Chapter 14: It’s a Miracle!

The word “miracle” has become so watered down in our culture that we even associate it with artery-clogging condiments used by people too cheap to spend an extra 30 cents on Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise . When the underdog emerges victorious during a sporting event, we call it a “miracle.” We call it a “miracle” when a good-looking kid is the offspring of two not-so-attractive parents. From a high-fat sandwich spread to cute kids, the word “miracle” has become synonymous with everyday events. But this isn’t the kind of miracle that serves as the foundation of Christianity — or of most religions for that matter.

The Biblical kind of miracle I will define as an intervention of the divine as made evident by the violation of all known natural laws is the kind of miracle that’s the subject of this chapter. I do not believe, nor do I think anyone should insist that a mere apparent violation of natural law constitutes a miracle. Modern science has been around for just a few hundred years out of our roughly 250,000-year existence. How can we possibly be so arrogant as to assume that we know all of the laws of nature? Today we are just beginning to understand particle and quantum physics and how these new areas just might change the way we see reality. Take for example the common “miracle” of spontaneous cancer remission. People seem really amazed that doctors can’t explain why this happens. Out of the last five times I went to the doctor for common ailments, three of those times my doctor didn’t have a clue as to what was wrong with me. The ignorance of the “professional” community doesn’t constitute a miracle; it just verifies their ignorance.

So if I insist that a miracle requires the intervention of the divine, how in the world can one prove this intervention? Well, they can’t. But they can suggest evidence for divine intervention. Let’s go back to our example of spontaneous cancer remission. If a faithful believer of God prays many times a day for her cancer to be gone, then it goes away overnight, it certainly would appear to suggest divine intervention. But what about all those documented cases where non-believers report spontaneous cancer remission? Now we have evidence that this unexplained phenomenon appears to be unrelated to the divine.

We hear much more about the spontaneous cancer remissions attributed to God because we love hearing stories about miracles and the media knows it. The televangelists also love to show us little old ladies throwing away their walkers thanks to the power of God. But what they don’t want us to know is that many older people, who use walkers, canes, and even wheelchairs, do not require them. They are using them to help prevent injury. Connecting an unexplained event to the deliberate will of God is as impossible as the miracle itself.

What kinds of miracles exist today? Look on the Internet and you see them all over the place. We see healings credited to God, Hindu statues dripping milk, guru Sathya Sai Baba’s “miracles” (who claims to be born of a virgin) believed by hundreds of thousands of people, and the list goes on.

But each and every one of these stories can better be explained by the power of the mind (as experienced by the placebo effect), cheap parlor tricks, coincidences, statistical necessities (i.e., someone has to the win the lottery), and charlatans taking advantage of a person’s gullibility and a desire for the miraculous. When was the last time we witnessed a resurrection (resurrection, not resuscitation), the sun “stopping” in the middle of the sky, wives turning into pillars of salt, angels slaughtering first-born children, talking donkeys (outside of the movie Shrek ), seas parting, and the hundreds of other “holy crap” types of miracles that we read about in the Bible?

Let’s go back a couple of thousand years. Imagine you are living in a time when there was no science as we know it today. No understanding of biology, cosmology, disease, the laws of nature, and the laws of physics. It was a common belief that either the God, or many gods, were responsible for pretty much everything. If you did experience something outside your normal everyday empirical observation, such as an eclipse, volcano eruption, drought, or disease, it was just God (or the gods) interfering in the world. If you were to hear stories of God turning people into salt pillars, making donkeys talk, or resurrecting the dead after three days, it would not go against your common knowledge and your understanding of the universe because you didn’t have today’s common knowledge and understanding of the universe . You would have simply accepted these stories as fact back then as easily as you would accept the discovery of a new species of butterfly as fact today.

If you accept the miraculous as a valid explanation for the unknown, where do you draw the line? Do you believe in all the miracle stories in the Bible, or just in some of them? How about the miracle stories in many early Christian writings that did not make it into the Bible? How about the countless people who have claimed and do claim to be the second coming of Jesus?

If you are like the majority of Christians, you believe in some miracles in the Bible and not in others. You might explain this by saying you use logic or a more reasonable interpretation of the scripture to determine what miracle stories are just symbolic. However, logic and reason are outside the realm of the miraculous — miracles are neither reasonable nor logical .

Ask yourself, on what basis do you reject some Biblical miracles and accept others?

Now let’s look at the probability of miracles occurring. Given probable possible explanations of an event, are miracles always the least probable possible explanation? Well, it depends on what you are using for the basis of your comparison . We can all agree that alleged miracles are extremely rare compared to the number of events that can be explained. For example, in the past 3,000 years, based on an estimated 1,000 virgin birth claims and 25 billion people born, there is a .000004% chance that someone will seriously claim to be born of a virgin (ignoring the validity of the claim for now).

So if we ask the question, “Is it less likely that Jesus was born of a virgin than through sexual intercourse?” compared to the other 24,999,998,999 regular births, YES , the virgin birth miracle is certainly less likely. But if we accept the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin, now we ask the question, “Is it less likely that the virgin birth of Jesus was a miracle than the virgin birth being a result of a form of asexual reproduction found in females, where growth and development of embryos occurs without fertilization by a male (parthenogenesis)?” Since there are no known cases of human births through parthenogenesis — and no serious claims for that matter — the option of a miracle is on equal ground.

What about the resurrection of Jesus? Given the assumption that only one in the last 25 billion people to have walked this earth is claimed to be resurrected from the dead, is it more likely that the resurrection of Jesus was a symbolic representation of Christian theology than a historical event? YES, it is extremely more likely. But, if one were to accept the idea that Jesus did come back from the dead after three days since there are no natural resurrections to compare this to, a miracle becomes an option of reasonable probability. As you can see, many of religion’s miraculous claims are indeed the least probable possible explanation. That is, of course, assuming you don’t throw all logic completely out the window.

Although science can easily disprove many alleged modern-day miracles, science can never prove miracles . Accepting the unexplained as a miracle is an act of faith because claiming to know that God suspended the laws of the universe can only be done through faith. In many cases, accepting the miraculous requires a complete disregard of logic and statistical probabilities along with an enormous leap of faith.

Our world consists of many unexplained phenomena and we should certainly give credit where credit is due. But to ignore the “miracle” that is within each of us is to deny the entire human race the possibility that the human mind just might be the source behind much of what we cannot explain.