It is generally believed that some 110,000 persons in total were tried for witchcraft and between 40,000 to 60,000 were executed. And what caused so many God-fearing Christians to renounce their moral high-ground and begin torturing and murdering so many innocent people, including a dog and a four year old girl named Dorothy Good, as much out of fear of the devil as punishment from their own God for failing to do so? One thing: a belief in miracles.
If God can override the natural laws of nature, so the Christians who
murdered innocent women and children as witches sincerely believed, then it only made
sense that His nemesis must possess similar powers. Otherwise the
lopsided nature of a God with supernatural powers at war with a devil without
such powers would look like Superman being unable to defeat Wile E. Coyote. Nobody
would buy it. Besides, if God is an "all loving and good God," than everything we fear must be the result of someone or something else. Even though God made the universe and everything in and outside of it, we learn to blame the devil,
God's best (or worst, depending on how you look at him) henchman, for all we fear
It was a belief that God performed miracles to help us, as such, that led to the belief that evil supernatural forces could do the same thing to hurt us. Both were seen as overriding the mechanical deterministic
laws of nature, one for our benefit and the other for our detriment. Without a belief in the ability of people to perform miracles, in other words, there
would be no need to fear the ability of witches and sorcerers to do the same thing. A miracle is simply witchcraft being performed by someone we perceive to be a friend, like a priest who turns wine into blood, while witchcraft is simply a miracle being performed by someone we perceive to an enemy, even if they are merely administering medicine to cure someone.
A “miracle” is not something that happens, therefore. Rather, it is an
interpretation of something that happens. It is not an objective assessment of an event, but a subjective
qualification. This means that there are basically two kinds of miracles: good ones and bad ones, with the latter labeled as witchcraft. Cancer, for example, is witchcraft when it is thought to have been the result of your neighbor's evil eye. If Saddam Hussein had come down with cancer, on the other hand, it would be seen as a miracle from God. (Why that same God didn't give King Herod a stroke or an aneurysm prior to his "massacre of the innocent" is likewise a miracle, one almost as incredible as why Christians ignore such a question and worship such a God as "good" anyway.)
Aside from "bad miracles," there are two kinds of what we call “good miracles”:
miracles of chance and miracles from God. For most people, especially for those
who believe in one brand of God or another, these two categories are
necessarily mutually exclusive. One
happens regardless of God, the other only happens because of God. The question
then is why do some people interpret inexplicable phenomena that seems to benefit them as miracles of
chance and others as miracles from a God?
There are probably an infinite number of things about the universe we
know nothing about, and even the things we think we know are always being
modified and upgraded with new insights and understanding. Such unanswerable mysteries
illicit excitement from some people but creates uncertainty in others. This difference
may be the result of people born with naturally different temperaments or from
growing up in different environments. Studies
on childhood trauma show how children raised in more loving, nurturing, and
accepting environments tend to see the unknown more like the former, while
those raised in environments lacking such supports tend to see the unknown like
the latter. And this in part helps to explain why people see "miracles" so differently.
For the former, the universe is filled with limitless possibilities that exceed our limitations, while the latter sees that same universe as a scary place filled with mysteries, all of which are but breadcrumbs that lead directly to a particular brand of a God who is responsible for it all, and promises to protect us from the things we fear, including His own eternal wrath. Both groups of people can view the universe, and everything in it, as operating mechanically and deterministically, like a giant watch. But for one, the watch itself has a kind of “free will” reflected in statistical probabilities and quantum mechanics, while for the other, the mechanical deterministic laws of the universe can only be overridden by the divine watchmaker who created it all, which they call God.
Defining what we mean by the word “miracle"
What these differences in perspective tell us is that any investigation
into understanding “miracles” must first start with trying to define what we
mean by the word "miracle." Any attempt to offer such a definition,
however, leads us to our first problem: Christians and atheists do not agree on
the definition. Because of this, we have to consider two different definitions
- one from a Christian perspective and the other from an atheist perspective -
and what each definition tells us about the confirmation bias operating behind
the eyes of those offering the definition.
A close examination of these dueling definitions allows us to see how,
even though both are looking at the very same phenomena, each sees something
very different from the other.
Let’s start with the Christian definition of miracles. According to the
Christian encyclopedic website, Theopedia, a miracle is “any action in time
where the normal operation of nature is suspended by the agency of a supernatural action.
(Emphasis added) Of course, this definition presupposes at least two three things. First, it presupposes that we have a full, or at least a full enough, understanding of nature to determine what is "normal" and what is abnormal. Second, is also presupposes that we have the kind of brains that give us not only an infallible ability to know how nature works, but to know clearly what falls within the "normal operation of nature" and what does not. As we will see, however, the more we get to know about nature and how our mind perceives its operations, the less they seem to require a supernatural explanation because they look more and more like merely the "normal operation of nature." And third, it presupposes the existence of a
"supernatural agent" – be it a God or devil - who is assumed to be
responsible for preforming the supernatural miracles. Starting with such an
assumption only leads us to conclude that there would be no point to trying to
discover if a “miracle” can be explained by natural causes because, by definition,
the supernatural agent responsible for the event must have suspended all
natural causes in the performing of the miracle.
An obvious caveat to this assumption is that it leaves us unable to know when we should investigate something inexplicable with the hope of learning something about the nature of reality, since God (or nature) clearly designed us with the ability and the desire to do so, and when it is pointless to investigate such a thing because it is simply a “miracle” that, because it is the result of supernatural interference in the laws of nature itself, it thus impossible to explain. And it must remain unexplainable so that the only way to explain it is that God did it, in the laboratory, with the candle stick. That way, the “miracle” will only lead us to seek to know more about the particular God who is said to be responsible for the miracle; even though that "god" is even more unexplainable than the miracles themselves.
The Christian definition of "miracle," in other words, requires a willingness not to question or investigate, nor try
to understand, the nature of that "miracle" as anything other than a
sign from God, so that we will instead understand it as a sign to only try to
know said God. But the same God who is alleged to have performed the
miracle in order to direct us toward trying to know “Him” not only designed us with a curiosity that is far better suited to trying to know the miracles itself, since it is at least related to the material reality we inhabit, but worse, then hides completely
from the very best methods our species has ever designed to try to know
anything and everything, which we call "the scientific method." As a result, the most natural question of all is not only one we are forced to ignore, but is even treated as heretical just for asking!
Worse still, a willingness to accept "in faith" that a miracle comes from a God makes it impossible to ever determine if a miracle is ever the result of anything else, like per chance alone. On the one hand, this means that the only place anyone can ever go to learn anything at all
about such a God is in one religion, according to Christians, even if there are
over 40,000 different versions of Christianity we are forced to choose from,
and that number is only growing. On the other hand, having to learn about God by sifting through the 40,000 different brands of Christianity - which itself requires a miracle for us to pick the right one - leaves little time to learn about anything else, keeping us ignorant of how miracles of chance happen all the time.
Tell
the Christian the miracle of life itself came about by “natural”
causes, ironically enough, and they will either disbelieve you, or devote themselves to finding
ways to
prove such a thing is impossible. Tell them that life is the result of
anything other than their brand of God, including that it came from
another brand of God, and they will insist they do not believe that either. And
if you ask them why they believe one story about the origin of the
miracle of life and reject every other, and you'll realize their explanation is
rooted not in reason or evidence, but in emotions.
Another definition of miracles which does not already presuppose a
“supernatural actor” (one that intends His “miracles” to remain forever
inexplicable so as to serve as proof of His existence to those who already happen
to “believe” He exists to begin with), comes from the Encyclopedia Britannica:
“A miracle is generally defined as that which causes wonder and astonishment, being extraordinary in itself and amazing or inexplicable by normal standards. Because that which is normal and usual is also considered as natural, miracles have occasionally been defined as "supernatural" events, but this definition presupposes a very specific conception of nature and natural laws and cannot, therefore, be generally applied." (Emphasis added)
Comparing these two definitions allows us to see one of the biggest differences between the Christian and the atheist conceptions of the word “miracle.” The Christian has a “very specific conception of nature and natural laws,” even though the greatest scientists in the world are still wrestling with trying to understand both and only discovering we do not understand human consciousness enough to feel we are capable of doing so with any definite accuracy, while the atheist, aware of how little we really know about nature and ourselves, has a very different conception of those same things. The former thinks the “natural world” is more mechanical in nature, like a watch built and set in motion by a divine watchmaker, while the latter sees the mechanical nature the Christian sees, but also sees that mechanical nature as being merely a veneer which hides a much deeper, richer complexity.
Of the two perspectives we humans have of reality, one sees a universe that, because it is as rigid in its order and processes as a machine, requires someone or something to intervene to produce a different outcome. The other sees a universe as a delicate dance between order and chaos. The former sees a universe that acts robotically, without free will, which requires the hand of its creator to produce something different, while the latter sees the universe as a cauldron bubbling with infinite possibilities.
Simply put, one sees the universe more like Albert Einstein and the other more like Neils Bohr. The tricky part is understanding how both were not only partially wrong, but how together, both were looking at opposite sides of the same horse we call reality, and therefore also completely right.
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