Miracles

Miracles

Miracle belief is extremely popular. Just look around, just listen. Miracles are everywhere. One can hardly walk down the street or turn on a television without hearing someone claim that a miracle has occurred. According to the Harris Poll cited in this account, 76 percent of American adults believe in miracles.[36] But believing in miracles is easy. Thinking about miracles takes a bit of work, and, despite all the talk, most people don't bother. They just seem to accept them as a fact of life without question. But a good skeptic doesn't believe in something only because most people around her say it's true.

Miracles are generally thought to be supernatural events caused by a god, a magical being, or a person with special, unnatural powers. According to various believers, miracles can be bizarre feats that defy the normal workings of nature. They can also be natural events that are intentionally orchestrated to bring about desired outcomes. So a miracle might be a natural rainstorm that a pious farmer's prayers bring on just in time to save his crop or it could be a god or preacher bringing a dead man with rigor mortis back to life by supernatural means.[37]

Maybe miracles really do happen. I don't know. But I am sure that the claims of miracles that I hear about are obvious cases of people failing to think critically and be good skeptics. Just because something is unexpected, unusual, or extraordinarily well timed does not necessarily mean that it is a magical event. Of course weird things happen all the time. Wouldn't it be strange if nothing strange ever happened?

A key problem people have when thinking about miracles comes from the fact that we aren't natural mathematicians. Most people in the world never take a class in statistics or even pause to consider how likely it is for "unlikely" events to occur. Consider a hypothetical population of seven billion people. Let's imagine some quirky event that happens every day but at a very low rate—let's say this event has a one-in-a-billion chance of happening to you or me on any given day. It probably won't happen to us, but across that population we would expect an average of seven occurrences per day. Those seven people are probably going to feel extremely lucky or unlucky, depending on what it is. Across such a large population, some occurrences would be unsurprising. Even a rare daily event with one-in-a-million odds of happening to you or me sounds unlikely, right? We would expect about seven thousand occurrences per day. Over an ordinary year, that is an expected 2,555,000 occurrences—not necessarily that many different people! It's the same with lotteries. The chances of winning those things tend to be astronomically small. But people do win them virtually every day, nonetheless. No doubt, the winners feel very special and many of them likely conclude that they must have been on the receiving end of a miracle. But when you consider those few winners in the context of all the losers, it becomes clear that nothing magical necessarily occurred. Across enough drawings and entries, winners are unsurprising even though an individual ticket is unlikely to win.

If you are prone to believing in miracles and you think some things happen that just can't be explained as anything other than the work of a god, then try to imagine being in very different circumstances. Transport yourself into the body of a prehistoric human one hundred centuries ago. You are living in a time before Google, Wikipedia, and soap. Your clothing, footwear, and scent will change, but biologically you are no different. Mentally and physically, you are the same. What you are missing out on, however, is the convenience of being able to call on 100,000 years of accumulated human knowledge and scientific discovery. It's gone. All you have now is the potential to reason for yourself and figure things out. You also have whatever skills and awareness your prehistoric peers passed on to you around nightly campfire gatherings.

Suddenly a nearby volcano erupts. The ground shakes. A strange, orange-and-black goo flows down the mountain. When it comes into contact with trees, they burst into fire. Smoke and dust darken the sky. You are terrified but also desperately curious. What is going on? How can this be happening? It makes no sense! All you have are questions and no answers. You are smart, but you know nothing of geology, volcanology, the layers of the Earth, magma, lava, and so on. You can't simply ask someone else to explain what is going on because no one on the entire planet knows. What do you do? You might have a flash of insight and come up with a respectable guess about the Earth's fiery underbelly releasing a bit of pressure. But even then you couldn't be sure. No one can look at an erupting volcano for the first time and explain it sensibly and fully with absolutely no knowledge of geology to draw from. So maybe out of frustration you would do what everyone around you is doing: explain the volcano as the work of gods or magic. "The gods did it" and "It's a miracle," has probably been the most common quick answer to every mystery faced by people since the dawn of language. But from the perspective of your presence in the twenty-first century, you know that a volcano can be explained by natural forces and doesn't require the involvement of gods or magical forces. Nothing would have changed about you between prehistoric times and now other than the availability of a natural explanation. This is key because as natural explanations come, supernatural explanations go. This has been the pattern for thousands of years. Magical explanations lose their appeal when they just aren't necessary anymore. Thousands of years ago, who wouldn't have thought that a solar eclipse was a miracle? Today, however, fewer people in most societies feel the need to invoke magic as an explanation for them. Nothing changed in nature. Only our knowledge of astronomy did. Perhaps patience is the first thing we should think of when faced with unanswered questions. If the past is a guide, many of today's miracles probably won't seem so miraculous in the future.

It should not be interpreted as insulting or rude to point out that ignorance drives many specific miracle claims and the general belief in them. Ignorance doesn't mean stupidity or intellectual dimness. It only refers to a lack of specific knowledge needed to understand something in a given situation. We are all ignorant of many, many things, of course. What matters is how we choose to react to our ignorance when it stares us in the face. Some of us freely admit that we do not know some things and proceed accordingly. Others, however, attempt to hide their ignorance under a tent of made-up answers.

It seems to be human nature, or an irresistible impulse, for us to explain things even when we can't. So we make up answers. We fill in the blanks with "miracle." But here's a critical truth every good skeptic knows: It's okay to say "I don't know." Really, it's fine. I understand that it can be difficult at times, but this is how humans ought to operate. If I were out walking my dog, and an autographed first-edition copy of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad suddenly fell from the sky and landed at my feet, I would be challenged to come up with a natural explanation. It fell out of a passing airplane currently being leased by a wealthy collector of rare books? It was swept up into the stratosphere by a tornado in Oklahoma and then it blew over to my state before tumbling earthward? Some juvenile delinquent stole it from the Twain museum in Hannibal, Missouri, and then traveled to my neighborhood so that he could throw it at me while perched in a nearby tree? All sound and reasonable possibilities, of course, but none of those would probably be the right answer. Maybe I would just have to live the rest of my life with a nagging mystery, one that gnaws at me every time I hear the name Mark Twain or look at that book on my shelf. As a good skeptic, however, I am sure that I wouldn't cheat by pretending to know that the gods tossed it down to me as a gift. I wouldn't do that because I couldn't possibly know such a thing. Mysteries are not miracles.