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.
 
 



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