miracles are unfalsifiable and therefore inherently lack credibility
Nature indicating that something is true that you
cannot falsify is one thing. It is bad. But people doing it shows they
are hiding something. That is another problem. A good theory tells
us to refute it if we can and what would do so because it does not want to be in
contradiction to the truth or contradictory. Contradictions destroy everything
based on them and turn it all into useless nonsense. A miracle claim amounts to
a theory. God's love amounts to a theory. So if a miracle shows
God's love that is two theories not one. Believers definitely refuse to
admit that any evil can refute God. Saying a miracle happened is denying
that anything can disprove it or show it improbable. For example, if we
proved Jesus was a huckster and none of the resurrection witnesses were credible
you can still say, "That does not mean no miracle happened."
SUPERNATURAL IS ABOUT PUTTING BELIEFS BEYOND CRITICISM
A miracle is what is not naturally possible. It is a supernatural occurrence. It
is paranormal.
Miracles are kept out of the reach of evidence that may disconfirm them or show
them to be doubtful or false.
Believers can go as far as saying that the problem of evil or the falsity of
miracles is a claim made by unbelievers in God. Not so. They make claims about
evil and suffering and miracles and those claims invite a response. They want to
put people off examining the case against their doctrines.
Miracles are unfalsifiable for the following reasons:
-Believers tend to ignore evidence that the event may not be a true miracle.
-They cannot be repeated.
-You can't verify them though scientific experimentation.
You can never prove that a man who died and rose in a week did this by
supernatural powers - maybe it was a trick of nature.
- Science has to assume that the inexplicable must have a
natural explanation though we may never know what it is.
-Belief in them is based on human testimony - yet there
are many miracle accounts we reject even though there is good solid testimony
for them.
-The person who says a miracle happened guesses about
what the actual miracle was. The apostles supposedly said Jesus miraculously
rose from the dead but we should say the miracle was that they thought he did!
-They cannot be falsified for believers formulate their
teaching of miracles in such a way that it cannot be refuted even if it is total
rubbish. They do this as follows
# When there are no miracles of regrowing limbs or people being dead for a week
returning to life, they say it is not God's plan to do these. They say he
chooses to do miracles that are not as obvious as those. Though nobody denies
that lots of people lie that miracles happen, the liars are careful not to say
anything too unconvincing. Religion is careful to expect "miracles" that will
happen or be reported anyway. For example, Catholicism tells you to expect
healings but never asks you to expect God to make the sun stand still next
Tuesday as a sign for the world. Witches and those who pray are careful to ask
for things that will probably happen anyway. They want to convince themselves.
In doing that they empower and prolong their cognitive dissonance, their
availing of a placebo and their escapism. This has a ripple effect on others. It
invites them to be as bad.
# When evidence against a miracle appears, believers invent a new miracle - they
say that the new evidence is a miraculous intervention by Satan to discredit the
miracle. Joseph Smith lost his 116 pages of the Book of Mormon forever. He
claimed that Satan was behind this and that God permitted it to happen to test
people's faith. Believers without any evidence say that Padre Pio's cologne was
miraculous and he was not using perfume. They just take his word for it. What
could prove Pio to be unreliable is explained away. When you prove to a believer
that the resurrection tales about Jesus are uncompelling they will say that even
if they are, they feel that Jesus rose and this feeling is a sign from God that
he did. This inventing of miracles to disarm evidence leaves you with only one
reason why you might reject one miracle tale and accept another. That reason is
preference.
# Belief in miracles is never down to hard evidence but to human testimony - you
believe because witnesses say they have seen miracles. You cannot catch every
person who is erring or lying out. So you cannot prove the miracles didn't
happen.
# Even truthful witnesses of miracles will fear not being believed and may
encourage belief in other witnesses many of whom may be suspect or secret
frauds. They feel that the more they normalise belief in miracle wonders the
safer they are.
# When God makes a statue bleed instead of healing a child from cancer which
seems more fitting, again we are told it is because of his plan and we cannot
understand his plan. People will say that that is fine in theory. But if you
were God, would you want people taking miracle witnesses word for it that you
made a statue bleed when a child was dying nearby? You need better evidence than
that. Would you take people's word for it that a mother let her seven year old
daughter drive a car on a motorway even though it could be true and though there
might have been a reason why she had to do it? You need something better than
testimony. God making the statue bleed while the child is in agony would be a
necessary evil assuming God is all-good and all-powerful. You would need very
strong evidence that it happened. You don't want to risk making excuses for the
inexcusable and you don't want to say God did this necessary evil without you
being able to prove it.
# Evil people and sceptics sometimes plant evidence that a miracle is not a real
miracle. Satan is smart and he inspires them how to succeed. Sometimes he plants
the evidence against a miracle himself. The supernatural gives excuses for
ignoring evidence and proof that a miracle is spurious.
Religion often teaches doctrines and makes miracle claims but puts them in a
context that makes refutation difficult or impossible - because the religion
wants to believe nonsense not the truth it protects it from the possibility of
refutation or from anything that shows it is implausible. Doing that is a sign
that deep down they don't believe and don't care about truth. They have grave
suspicions. They set it up to make it look convincing when it is not as if they
are trying to convince themselves. When an idea is made irrefutable all you can
do is guess that it is true. You are not accepting it because of logic or
evidence so it is a guess. It is impossible to take an assumption or guess
seriously unless you are brainwashed or adept at self-deception. You are trying
to perceive your assumption as your belief. And you do this to fool others and
to get some kind of comfort from them. The person who believes rubbish is
consoled and comforted and validated when others seem to believe the rubbish as
well.
The Catholic Church professionally investigated Padre Pio and found that he was
no saint but a dodgy psychopath who exploited peoples' credulity. Much later,
the Church ignored this research. It never debunked it but settled for saying
that Pio was a saint. The Church does not require anyone to believe in the
miracles claimed by and for Pio. The Church recognises some miracles allegedly
done by Pio after his death as it takes them as a divine sanction for the
canonisation of Pio as a saint. No recognition exists for the wonders he
supposedly did when he was alive. Even the stigmata is not an officially
accepted miracle. Believers say that Satan tricked the Church to make it think
Pio was not really holy. He rigged the evidence that Pio was fake. This is an
example of how belief in magic and the supernatural can be used to detach you
from reality and make you disbelieve what the evidence points to.
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
tally 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
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 and 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 that she was a good person who helped many,
that 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 the 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-falsfiable 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 on 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 the 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 any 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 then 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 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!