness
-
Why miracles don’t “violate” the laws of nature
-
The difference between coincidence, placebo, and genuine miracles
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Why miracles often cluster in parts of the developing world
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How to wrestle with faith when healing doesn’t come
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Lee Strobel’s personal story of suffering and unanswered prayer
-
Why The Case for Miracles is designed for skeptics and seekers
Join the Conversation
Do you believe miracles still happen today—and what role does faith play when prayers go unanswered?
Share your thoughts and join the conversation using #LifeAudio.
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š§ Discover more faith-centered podcasts at LifeAudio.com
Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Life audio. Do you believe a miracle can be provenly? Well,
I think, like anything else you look at evidence. Proof
is a funny word because you know, I come from
a law background, and to prove something meaning something versus
provide evidence for And I think what we have is
evidence from science, from eyewitnesses and so forth that point
(00:23):
in a direction of something being true. Do we have
to take kind of a step of faith in the
same direction the evidence is pointing? Yeah, I think we do.
But we do that every day of our lives. So
very few things other than mathematics, it is provable beyond
any doubt whatsoever. There's always some question that needs to
be resolved by the quality and the quantity of the
(00:44):
evidence that we have.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Tell us an example or two of significant miracles in
this movie that maybe you know encourage your faith, and
of course, yeah, the case for miracles is the movie
December the fifteth through the eighteenth.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, one of the ones that we talk about is
a woman who is blind for a dozen years with
an incurable condition. She went to a school for the blind,
she learned how to rebrail, she walked with a white cane,
and she married a Baptist passer and one night they
getting ready to go to bed, and she's already in bed.
He comes over. He puts his hand on her shoulder.
He begins to cry, and he begins to pray and says, God,
I know you can heal my wife. I know you
(01:17):
can do it, and I pray that you do it tonight.
And with that, she opened her eyes and said, I've
got perfect eyesight. She saw her husband for the first time.
She said, for years there was darkness, there was nothing. Now,
all of a sudden, it's a miracle. I can see.
And she said, in her words, I've got perfect vision now.
That her eyesight continued for the rest of her life,
(01:39):
which was another fifty years. So what do you do
with something like that. This case was investigated by multiple
medical researchers and it was published in a peer reviewed
medical journal. So this is an incredible case that I
don't think as a natural explanation. I mean, this is
an incurable condition, juvenile macular degeneration. You don't just see
(01:59):
that being instantaneously.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Cure it after a prayer.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
How would you define miracle? What's the definition that you
applied for this book and this movie.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I think the best definition to say a miracle is
an event brought about the power of God, that is
a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for
the purpose of showing that God has acted in history. So,
in other words, a lot of people misunderstand miracles. They think, oh,
you can't have a miracle because it would violate the
laws of nature. That's not what a miracle is about.
(02:29):
You know, I'm picking up something from my desk or
this pen. If I were to drop this pen, the
law of gravity says it's going to hit the floor.
If I drop this pen and you reach it and
grab it before it hits the floor, you're not overturning
the law of gravity, and you're not violating the law
of gravity. You're merely intervening. And that's what a miracle is.
(02:49):
We have good evidence from cosmology and physics, for example,
that there is a creator behind our universe, and if
indeed a creator can create our universe, then for him
to vene and the same laws of nature that he
created would be child's play.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
What about an everyday occurrence, because we often use the
term miracle to describe somebody running into somebody that they
have been singing years. Yeah, and answered prayer, Yeah, what
would you say about those types of incidents being called
a miracle?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Well, you know, I think you can have great coincidences.
I think, you know, for me to document it as
a miracle, I think it's got to be a well
documented it's got to have multiple eye witnesses with no
more but to deceive. It's no natural explanation and so forth.
So you know, if if all of a sudden, I
pull up and I see a parking lot in the
middle of a crowded city, and I say it's a
(03:41):
miracle I got a parkings place, say well, maybe not,
you know. And let's face the third cases of fraud
where people pretend to have a miraculous ceiling. There are
cases of misdiagnosis or someone says, oh, a seal of cancer,
but the original diagnosis was wrong. We have the placebo
effect where people who think they're going to feel better,
all of a sudden will feel better. So there are
(04:03):
some explanations going to account for some miracles. And yet
I did a national survey in which we asked a
cross section of Americans, have you ever had at least
one experience in your life you can only explain as
a miracle of God in thirty eight percent of American
adults said yes. Now, if we got rid of ninety
nine percent of those and said okay, they think it
was a miracle but a big coincidence, that would still
(04:25):
leave a million miracles just in the United States.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
What do you think the purpose of the miracles are?
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I think they deepen our faith. They point us toward God.
We see clusters of miracles taking place. I don't think
miracles are evenly distributed around the planet Earth. We tend
to see them in places where the gospel is just
now breaking, in cultures where, by the way, they don't
have a lot of literate people who can't read a Bible,
and so in Mozambique, for instance, in parts of Brazil,
(04:53):
we see clusters of the miraculous taking places, and I
think that points people toward the reality of God.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You still my next question, because I was going to
ask you, do you believe miracles are more prevalent in
certain parts of the world than others?
Speaker 3 (05:05):
The answer is yes, in your opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
It is. And in fact, there was a study done
by a PhD from Harvard. It was a professor at
Indiana University who took researchers to Mozambique, where there's a
cluster of miracles. They went into the rural areas. They said,
bring us all your deaf and blind. They would then
test them scientifically, what is their level of vision? What
is their level of hearing? Then they were immediately prayed
(05:29):
for in the name of Jesus, and then they were
tested again scientifically. Is there any difference and get us
What they found there was improvement of virtually every case.
In fact, the average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold.
One woman named Martine could not hear the equivalent of
a jackcammer next to he when they encountered her. After
ten minutes of prayer in the name of Jesus, she
(05:49):
could here a normal conversation. Well, I was gonna ask
to go ahead and went to another place where miracles
are breaking in which and the Gospels breaking in, which
is Brazil. They did the same testing and got the
same results. This is a legitimate scientific study that was
published and accepted for publication in a secular, scientific, peer
(06:10):
reviewed medical journal, the Southern Medical Journal. That's pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
How would you counsel someone who is prank for a
miracle but it hasn't received one because they'll watch this film, yeah,
and they'll be encouraged, but they might also.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Be discouraged a little bit. How do you counsel someone
like that?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Well, you know, this is a story of our life,
my wife and I My wife has an incurable neuro
muscular condition. She's been in pain for twenty years. She
will be in pain every day for the rest of
her life unless God does a miracle and cures this
incurable condition, which she has not chosen to do. And
so we get it. We get it. And yet in
the New Testament, miracles were not automatic either. In one
(06:55):
chapter of the Gospels, Jesus gives the disciples the authority
to heal, and then about six chapters later, they couldn't heal.
An epilogic boy Paul never had this thorn in the
flesh was being healed. In fact, Paul had a friend
named Trophemus. Trophemus was sick. Did Paul heal him?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Know?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
He went off on a.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Mission every journey instead, So healing was not automatic in
the New Testament either. God is sovereign. God understands things
that we don't understand. And you know, the Bible says
We sometimes use this a sick cliche, but God can
take things that happened to us, that are difficult, that
are hard, that are painful, and from those if we
(07:33):
follow him, if we trusted him, he can create good
to emerge. And we see that. I see that in
my wife's life. You know, she's such a person of
sensitivity and love and compassion for others and empathy for
others that I don't know she would be if she
didn't face this issue in her own life. So God
can take things that are difficult for us and yet
(07:56):
draw good out of them.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Final question for you, perhaps, so do you hope viewers
of this movie take away from it?
Speaker 3 (08:03):
What do you hope they're talking about all the way home?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
I hope for Christians they walk away evermore in love
with God and evermore solid in their faith. But I
hope they also reach out to a friend who's maybe
a spiritual skeptic or someone who's maybe just spiritually curious
and say, hey, I just saw this movie. Why don't
you come with me tomorrow we'll see it again. I'll
see it again. You can see it for the first
time and then we could talk about and see what
(08:26):
you think. But you know, this was dumb, bad guy
who was a skeptic himself, an atheist himself, and yet
came to faith because of the evidence for a supernatural
miracle of the resurrection, and now has researched these cases
that are well documented. These are just stories that you
hear in an elevator. So I hope people use it
as an outreach and I hope it deepens the faith
(08:46):
of believers as well.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Let me ask you more question.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, because E've ben following Christianity for several decades now,
and we're kind of in a period right now where
it seems to be.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Christianity is on the rise.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Almost Bible sales are a college campus is being arenas
are being filled with college students, worship being interesting, Jesus
is up. How would you describe this movement and what
do you think How do you think the Body of
Christ should react to it.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
I think it's very encouraging. I see evidence of it.
I have a friend whose ministry is to travel the
country and to speak to audiences of college or high
school students. He said, Lee, I've seen more young people
come to faith in Jesus Christ in the last three
years than the previous eighteen years of ministry combine. Something
is going on. God is working in amazing ways right now.
(09:31):
And I think for those of us who are Christians,
this is an opportunity. You know, Christmas season is upon
us and people are more spiritually open during the Christmas season.
Let's take a risk and invite them to come to
the movie or to Christmas service as a church, give
them a Christian book or whatever. But you see this
season as an opportunity to reach out, to be able,
to be praying for them, to be looking for opportunities
(09:54):
or spiritual conversations, and then when those opportunities come up,
they have the courage to kind of pursue them.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Lee, thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
I enjoyed it, Michael, Thank you, my friend.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
If you enjoy today's interview, please make sure to subscribe
and share the episode with a friend. A big thanks
to the team at Life Audio for their partnership with
us on the podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com,
you will find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in
their network.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
See you next time.
Life audio. Do you believe a miracle can be provenly? Well,
I think, like anything else you look at evidence. Proof
is a funny word because you know, I come from
a law background, and to prove something meaning something versus
provide evidence for And I think what we have is
evidence from science, from eyewitnesses and so forth that point
(00:23):
in a direction of something being true. Do we have
to take kind of a step of faith in the
same direction the evidence is pointing? Yeah, I think we do.
But we do that every day of our lives. So
very few things other than mathematics, it is provable beyond
any doubt whatsoever. There's always some question that needs to
be resolved by the quality and the quantity of the
(00:44):
evidence that we have.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Tell us an example or two of significant miracles in
this movie that maybe you know encourage your faith, and
of course, yeah, the case for miracles is the movie
December the fifteth through the eighteenth.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yeah, one of the ones that we talk about is
a woman who is blind for a dozen years with
an incurable condition. She went to a school for the blind,
she learned how to rebrail, she walked with a white cane,
and she married a Baptist passer and one night they
getting ready to go to bed, and she's already in bed.
He comes over. He puts his hand on her shoulder.
He begins to cry, and he begins to pray and says, God,
I know you can heal my wife. I know you
(01:17):
can do it, and I pray that you do it tonight.
And with that, she opened her eyes and said, I've
got perfect eyesight. She saw her husband for the first time.
She said, for years there was darkness, there was nothing. Now,
all of a sudden, it's a miracle. I can see.
And she said, in her words, I've got perfect vision now.
That her eyesight continued for the rest of her life,
(01:39):
which was another fifty years. So what do you do
with something like that. This case was investigated by multiple
medical researchers and it was published in a peer reviewed
medical journal. So this is an incredible case that I
don't think as a natural explanation. I mean, this is
an incurable condition, juvenile macular degeneration. You don't just see
(01:59):
that being instantaneously.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Cure it after a prayer.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
How would you define miracle? What's the definition that you
applied for this book and this movie.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
I think the best definition to say a miracle is
an event brought about the power of God, that is
a temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature for
the purpose of showing that God has acted in history. So,
in other words, a lot of people misunderstand miracles. They think, oh,
you can't have a miracle because it would violate the
laws of nature. That's not what a miracle is about.
(02:29):
You know, I'm picking up something from my desk or
this pen. If I were to drop this pen, the
law of gravity says it's going to hit the floor.
If I drop this pen and you reach it and
grab it before it hits the floor, you're not overturning
the law of gravity, and you're not violating the law
of gravity. You're merely intervening. And that's what a miracle is.
(02:49):
We have good evidence from cosmology and physics, for example,
that there is a creator behind our universe, and if
indeed a creator can create our universe, then for him
to vene and the same laws of nature that he
created would be child's play.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
What about an everyday occurrence, because we often use the
term miracle to describe somebody running into somebody that they
have been singing years. Yeah, and answered prayer, Yeah, what
would you say about those types of incidents being called
a miracle?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Well, you know, I think you can have great coincidences.
I think, you know, for me to document it as
a miracle, I think it's got to be a well
documented it's got to have multiple eye witnesses with no
more but to deceive. It's no natural explanation and so forth.
So you know, if if all of a sudden, I
pull up and I see a parking lot in the
middle of a crowded city, and I say it's a
(03:41):
miracle I got a parkings place, say well, maybe not,
you know. And let's face the third cases of fraud
where people pretend to have a miraculous ceiling. There are
cases of misdiagnosis or someone says, oh, a seal of cancer,
but the original diagnosis was wrong. We have the placebo
effect where people who think they're going to feel better,
all of a sudden will feel better. So there are
(04:03):
some explanations going to account for some miracles. And yet
I did a national survey in which we asked a
cross section of Americans, have you ever had at least
one experience in your life you can only explain as
a miracle of God in thirty eight percent of American
adults said yes. Now, if we got rid of ninety
nine percent of those and said okay, they think it
was a miracle but a big coincidence, that would still
(04:25):
leave a million miracles just in the United States.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
What do you think the purpose of the miracles are?
Speaker 1 (04:31):
I think they deepen our faith. They point us toward God.
We see clusters of miracles taking place. I don't think
miracles are evenly distributed around the planet Earth. We tend
to see them in places where the gospel is just
now breaking, in cultures where, by the way, they don't
have a lot of literate people who can't read a Bible,
and so in Mozambique, for instance, in parts of Brazil,
(04:53):
we see clusters of the miraculous taking places, and I
think that points people toward the reality of God.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
You still my next question, because I was going to
ask you, do you believe miracles are more prevalent in
certain parts of the world than others?
Speaker 3 (05:05):
The answer is yes, in your opinion.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
It is. And in fact, there was a study done
by a PhD from Harvard. It was a professor at
Indiana University who took researchers to Mozambique, where there's a
cluster of miracles. They went into the rural areas. They said,
bring us all your deaf and blind. They would then
test them scientifically, what is their level of vision? What
is their level of hearing? Then they were immediately prayed
(05:29):
for in the name of Jesus, and then they were
tested again scientifically. Is there any difference and get us
What they found there was improvement of virtually every case.
In fact, the average improvement in visual acuity was tenfold.
One woman named Martine could not hear the equivalent of
a jackcammer next to he when they encountered her. After
ten minutes of prayer in the name of Jesus, she
(05:49):
could here a normal conversation. Well, I was gonna ask
to go ahead and went to another place where miracles
are breaking in which and the Gospels breaking in, which
is Brazil. They did the same testing and got the
same results. This is a legitimate scientific study that was
published and accepted for publication in a secular, scientific, peer
(06:10):
reviewed medical journal, the Southern Medical Journal. That's pretty powerful stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
How would you counsel someone who is prank for a
miracle but it hasn't received one because they'll watch this film, yeah,
and they'll be encouraged, but they might also.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Be discouraged a little bit. How do you counsel someone
like that?
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Well, you know, this is a story of our life,
my wife and I My wife has an incurable neuro
muscular condition. She's been in pain for twenty years. She
will be in pain every day for the rest of
her life unless God does a miracle and cures this
incurable condition, which she has not chosen to do. And
so we get it. We get it. And yet in
the New Testament, miracles were not automatic either. In one
(06:55):
chapter of the Gospels, Jesus gives the disciples the authority
to heal, and then about six chapters later, they couldn't heal.
An epilogic boy Paul never had this thorn in the
flesh was being healed. In fact, Paul had a friend
named Trophemus. Trophemus was sick. Did Paul heal him?
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Know?
Speaker 3 (07:12):
He went off on a.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Mission every journey instead, So healing was not automatic in
the New Testament either. God is sovereign. God understands things
that we don't understand. And you know, the Bible says
We sometimes use this a sick cliche, but God can
take things that happened to us, that are difficult, that
are hard, that are painful, and from those if we
(07:33):
follow him, if we trusted him, he can create good
to emerge. And we see that. I see that in
my wife's life. You know, she's such a person of
sensitivity and love and compassion for others and empathy for
others that I don't know she would be if she
didn't face this issue in her own life. So God
can take things that are difficult for us and yet
(07:56):
draw good out of them.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Final question for you, perhaps, so do you hope viewers
of this movie take away from it?
Speaker 3 (08:03):
What do you hope they're talking about all the way home?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
I hope for Christians they walk away evermore in love
with God and evermore solid in their faith. But I
hope they also reach out to a friend who's maybe
a spiritual skeptic or someone who's maybe just spiritually curious
and say, hey, I just saw this movie. Why don't
you come with me tomorrow we'll see it again. I'll
see it again. You can see it for the first
time and then we could talk about and see what
(08:26):
you think. But you know, this was dumb, bad guy
who was a skeptic himself, an atheist himself, and yet
came to faith because of the evidence for a supernatural
miracle of the resurrection, and now has researched these cases
that are well documented. These are just stories that you
hear in an elevator. So I hope people use it
as an outreach and I hope it deepens the faith
(08:46):
of believers as well.
Speaker 3 (08:48):
Let me ask you more question.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, because E've ben following Christianity for several decades now,
and we're kind of in a period right now where
it seems to be.
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Christianity is on the rise.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Almost Bible sales are a college campus is being arenas
are being filled with college students, worship being interesting, Jesus
is up. How would you describe this movement and what
do you think How do you think the Body of
Christ should react to it.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
I think it's very encouraging. I see evidence of it.
I have a friend whose ministry is to travel the
country and to speak to audiences of college or high
school students. He said, Lee, I've seen more young people
come to faith in Jesus Christ in the last three
years than the previous eighteen years of ministry combine. Something
is going on. God is working in amazing ways right now.
(09:31):
And I think for those of us who are Christians,
this is an opportunity. You know, Christmas season is upon
us and people are more spiritually open during the Christmas season.
Let's take a risk and invite them to come to
the movie or to Christmas service as a church, give
them a Christian book or whatever. But you see this
season as an opportunity to reach out, to be able,
to be praying for them, to be looking for opportunities
(09:54):
or spiritual conversations, and then when those opportunities come up,
they have the courage to kind of pursue them.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Lee, thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
I enjoyed it, Michael, Thank you, my friend.
Speaker 4 (10:06):
If you enjoy today's interview, please make sure to subscribe
and share the episode with a friend. A big thanks
to the team at Life Audio for their partnership with
us on the podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com,
you will find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in
their network.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
See you next time.
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