A miracle is what is not naturally possible. It is a supernatural
occurrence. It is paranormal.
This website argues that if miracles happen, they are not to be considered signs from God. They should not be religiously significant. Religion contends that God has set up the laws of nature. At certain times, He will do things, such as make a dead man live, that seem to go against these laws. Why the change? Because He wants to use the event to convey something religiously significant. In other words, He uses miracles as signs that He exists and as teaching tools. So, it is the message that matters, not how the message is conveyed! Even if miracles happen, the love people have for them is misplaced, idolatrous, and superstitious.
I assert that miracles are not signs and that it insults God to ascribe them to Him. The best rebuttal to this is Monsignor Knox’s booklet, Miracles.
Knox reasons that skeptics are right to refuse to believe in miracles that are just theatrical performances. He says that it is derogatory to divine dignity to suggest that the Lord does miracles without sufficient reason (page 8). But the fact is, we have to know the reason why God does each miracle He does before we can be sure that miracles are not random. Nobody pretends to know the reason, and whatever reasons they can think of are just opinions or guesses. God's reasons could be incalculably complex and numerous. Nobody can know. For example, when a miracle happens at Lourdes and is rather private, we don’t know why a miracle meant to convert open-minded unbelievers or at least get them to consider the faith was not done instead. It is no answer to say that the miracle was done for a good purpose—only God can see, and that is too unspecific. So, religion just assumes that miracles defend divine dignity and are not showing off. It is just assuming that they are signs, which is the same as saying that miracles are not signs at all. If you have to assume they are signs, you have no evidence that they are, because you are assuming. So, miracles imply that God is dissatisfied with nature, regrets the rules He made, and tries to change them. In that case, He should know better. He doesn’t even have the power to keep the change in force forever. For example, when He makes a statue weep, it doesn’t weep forever. To say that God does miracles to attract people to Jesus Christ is the same as saying that God is a deceiver, for He wants us to accept non-signs as signs. You can’t just assume that miracles are not random. Often, what seems random might not be.
OBJECTION: There's some potential circular reasoning. For example, you argue that miracles can't be assumed to be signs because you have to "assume" they are signs without evidence, but in doing so, you fall into the same trap when you claim that the very existence of miracles implies dissatisfaction with nature (which is an assumption, not a fact).
REPLY: It is not the same trap. God should be able to message through the mundane. To assume He is sloppy with nature is wiser than assuming He speaks through signs in miracles. This is for the same reason as in the following examples:
My alarm clock went off earlier than I set it, so God was doing it to maybe stop me from going out and having an accident.
Something stuck in it, and if God is behind that, then fine.
Knox reasons (correctly for a change!) that since God is so strict in expecting us to believe in His gospel and will send us to Hell if we do not, then there must be no room for reasonable doubt in the Christian faith (page 11). That is to say, the faith must have excellent evidence, and only somebody who doesn’t want to know would reject it.
Look at the faith, and if it has doctrines that can only be considered ignorant and harmful, then all the miracles in the world cannot make the faith correct.
Knox says that people who say they believe in the gospels despite the miracles they report are unreasonable (page 12). He says what they should be doing is convincing themselves that the evangelists wrote the truth and then thinking about whether the Church is right to infer that Jesus was the infallible God from their documents. He says that the gospels reporting miracles makes them harder to believe, and this is how it should be. So, he argues that accepting the miracles should not come as a result of thinking the gospels are credible, but of thinking their evidence that Jesus was God is good enough, in which case the miracles would be true. This is a an improbable setup, as it amounts to believing that Jesus was God just because the gospels (according to him) say so. Yet, this is the only thing a Christian can say because they have to admit that a document confessing miracles is hard to believe. He is asking us not to see miracles as evidence for Jesus being God, which means we have no evidence for Him being that. This contradicts page 15, which says that Jesus pointed to the miracles He did as evidence for His being the divine Son of God. He quoted Jesus saying that if He had not done great miracles among the Jews, they would be without sin for disbelieving in Him. If miracles are hard to believe, how could the gospels help us believe in the more difficult idea that Jesus is the Son of God—or worse, God Himself?
Probably from what Jesus said about not being able to blame people for refusing to believe if He did no miracles, Knox infers that the resurrection had to be more than just Jesus’ ghost appearing to people. For then Jesus couldn’t seriously call us to account for being skeptical. This ignores the fact that the gospels never say there was any evidence that the body was miraculously removed from the tomb—perhaps by rising from the dead. Matthew does not say if the agitated and jumpy soldiers who reported the missing body were not mistaken. Maybe none of the gospellers knew everything that happened. The gospels have a gap that lets us think the body could have been stolen before Jesus’ followers came to the tomb. It is no use to say that Jesus did other miracles, so He probably did raise His physical body. Jesus Himself warned that evil forces could duplicate His miracles, except the resurrection one. It is no use saying that Jesus was touchable after His resurrection and ate food because a ghost would naturally have psychic power to appear and could have pretended to eat food and be solid.
Knox says that there is no doubt that we should not need miracles, but they only happen because we do need them—we forget God so easily and need them to startle us out of this forgetfulness (page 10). The problem with this is that there are so many miracles reported today that we get desensitized to them, so they no longer have this effect. A power that was truly able to do miracles would not allow this to happen to such an extent. So, are all miracles fraud?
Miracles, if they are intended to have an effect on us and do, do not bring us to God. They bring us to fear. We heed their message because we are scared, not because we think the message is true—even if we do believe the message. The fact that miracles are not good signs shows that those who believe because of miracles are motivated by fear, not reason. The fact that there is no sense in letting a miracle tell us what to believe proves this. And why is there no sense? Because when you decide to believe in the miracle and what it says, it is clear you should be able to believe what it says without needing a miracle. A miracle, then, has no right to try and make up your mind for you—that is up to you and can only be up to you. So, miracles attempt to destroy your freedom; therefore, miracles are malignant. Knox writes that religions that claim to be sanctioned by miracles are the only ones able to be popular among men (page 10). I say this shows that religion thrives on fear and error, as does belief in miraculous signs and revelations from Heaven.
There is no value in fear in a spiritual context. If you are spiritually balanced, you don’t need to fear God or anything. All you need to do is resolve, with God’s grace, to do your best and purify your heart of sin. Fear is always an indication that you are not wholly committed to God, so miracles induce fear and thus distance you from God, though at first glance, you may seem closer. No miracle, however great, could prove a religion like Roman Catholicism, which teaches that a harmless act of masturbation is a serious sin deserving eternal torment, to be true. Examples of other harsh traditions from the Roman Church could be given, and it would take a month to mention them all.
Knox admits that God has no need for signs, for nature is full of evidence of His power and love, but says He only does miracles because they are needed to attract men to the holy movement of truth, the Roman Catholic Church. He is not sure if God could do a miracle to back up the truths of the Catholic faith when taught by the Salvation Army in China but tends to the view that He would do it. What is God to do? He wants them to have some truth, but if He does miracles outside the Catholic faith, the miracle is construed as evidence that the gospel differing from the Catholic one is the true one. But a really good God would be concerned about getting people to see good and do it, rather than getting them to subscribe to religious dogmas. This suggests that miracles that seem to back up dogmas are false miracles or from the demonic realm. Why would God be so concerned about truth when we are creatures that prefer delusion, according to Him? Better to focus on inducing virtue and the perception of moral truth instead. If the creed miracles defend is absurd, they are not pointers to the truth.
Knox says that it is because we believe in medical science that we believe in the cures at Lourdes—because medical science says they are impossible (page 23). He was writing in 1937 when medical science was still in its infancy. For Knox’s statement to be true, it would have to be the case that medical science then was perfect, but it was not. There is no doubt that the Lourdes miracles protest against real medical science, for it is a false science they defend. The miracles imply that since science misleads - that we should pay scant attention to it. It is true that science makes it impossible to believe in miracles.
Knox says that he does not believe the healing miracles of the Christian Science Church or the miracles of Spiritualists imply that their heretical gospel is true, for they expect the Lord to do miracles on demand, not when He freely sees the need for it (page 30). This implies that Catholic miracle workers have not done miracles by forcing God to do them. Their miracles happen because of God’s free agency. All these miracle workers use the same procedure—usually by laying hands on the sick and praying for healing miracles to take place. Knox is mistaken. Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, and indeed no healer has ever claimed that they can make God heal. Knox is just making excuses to deny that miracles outside Roman Catholicism show that Roman Catholicism is not true and that some other faith is. Even if his objection were correct, is it honest to reject miracles that show God can be made to do miracles on demand, as evidence that He can be controlled? If miracles are evidence for a religion being true, then clearly we have no right to impose our interpretation on them and have no right to ignore miracles that don’t fit our interpretation.
For example, in Spiritualism, you may have to develop the gift to make the dead appear, but the movement believes you are developing a gift from God and that not everyone has this gift. So, Knox just randomly picks which miracle signs he wants to follow and smears the doers of miracles that don’t fit. Miracles then certainly attack the law of Christ: "Love thy neighbor as thyself." If they do that, then Satan is behind them all. What makes it worse is that the Catholic Church believes you don’t need to be a great saint to be able to do miracles. You just need to be chosen, so how can Knox be so sure that the Catholic miracles were done by extremely sound people?
How does he know that any Catholic healer or miracle worker wasn’t forcing God? They could have forced God to make them look holier than they were while pretending they didn’t want anybody to see their holiness. That way, they could look like sincere servants of God who wouldn’t dream of ordering Him to do anything. Many Christian Scientists and Spiritualists would be devout lovers of God, and they all claim their abilities are gifts from God. Knox wants us to think they are liars, and the Catholic miracle doers are not. How arbitrary. Miracles bring out the prejudice that resides in religion.
Near the end of his treatise, Knox states that Catholics differ from skeptics of miracles in saying: “Maybe it is a miracle, and maybe it is not,” while the skeptics say, “Whatever it is, it simply cannot be a miracle” (page 24). He applauds the Catholic stance as openness towards the truth. But in fact, the skeptic’s view is more open to the truth, whatever it might be. The skeptic can see blood coming out of nowhere in a communion wafer and deny that it is supernatural, holding that it is some strange natural illusion caused by some unknown energy. He denies that it is a miracle because he has no reason to believe it is or could be. He is keeping his heart and mind as close to natural law as he can. Plus, a bizarre and far-fetched natural explanation—even a conspiracy theory—is better than assuming the supernatural, for the supernatural is too uncompelling. That is the fallacy that Christians fall prey to when they say things like, it’s harder to believe that Jesus swooned on the cross and came to in the tomb than that He really did rise. If an event maybe could be a non-miracle, then why believe it could be a miracle? If the event is a miracle and the skeptic is wrong, no harm is done because the skeptic cannot be expected to assume miracles without reason; that would be harmful in the sense of being irrational.
Miracles are meant to make us see that we cannot have a sense that our life has value without God. But if you were really a good person, you would find zest for life in helping yourself and others, not from God. You would be able to do without Him. Miracles are undoubtedly to be avoided.
CONCLUSION
To believe in miracles as signs is unjustifiably risky. Miracles or supernatural events are hopeless when it comes to searching for support for any dogma or faith system in them.