Miracles

Miracle claims are only possible in worldviews that include the supernatural. There can be no 'natural' — that is, naturalistic — miracles. And when we consider Jesus’ life and claimed resurrection, the case for or against specific miracles is one component of a broader case for or against Theism. Theism asserts that the transdendent creator of everything, of ourselves and our universe, is personal, in the technical sense of having personhood. By this we mean that he (he?) is self-aware, makes free choices, and is capable of action and communication.

When we say that miracles have happened, we are saying that God has personally acted in his world, and that these acts were recognizably supernatural. Being the product of intelligence, we expect them to have meaning. We do not expect them to conform to the regular course of nature, or to what can be explained in terms of natural causes. Natural laws have no more relevance to miracles than they do to God himself — if he made the laws in the first place, he is not going to be constrained by them.

Miracles are much like special programming. Say you're watching television and you hear, We now interrupt our regular programming for this special announcement... What you will see next will not be determined by the TV Guide, or by what was showing this time last week. It will be determined by the person at the TV station pushing the buttons. But of course, anything they do will be open to investigation — whatever’s broadcast can be checked. Did anyone see it? Did anyone tape it? So too with miracles.

Miracles imposed upon the natural world will have natural consequences, making them accessible to reasoned confirmation or denial. They will not have natural causes, however, by definition. If an event can be explained by natural causes we should not (a la Ockham’s Razor) still be seeking other explanations for it.

But though the study of the natural world can offer evidence confirming or denying a purportedly miraculous event, it cannot say if one is possible or not. If God created and transcends the natural world (that being the real question!) natural laws are just descriptions of his work, not limitations on it. Miracles are only categorically impossible if either:

1. God does not exist, or
2. God by choice does not do miracles

Of course, if no persuasive miracles have ever been confirmed, the case for Theism itself will be proportionately weaker. The interesting question then, is not of whether miracles are possible, but what the evidence for them may be — so we have to ask how a miracle would be identified in practice. Let me suggest a the following 'specification' for such an event:

• A miracle is a particular verifiable event,
• which cannot be confused with or explained by natural causes
• and which is meaningful in its context

The first point is required to exclude the kind of broad claims that might be found in folklores or mythologies: timeless, placeless events that make no historical claims at all. Unless an event can, at least in principle, be verified, it does not constitute a testable claim that a miracle has happened in history.

The second point is really two: it excludes the ‘paradigm shift’ approach of deeming the whole course of nature miraculous. (It may well be, of course, especially allowing that creation itself is necessarily miraculous, but theologians usually reserve the term 'providence' for God's day-to-day sustaining work, and 'miracle' for unusual signs.)

This second point also eliminates events whose miracle status is somewhat ambiguous, like natural events of simply low probability. When a person recovers from an illness with 80% mortality, for example, they may justifiably be thankful to be alive; but only in the sense that people may generally appreciate the gift of life, with all its goods and evils. To establish a miracle, you would need to show that they were not simply one of the 20% who generally survive regardless. (Recovering instantaneously might achieve this.)

Neither providence nor probabilities are free of ambiguity, and so, for the sake of clarity, we will only be considering the unambiguously miraculous here.

Our third point is the most important. An event that makes no sense at all, naturally or theologically, would not be miraculous. Say, for instance, that on an otherwise unremarkable afternoon the Sydney Opera House began to levitate several feet off the ground, and continued thusly for a week, before settling down again -- and that no plausible account of why can be advanced by anyone. An event like this, with neither natural nor supernatural justification would be simply inexplicable. A miracle is an event which, as the work of a transcendent intelligence, should make more sense, not less, than the usual course of nature.

So, having specified a miracle, for our purposes, we must consider the possibility, the credibility and the rationality of such an event.

Because of the number of spurious miracle claims throughout history, a skeptical stance is highly desirable in our evaluation of the evidence. But many have tried to debunk miracles en masse, as a whole class of events, thus making questions of evidence rather irrelevant. We will need to address these arguments first, which deal with the a priori possibility of miracles.

Arguments that miracles cannot occur always involve theories of natural law, and why it is inviolate. Consider these:

If God exists then laws of nature are direct expressions of his perfect knowledge and omnipotence — hence their precision. Consequently, they do not admit the possibility of exceptions. God will not override natural laws (that would be overriding his own will), and no one else can do so.

This is a theological argument against miracles: God made nature's laws, they are his will, he will not contradict himself by overruling them. But how is anyone to know whether natural laws (as we uderstand them) are in themselves the sum of God’s intent, or whether he may wish to act in other ways? The error here appears to lie in (firstly) making nature's laws prescriptive rather than descriptive — saying how things ought to be rather than reflecting how they actually are — and (secondly) in neglecting God's personhood, as if he were employed by us to simply run the universe and keep his other opinions to himself.

The laws of nature are complex beyond imagining and we only understand a fraction of their total working. There is no way we could be confident that an alleged miracle was really that, or simply some phenomena not yet explained by science.

However, the event we are considering here, the resurrection, is obviously not a physical anomaly. No strange quirk of physics, or even of biology could recuscitate a corpse after more than a day -- that was clear in the first century, and it is clearer now:  damage to the brain is irreversible after just ten minutes without oxygen. There are several other problems with the ‘undiscovered laws of nature’ approach: Suppose ‘spontaneous human resuscitation’ is a quirk of nature. Why doesn’t it happen more often, indeed, why haven’t scientists and surgeons, in particular, found at least some trace of it? Isn't it odd that such a one-off natural fluke (if that’s what it was) would (literally) chance opon such a theologically loaded setting as Jesus' execution? This is plainly a dead end. But now consider the opposite objection:

We know the laws of nature well enough to be sure of one thing, and that is that they do not admit of exceptions. We know that such a claim is simply a misunderstanding on the part of witnesses. A miracle, by definition, is inexplicable by natural law: it is a physical impossibility. And physical impossibilities are quite impossible.

For all the popularity of this approach, it’s very hard to make it sound convincing -- the circular reasoning is just too blatant. The argument assumes that supernatural events do not occur, which it accepts as a self-evident fact, and from which it proves that supernatural events do not occur. Why not just call it an article of faith and be done?

This is not to say that any and all miracles are credible until specifically debunked. Their exceptional nature and the history of frauds in the area means that their advocates must shoulder the burden of proof in every case. We are simply saying that should there be an evidentially sound miracle proposed, it cannot be disallowed simply for being a miracle claim. It must be judged on evidence. As I remarked above, although a miracle (by definition) will not have natural causes, it will have natural consequences, and as such will be accessible to scientific or historical inquiry, just like any other physical event (but more on this below).

To reiterate, the only way out is to know either that God does not exist, or that he does not do miracles. Apart from this, there is no a priori case against God's intervention in the natural world.

In any case, you hardly ever hear an argument today against the possibility of miracles, or if you do, it quickly reduces to circular reasoning. Is more common nowadays to hear arguments against the credibility or the rationality of miracles, than their possibility. The main ‘in principle’ argument against the credibility of miracle claims is that proposed by David Hume (1711-1776), in recent times updated by Antony Flew. To paraphrase first Hume:

A miracle is an exception to a law of nature. Since laws of nature are based on uniform experience, and so have the highest degree of probability, exceptions must be have the lowest degree of probability. We should always base our belief opon the highest level of probability, so we should never believe in miracles.

This argument appears to avoid the crude circularity of attacking the possibility of miracles by simply preassuming naturalism. On one level it may be taken to mean that miracles are rare ('lower probability'), and so they should not be believed — but that obviously cannot be what Hume means, given that the world is large and relatively rare things happen all the time, and that Hume is saying that we should never believe reported miracles. The key phrase seems to be 'uniform experience'. He seems to be arguing that miracles have never happened. After all, if they had, we might sometimes have reason to believe in them. His argument seems to depend on keeping the door bolted against the first miracle claim. If one were admitted, belief in them would become simply a question of evidence, rather than a priori disbelief.

So this argument is also circular, but in a different way: It assumes that miracles have never happened, then uses this against the credibility of the first proposed exception. It is doubtful that Hume himself actually thought this, since he was almost certainly too astute to miss such an obvious problem, and he followed his argument with a series of objections to the actual evidence for miracle claims generally — which would be redundant if he thought the argument was solid. (We'll come to those reasons shortly.) For these and other reasons, Hume’s argument has received a recent upgrade by Antony Flew. Again, to paraphrase:

Scientific laws describe general and repeatable events, whereas miracles are particular and unrepeatable events. The evidence for general and repeatable events is always better than for particular and unrepeatable events. We should always base our belief on the strongest evidence, so we should never believe in miracles.

So finally, we have an argument that does not implicitly assume what it is trying to prove. Rather, the argument puts miracles in a big box labelled 'unrepeatable', and notes that the events in this box are relatively uncertain, compared to events in the 'repeatable' box (where we find our knowledge of natural laws). And, he argues, if the two are in conflict, we go with the natural laws.

I earlier mentioned Hume's arguments against the general credibility of specific miracle claims. He was of the view that even if miracles were credible ‘in principle’, they were never credible ‘in fact’. To whit, he argued:

1. The witnesses are never any good.
2. Miracles are only reported amongst ‘barbarous peoples’.
3. People are unreasonably credulous of sensational supernatural tales.
4. Miracles are claimed for numerous, contradictory beliefs, and so cancel each other out.

These arguments are, of course, questions of evidence, and the first of them will be addressed on a separate page. As to the other objections, a few comments may suffice, as they bear on our topic:

The second point appears to be a special case of the third, with the suggestion that ancient peoples were naturally more credulous of sensational tales on account of superstition and scientific naivety. Insofar as that applies to myths or narratives that did not directly bear opon their own lives, it would seem to be borne out by a large body of evidence -- we see that quite a lot today also. I would suspect, however, that in regard to the evidence of their senses, and in understanding their contemporary world, they would have shown a comparable degree of common-sense to anything we have today. For example, if belief in the resurrection can be tied down to Jerusalem, within a short period of Jesus’ death, then the value of superstition as an explanation of belief is very much reduced, simply because of the locality of the incidents, and the accessibility of relevant facts. But that, of course, remains to be shown. For now, let us once more file this point under “questions of evidence” and move on.

In fact, we can file it next to Hume's fourth point, that miracle claims support opposing views, and so cancel each other out. This is the So What Defense: “Even if they happen, so what? What do they prove?” Whether they happen is, of course, a question of evidence, but let us grant (just for now, just for the sake of argument), Hume’s hypothetical: that miracles do happen in quite opposed belief systems.

There are two levels of response. The most obvious would be to check each set of miracles out, and see which are the most comprehensive, the most meaningful, and the best attested — and draw one's own conclusions. But I think that Hume’s real questions are rather: Who's doing the miracles? Would God contradict himself? Would you say they're all satanic (and so on)? These, in all sincerity, I'm perfectly happy to leave as open questions -- the case is hypothetical, and our knowledge of God's intentions, as well as of the created spiritual world, are not exhaustive. If nice things happen to other people, well and good -- I can be happy for them. To me, spirituality does not rest on particular speculative points of theology, but on a historically and experientially grounded understanding of Jesus himself, his nature and significance, which we approach when we address his resurrection.

Of the current crop of objections to miracles, by far the most popular are objections to their rationality — the establishment of an intellectual no-go area at a popular level.

Miracles are vestiges of a pre-scientific age, when superstition filled the gaps in human understanding. We know now that thunderstorms are not a consequence of angry gods at war, and so on. Likewise, that anyone believes in miracles in this day and age, is simply an embarrassment to public education.

Superstitions are usually resolved by finding natural explanations for them. If alleged miracles are easily explained by natural causes, then well and good. If someone says that angry gods at war cause thunderstorms, but electrical charge in the atmosphere offers a satisfactory explanation, then Occam’s Razor (the principle of simplicity in explanation: not multiplying causes beyond necessity) suggests that the angry gods add nothing to the explanation, and so are superfluous.

But though miracles and superstitions are associated, they also differ in several respects. You will recall that for our purposes, we specified miracles as events making historical claims, which are inexplicable in terms of natural laws. Superstition might account for much greater credulity of reports, or the attribution of natural events to epic narratives. But it doesn't help us with events that are plainly never going to be naturally explained — like a resurrection after more than a day (to return to a theme).

The study of science or history requires an assumption of uniformity: that nature is everywhere consistent. Neither science or history can admit the possibility of miracles without abandoning the most fundamental principles of rationality.

Here is a more sophisticated argument: the possibility of supernatural explanation undermines the fundamental cause-and-effect relationships we recognize in our practice of (eg.) science, law or history. If a tree falls in the forest we do not at once suppose an angel pushed it over -- but mightn't we need to allow for this, and goodness knows what else, if we open the door to supernatural explanations?

It is curious to hear an argument that the purposeful actions of a super-intelligence should result in chaos and uncertainty. This appears to be a further case of identifying miracles with superstition (as just discussed). Eastern cyclical views of histories, ancient Greek accounts of recalcitrant matter that could not be perfectly controlled, animistic views of a world subject to a plurality of conflicting wills, none dominant -- there have been many chaotic views of nature. But the concept of intelligent intervention in the natural world -- by the same will that orders it so remarkably -- does not lead us in this direction. Who do you suppose made the following statement?

The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover in it the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God, and which He has revealed to us in the language of mathematics.

This is a quote from Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a pioneer of heliocentric astronomy. Similar statements could be listed by Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Boyle, amongst a great many others. For many of the pioneers of modern science, God's sovereignty was the rational foundation for the uniformity of nature. It offered opportunities for science, not problems.

Hoping in miracles is an irrational security blanket for the weak, who need to wake up and face reality (recognizing their psychological desire for a cosmic father figure, etc).

It would be remiss, in closing, not to give the old psycho-genetic fallacy a run here. This is where you point to some appeal which ‘belief X’ has, thus offering a psychological or sociological account of its origin (or its continued acceptance, or both). You then assume that this covers all cases, and then proceed as if you have discounted the belief as a serious, rational option. The cutest thing about this is that such arguments usually work just as well in reverse, e.g. Doubting in miracles is an irrational security blanket for the weak, who need to wake up and face reality (recognizing their psychological desire for freedom from implied accountability, etc). Needless to say, psycho-genetic arguments have little to do with questions of evidence and should be valued accordingly. However, they offer a warning against simplistic, naive optimism, and in this capacity they are certainly helpful -- we should certainly test what we believe against this. While a sense of hope does not disqualify any belief that generates it, mere unsubstantiated hope is simply wishful thinking.

To summarize, there are three basic arguments against miracles, or belief in them.  The first says that in principle miracles are impossible, the second that there is no credible evidence for them, and the third that it isn't rational to even consider them.  The problem with the first is that unless you know either that God does not exist or that he doesn't do miracles, then they are at least possible.  The second and third are simply questions of evidence, which we are here to consider now.  More information on this may be found at the following sites: