"No testimony is sufficient
to establish a miracle," 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 assuredly know that
something is a genuine "miracle," in other words, is if it would be
an even greater miracle to discover that the person making the claim is in fact
a liar.
I found this quote on a recent
flight back from Central America, where I had the opportunity to finish reading
The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Rare Events, and Miracles Happen
Everyday, by David J. Hand.[i]
In it, Hand contends that everything we
know about statistics leads us to the conclusion that, in fact,
"miracles" actually happen all the time. As Hand explains, it is a “law” that “extremely
improbable events are commonplace.” And he
calls this law "the Improbability Principle."
The trouble that Christians have
with such a “law” – which may be the only real “universal natural law” that
humanity can in anyway calculate and thus “know” - is that it undermines the certainty
they have in their knowledge of how the world really works, and by extension,
those things they insist are indisputable "miracles" from God. And they "believe" in those things
they insist must be indeed "miracles," because they are the surest evidence
they have, not only that their "God" must exist, but that they are
correct to claim that their "beliefs" constitute a communication from
that God of his "infallible truth."
That claiming something is a
"miracle" from God necessarily requires an assumption a priori of a
god-like understanding of the seemingly infinite complexity of reality, is
simply overlooked by the Christian, of course. And when it is pointed out, the
Christian simply denies that this is in fact what they are doing, miraculously
enough. Hence the true "miracle" of "miracles" is how the
occurrence of an entirely inexplicable event turns a person's utter ignorance
of how it happened, into an intimate knowledge of the lone God who is said to be responsible for it.
Indeed, for the Christian, every
"miracle" is essentially intended as a kind of indirect communication
to humanity from a Deity, who performs such "miracles," in part, to
help convince His children that He is not only real, but indeed cares deeply
about their well-being (despite having thrown them into a world He alone is
responsible for having created, where every gift of life includes the guarantee
of death, and where everything must feed upon everything else to survive).
Miracles, then, being intended in
part as indirect evidence of both God's existence and love, also prove that
such a Deity is far too modest to engage in any direct communications with his
creation (after he beamed down to earth in the form of Jesus anyway) but not
too proud to command He be worshiped above all other gods, lest He throw all
those "children" who refuse to do so into an everlasting hell that is far worse than even the ovens of Auschwitz. The Christian
"miraculously" skirts around God's cold blooded handling of his dear
"children" in this way, of course, by insisting that "people
only ever send themselves to hell," which only echoes with all of the
victim blaming of the Muslim who claims rape is the fault of women who fail to
wear a burka.
But what “miracles” perhaps prove
more than anything else, is just how much Christians are really
closet determinists, despite all of their talk of a “belief” in free will. And
this is because, to argue that it must be a “miracle” if a person is suddenly
cured from cancer, for example, is to first assert that the nature of reality
works in such a way that while cancerous cells can spontaneously appear in a
person’s body, and perhaps altogether without explanation, those same cancerous
cells can never spontaneously disappear, without some divine intervention
scaring them off or setting them aright.
This makes perfect sense, of
course, when we consider that the Christian’s view of cancerous cells being “cured”
is identical to their view of how “sinful souls” are “saved,” since both can
only happen by the “grace of God;” a “God,” mind you, who saw fit, in His
infinite wisdom and benevolence, to create souls as predisposed to sin as cells
are to cancer.
Ask the Christian why you should
believe that the disappearance of cancer in someone’s body necessarily constitutes
a “miracle” from God, and they will most likely give you the very same blank stare they
exhibit when they are asked why anyone should pray for someone with cancer in
the first place, since the person’s cancer seems to be as much a part of “God’s
divine plan” as anything and everything else. As George Carlin pointed out, “isn’t
praying just an attempt to mess with God’s plan?” For at the very least, it is
surely a way of complaining about it.
[i] A
good article about this book can be found here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-improbability-principlewhy-coincidences-miracles-and-rare-events-happen-every-day-by-david-j-hand/2014/02/21/4d94c5d8-718d-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html?utm_term=.c50c504c9ffa
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