Miracles: Confirmable, or Chimerical?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Multiplication of the Loaves, by Georges, Mount Athos.

We are often passionately told of claims to experienced miracles, in both the religious and secular worlds. The word ‘miracle’ coming from the Latin mirari, meaning to wonder. But what are these miracles that some people wonder about, and do they happen as told?

Scottish philosopher David Hume, as sceptic on this matter, defined a miracle as ‘a violation of the laws of nature’ — with much else to say on the issue in his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). He proceeded to define the transgression of nature as due to a ‘particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent’. Though how much credence might one place in ‘invisible agents’?

Other philosophers, like Denmark’s Søren Kierkegaard in his pseudonymous persona Johannes Climacus, also placed themselves in Hume’s camp on the matter of miracles. Earlier, Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote of miracles as events whose source and cause remain unknown to us (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1670). Yet, countless other people around the world, of many religious persuasions, earnestly assert that the entreaty to miracles is one of the cornerstones of their faith. Indeed, some three-fourths of survey respondents indicated they believe in miracles, while nearly half said they have personally experienced or seen a miracle (Princeton Survey Research Associates, 2000; Harris poll, 2013).

One line of reasoning as to whether miracles are credible might start with the definition of miracles, such as transgressions of natural events uncontested convincingly by scientists or other specialists. The sufficiency of proof that a miracle really did occur and was not, deus ex machina, just imagined or stemming from a lack of understanding of the laws underlying nature is a very tall order, as surely it should be.

Purported proof would come from people who affirm they witnessed the event, raising questions about witnesses’ reliability and motives. In this regard, it would be required to eliminate obvious delusions, fraud, optical illusions, distortions, and the like. The testimony of witnesses in such matters is, understandably, often suspect. There are demanding conditions regarding definitions and authentication — such as of ‘natural events’, where scientific hypotheses famously, but for good reason, change to conform to new knowledge acquired through disciplined investigation. These conditions lead many people to dismiss the occurrence of miracles as pragmatically untenable, requiring by extension nothing less than a leap of faith.

But a leap of faith suggests that the alleged miracle happened through the interposition of a supernatural power, like a god or other transcendent, creative force of origin. This notion of an original source gives rise, I argue, to various problematic aspects to weigh.

One might wonder, for example, why a god would have created the cosmos to conform to what by all measures is a finely grained set of natural laws regarding cosmic reality, only later to decide, on rare occasion, to intervene. That is, where a god suspends or alters original laws in order to allow miracles. The assumption being that cosmic laws encompass all physical things, forces, and the interactions among them. So, a god choosing not to let select original laws remain in equilibrium, uninterrupted, seems selective — incongruously so, given theistic presumptions about a transcendent power’s omniscience and omnipotence and omniwisdom.

One wonders, thereby, what’s so peculiarly special about humankind to deserve to receive miracles — symbolic gestures, some say. Additionally, one might reasonably ponder why it was necessary for a god to turn to the device of miracles in order for people to extract signals regarding purported divine intent.

One might also wonder, in this theistic context, whether something was wrong with the suspended law to begin with, to necessitate suspension. That is, perhaps it is reasonable to conclude from miracles-based change that some identified law is not, as might have been supposed, inalterably good in all circumstances, for all eternity. Or, instead, maybe nothing was in fact defective in the original natural law, after all, there having been merely an erroneous read of what was really going on and why. A rationale, thereby, for alleged miracles — and the imagined compelling reasons to interfere in the cosmos — to appear disputable and nebulous.

The presumptive notion of ‘god in the gaps’ seems tenuously to pertain here, where a god is invoked to fill the gaps in human knowledge — what is not yet known at some point in history — and thus by extension allows for miracles to substitute for what reason and confirmable empirical evidence might otherwise and eventually tell us.

As Voltaire further ventured, ‘It is . . . impious to ascribe miracles to God; they would indicate a lack of forethought, or of power, or both’ (Philosophical Dictionary, 1764). Yet, unsurprisingly, contentions like Voltaire’s aren’t definitive as a closing chapter to the accounting. There’s another facet to the discussion that we need to get at — a nonreligious aspect.

In a secular setting, the list of problematic considerations regarding miracles doesn’t grow easier to resolve. The challenges remain knotty. A reasonable assumption, in this irreligious context, is that the cosmos was not created by a god, but rather was self-caused (causa sui). In this model, there were no ‘prior’ events pointing to the cosmos’s lineage. A cosmos that possesses integrally within itself a complete explanation for its existence. Or, a cosmos that has no beginning — a boundless construct having existed infinitely.

One might wonder whether a cosmos’s existence is the default, stemming from the cosmological contention that ‘nothingness’ cannot exist, implying no beginning or end. One might further ponder how such a cosmos — in the absence of a transcendent force powerful enough to tinker with it — might temporarily suspend or alter a natural law in order to accommodate the appearance of a happening identifiable as a miracle. I propose there would be no mechanism to cause such an alteration to the cosmic fabric to happen. On those bases, it may seem there’s no logical reason for (no possibility of) miracles. Indeed, the scientific method does itself call for further examining what may have been considered a natural law whenever there are repeated exceptions or contradictions to it, rather than assuming that a miracle is recurring.

Hume proclaimed that ‘no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle’; centuries earlier, Augustine of Hippo articulated a third, and broader take on the subject. He pointedly asked, ‘Is not the universe itself a miracle?’ (The City of God, 426 AD). Here, one might reasonably interpret ‘a miracle’ as synonymous for a less emotionally charged, temporal superlative like ‘remarkable’. I suspect most of us agree that our vast, roiling cosmos is indeed a marvel, though debatably not necessitating an originating spiritual framework like Augustine’s. 

No matter how supposed miracles are perceived, internalised, and retold, the critical issue of what can or cannot be confirmed dovetails to an assessment of the ‘knowledge’ in hand: what one knows, how one knows it, and with what level of certainty one knows it. So much of reality boils down to probabilities as the measuring stick; the evidence for miracles is no exception. If we’re left with only gossamer-thin substantiation, or no truly credible substantiation, or no realistically potential path to substantiation — which appears the case — claims of miracles may, I offer, be dismissed as improbable or even phantasmal.

Is 'Christian Healing' a Contradiction in Terms?

The Sick Child, by Edvard Munch

Posted by István Király V.

At the heart of the Christian faith and thinking about human illness lies a contradiction. If illness is accepted as a punishment from God, then 'Christian healing' and 'Christian medicine' resists the will of God – alternatively, compromises one's faith in his purposes.

The idea of the divine origin of illnesses, and their perception as a divine punishment for the sins of human beings dates back much before Christianity. It was shared for instance by Hebrews and Mesopotamians. However, this was not a hindrance for them – as it was, and is, in Christianity – to relate to diseases not merely, and not primarily with supplication by prayers and hoping for miracles in the expectation of healing, but in an actively medical way, namely with their empirical observation, interpretation and explanation, and with an attitude aiming at their prevention and healing.

For Christian faith and thinking, human illnesses are primarily the results and consequences of original sin, as well as the 'blows' of its original punishment and other, also divine, punishments associated with it, such as 'historical' punishments beyond the expulsion from paradise.

Secondarily, however, from a Christian 'point of view', illnesses are the punishments of yet another kind of divine sin of personal concern, and as such, in fact external to man, unappealable, unexplainable, and actually unforeseeable, and, while purportedly determinate, not clearly identifiable. These 'blows' are not meant to smite the human race in general, but specifically individual people, and of course, are exclusively designated to make them accept divine punishment.

Consequently, if we give deeper thought to the matter, then it emerges as highly problematic whether the naturally human-medical efforts of healing can indeed be considered as human activities worthy of divine contentment and respect. They are carried out, namely, as confrontation with 'illnesses' which are identified with all sorts of divine punishments in 'correspondence' with divine orders and intentions. Or, on the contrary, they should be considered a threatening insight into ever newer, very much determined sin, connected to, and branching further from, the original sin – that is to say, knowledge.

Paradoxically, Western science, purportedly, and also actually 'devoid of ethics', is precisely a product of Christianity – since, if the knowledge of the distinctions between good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly is considered and treated exactly as the original sin of mankind, then cognition and systematic knowledge, constitutive and indispensable for human life, can only be cultivated with a 'bad consciousness', and mostly with the ignorance of this 'ethics'.

And thus medicine and medical doctors were prosecuted during the Christian Middle Ages with special theological and ecclesiastical concern (and also afterwards, in fact to this day compared even to other sciences and scholars). Because medicine – as a search for knowledge and knowledge – is not only a further immersion into the original sin, like any other historically articulated science, but, more than that – as healing! – it comes into a direct confrontation with that indefinable, yet 'concrete' divine decision and will which punishes that particular person (!) with that particular disease.

While, of course, the cases of healing sometimes occurring nevertheless could only be regarded in fact from a consistently Christian viewpoint as miracles of divine grace. It is therefore this grace and only its penitent reception that, from a 'Christian point of view', an ill person, as well as his / her caretaker, can actually strive, urge, and hope for.

So it is no wonder, historically speaking, that the medieval, and especially early medieval meaning of medico had so much shifted towards the meaning of curo – namely an indeed 'positive' and sui generis Christian attitude and obligation, the nursing and attendance of the weak, the poor, and the sick - that it no longer means in fact 'healing' in an (ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, etc.) medical sense, but rather the caretaking of the sick and the suffering. Obviously, in the midst of a penitent supplication, and in the desperate hope of 'healing' as a miracle-like divine mercy.

The case is probably the same with Jesus, considered the son of God. Because, in a real and explicit medical sense – that is, in the sense of the medical conception, knowledge, and skills of his age, culture, and environment – he was not really a healer, but he only made all sorts of miracles connected (also) to illnesses.

This illustrates those deep ruptures which Christianity meant and represented in relation to – recte: against and opposed to – e.g. ancient Greek and Roman traditions, where truth was always tried to be knowingly and continuously thought and kept together with good and beautiful, as the noblest human modes of being. 

Strictly considering the relation of Christianity to illness – which actually seriously and decisively influenced two millennia – we must ultimately make it clear that, since illness, according to Christianity, is considered in its origin, source, nature, and purpose one of the main types of divine punishment for human sins, the liberation from these sins – recte, healing itself, or the recovery obtained in its historically articulated efforts – cannot actually and really be considered a blessed task of human, let us say, medical involvement (that is to say, one articulated in the sense of actual, all-time therapy, carried out with knowledge and skills).

Instead, it can only be perceived as a result and consequence of the 'workings' of divine grace, achieved by purportedly always exceptional, pious miracles. Consequently, the expression 'Christian medicine' in the sense of healing or therapy – because it is separated from God's purposes – is none other in fact than a mere contradictio in terminis, an absurdity.

'Yet in his disease he sought not to the Lord, 

but to the physicians.' II Chronicles 16:12.

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Király V. István is an Associate Professor in the Hungarian Department of Philosophy of the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. This post is an extract selected by the Editors, and slightly adjusted for Pi, from his bilingual Hungarian-English Philosophy of Human Illness, which focuses on specific human reporting. Free downloads are available at Illness a Possibility of the Living Being or Illness a Possibility of the Living Being.