We do not need to care about miracles

Some background from the philosophy of science

Miracles and Faith

Should we believe in God? It’s an important question, arguably the most important one. Divine miracles are considered by many people to be a good reason to believe in the divine, or (more riskily) a specific religion such as Catholicism. And there are some miracles that are considered to be pretty good — one of the most famous is the “miracle of the sun”, most famously seen by thousands of people in Fatima Portugal in 1917 (although many other similar miracles have been seen in other places and times). The miracle of the Sun came in for a great deal of discussion recently on Substack, provoked by a detailed post by Ethan Muse arguing that it is strong evidence for the truth of the Catholic faith. This was then rebutted by several people, particularly Evan Harkness-Murray and Scott Alexander.

This was all very interesting (to some), and I thought that Evan and Scott did a good job of dealing with that miracle specifically. But the general approach they took is only a short term patch: it is debunking a specific miracle. I am an agnostic, and I am only comfortable in my agnosticism because I believe I have good reasons to disbelieve in the miracles generally. My reasons are based on my own background in the philosophy of science, based on evidence that is widely known and understood by professional philosophers of science but which are not as familiar to the general public. So I thought it might be helpful to explain why we generally should not worry or think too much about miracles, and as Ethan continues to publish his series on various miracles trying to convince us all of Catholocism, we are not being unreasonable if we just ignore the whole thing. If we believe in any religion, it should not be because of any extant report of a miracle.

Miracles are a kind of Strange Event

One of the odd things about how evidence works is that the quality of evidence depends on other evidence we have. A naive person who sees a yogi floating in the air might reasonably come to believe that yogi have magic powers. But if we know that the appearance of floating is achieved in known cases via a disguised metal seat, what had been a strong confirmation of magic powers becomes no confirmation at all. We no longer need to investigate each further case of yogic flying. Unless we have compelling reasons to believe that our standing explanation of yogic flying cannot apply in this case, reports of flying yogis constitute bad evidence, so bad as to be practically indistinguishable from no evidence at all.

Confirmation of mysterious powers?

There are many, many cases where astonishing and seemingly impossible occurrences initially convinced observers that something miraculous/magical/ inexplicable had occurred, only for subsequent investigation to reveal that nothing at all mysterious was going on. Many of these events have nothing to do with religion and would not be considered miracles: rather, purportedly religious miracles are a subcategory of apparently inexplicable happenings what I will call strange events. Some of the more famous non-religious examples of apparently inexplicable strange events that were subsequently explained include a horse that could count and do arithmetic , some children who made friends with fairies and got pictures of them on camera, psychics who could bend spoons with their minds, mysterious circles appearing in farmers fields perhaps made by aliens, mediums who could talk to ghosts and levitate tables, and people who could dowse for water with sticks or wire.

Does the fact that we have first person accounts of how these are made prove that none are made by aliens? Should we investigate them all?

Some of these cases fall under the label of ‘pseudoscience’, where the happenings are less dramatic and the issue is whether there is some sort of practice that works or not, such as homeopathy, phrenology or remote viewing. There is a kind of continuum, from very remarkable on-off happenings such as the Hudson Valley UFO wave, through to well established and documented phenomenon that might, but probably don’t, have efficacy beyond the placebo effect, such as acupuncture or therapeutic touch. But what we are interested in here is not the more prosaic end of the spectrum. We are interested in a general sort of thing: the strange event. And we are not just interested in strange events, but in ones that purport to give evidence for a hypothesis. The hypothesis is one that supposedly is needed to explain the strange event. Four common such hypothesis are: divine entities cause miracles; some people have supernatural powers; ghosts are real; aliens are visiting earth.

While many ‘inexplicable’ phenomena have been explained, some others have not. Ghost sightings and UFO both illustrate the general situation well: the categories encompass many, many reports of mysterious happenings. Some of these happenings are investigated and explained; many are not and cannot be, because they were single, unrepeated events that did not leave behind much evidence. Much of the interest in UFO’s and ghosts is because there is disagreement over a basic question: are aliens visiting earth? Do people’s souls sometimes linger and affect the world?

Photographic evidence of aliens!

Miracles are evidence that functions the exact same way as ghost sightings and UFO accounts. There is an underlying hypothesis in question; a class of strange events are offered as evidence for the hypothesis in question. The contention is that the strange events in question are best explained, and perhaps could only be explained, if the hypothesis was true.

Strange Events have natural explanations

There are broadly three types of evidence that one gets for mysterious happenings. Best is physical remnants, such as were found at the Roswell UFO site. Video or photographic documentation is next best. Finally one gets eyewitness accounts, which are better if they include a systematic interview by an experienced investigator, and which are least persuasive when they are written accounts that lack any other supporting detail. Multiple eyewitnesses that gave independent testimony whose accounts corroborate one another are on their own pretty good evidence considered independently of other considerations, and this is the sort of evidence that the most credible cases of mysterious happenings (such as the miracle of the sun) are based on. But as with any evidence, other considerations do need to be considered, and such considerations can mostly or entirely undermine the force of the witness testimony.

This can be most clearly seen with magic tricks. A properly performed magic trick will cause a whole lot of people to have nearly identical experiences of a mysterious happening. They will tell stories that corroborate one another, and an independent observer or investigator can quite easily establish with a great deal of confidence an exact and accurate description of the apparently mysterious event. But the thing about magic tricks is that they are not really mysterious, they only appear to be.

If I did not know that people can do magic tricks — that is, create apparently incredible and mysterious happenings , I would quite reasonably come out of a magic show thinking I had seen real magic. But, since I do know such things are possible, I do not need to know the specific trick behind any particular vanishing assistant, card produced from nowhere, or seeming mind-reading. I can be confident that magic is tricks, unless I get a very good reason to override my usual presumption.

The Mysterious Floating Orb. Click to see the magic in action.

The existence of magic tricks is the clearest case of the general reason why an informed observer shouldn’t alter their opinions much based on a strange event. It is that strange events are very common in the aggregate, and when they are thoroughly investigated they almost always are explained naturalistically. In the cases where strange events are not explained naturalistically, the situation is always either that the event could not be investigated very well, or else (rarely) the evidence does not rule out the naturalistic explanation, but does not confirm it either.

So we see with the miracle of the sun. As Evan and Scott show, we can perfectly well explain the miracle of the sun naturalistically. We can’t prove it wasn’t a miracle: but we also certainly can’t prove it was. The specifically religious visions of the spiritual being were seen only by a few children who, as Evan nicely illustrates, are not reliable witnesses even if they are sincere. So general consideration of the phenomena of strange events suggests that we really don’t need to care about the miracle of the sun.

Every magic trick is mysterious until you know the (usually very simple and dumb) secret. Every UFO sighting is mysterious until we find out about the relevant weather balloon or see how the photo was altered. Given how many cases of strange events have been naturalistically explained, the general inference that is supported by the class of strange events is that strange events subject to rigorous investigation always have a natural explanation. In cases (such as the miracle of the sun) where the investigation was not sufficiently rigorous to remove all doubt, we should believe that had the investigation been better, so too would have been the strength of the naturalistic case.

Miracle accounts are terrible evidence

Historical accounts are full of miracles. This is true for every religious tradition. While believers may be convinced that only their faith has reliably attested miracles, the vast majority of historical miracles have as their evidence only a written account, and so the quality of attestation from one tradition to another is not substantially different. Each religious tradition has written accounts of miraculous happenings with the main difference in evidential quality being whether the happening is referred to in multiple sources, and whether the author of the account claims to have seen the miracle themselves. Collectively the evidentiary value of these is almost nil: each tradition rejects the veracity of all the other traditions’ miracles (with some exceptions), and irreligious observers should reject them all. If the miracles in historical texts had been investigated by careful and skeptical observers, they would have been debunked. But in any case they should be dismissed.

When a historian reads an account of a miracle in a medieval text, they do not thereby slightly increase their credence in the religion. They instead, rightfully, adjust their estimate of the credibility of the source downward. You could show me a million magic tricks, and it will not make me believe in magic, because my hypothesis that they are all tricks explains them all better than the alternative. Similarly, the thousands upon thousands of reports of miracles in historical texts moves my credence in God not at all because the hypotheses that these are all some combination of credulous hearsay, exaggerations, honest mistakes, hallucinations, ecstatic visions, unusual natural occurrences or wilful fraud explains them better than that they are all miracles. Once we have accepted that the best explanation for any given miraculous report is natural, then a new miraculous report does not move our credence in God. We do not need to imagine that some small quantity of purported miracles are really miraculous, any more than we need to assume that the small remnant of unexplained UFO sightings really are aliens, or that the small remnant of unexplained ‘hauntings’ were actually ghosts.

This is not to say that no strange occurrence should change our views. But given the tendency of strange events to end up being explicable after all, only extremely well vetted and attested, robustly inexplicable events should interest us at all. And even then, we should feel quite comfortable saying ‘we’ll figure it out eventually’, even if we can’t imagine how quite yet.