Introduction:
To believe in a miracle is often to believe in something that cannot, by its nature, be disproven. Such beliefs invite followers to ignore or reinterpret any evidence that might count against them. When every challenge is explained away—by blaming evil spirits, divine mystery, or human limitation—the claim ceases to be meaningful in rational terms. This section explores how the refusal to subject supernatural claims to falsification erodes intellectual honesty, empowers deception, and blurs the line between genuine faith and self-delusion.
Falsification does not apply to everything. Some areas of life deal with values, meanings, or personal experiences that cannot be tested or refuted in the way a scientific hypothesis can. You cannot falsify the claim that beauty matters, or that forgiveness is good, or that a piece of music feels divine. These are subjective or moral statements, not empirical ones. Likewise, in mathematics or logic, certain truths are analytic and need no testing — they are true by definition. Even in everyday reasoning, we often rely on trust, testimony, and probability rather than strict falsifiability.
But acknowledging that falsification is limited does not weaken its importance. It is still one of the best tools we have for protecting ourselves from deception and self-deception. When a claim could be tested but is instead made immune to testing, that is when falsification becomes essential. A falsifiable claim can be challenged and improved; an unfalsifiable one only hardens into dogma.
This is why Karl Popper did not treat falsification as a rigid scientific law but as a safeguard of intellectual honesty. It draws a line between claims that risk being wrong and claims that refuse to risk it. The former belong to the pursuit of truth; the latter belong to the preservation of illusion. Even outside science — in politics, religion, or personal belief — asking “What would count as evidence against this?” protects us from manipulation, bias, and wishful thinking.
Falsification is not a rule for everything we value, but it is a warning system for everything we can be wrong about. It keeps belief accountable to reality and reminds us that conviction without vulnerability to disproof is not knowledge, only confidence without warrant.
THE ARGUMENT
Supernatural claims inherently escape evidence.
If they did not, believers could—and often would—still manage to protect them from refutation or from being shown implausible.
Spirit mediums are regarded as doing miracles when there is no obvious fraud. When they are caught cheating and using props, it is argued that they are possessed by some evil spirit which made them cheat. It is reasoned that if you tangle with spirits, you risk occasional interference by evil spirits who want to discredit spiritualism.
If you claim your urine cures cancer, you can say it has a mind of its own and that it always works, though it looks like it does not, for it works in mysterious ways. If you really believe it works, you will tell the gullible not to go to the doctor or to hospital. If it works, then doctors and hospitals are a waste of time, and you are better to let them spend time treating somebody who doesn’t have cancer. You will charge a fortune for urine if you feel like it.
Once you encourage and get people to believe that any evidence against a belief is to be dismissed or ignored, you make it very hard for them to find truth again. People lose their life savings, their health, and their lives over it. When the Inquisition decided a girl accused of witchcraft was guilty, they reasoned that if witnesses turned up saying she was a good person who helped many, Satan was inspiring those witnesses to lie in such a way that they could not be found out. If a witch had supernatural powers, she should be able to protect herself from pain during torture. If she didn’t, she was believed to be using her powers to simulate pain and suffering. Or she was allowing herself to suffer so that she could offer the pain as a sacrifice to Satan to give him more power to hurt people.
You might say that it is okay for people to remain unaffected by the evidence against their beliefs as long as it does not make them do harm. But that is saying that truth does not matter, and that kind of attitude always leads to harm. Disconnecting a person from his or her reality, even if it seems to bring more happiness, is still doing harm. It is like claiming you do a person a favour by making them blind. It is not doing them a favour, even if hypothetically they could be happy to be blind and better off. It harms people by depriving them of the chance to embrace truth with dignity and be themselves—to be really themselves. A lack of concern for truth has a ripple effect in your community, and even if it feels good, it will create trouble for others and a bad example where bad things pave the way for worse things.
If a doctrine is made non-falsifiable and is considered sacred, that means that questioning or doubting that doctrine is sinful and thinking critically about it is a waste of time. Non-falsifiable doctrines and bullying go together. The bullying may not be obvious, but it is still happening. It is tacit bullying. And whoever encourages you to disbelieve the doctrine or doubt it is to be avoided. It impacts relationships. The victim of religion is blamed for trying to free her or his mind.
To create a mental disconnect between a person and her place in the world is also to create an emotional disconnect. To oppose truth willfully or unwilfully is to give evil people permission to harm. Why not, if truth does not matter? If you condemn them, you will make them worse, for they will see you as hypocritical and unfair. The condemning makes you worse, not better. A faith that causes evil to flourish is actually better than one that does not but which allows evil to flourish. When your faith allows the evil of others to flourish, it is worse than one that lets the evil in you flourish.
People who make a supernatural claim and who tell you to make excuses if it seems to be false are trying to stop you from seeing that it is false if it is indeed false. They do not inspire trust.
The convincing miracles are only superficially convincing. The spin doctors in religion are careful to make them look persuasive.
Beliefs in the supernatural are really about putting certain allegations and claims beyond the scrutiny of reason, with the intention to forestall attempts to show the beliefs are wrong or probably incorrect.
Imagine a rich woman lost her son in a car accident.
Soon, a man appears claiming to be the son in another body.
The woman, in time, begins to believe him. She leaves him her entire fortune at
his behest.
Does it follow that because he was after money we can be sure he was a fraud?
No. Perhaps he was the son and just got greedy. Or perhaps he thought it made
her happy to think her son wanted her property and to be her heir. Or perhaps
his asking for the fortune was not his doing but down to a miracle causing him
to do it.
What this shows us is that miracles are unfalsifiable. Evidence, then, is eliminated as being of any value in relation to miracles. We are only making fools of ourselves by checking out testimony to miracles and checking them out.
Religion uses miracles as evidence for the truth of its claims.
We see, then, that belief in miracles is really circular:
“John said the sun turned to the colour of blood for no reason. John is honest, so I accept his testimony that this miracle happened. His testimony is right because miracles happen.”
The acceptance of the miracle is really just an assumption. The miracle is not believed in because of the evidence at all. The evidence is window dressing. The decent and honest unbeliever, then, has no choice but to assume that miracles do not happen. At least the unbeliever is basing his view on evidence. The accusation of bias against the unbeliever is unfair. It is the believers who are biased and unfair.
The unbeliever says, “It stands to reason that we could be wrong about John’s honesty in this matter. It is more likely that we are wrong than that a miracle really happened. If a miracle happened, how do we know that the miracle was not in the sun but in John’s brain? Was it a miraculous hallucination?” And the believers believe it themselves. They just make random exceptions, which again proves that they are not the servants of reason and evidence and truth they say they are.
People do lie to themselves, believe their own lies, and commit fraud in religious and paranormal matters. There is a limit to what they can do to fool us. A magician is limited by his resources in relation to what tricks he can perform. Suppose the religious miracle doers have supernatural abilities or paranormal powers. It follows that they have more resources with which to fool people. Maybe they used telepathic manipulation to make people think their powers are better than what they actually are. If you are lying, for example, about seeing the Virgin Mary in a miracle apparition, you could send a telepathic image to the mind of a friend to make them think they see it along with you. See the point?
Miracle reports are not to be automatically trusted. Every test to eliminate trickery must be applied. A person who has no powers, then, is not to be trusted until the evidence is good enough that they can be. A person, then, who may have supernatural powers is deserving of even less trust!
Miracles might as well not happen at all. And they lack the power to help us genuinely believe. Religion encourages people to say they believe in miracles when, in fact, they do not. They only guess they have happened.
Conclusion
We conclude that believers merely assume that a miracle is a miracle. There is no real belief in miracles where people are merely assuming they happen. We are suspicious of a claim that cannot be falsified—and a miracle claim is that kind of claim.