Understanding Miracles: An Athiest Perspective Part I - Dueling Definitions

Preface

Understanding why people hold such radically different perspectives about miracles is much easier than explaining what those differences are and why people hold them as tightly as they do. At one end of the spectrum are those who simply "believe" a miracle comes from a God, and mostly because doing so evokes an emotional response that is undeniably real for them. At the other end of that spectrum is a way of looking at the world that is willing to let go of the comfort and security that comes from such a belief, despite how scary it can be to do so, in exchange for a deeper understanding about both the nature of reality and ourselves. What a person must ask themself before any attempt to understand miracles, or anything else for that matter, is what is more important to them: their beliefs or the truth? And if a conflict is found to exists between the two, which are they willing to sacrifice in order to follow in the footsteps of the other?      

Only by keeping these questions in mind can what follows shed any light on why people have such radically different perspectives about miracles. So with that being said, let us proceed. 

 

 PART I

With or without religion you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do things, that takes religion. 

 Stephen Weinberg 

 

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 believed, then it only made sense that His nemesis must 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.

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 one, 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.

 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.

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 deterministic, 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 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” 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." 

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 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 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 the reason 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, 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 also completely right.