IS GENERAL AGREEMENT AMONG MIRACLE WITNESSES HELPFUL?
A miracle is an event that is not naturally possible. That does not mean it is
necessarily impossible. There could be a power greater than nature such as a god
that can do it. A miracle is supernatural. It is really magic and superstition
under a different name. If a power can instantly remove an incurable terminal
disease, then it can guarantee bad luck for those who walk under ladders. A
miracle cannot have a moral purpose. Any moral benefits that seem to result from
it only happen despite it not because of it.
Somebody gets cured by an alleged miracle. Some people get religious comfort
from believing in the miracle. But the vast majority of people do not have the
tools to think about miracles carefully. They are not trained in healthy
scepticism. For example, your trusted and reliable friend tells you about a
miracle they saw or a vision. It does not follow that you should accept their
testimony just like that. We should ask them questions about it to make sure
there is no other explanation. There are billions of miracles that have been
approved by investigators as genuine miracles and then when some others come
along they find faults in the way they assessed them. For example, take the
Knock apparition which is certainly the best attested miracle of all time - when
images of Joseph and Mary and John appeared in a ball of light on a Church gable
in 1879. Minor details are used to persuade people that this apparition was
really miraculous. One witness said the ground was dry beneath the apparition.
Another said that the apparition was crisp and clear and not like an image made
by a magic lantern. The main details do nothing to show that the apparition was
not a trick. But the minor details are insufficient as evidence for we know that
if you have people witnessing some event and ask for their testimony, they will
all give the same rough outline and the details will contradict one another. For
all we know, cut outs may have been put on the gable and a light source shone on
them. No wonder the priest was so keen on letting people pull pieces off the
wall the next day. It helped get rid of the evidence for tampering. The
excessive importance given to minor details is fatal to the reliability of the
evidence for a real miracle at Knock. So we see that miracles encourage a
superstitious mentality. They endanger people. If Christianity didn't go on
about a Virgin-born man coming back from the dead and miracles, people would not
be so amenable to them. And when they are, they become more at risk of being
fooled by fake mediums and other charlatans. Overall, belief in the supernatural
does more harm than good.
Imagine a case where a number of people see a miracle. They testify. They agree
on the important and major parts in their testimony.,
What should one choose of the following?
1 Minor details in miracle testimonies that seem to indicate that the miracle
was real.
2 Minor details in miracle testimonies that seem to indicate that the miracle
may not have been a real one.
Knowing that people make mistakes in minor details, it is healthy scepticism to
embrace number 2. This justifies rejection of most if not all miracle claims.
For example, the frightening pallor of Bernadette of Lourdes during her visions
does not match her claim that she saw a beautiful loving Virgin Mary. The
children of Fatima being summoned by Mary for a vision in disobedience to their
parents does not hold out much hope that this entity really was Mary. Was it a
dream or something else? Also the vision making a mistake when telling Lucia
that the war would end that day is another indication that the entity was not
from God and possibly not supernatural.