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[Rough notes
for a lecture given in London, April 27th 05. They are based on the
relevant chapter in An Introduction to Philosophy and Ethics. Copyright is
retained by the author, but permission is hereby given to use these notes for
the purpose of individual study.]
A study of miracles is absolutely key to any Religious
Studies course that is related to Western religions. That is because it relates
to so many other issues. For example:
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If you believe in miracles, you
must believe in a God who interferes in the workings of nature. But what
sort of God could that be? If people argue that nature is designed in such
a way as to reflect the intentions of a loving God, does that not exclude
miracles? If God needs a miracle to put something right, should he not be
blamed for getting it wrong in the first place. So an understanding of
miracles impinges on our understanding of ‘God’. In a well-ordered world,
miracles should not be necessary.
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How do miracles square with our
understanding of science. Are religion and science opposed to one another?
Can a scientist believe in miracles?
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Are miracles moral? If one person
is saved when 99 are killed, can that person claim that they were spared
through a miracle? And, if they do, does that not imply that the 99 who
were killed were victims of God’s ill-will or indifference?
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But what do we mean by ‘miracle’?
We’ll look in a moment about how we define a miracle and the difference that
makes to how miracles relate to other beliefs.
Clearly, if we are to take the Bible literally,
a majority of people at that time believed that events were not determined by
fixed laws of nature, but were the result of the action of God or those of the
devil, or angels, or evil spirits.
Hence, if something unusual happened, they would naturally ask ‘Why did God
choose to act in this way?’ If everything reflects God’s purpose, then the
unusual is a most clear example of what he wants to happen. That is very
different from a scientific question about the reason for an event.
Even today, religious people sometimes ask ‘Why should this happen to me?’ when
something goes wrong.
I
used to work in a hospital, and relatives of seriously ill patients sometimes
said ‘I don’t understand why this had to happen to him. He’s such a good, loving
person.’ And it would have done no good to explain why in terms of genetics, or
cancer causing substances in the environment, or the chances of picking up
infections. Something has gone wrong and someone must be to blame.
To
recover unexpectedly was therefore seen as ‘a miracle’. But again, this might
or might not have some physical explanation. ‘It was a miracle he wasn’t killed’
might refer to some daring deed that was life threatening. It does not imply
that the laws of nature were suspended in order to save someone’s life.
So
there is a problem with the vagueness of what is meant by ‘miracle’. We’ll come
on to this in a moment, but let’s start with the general problem of how you
relate the idea of miracles to science.
Miracles and Science
With the rise of modern science, in the 17th century, the general
view of the world was of an ordered mechanism. An argument about miracles that
starts with that premise come from David Hume.
Hume was an empiricist
– in other words, he believed that all knowledge is
based on evidence that we gain through the senses, and which the mind then sorts
out to give us the information we need.
It
is also important to recognise that scientific
laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, a ‘laws of
nature’ cannot dictate what must happen; it summarises what has been
found to happen. Laws of nature sum up what we have observed.
He
pointed out that people did not refer to things that happened in the ordinary
course of events as miracles, but only those that went against what people would
normally expect. Hence he defines a miracle as
‘a violation of a law of nature’.
But
he took the view that laws of nature were based on evidence. The more evidence
we have, the more certain we are about them. And for Hume, everything is a
matter of probability, not certainty. The more evidence, the higher the
probability. That is a principle that has been fundamental to science.
If
a miracle goes against a law of nature, then it represents a single piece of
evidence that goes against all the rest. We observe that everyone eventually
dies and stays dead – that is the general observation. If we hear an account of
someone coming back to life, that information has to be judged on the basis of
probability.
His famous quote on this:
‘A miracle is a violation of
the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established
these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as
entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined... The plain
consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention), ‘That no
testimony is ever sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of
such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it
endeavours to establish;’...
from his An Enquiry
into Human Understanding
He argues that, since we proportion belief to evidence, there can never be
enough evidence to prove that a miracle has taken place.
It is always going to be more likely that the person reporting it was mistaken.
BUT
NOTICE THAT Hume’s argument is not
that miracles cannot happen, but that – given the amount of evidence that has
established and confirms a law of nature – there can never be sufficient
evidence to prove
that a law of nature has been violated.
Inductive arguments
There are two
very different kinds of argument: inductive and deductive.
A deductive
argument works on the basis that, if one thing is believed to be true, another
is ‘deduced’ from it.
Inductive
arguments are based on evidence. Evidence is gathered and a theory to explain
it is devised. Based on that theory, it is possible to anticipate what will
happen. Observations are made, and if the anticipated thing happens, then it
confirms the theory.
Mostly,
science is based on inductive arguments – that is why the gathering of evidence
is so important for science.
Hume’s
argument is inductive, since it is based on the vast number of occasions
when a miracle has not happened. However, inductive arguments, being
based on experience, always lead to degrees of probability – which is why
Hume is careful to qualify his argument and explain that there can never be
enough evidence to prove a miracle, not that a miracle can never occur.
Science cannot
say that something can never happen, only that it is hightly improbable that it
will happen. Light, for example, goes in straight lines. But that is not some
absolute rule. Near a very strong gravitational force, light rays bend.
If a miracle
is a ‘violation of a law of nature’ then Hume has a good case for not believing
an account of any such event. But it cannot be an absolute proof that an
unexpected, unique event cannot take place.
A problem –
Regularity in the Universe
It might be
tempting to think that religion is on the side of a world where miracles (in the
form of violations of natural laws) can happen, whereas science with its
inductive arguments and gathering of data, leads to a world that is regular,
predictable and free from divine influences.
The
Cosmological and Teleological arguments for the existence of God were based on
the idea of a world which displayed regularity and design – a world which,
understood as a whole, led to the idea that it was designed and sustained by
God.
The problem is
that religious believers appear to want to have it both ways:
1. Given the
regularity and predictable nature of the world, they argue that this suggests
that it is sustained and guided by God.
2. But they
may then argue that events are ‘miracles’ and therefore directly caused by God,
simply because they do not fit the regular and predictable nature of the world.
A key issue
therefore is to decide how the particular is to be related to the general, and
which of them is the more important for religion.
Some
philosophers of religion look to the rational and regular aspects of the world
as evidence of an overall intelligent creator. Others look to miracles and
religious experiences - particular moments that go against the general
experience of the world – as the basis for belief in a God who is able to
disrupt the rational and the regular.
The problem
is that belief in miracles suggests that the world is unreliable. Things can
suddenly happen in ways that are against all that we understand to be the norm.
How can science deal with that? But also, how can that accommodate the idea of
a purposeful creator?
How do we get
round the idea of a miracle as a ‘violation of a law of nature’? Is it possible
to have an event that appears to be ‘natural’ but is still called a miracle?
There are two
ways in which some events may be described as ‘miracles’ but which do not
involve the violating of laws of nature. Both involve timing:
1. A natural
event that has been either speeded up or slowed down.
A broken bone
will eventually heal itself – but it cannot do so instantly. Equally, a person
may recover from a serious disease, but this does not usually happen instantly.
Thus it is not what happens that counts as a miracle, but the speed
in which it happens.
This
interpretation cannot overcome Hume’s criticism, since the speed at which
something happens is part of its fundamental nature, and part of what we observe
to happen on a regular basis.
BUT that
doesn’t really solve the problem. It is no more probable that one of these
things is going to happen instantly, than it is for something to happen that
goes against what we know of the laws of nature.
2. a natural
event that happens at a particularly opportune moment.
You were
desperate for money, and suddenly a long-lost uncle dies and leaves you a
legacy. Nothing usual in that - it does not involve any change in the way
things happen, or the speed at which they happen. The event is normal enough –
what appears to make it a miracle is its happening at exactly the ‘right
moment’. But what is a ‘right moment’?
But one
person’s luck is another person’s tragedy. The bereaved aunt may not feel that
it was a miracle her husband died at exactly that moment!
My usual
example:
For the
occupants of Jericho, about to be slaughtered now that their defensive walls are
down, the earthquake could not have happened at a worse time. Nor would the
Egyptian army, bogged down in the mud and about to be drowned, have thought it a
good time for the wind to have dropped.
But you could
argue that an event is so unlikely (whether good or bad) that it must be the
result of some non-natural intervention in the world.
However, we
need to recognise that everying is both utterly unlikely and absolutely
inevitable at one and the same time.
For -- Every
particular event is a unique combination of causes and conditions.
If anything in
the world were to be different, everything would need to be different. So many
detailed coincidences need to take place in order for you to be sitting here
today. But at the same time, given all the causes you know about, it seems
inevitable that you should be here.
So it all
comes down to interpretation.
However, from
what we have already seen about religious experience and religious language,
what makes something ‘religious’ is often a matter of interpretation,
rather than fact. A violation of a law of nature (i.e. an inexplicable event)
need not be seen as a miracle, and may have no religious or personal
significance whatever. Science only makes progress because it encounters
inexplicable events.
So, for an
understanding of miracles from a religious point of view, something else is
needed.
To call
something a miracle is not to describe it, but to give it value. ‘Miracle’ is an
interpretation of an event, not an event in itself.
In other
words, as found in religion, miracles are those events which express the
particular will of God in a situation.
So why do some
people want to interpret the world as miraculous.
The 19th
century philosopher Feuerbach argued that miracles were projections of human
desires. They represented the things that people longed for, rather than those
that actually happened. So perhaps the idea of miracles is wish fulfilment.
Of course, it
is possible to argue that God is everywhere doing miracles all the time. Every
birth is a miracle. The problem with this is that it effectively makes the
concept of miracle redundant. A religious person may see God acting everywhere,
in common events as well as in rare ones. Unless a miracle is at least a
violation of a law of nature, even if it is many other things as well, then
there seems no point in calling it a miracle at all.
Two other
problems are linked with this:
1. If God’s
action is seen as particular – in other words, he interevenes in particular
circumstances – then why does he not do that all the time. Here is the problem
of evil – Why does a loving and omnipotent God heal every dying child?
2. If God is
omnipotent, why should we pray for him to do anything? If he knows about the
situation and is powerful and therefore able to sort it out, why does he not do
so?
The general
problem for belief in a loving God…
If God exists,
he should have no need of miracles at all. Why, if the world is designed by God,
should he need to keep interfering to put right things that do not work
according to his intentions.
TO CONCLUDE
The issues I
have just raised show why the question of miracles is so central to Religious
Studies. Where you stand on miracles is a good indicator of where you stand on
many other topics. Is the world predictable or random? Are there external
forces that interfere with nature? Is God the name we give to the regularity
and purposeful working of the universe? Or is he some external force that
enters the world from time to time to change it?
Where you
stand on miracles will be a very clear indication of where you stand on the
matter of God, and of religion in general.
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