An Atheist's View of Miracles

If you believe in God, there's probably a good chance you also believe that God performs miracles every now and then, to not only remind the world that He hasn't forgotten us, but also to advertise His mercy and benevolence to believers and nonbelievers alike - at least that is, until the dreaded "judgement day." Perhaps the greatest miracle today, however, is the fact that there are still people in the world who believe that "miracles" come from a God.  For many "believers," on the other hand, it's as much of a miracle to them that people don't believe in their particular brand of "God" as it is for them to discover that people don't believe such a "God" performs miracles at all; and especially not for all those He's thrown into the torture chamber of our reality - with the apparent intent of using religion to turn us all into "demons" towards each other, because of our differences. 

To believe in the Christian perspective on miracles, therefore, is to believe that the Christian God wishes to communicate to humanity via the most cryptic means possible, since all miracles are necessarily ambiguous in their meanings, even though such miracles are not only always the very least that same God is capable of doing, but are always hidden from the vast majority of people on the planet, who just happen to be the very same people God is said to be indirectly trying to "save" by performing such miracles. Add to this the fact that the 'God' who is said to be responsible for such "miracles" chooses to hide from any and all of our very best attempts to "know" him, except through religion alone, even though religion is by far the worst means humans have come up with to ever attempt to knowing anything at all - ever! Because religion only teaches you to know anything through faith. In fact, in the same way religion works mostly to teach a person to believe the world is something that it is NOT, so religion only ever teaches people to believe in exactly what God is NOT as well.  

As such, the point of this blog post, which is really just an assortment of notes and observations collected over the years, is an attempt to reach a kind of Nirvana, at least with regards to an understanding of miracles anyway. Nirvana means "extinction," according to the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, which in this case means "a state in which all erroneous perceptions, which are the cause of sufferings, are extinguished." To do this, then, I lay out what an atheist thinks about miracles (which turns out to be quite a lot in fact), and also explore and explain many of the ever growing number of reasons why atheists reject the Christian view of miracles, just as much as they reject the Christian brand of "God."

The more you know about humanity, the more undeniable it is that religion is the first mass produced multilevel marketing and ponzi scheme humanity has ever hatched for itself; and all so that the few could control the many, by convincing them that their spiritual bondage to a religion was a form of  "freedom," that they were required by their God to practice, in order to save their eternal souls from oblivion. 

So without further delay, here's the what and why of it all regarding miracles - from an atheist perspective.

INTRODUCTION

Feeling or emotions emanate from the more ancient, less evolved, lower part of the human brain, while thoughts are a product of our highly evolved, uniquely human, outer part of the brain."

Dr. Laura Schlessinger

We do not see things as they are but as we are

According to Christianity, the God who loves us, hides from all human attempts to “know Him” through science, so that religion could corner the market on selling the idea that God wants us to know him, but only through the sacraments and the occasional miracle. God hides from humanity so much in fact that he even intelligently designed our brains to look exactly like what our minds would interpret to be a brain designed completely by evolution. It is for this reason that the question of miracles is a central pillar of all religious claims to authority, since miracles are said to be one of the only ways God ever reveals He exists at all, with the sacraments being like second class miracles, and why a rigorous consideration of miracles is therefore required. 
The question of "miracles" almost boils down to a contest between the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s of nurture versus nature. Looking at it this way may in fact allows us to see how claiming miracles come from the nurturing hand of God may only be to blaspheme against the laws of nature that such a ‘God’ is said to have “intelligently designed” to work through evolution. 

On the “nature” side, human beings have an incredible knack for recognizing patterns, which happens to be an innate aspect of the most evolved part of our brains, but a horrible ability for doing math with really large numbers, which is a learned skill that allows us to greatly extend our innate ability for pattern recognition to do everything from connecting dots in the sky and distinguishing different faces in front of us, to creating language and doing science and mathematics. Like learning to use our critical thinking skills to overcome the irrationality of our emotions, or as Dr. Sschlessinger explained, learning to use the more evolved parts of our brain to overcome the irrationality of the lesser evolved parts of our brain, so learning how to calculate and understand mathematical probabilities and statistics are skills which must be learned and exercised regularly.

So poor are we at these mathematical skills, however, that we are highly susceptible to deception and delusion, and as such, to holding fast to false beliefs even against all evidence. And the reason we do this, of course, is mostly because we are rewarded with the euphoria of our own endorphins that we auto-stimulate in our brains, every time we defend our identity and our ego as a "Christian" or a "believer," even to the detriment of our own life. Like rats in a cage that will continually press a lever to get a fix of heroin, even unto death, so religion encourages us to only ever depend upon that part of our brain that dupes us into a false reality, by rewarding us with the euphoria of endorphins for doing so, every time we hit the lever of our religion - a habit we are conditioned to engage in almost from birth, and which is celebrated by society as the greatest virtue of all. 

 While the “natural ability” to recognize patterns most likely evolved in humans via the nurturing hand of our environment, religion cradles a person in a man-made intellectual paradigm, which works to nurture our dependence upon a God, or more specifically, to our religion.  On the nurture side, as such, religion, not only preys upon and exploits  the least evolved parts of our brain by installing and cultivating a host of biases through elaborate systems of purely man-made beliefs, but does so while conditioning us to believe that an intentional agent called “God” is responsible for everything that is good in the world, and another “intentional agent” called “Satan” is responsible for everything that is bad in the world.  It does this last part by preying upon a part of our brain called the “hyperactive (or hypersensitive) agency device” – HADD.  According to neuroscientists, this “device”  inclines animals, including humans, to presume the purposeful intervention of a sentient or intelligent agent in situations that may or may not involve one. Miracles, of course, are a prime example of this. And the reason animals developed a hypersensitivity to detecting intentional agents at a perceptual level, is  because failing to do so may be potentially more harmful than incorrectly assuming that agents are absent.

 In recent years, psychologists and neuroscientists have demonstrated that our brains are hardwired to distinguish agency detection by differentiating between things in our environment that are alive from those that are not alive. “Being alive” from a psychological point of view, however, is not about biology, but agency – that is, “something that can act in the world, that has its own will and can cause things to happen.” And while this is a property of living things, we can also perceive agency in non-living things as well, if they are acting as if they are agents.  

What makes our ability to distinguish things in this way relevant to miracles is that we process things we think  have agency - that is, things we think of as "being alive" - through the hard wiring of our emotions, which again, is the least evolved part of our brains, while the things we think of as not being alive we process through our critical thinking cortex, which is the most evolved part of our brain. As such, once we call something a "miracle," we thus infer agency to whatever is responsible for it, and by so inferring, we hand the reigns of our critical thinking skills over to our emotions, which then simply uses those skills to rationalize and defend our assessment of something as a miracle. In this way, religion convinces people to believe in "miracles" by conditioning them to depend upon their emotional brain more than their critical thinking brain, whenever they encounter an unexplainable event.

It is believed that humans evolved this tendency toward agency detection as a survival strategy. In situations where one is unsure of the presence of an intelligent agent (such as an enemy or a predator), there is survival value in assuming its presence so that precautions can be taken. For example, if a human came across an indentation in the ground that might be a bear claw, it is advantageous to err on the side of caution and assume that the bear who made it is probably nearby. 

 Some scientists believe that the belief in creator gods is a “spandrel," that is,  an evolutionary by-product of agent detection. A spandrel is a non-adaptive trait formed as a side effect of an adaptive trait. The psychological trait in question is "if you hear a twig snap in the forest, some sentient force is probably behind it". This trait helps to prevent the primate from being murdered by an enemy or eaten for lunch. We may see God behind the moving star in heaven, in this respect, for the same reason we see a lion behind a rustling bush in the jungle. Because this hypothetical trait could remain in modern humans, some evolutionary psychologists theorize that "even if the snapping was caused by the wind, modern humans are still inclined to attribute the sound to a sentient agent; which many people just happen to call god.

 This is all incredibly ironic, when you think about it, because religion tells us we are all "born broken," and must be "nurtured" to health via faith in an intentional agent called God, or more specifically, in the particular brand of religion officially sponsored by that God, which today just happens to have as its mascot, a man nailed to a cross. (For the atheist, it should be noted, this is like people who opposed slavery erecting a hangman's noose in their living rooms out of a devotion to the ideas of John Brown or Nat Turner. )What is so incredibly ironic about this, then, is that religion only "nurtures" us to be increasingly more dependent upon the part of our brain that, because it is the least evolved, is therefore the most broken, because it is by far the least naturally adapted to the technological complexities of the modern world, and therefore the most dependent upon a parental figure that will take care of us when we get lost in the cyber-shopping mall of our daily bread and circus.  

 Like our ability to read and write, then, thinking in terms of probability and statistics - which are the only binoculars through which humans can recognize the patterns that only a God's eye view of things can reveal - are skills that must be learned and exercised. Thanks to our religions and our technology, however, both of these skills are, for an ever growing number of people, only being increasingly subverted, corrupted, or destroyed.

Our talent for recognizing patterns and our incompetence in the calculus of critical thinking, means that miracles, rather than being mere acts of God, are born instead out of human ignorance on the one hand, and our preference for simplicity and narrative, on the other.  To minimize the anxiety caused by the former, we seek some security by maximizing the latter. By doing so, humans attempt to exert some degree of control over their fears of the unknown. What's more, because the idea that an event could be simply the result of a statistical fluke only serves to increase our sense of insecurity, we are forever trying to assuage our anxieties by imposing a meaning on events that always provides us with a sense of purpose and certainty. And the primary way we do this, of course, is by attributing to purely natural processes an intentional agent we call "God."

 What is incredibly ironic about this, however, is that this "natural tendency" to attribute agency to natural processes even when no such agent is responsible or present, is actually part of our neuroanatomy, that is, part of our brain, and thus part of our innate human nature.  And the fact that our neuroanatomy predisposes us to making this kind of attribution error all the time, combined with the fact that we are driven by emotions to embrace irrational systems of thinking far more than we are prone to engage in the kind of calculus required to exercise one's critical thinking skills, only means that nature designed us all to be much more manipulable than we ever realized.  God did not design us to "believe" in Him, in other words, but to believe anything, and everything, all the time. And religion not only exploits this neuroanatomical flaw of nature, but amplifies it by only nurturing in "believers" a lifelong dependence upon a religion that only offers an incredibly myopic definition of the word "God."

Hence, the fact that religion is based largely on using fear and emotion to promote superstitions into "sacred tradition," only contributes to addicting people to "belief systems" that claim to save those from the very superstitions their religions have convinced them to buy into to begin with, which most people do almost reflexively as a kind of life insurance policy for the afterlife.  As a result, those belief systems install in the operating system of our culture, which our culture in turn installs in each one of us from birth, any number of different confirmation biases that not only work to blind us from seeing the difference between our sacred "beliefs" and the truth, but which also sabotages our attempts to rely on our reasoning skills, by plaguing those skills with biases that blind us from other more valid arguments, and logical fallacies that blind us from the mistakes we make in our own arguments.  

A very pernicious logical fallacy that does this, for example, is one that is very common in the promotion of paranormal, or supernatural, beliefs. In Latin, it is referred to as "ad ignorantiam" —an appeal “to ignorance”— which involves using a lack of evidence or knowledge as if it were a positive argument for a specific conclusion.  In simpler terms, this boils down to the idea that if we do not know why or how something happens, we therefore know God must exist, because "He" is the only one who could be responsible it. Like the biases that metastasize in our faculties of reason, "beliefs" have the ability to install an internal lens under our eyes,  which blind us from seeing how we desire simplicity because the simpler things are, the more control we feel we have over them, which is probably why so many people prefer checkers to chess. 

Miracles, as such, are simply the result of our natural tendency to recognize patterns and attribute agency to purely natural processes, along with our preference for simplicity and narrative as a means of defense against fear and uncertainty, combined with a plethora of biases that plague both our senses and our capacity to reason. All of this and more will be explored in the rant that follows about an atheist's view of miracles. So buckle-up buttercups, because the Kansas Christianity of mommy and daddy, one that dupes the world with the idea that an invisible magician performs the magic of miracles  because he wants people to love him more than Harry Houdini so He won't have to throw them all into hell for failining to do so, is going bye-bye.

 

 The Sin of Believing in Miracles

    In 1877, William K. Clifford considered the question of whether a person should believe in something on insufficient evidence in his essay The Ethics of Belief. Every "miracle" a person chooses to believe-in falls into this category. They do so, not only because the "God" Christians say is responsible for miracles has never been demonstrated to exist in the first place, but also because there is amble evidence that demonstrates why miracles do not need to come from such a God, even if He does exist. Also, it was St. Augustine who argued that Christians must first consider explanations in light of the prevailing scientific understanding, because failing to do so amounts to crucifying Christ by demonstrating an ignorance of contemporary knowledge that only serves to discredit that person's claims about Christianity on the whole. As if to second St. Augustine's admonitions then,  Clifford explained how a belief based on insufficient evidence - let alone one based on deliberately ignoring evidence that provides a much more plausible alternative explanation, and simply because that evidence diverges from what one wishes to "believe" is true - turns the religious search for truth into a childlike dependence upon a lie. As Clifford explained:  

• If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.

•  As Clifford sums up: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind." 

And there is perhaps no evidence more insufficient for determining if something is a true-blue "miracle" from God, than the testimony of "believers," not only because such stories were handed down for generations before they were written down, and we are just beginning to understand how human memory is far more flawed than we ever feared it could be, but because it has also been demonstrated  that the truth claims of all such stories always fade far faster than the memory itself. On top of this, "believers" likewise claim we were all born equally addled by the stain of original sin on the one hand, yet thanks to their faith in God, they now possess a divine insight into the "true" nature and origins of all "miracles" on the other. And as far as the believer is concerned, this divine insight not only surpasses anything science may have to say on a particular miracle, but  one that also dispenses with any need to listen to what science has to say about miracles altogether; at least until the institutional Church such a person belongs to tells them otherwise.  As an iron rule of logic, then, it must be understood that "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle," as David Hume once wrote, "unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." The only way we can define something as a genuine "miracle," in other words, is if we believe it would be an even greater miracle to discover that someone could either be simply mistaken or is in fact a liar.

Hence to be a Christian, one must believe it would be a far greater miracle to suppose that any human embellishment or error had found its way into the Bible, over the course of thousands of years and countless translations,  than to simply accept that Jesus actually walked on water and rose from the dead; and just so he could prove to all those who crucified him that he really was the son of the God he was condemned to death for blaspheming. (Because clearly, no one's reputation needs more defending than that of the most powerful being in the universe, and by the weakest and most disreputable beings in the universe, at that).

For the atheist, in contrast, miracles are not evidence of a divine intelligence indirectly demonstrating its existence by showing-off or manipulating reality for the personal benefit of someone who just happened to win the lottery for miracles that century, but simply evidence of our mind's need to attach a meaning to everything, as well as the penchant we have for assigning responsibility for inexplicable events to some agent like a God or a devil, and of the limits of human understanding.

Because the human mind in many ways is simply a biological machine that generates meanings, miracles are simply an easy way of explaining the inexplicable, by personalizing the reason it occurred, as if it were a postcard from God. We do this, according to evolutionary psychology, because inside our brain is something neuroscientists refer to as our our "neurological agency detector," which is the part of our brain that leads us to automatically infer events are the result of an "intentional agent," like God or the devil, or angles and demons, ghosts or goblins, or even aliens from outer space.  As a result, our ignorance of the complexities of reality leads us to rely on the least evolved part of our brains to infer the existence of intentional agency in natural processes even when no such agent is present. "God," as such, is as responsible for every "miracle" as He is said to be the "intelligent designer" of the universe itself, and the "divine author" of both sacred scripture and, more importantly, our eternal salvation.

Like a cross, then, a miracle is simply a symbol of God's magic powers, which He exercises with an extreme infrequency of course, to remind us He's not only watching our every thought, but like the NSA and Santa Claus, He's making a list and checking it twice. Calling something a "miracle" is a way of personalizing a random event, in other words, as if it was specifically targeted marketing campaign tailor made for a particular individual, and no one else. We do this, of course, by magnifying those events we interpret as positive, and minimizing those we interpret as negative.  And we do this, in part, by relying on the mental filter which religion works so diligently and effectively to clasp over our eyes, to keep us hypnotized by the specific brand of beliefs in "God" it sells us.

What we often fail to realize, however, is how an event that looks like something positive today - something we may define as "a miracle" because we interpret it at that moment to be a blessing - can come to be seen as a curse tomorrow, or vice versa.  The lottery winner who ends up loosing everything as a result of winning the lottery, is a familiar example today of the former, and the cancer survivor who learns to seize life in a way they never would've but for their cancer, is an example of the latter. And because one can so easily and so often become the other, our ability to ever truly distinguish the difference between a "miracle" and a curse is only as clear as reading tea leaves.

From the perspective that Christianity addicts a person to a narrative of torture and death from which they derive all of their purpose and meaning, along with the threat of an eternally unpleasant afterlife, miracles are simply placebos designed to alleviate the permanent state of anxiety and PTSD that religion first works to create, so it can then claim to be the only cure for. And by engaging in this spiritual tail-chasing, we feel connected to the billions of other people around the world who, much like ourselves, find that doing so keeps them distracted from facing the possibility that they might just be chasing their tails. 

 If "miracles" are acts of a God, however, they are not only acts by said God to alter reality - again, usually for someone's personal benefit and always as acts of divine advertising and public relations - but are admissions by that same God of both the woeful inadequacy of Jesus and His own sacred scripture to convince people to worship such a God, on the one hand, and that all of the flaws in the world such a God is alleged to have "intelligently designed," are in fact intentional, on the other, so that God can stroke His own divine ego by showing off for His faithful flock, so they will worship him as the greatest magician of all time.  Miracles, more to the point, are God's way of showing His faithful flock of followers that Harry Houdini has nothing on the Holy Spirit.

How Miracles Come From Chaos:
Why Christians & Atheists View Miracles Differently

 The difference between the "nature" versus "nurture" previously described, which reflects the difference between how and why the Christian and the atheist interpret miracles so differently, can be seen in the difference between how Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr viewed reality itself. While Einstein saw reality as operating according to the deterministic laws of Newtonian mechanics, ones laid down and set in motion by the nurturing hand of a completely invisible God, Bohr saw the world through the prism of quantum physics, where reality itself was animated by a mostly invisible hand of nature, that was free to ignore such laws whenever it wanted. This difference can be seen between an orderly world of large objects like planets, one governed by predictable mathematical laws of cause and effect, and a chaotic world of subatomic particles that appears to defy everything we think we know about physics. In 1972, John Clauser performed what are known as the Bell experiments, based on the theoretical work of John Bell, which finally demonstrated that Einstein's deterministic view of reality was, in fact, incorrect. Those findings have not altered the way that theists, or Christians more specifically, think about miracles, of course, but they should have.
     
Like Einstein's belief in Newtonian mechanics, organized religion tends to deify mechanical laws of order and tradition while at the same time demonizing ideas of chaos and change. Like quantum mechanics, however, nature itself tends to honor such laws more in the breach than in the observance. One runs like a clock - hence the idea that God is a watchmaker who "does not play with dice"- which requires divine intervention to create something new, while the other operates through a feedback loop that can perpetually evolve into something different; with life and death acting as the revolving door between these two sides of reality.

As the worship of traditions nails our ideas to the iron cross of impossible ideals from above, as such, change continually arises out of the compost heap of old habits into something forever new from below. And while various religions all promise eternal life to those who refuse to change their "beliefs," especially about either God or the nature of reality, the only law of survival in nature is change. Change, one could argue, is not only the soul of evolution, but the staple of any system or "being" that is said to embody both infinity on the one hand, and perfection on the other. Fredric Nietzsche summed up this idea by drawing a parallel between biology and beliefs, with the latter being an immaterial organism comprised of our minds, like a traffic jam of virtual ants, when he pointed out that "The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be minds." Indeed, like religion's attempts to regiment our mind and body to that of a machine, the mind that refuses to change its opinions on things, especially out of a preference for a familiar "belief" over an uncomfortable truth, is simply a form of a biologically domesticated computer.  The point is that what we define as a "miracle" from the first perspective is often the very opposite of what we define as a "miracle" from the second.

Thank God for Einstein's Mistake

 The discovery that Einstein's mathematical worldview was incorrect turned out to be both a blessing and a curse for the Christian concept of miracles. It was a blessing because it demonstrated that the material world was not as entirely deterministic as so many atheists often argued it was. But it was also a curse, at least with regard to miracles, because it demonstrated that what we define as "miracles" did not need to come from a deity operating outside of a clock-like universe, but could bubble up from within the system itself, out of the cauldron of chaos and uncertainty that underwrote reality on the quantum level. Alan Turing's 1952 article entitled The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which described the way natural patterns like stripes, spots, and spirals arise naturally out of a homogeneous, uniform state, at least suggested this was theoretically possible anyway, and the laws of probability demonstrated that "miracles" of the sort that would arise out of the soup of quantum chaos, were only ever increasingly likely to happen. Miracles from God, on the other hand, were intentionally designed to always be impossible to verify, because God insists on forever playing the role of the invisible magician. Miracles, in this respect, are God's way of letting the world know He's there, even though He refuses to ever show Himself in any way, shape, or form, and makes sure to not leave behind a single shred of evidence that might incriminate Himself later on.  Every miracle God performs, to put it more simply, is like a love letter, from a stalker. 

 What discovering Einstein's mistake did do, interestingly enough, was demonstrate quite clearly how God had "intelligently designed" reality itself to fool even the brightest of minds. God did this, of course, in addition to making Himself completely immune to all forms of human investigation or inquiry save one: religion, which just happens to be the most flawed means of ever understanding anything that humans have ever designed for themselves; and as science has routinely demonstrated, it often only ever finds "beliefs" that are the very opposite of the truth. You see this from the fact that all of the religions that currently hold sway over the vast majority of human minds today just happen to all be founded and run by men, who all equally claim they understand the cryptic meaning of every miracle God performs, even though the explanations they offer all disagree with each other. Humanity only discovered the truth of just how complicated God had created reality to be, in other words, when God allowed us to discover that the interpretation of the nature of reality by one of humanity's brightest minds just happened to be wrong. What has largely been overlooked ever since, of course, is how that discovery undermined all of the ideas through human history that were likewise built on this same error, which included first and foremost, of course, religion itself. In short, the greatest casualty that resulted from the discovery of Einstein's mistake, was religion, for it had made the very same mistake in its interpretation of the nature of humanity as Einstein had made about the nature of reality itself.

From Einstein's flawed point of view, a miracle might only happen when a creator intervenes in the mechanically deterministic operations of the system it had created in order to produce a different outcome from that which the system itself was designed to produce. A child being spontaneously cured of cancer, for example, would be no different than that same child suddenly become immune to the force of gravity, since both would equally require God's intervention. From Bohr's point of view, on the other hand, a miracle is simply the result of a system that operates with infinite possibilities producing an outcome that only seems "miraculous," not because it it is the opposite of how nature actually works, but because of how often we fail to notice anything that challenges our beliefs about how nature actually works. And the reason we so often fail to notice anything that challenges our beliefs, is because our beliefs clasp confirmation biases over our eyes, to prevent us from seeing or interpreting anything that contradicts our beliefs, which are based on the idea that, like a dog, we must always strive to please our divine master through our total obedience; and even if He insists on remaining completely invisible. For Einstein, the orderly nature of reality seemed as real as reality itself, but for Bohr, as the physicist Jim Al-Khalili explained, the paradoxical truth of reality itself was that everything that we regard as real, is made of things that cannot themselves be regarded as real.

Even if God did not play with dice, that is, He had clearly created a reality that did, and didn't, at the same time. In Chinese philosophy, this would reflect the dualistic concept of the yin and the yang, which describes how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.

That the yin of an orderly universe emerges out of the yang of quantum mechanics not only demonstrates that the order we rely on to give us some certainty of really mostly a perceptual illusion, one which our senses cling to anxiously to make sense of the world we live in, but it is also what leads the atheist to conclude that anything a person defines as a "miracle" is simply the result of our inability to understand exactly how one produces the other, and why. Because we do not understand the specifics of how and why the order of our reality grows out of the soil of such quantum chaos, it is impossible to ever clearly understand the difference between "miracles" that are said to come from an "intentional agent" like a God, who is said to exist outside of the system - if such a "God" exits at all - and which miracles come from out of the chaos that underwrites the fabric of reality itself, which our "neurological agency detector" leads us to "believe" comes from an intentional agent like a God, even if didn't.  What it does do, however, is demonstrate that the latter displaces any need for the former, and by doing so, it also demonstrates that the chaos Christians attribute to their devil, and the order which they attribute to their God, are actually two sides of the same system; a system which makes "miracles" and "anomalies" mere distinctions without a difference, that is, subjective qualifications that reflect only our own approval of the one, and our indifference or disapproval of other. 

When the atheist sees the world from this perspective, they see the chaos that underwrites reality, and understand that anything is possible because of it. Yet when the theist sees the world, they see a system of laws and order, and conclude that nothing is possible without the "God" who designed the system to be as orderly as a clock (even though a clock is a man-made device designed to regiment people's lives in the same way that religion was designed to domesticate the human mind). One claims that a much greater reality of law and order exists that is far greater than our own, a reality filled with God, angels, and divine immutable moral laws, while the other recognizes that the only "greater reality" we know to exist is one built entirely upon the cornerstone of a chaos pregnant with infinite possibilities. Only through divine intervention are things like curing the sick or even murdering nearly every living thing on the planet with a world wide flood, possible,  from the Christian perspective, even if that same God seems to have designed the system with a more atheistic perspective in mind, one rife with quantum chaos so it could be just as infinite in possibility as God himself is said to be.

If the universe is likened to a machine, then, it is one that is completely self sustainable for the atheist, one based on a feedback loop between chaos and order, but for the Christian, it seems to be a system completely dependent upon its creator, who orders it about, and tells it how to behave - even if He is totally bored with it. Put another way, we can almost think of the reality we perceive as something generated out of a democracy of competing quantum elements and the objects they form, while religion is the imposition of a tyrannical watchmaker that subjugates all those elements, both large and small, to suit the fancy of a divine dictator, in accord with His divine plan; that everyone says they "accept" as Jesus is to have accepted his cross, even though they all pray endlessly for God to change it, especially because it apparently happens to include forcing people to depend for their salvation on a church that happens to use the spiritual dependence it works to hard to foster in its faithful flock, to rape their children.

Again, from an atheist perspective, it is a miracle that anyone would believe the most omniscient being in the universe would create a system so susceptible to such abuse, yet require everyone on the planet to depend upon it for moral guidance anyway, in order for each of us to have a snow-balls chance in hell of making it to heaven.

Three Categories of Miracles

There are at least three kinds of "miracles" an atheist should consider when discussing the issue of miracles with "believers." Those categories can be thought of as miracles of the flesh, miracles of the facts, and miracles of faith over reason.

Miracles of the Flesh

Miracles of the Flesh occur when a person is suddenly cured of a terminal disease like cancer or of some physical impairment like paralysis or blindness. Such miracles appear to be the result of a divine lottery every thousand years or so, even though God, as the most powerful being in the universe, could cure everyone of everything just as easily as He could cure no one of anything. In fact, so random and infrequent are the miracles that God is alleged to have performed that it would make more sense to attribute them to being the result of a broken clock, rather than to a God who is cherry picking times and places to perform random miracles. The reason why God only chooses to cure one person only, then, and not the whole world, is because His miracles are not simply personal favors for a particular lottery winner: He is also advertising His benevolence to both friends and foes alike. That this kind of targeted marketing has failed to have the desired affect of selling one brand of religion or another,  never seems to deter God from continually doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different outcome. And since the orderly universe of Einstein was proven to be an incorrect interpretation of the nature of reality, and religions and their theologies have always been based on this incorrect assumption, to foster the idea that miracles come from a God may only be to foster a break with reality itself. 

To illustrate some of the other myriad problems that arise from the performance of this kind of miracle, let's use the example of "the Miracle in Manhattan," the 2006 miracle of the near-death experience of Frank Martin, the men's basketball coach at the University of South Carolina, which was highlighted by ESPN's SportsCenter in 2010.

Martin had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer with only days to live, until what he described as "a spirit, a Guardian Angel, or just a nurse," prayed for him one night alongside his uncle. It was immediately after that moment that Martin says his condition improved dramatically. "There was an angel that was sent to make me right," Martin said. Of course, God saving Martin's life after a single night of prayer, is quite the snub to all those countless other people who have been praying for the same thing, for years or even decades on end. 

Calling this a "miracle," however, not only ignores the infinite number of other ways God could have better used his miraculous powers to help countless others, but it also ignores ample evidence that shows why such "miracles" may just be psychosomatic, that is, the result of powers of the mind over our own body that we have yet to fully understand. On the one hand, it has been demonstrated in everything from placebo experiments to Tibetan monks to extreme athletes like Wim Hof and even people with split personalities, how our mind can alter our own physiology. On the other hand, the renown statistician David J. Hand, in his book The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day, has shown how statistics and the laws of probability demonstrate perfectly rational explanations for why "miracles" like this, happen all the time.  For a glimpse of such explanations, one need only consider the relationship between the law of large numbers and coincidence.

The Law of Large Numbers and Coincidence

Rather than being acts of a God, it has been demonstrated that "miracles" like the one experienced by Frank Martin are most likely just examples of our failure to fully appreciate the statistical power of geometric progressions. This failure, called "innumeracy," leads to a number of probability-based cognitive biases, all of which make it increasingly difficult or even impossible for us to clearly distinguish between a "miracle" being an act of a God or just a statistical outlier. 

In the same way we have a habit of attributing events to an intentional agent even when no such agent is present or responsible, we also have a knack for recognizing patterns even where no patterns exist. We see the one when we connect dots in the sky and call it the big dipper and the other when we attribute strange lights in the sky to alien beings. In a sense, even common phrases like "father time" and "old man winter" reflect our habit for characterizing natural processes in terms of more human, and thus a more relatable, agency.  In fact, mascots like the Green Giant and Mr. Clean likewise reflect what advertisers have understood about the human mind for over a century: customers can relate better to a more human agent even if it's a cartoon character, than to something as abstract as vegetables or cleaning products. And we see our tendency to employ both pattern recognition and agency attribution when we see the Virgin Mary's image appearing on a piece of burnt toast or the face of Jesus in a cloud. 

What we are horrible at, however, is spotting patterns in incredibly large sets of information. While it is easy for us to recognize a pattern of only odd numbers, for example, it is nearly impossible for us to see how some infinities can be larger than others, as the famous nineteenth century mathematician Georg Cantor discovered in his work on set theory.  Like theology, then, the only way humans have come up with to grasp numbers that seem to be as infinitely abstract as a God, is though the language of mathematics.

As such, in the same way theologians claim that theology is a spiritual lens through which humans can better see God, so statistical probability serves as a mathematical lens though which humans can better see the patterns of coincidences on a much larger scale.  While it is statistically improbable that any particular person will win the lottery, for example,  it is a statistical certainty that someone always wins the lottery eventually.  As the former perspective equally leads everyone to the conclusion that "I'll never win," the latter perspective is flashed in commercials proclaiming how everyone's a winner. In fact, it is the bias we have for "wishful thinking" - what is sometimes referred to as an "optimism bias" - which casinos, lotteries, and even religions are based on, that leads so many millions of people to truly believe they were lucky enough to have won the lottery of picking the right God and the right religion. The laws of truly large numbers and inevitability, in other words, gives us a God's eye view of how things that so often appear as incredibly rare events, actually happen as often as someone winning the lottery.  It is only our biases that lead us to think that one must come from God and the other is bound to happen to us eventually, even though in truth, there's about as much chance of us winning the lottery as there is that we just happened to have picked the right God and the right religion. 

 As the law of very large numbers states, the reason we routinely make this mistake is because,we are simply bad at intuitively understanding the probability of very large numbers. And because we are, we underestimate the probability of events occurring at random just as often as we overestimate how often we think an event just could not have happened by chance alone. Put another way, while we are good at seeing patterns and attributing agency to events, we are bad at seeing very large numbers from God's point of view, even though it is only from the "God's eye view" offered by studying statistical probability that people can recognize the pattern of seeing that what Christians call "miracles" are simply the result of how often we fail to notice coincidences that happen on a regular basis.  It is this disparity that leads a person to claim that there are no coincidences, for example, even though to make such a claim is to fall victim to a meaning bias, which stems from our need for the world to make sense or have some meaning, especially one we are comfortable with.

The Miracle of Living in Denial

  For the true believer in miracles, ironically enough, the laws of truly large numbers and inevitability amount to a mathematical form of hocus pocus. In fact, any explanation that threatens to dethrone 'God' as the author of miracles is often rejected by such "believers" as a "scientific religion;" as if theistic religion is somehow superior to all other religions, and presumably because it is one so many people unashamedly choose to simply "believe". The problem with this, of course, is that it then leads to a flood of considerations that the "believer" must either deny are valid, or simply ignore.

    An atheist can therefore admit that this kind of a "miracle" happens, since according to such laws, these kinds of "miracles" occur every day. Thus, the "miracle in Manhattan" is perhaps much less a result of our own ignorance of how it happens, and much more a result of our ignorance of how often it happens. Before being admitted to the hospital with a temperature of 105°F, for example, Martin had thought he was simply suffering from the flu, a condition he was convinced he would get over in a few days, not that he would be dead in a few day from pancreatic cancer. Without access to adequate health care services, as is the case for millions of people in America today, this "miracle" would have gone altogether undiscovered, since Martin would have simply interpreted his recovery not as a miracle from God but as a confirmation that he was simply suffering from the flu. In fact, the only reason the world discovered God's great love of men's college basketball, is not only  because Martin had access to healthcare services, but more specifically, because Ted Turner decided to create CNN, which would eventually broadcast the news of Martin's "miracle in Manhattan," as part of God's "divine plan" to rub it in the noses of all those who have prayed for years on end, who didn't get a miracle - and who aren't going to get one either!

Of course, all of this only leads to the question of why God would rely on anything so cryptic as miracles to communicate anything to His followers - especially when you consider the fact that a miracles is even far more cryptic than a Bible that no two people on the planet can agree on - instead of simply waiting a couple of thousand years so that Jesus - a man who clearly preferred preaching to writing - could communicate God's divine message to all of "God's children" more directly by starting a YouTube channel. I guess from the perspective of eternity, patience isn't a virtue, it's an externality. 

It would also be impossible for anyone to know why God cured Frank Martin of pancreatic cancer but not, say, Aretha Franklin,  or Steve Jobs, Luciano Pavarotti, Jack Benny, Margaret Mead, Joan Crawford, "Dizzy" Gillespie, Patrick Swayze, and hell, countless others. From an atheist's perspective, God's choice to cure Martin and not Pavarotti or Gillespie must mean that God likes men's college basketball more than He likes opera or jazz.

The hard thing for an atheist understand, of course,  is this: since curing everyone of pancreatic cancer should be just as easy for "the most powerful being in the universe" to do as curing a single person of hay fever - especially when you consider that "God" is said to have conjured up the entire universe and everything in it out of a single thought - why is God being so stingy with the miracles?  And the fact that it would seem to require far greater effort for such a being to apply his miracles with all of the precision of a scud missile than for that same God to have simply designed humans to be as immune to all forms of cancer as He apparently designed sharks to be (since sharks are supposedly immune to all forms of cancer), makes it clear what the true "intelligent design" of God's "divine plan" really was: namely, to make us all suffer until we beg for mercy. God doesn't want us to call him "Father," that is, He wants us all to cry uncle, even though He intends to fulfill less than 1% of the miracles His expects His faithful flock to continually pray for.  And when the other 99% of those whom God does not grant a miracle happen to die instead, there's always the consolation prize of heaven, even though the Bible tells us that most people are destined to loose out on that as well. As Jesus or Jigsaw would say, "Let the games begin!"

If miracles are attempts by God to show people how much He loves them, curing everyone of cancer would certainly communicate such a message much more loudly and clearly than a random cure here or there every few centuries or so. Not curing everyone of cancer, on the other hand, only suggests that God likes watching people suffer and die of cancer. What is truly miraculous about all of this, of course, is that the Christian simply denies that any of this is true, even though to anyone not entranced by the Christian "beliefs" being sold by their own brand of Christianity, such a truism is as bright as the sun.

Furthermore, the Christian likewise simply ignores or denies the fact that each and every miracle God is alleged to perform is necessarily an admission by our "divine designer" of just how flawed He designed us all to be in the first place. Martin would never have needed a "miracle cure," as such, if he had not been "intelligently designed" to develop cancer to begin with. Every child dying of cancer, in this respect, is incontestable evidence that God is either an utter failure when it comes to designing human beings in His divine "image and likeness,"  or that any cure God happens to bestow upon such children, through an arbitrary miracle every once in a blue moon, is but a single drop of mercy in a "intelligently designed" world filled with suffering sentient beings, both human and nonhuman, where everything is forced to feed on everything else to survive and every form of life includes the free gift of a death sentence. God, from this perspective, is the deified equivalent of the serial killer from the movie Saw, and the world is simply His ghoulish contraption for teaching people to appreciate the benevolence of their torturer through a divine gospel of pain, and the threat of eternally more, after we die. 

Also, the fact that God could cure everyone with his miracles, but instead chooses to selectively cure only some, is like a doctor with an infinite supply of a panacea that cures absolutely everyone of everything, but who chooses to provide it to only a few patients arbitrarily, in the hope that the rest will love him for having the benevolence and mercy to do so. Yet rather than seeing such a doctor as being the moral equivalent of Joseph Mengele, Christians everywhere love and praise such a "God" as their "messiah," for doing the exact same thing. Now that is a miracle of faith over reason!

That so many patients who this doctor chooses not to cure with his panacea, chose to love him anyway, is by far a greater miracle than that such a doctor possesses such a panacea in the first place. Yet this is never noticed by those patients, and for perhaps no other reason than that they are wholly dependent upon that doctor to keep their hope of a cure - especially of a cure of being mere mortal human beings- alive, even with all of their mortal maladies in tact.

 Indeed, the atheist is flummoxed by the Christian's willingness to praise a God who intentionally chooses not to alleviate all of the suffering in a world which He is alleged to have "intelligently designed," even though it would take God less effort to do so, than it takes for Him to deal with the avalanche of prayers He is obviously forced to ignore every minute of every day, from all of his "faithful fans," asking, indeed pleading, that He would find it in his cold, cruel heart to alleviate all of their suffering. Religion, of course, assures us all He will, after we die... maybe. It depends. It's complicated. For details, read the Bible. 

And the reason God lifts not a finger to alleviate all that suffering, according to Christianity,  is because we either deserve it all because of our disobedience (even though none of us knows or can even agree about what the alleged "disobedience" to this mysterious and absentee "God" actually was), or because it is all somehow part of God's "divine plan;" a plan that only the most sado-masochistic psychopath could  agree with, and which Christians the world over accept as benevolent even though they admit that no one can understand its "wisdom" but God alone, and they all pray endlessly for Him to change it, even though doing so is, as George Carlin pointed out, simply a way of complaining about "God's plan," by people who all pray that "thy will be done."

When you think about it, however, maybe God's divine plan" is perfectly clear: God "intelligently designed" us to disobey him, so He could trick us all into murdering His son, and control us forever after by convincing us that we had to do it, so that all would be forgiven.  And we've been slaughtering each other by the millions ever since, because we believe that it will be. God's inaction in the face of the suffering that He alone is responsible for setting in motion, if the Christian is correct, only puts Him on the same moral level as old King Herod.

Miracles of the Facts

When a miracle is not an indirect message to humanity via a personal favor performed by a God for a lucky lottery winner, it often takes the form of a divine act of self-promotion that puts even the Kardashians to shame. The Miracle at Fatima in 1917, which the Catholic Church declared to be of "supernatural character" in 1930 and Pope Pius XII approved in 1940, is but one example. To top off the miracle of Mary, the mother of Jesus, appearing to three small children in Fatima, Portugal - where she simultaneously hid from the rest of the world she claims she came to save from God's divine wrath - God is alleged to have then performed the "miracle of the dancing Sun," which was said to be witnessed by 50,000 people - and no one else!

Despite plenty of explanatory evidence to the contrary, many Catholics today nevertheless chose to simply "believe" that the "miracle of the dancing Sun" was an authentic miracle from God. But the real miracle of the dancing sun is not the fact that 50,000 people claimed to have witnessed extraordinary solar activity of various sorts in 1917, and with at least as many contradictions and inconsistencies among the witnesses as you would expect from all of them offering a description of the same car crash, but that God - if in fact He performed this miracle as the Catholic Church claims - not only didn't attempt to reconcile so many conflicting descriptions of the miracles, but also chose to hide such an event from every other person on the planet; even though the whole point of such a dramatic miracle as this, is supposedly so God can show His creation how much He loves it so, so we'll all love him back, and thus save ourselves from eternal regret for failing to do so. And the fact that there are as many different and conflicting versions of Christianity in the world today as there were people who are said to have witnessed this miracle in 1917, what seems to be the true "fruit" by which Christians should "know" their God is one of divide and conquer. Hell, even the cross is a symbol of two planks, hewn out of a dead tree, divided and set agaisnt each other. From this perspective, the true purpose of the crucifixion of Christ was to create as much confusion among humanity as the tower of Babel - for that is what all theology amounts to: a tower of babel, built of rhetoric, by men seeking to reach their God, even if God is in truth, something completely different - like maybe truth itself .   

Rather than transforming Fatima into the Woodstock of rave dance parties, however, one with a divine light show for "believers" who often pride themselves on believing in God without any evidence anyway, wouldn't the prevention of World War I have been something far more commensurate of God's "miraculous powers"? And even more so, isn't God's obvious reluctance to ever use such powers on our behalf only evidence of just how unworthy of such efforts God must consider humanity to be? After all, rather than intervening in humanity's right to slaughter each other indiscriminately on a global scale, God chose to impersonate Meadowlark Lemon by bouncing the sun around the sky like a basketball.

The Miracle of Faith Over Reason

All religions are based as much on the belief that people are mostly if not perfectly rational creatures as they are on a story that such rational creatures must be capable of considering and accepting to be "true," of their own free will. Human rationality, in other words, is the sine qua non of all religions, because the fate of our souls depends upon our ability to select the right beliefs, and to never let go, no matter what. Yet contrary to the idea that we are rational beings, who can therefore be held culpable for our failure to "believe" in one of the different brands of god offered by religion as necessary for securing our salvation, which is an idea upon which all religions necessarily depend to support their claims, people are not particularly rational. In fact, people are not even mostly rational. Instead, as everyone from politicians to advertisers have known for well over a century, and religions have known perhaps since their inception as tools of control, people are mostly irrational, and driven more by fears and emotions than anything else, both of which are highly manipulable; and as much by priests and politicians as any other "experts" in any other fields.

To the atheist, of course, this should be obvious to everyone by now, since religion is to science what emotion has always been to reason. Religion itself, then, is simply the collective example of how the vast majority of people have always preferred to put their faith in the irrational, because reason requires a lot more effort, and  on your own, it often doesn't get you anywhere anyway, while religion is as easy as drinking cherry flavored cool aid and calling it "the blood of Christ."  

Our preference for irrationality over reason can be seen most clearly in our religions, of course, whenever anyone cares to take an honest look at them, that is. Christianity, for example, is the story of how God murdered his own son and got humanity to do it, by convincing humanity that doing so was the only way God would forgive them for being the natural born sinners He "intelligently designed" them to be. It's also a religion that claims all human morality should be based on the Bible while denying that the only reason the world is as bloody and violent as the Old Testament is because human morality has been based on the Bible, for the last two thousand years.

The New Testament likewise reflects this irrationality, it should be pointed out, because it is simply the story of Old Testament Israel, with Jesus Christ being simply the anthropomorphized man-god of Israel, who was Yahweh, who was symbolically murdered  when Israel choose David to be "the king of the Jews" - with Israel's breaking of the First Commandment by doing so being reflected in the sign Pilate had nailed to the cross over Jesus's head like a crown - the same way the Jews choose Barabbas (who's first name was also Jesus) over Jesus Christ, who Christians claim was the God Israel had rejected. In other words, choosing Barabbas over Jesus was to choose the sword over a savior, which just happens to be the same choice Christians have made repeatedly for the last two thousand years. Or, to put it another way, Christianity is simply the worship of the Yahweh of the Jews in the form of Jesus, after the Jews voted for David to be their King. Catholics then followed their lead and committed the very same offense to God, when they elected Peter to be their pope, who is basically the spiritual Caesar of the very Roman, Catholic empire. And anyone who has ever dared to challenge the authority of either one is treated no better than Jesus was treated by Rome, into who's hands the Sanhedrin delivered Jesus as Judas had delivered Jesus unto them. In this sense, the "betrayer" of Judas represents the religion of Judah - with the name Judas being derived from the name Judah - which was based on the monarchy of David, compliments of the Philistines, in the very same way that  Peter was made a spiritual dictator of a Catholic theocracy, compliments of the emperor Constantine and the Roman Empire, and Saddam Hussein was made the king of Iraq, thanks to the United States.

How Miracles Are Examples of Our Preference for Irrationality

Like in religion, the human preference for the irrational can also be seen in the belief that a God would rely on miracles to relay His affections to his "children," once or so every few thousand years; which is like me saying I know the government loves me because it once sent me a tax rebate a quarter of a century ago. Why? Because if God really wished to convey any kind of message or meaning to "believers" through an act of divine intervention, a miracle is perhaps the most ambiguous way of doing so possible, because miracles never carry any indication of which brand of God to believe in, which religion to convert to, or even which of the 50,000 different versions of Christianity being practiced in the world today, is in fact the one "true" faith. Interpreting a miracle as a telegram from God to join a religion therefore, is like believing that God wants people to save their souls by finding a needle in an Everest size haystack of hand grenades before they die, and all because He loves you.

The Christian, who simply ignores all of this, thinks such obvious ambiguity imbues every miracle with a crystal clear meaning that we should all worship God, while the atheist sees this ambiguity, if miracles do in fact come from a God, as evidence that that God wishes to keep us all dazed and confused, through religion. One sees miracles as evidence that their own brand of Christianity is the right one, while the other sees them as not indicating God's support for any religion at all, let alone a specific brand. And why a God who Christians believe took the time to write an infallible Bible about himself would then switch to trying to communicate to his beloved children through the Morse-code of miracles, which are all so ambiguous in their meaning that they only produce more division among "believers" than agreement about the nature of their God and what He's trying to say exactly, is a question that every Christian on the planet is left to simply ignore. 

But perhaps most importantly of all is the fact that all such miracles are simply God's way of interfering with the "free will" of believers, since each miracle seen or experienced operates as a Pavlovian form of behavioral conditioning, one which only compels the individual on a deeply emotional level to believe in God all the more, for fear of eternal damnation if they do not, from a God who is said to never intervene in people's free will, no matter how much suffering everyone from politicians to pedophile priests may inflict on His children.  Miracles, in this respect, are simply commercials for God by God, according to religion. And since God knows our every thought, and therefore knows us even better than we know ourselves, miracles should more accurately be described as simply divine acts of mind control from a Svengali who posses supernatural powers of manipulation. Not only do such commercials really tell us nothing about the true nature of the manufacturer, however,  but like all advertising today, they are designed to be a form of behavioral modification, one that increases docile acceptance and conformity by anesthetizing rational thinking and exploiting irrational fears and emotions.

Like companies that today rely on psychologists and "behavioral economics" to seduce customers into "buying trances" as sales guru Joe Vitale teaches, and marketers who use "neuro-marketing" techniques like a Trojan horse to bypass rationality and addict customers emotionally to an ever greater consumption of things that only make us feel evermore empty and artificial, such miracles are simply mass marketing techniques designed not by a God but by religion, to addict customers emotionally to one brand of "beliefs" about one God or another, as sold by one species of religion or another.  For the "true believer," however, these types of miracles serve as propaganda for God, all of which are "intelligently designed" to teach the faithful that their eternal soul depends necessarily on their willingness to forever subordinate the power of  their reason to the mystery of their faith; and more specifically, to hitch the fate of their eternal souls to all those who proclaim their sacred religion holds the answers to that mystery, and thus the keys to their salvation.

The miracle of faith over reason likewise explains why a Christian may be willing to believe that what happened to Frank Martin was a genuine miracle from God, as if God had a particular place in His heart for male college basketball players at the University of South Carolina in 2006, even though that same God did nothing to stop the sexual abuse of thousands of other children by his own Catholic Church, even though the pope claims to have an infallible Bat-phone to God's moral opinion on things. God overlooked the abuse, in other words, because he was watching March Madness. And the fact that the Catholic Church canonized Pope John Paul II - the very pope who facilitated that abuse by both protecting the clergy responsible for it from legal consequences and by refusing to engage in any thorough investigation of the matter, despite the ever growing number of allegations and reports he had received - only makes the Catholic God look a hell of a lot like Joe Paterno, to a Catholic Church that operates a lot like Jerry Sandusky.

What's more, the fact that God would perform a miracle at Fatima in 1917 which He hid from the rest of humanity, is like God's decision to save Jesus from King Herod's "massacre of the innocents" while allowing all of the other children to be slaughtered. In the New Testament remember, the Massacre of the Innocents is the incident in the nativity narrative of the Gospel of Matthew in which Herod the Great, king of Judea,  to protect his own power, orders the execution of all male children two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem, much in the same way Lucifer and his minions are said to have been thrown out of Heaven by a God, and for the same reason. In modern terms, then, this would be like God using dreams to protect his own child from pedophile priests while allowing everyone else's children to be abused. And how Pope John Paul II could be considered a "saint," when he is the very pope who's inaction aided and abetted such sexual abuse, is either proof that the Catholic "God" is really Keyser Söze, or it is a miracle of religion that even the omniscient mind of God will never be able to understand.

 So How Should We Think of Miracles?

Assuming that a "miracle" is anything more than a giant question mark, especially when those miracles are deliberately hidden from view of the general public who's eternal souls they are allegedly intended to help save, amounts to a dubious interpretation at best, or a deliberate act of manipulation at worst. Calling something a miracles, then, is to employ a logical fallacy, one that consists of confusing the notion that if something is currently unexplained it must therefore be unexplainable, no matter what discoveries or technological sophistication the future may hold.

This means that every bona fide "miracle" is really made up of a bundle of other "miracles" of perspective.  First, it requires a near Godlike understanding of the near infinite nature of how everything in the universe works, and with enough certainty to rule out every other possible explanation imaginable; Second, it requires a near Godlike understanding of how the human brain, mind, consciousness, and perception works, of every person who has ever lived, and again, with enough certainty to rule out every other possible explanation; and Third,  both of these must be possessed with an almost divine clairvoyance of the ultimate futility of all future investigations to provide any alternative explanation to what the Catholic Church decides to label a "miracle."

 Thus, a miracle has far less to do with the act God performs in the external world - like curing pancreatic cancer for example - and far more to do with the Godlike certainty God gives to all those whom He wishes to know - and only those whom He wishes to know, and no one else! - that God has in fact performed a bona fide miracle, one that all "believers" should understand is quite different from any anomaly that may be indigenous to the nature of a highly complex reality. Put more simply, to know that a miracle comes from a God, one must know as much about God, ourselves, and the universe as a whole, as that same God. Otherwise, it would be impossible to tell the difference between an authentic "miracle" from God and a pure act of magic; between the actions of a deity and that of David Copperfield.  After all, you can widen the lens of Arthur C. Clarke's remarks that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" to include a miracle as well.

What is truly miraculous about such claims, then, is not only how the same people who claim to understand a God they claim has an intelligence infinitely superior to their own, simultaneously admit they often have no ability to understand their own children or even themselves, but also how those who are required to possess such 'divinely gifted omniscience' to know when something is a true-blue miracle, claim that having received such divine insights are a "gift of faith," that one accepts as the ultimate act of humility, and that any denial of any of this is the ultimate act of intellectual pride.

Again, the only thing we all know for certain is that, like UFOs and Bigfoot, "miracles" are either things we will understand in the future, or they are things we will never understand - ever. But either way, it seems to an atheist to be far more intellectually honest, and certainly far more humble, to admit the human limits of what we know and understand, than to leap to the god-like conclusion that anything we are at a loss to explain today must have been done by God in the conservatory with the candle stick.

CONCLUSION

As the overwhelming weight of the evidence demonstrates so clearly for atheists, miracles are not acts of God, but attempts by religions to cash in on people's preference for simplicity on the one hand, and their ignorance of the complexity of reality on the other. Religions do this by teaching people to deny that the chaotic complexity of reality itself could ever produce such events without the guiding hand of a divine watch maker.  People believe in "miracles," that is, because they prefer to put their faith not in a God, but in the mechanical regularity their senses perceive and depend on, even though that regularity is largely an illusion. People who believe in miracles, in short, prefer to see the world as if God designed it, or at least us, with the clockwork precision of Albert Einstein's mathematics, even though that perspective has been demonstrated to be an inaccurate interpretation of reality itself, rather than the chaotic complexity that Neils Bohr discovered to be hiding behind the veils of Maya offered by so many different religions. 

Hence, to an atheist, a miracle is simply a subjective interpretation of an inexplicable anomaly which appears to be "intelligently designed" by religion to keep people addicted to, and thus divided by, their religious "beliefs" about what they are taught to think the word "God" means; a "God" that is largely conjured out of the "neurological agency detector" in the posterior superior temporal cortex of our brain, that leads us to attribute "intentional agency" to purely natural processes, which is an idea that every religion exploits to the tune of $1.2 to $4.8 trillion annually in the United States, which is more than double what the U.S. spends on defense, imprisonment, and social programs combined, and most of it tax exempt.  

 The "love" that religion uses such miracles to addict people to emotionally, it must also be understood, is not a love for their fellow man that they all preach equally, with all of the differences and diversity that would be natural for such a complex species to manifest, especially in such a complex environment as the one we inhabit, but to a single ideal concept of what they are taught to believe it means to be human, which religion convinces people is the only concept pleasing to their God, and that all other ways of being human are inspired by the devil.   It is this very idea that has always led humanity to repeatedly crucify the image of such an infinitely  diverse God standing before them, out of a preference for a simpler single religiously proscribed "belief" about God, which religion sells to the children of Adam & Eve like the fruit from the tree of knowledge of right and wrong.   And at least once a week, billions of people around the world flock to that tree to eat their fill. 

Calling something a miracle from God, then, is to condone the apathy and inaction of that same God, one who cures a basketball coach of a terminal disease, but ignores everyone else, even though the most powerful being in the universe  should be able to cure one just as easily as curing everyone (with the only reason for why he doesn't being that it would kill a "for profit" healthcare system, the blood of which the financial system drinks like a vampire, much like Christians drink wine on Sundays). It also attempts to bar the door on any investigation as to the nature of a "miracle," by putting the magician responsible for it outside of nature itself, and accusing anyone who questions such claims as challenging the existence of the divine magician who happened to have revealed this secret to them, even if not to anyone else. 

Scientific investigations into what causes things we may define as "miracles" are not a challenge to the existence of a God, however, but to the authority of organized religion, which all manufacture miracles out of the inexplicable in order to foster greater emotional dependence upon its privileged priestly class. And that privileged priestly class uses those "miracles," more specifically, to convince its faithful flock that their  particular brand of God is the right one, even though every miracle can be used to support every religion - including atheistic and satanic religions - equally.   

In this respect, it's quite possible that all of the "miracles" mentioned in the Bible actually happened, but that they were only "miracles" because people didn't know what else to call them, and there were perhaps few scientists or medical experts around at that time who were motivated enough to challenge the spiritual rulers of their day, in order to figure out the actual causes of such "miracles." Indeed, from Hypatia to Giordano Bruno and from Socrates to Galileo, those who have challenged the spiritual rulers of their day have often been treated no better than Jesus was treated by the Sanhedrin. Yet curing someone of a fatal disease is just as likely to be called a "miracle" today as it was five millennia ago. The difference, of course, is that today we use such a term as simply a euphemism for medical advancement and the tireless efforts of countless doctors, nurses, and countless others, around the world.

And thank god we have figured out how to multiply such "miracles" by seeking to understand both the human body and the underlying causes of various ailments, rather than thinking that humans constituted a species so above nature that it was blasphemous to think we should study ourselves; because God has historically been incredibly stingy in His willingness to use such "magic" to help humanity overall. In fact, "modern medicine did not begin until some four hundred years ago, when a group of northern Italians had the courage and the humility to suspect that man, rather than being something appointed by God as apart or above nature, was a part of nature". This extraordinarily powerful assumption "meant that man could study himself in just the same way that he was learning to study the motion of the stars and of moving bodies on the earth. Everything that has happened since that time is merely the result of working out the implication of that assumption. It took a very long time before the knowledge gained from such study reached a level which made it possible for almost any given doctor to use it in modifying the course of disease in any given patient." And while progress was made in medicine only after we overcame the mistaken assumption  that we were created in the image and likeness of a god, religions stand as evidence of how much people want to believe we are more special than everything else in the universe anyway, especially if they think their deserve heaven for believing in the right religion, and everyone else deserves hell for doubting them. 

And while God has healed a few people here and there over the centuries with a few miracles, science has healed countless numbers of people of an ever growing number diseases and conditions. And the reason God has not healed humanity on the whole of original sin, which is said to be the root cause of all such infirmaries, is because we keep murdering each other, in ever new and inventive ways, like through science, technology, and economics, thanks only to the stain of original sin, even though it should be easier for God to heal humanity rather than keep us sick, just so we will love him for having the mercy to save us from the eternity of suffering we all rightly deserve, after we finally die.

I mean, hell, from that perspective, God - or more specifically people who "believe" in God - is basically Kathy Bates in Misery, and humanity is basically James Caan. People who believe in God are basically Pontius Pilate, in other words, and anyone who doesn't believe in the same God as Pontius Pilate, is treated like the body of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Pope, for example is Pontius Pilate to anyone who is not a Roman Catholic, but only to their souls, hence their mind, because the Greek word for "soul" or "spirit" is "pysche," and as such, anyone who is not a Catholic becomes the sacrificial "body of Christ," when their mind is crucified in thought for failing to conform to the definition offered by Christianity about what it means to be human.   

Hence, even though it would be impossible for anyone to ever tell the difference between a higher form of intelligence and what looks like brain damage or simply insanity, even if that difference was by only 1% more, the Christian wants everyone to believe that they understand the will of a higher intelligence that is infinitely greater than our own, and better than anyone else on the planet, even as they claim to be no smarter than the rest of humanity.  And why are they so much smarter about God and His miracles than everyone else on the planet? Because they simply choose to "believe" this is true, and expect everyone else to respect this as a fact of life, or else.

Like the choice to  worship a Roman instrument of torture and death as if it were the tree of life, or to see a book as the"the living word of a God" we allegedly killed, which is like insisting that Pinocchio is a person not a puppet hewn from the tree we cut down, that rose from the dead like Frankenstein, and now reigns over human hearts and minds like a pope, and compels them to drink wine flavored blood every Sunday like a vampire, the choice to simply believe that inexplicable anomalies are acts of a deity trying to commune with His faithful flock, does not make them so, no matter how much people may wish they were.  

In truth, the people who wrote the stories in the Bible were not the illiterate fishermen, shepherds, and carpenters, who Jesus preached to in his native Aramaic language, but scholars of the Roman empire, decades later, who wrote down such stories in a highly literate Greek language, which was the language used by the Roman intelligentsia. This, then, is like academics working for the FBI and the CIA writing about the lives of say, Fred Hampton, or Malcolm X, or even Medgar Evers,  and then centuries later, "believers" insisting that every word of those "gospels" is infallibly true.

What gets lost in the telling of such stories, and the devotion to defending as "fact" those "miracles" they may seem to include, is the fact that story tellers are not just historical stenographers, but propagandists who write history to paint the conquers as always in the right, and  artists, who often paint the picture of the ideas they wish to convey with the power of prose and the color of poetry. Picasso, for example, painted ideas he gleamed from the writers and poets he surrounded himself with in Paris. In contrast, a writer paints the image of their idea on the canvas of our own imagination using the medium of language.  And the finished product, as is often the case with literature, is usually a portrait of ourselves spied through the retina of an author's pen.

Perhaps the biblical authors, in this same way, simply choose to describe the act of walking on a sand bar as "walking on water," not in an attempt to deceive their readers, but to describe the image more powerfully to their audience. Or maybe the author genuinely believed that Jesus was "walking on water" instead of a sand bar. After all, an author is only as human as their audience, and as such, he (or she) is as fallible in discerning what they see or translate as we are creative in interpreting what we read.

Whatever the case, it is certainly not a belief in "miracles" that is the problem between theists and atheists, but the different meanings that each derives from them. In short, the theist thinks a miracle informs us about the existence of a higher intelligence, while the atheist knows a miracle is simply evidence of our own ignorance. And while one sees them as a license to act like God, the other sees them as a reminder that we are only human.