A miracle is God doing something like making a person foretell the future, making a statue come to life, or giving a person a vision of the Virgin Mary. He supposedly does it to show he is with us and loves us. It stands apart from how we would expect nature to function.
I need to oppose the doctrine that God should be loved with all the heart, soul, and mind. Most of us who ignore that have healthy relationships. Christianity reports miracles, which assume divine supremacy — that wreaks the credibility of all miracle claims, and not just Christian ones. You need outstanding and incredible and unattainably good evidence to be able to teach doctrines like that with a straight face. They are extremely serious. The bigger the claim that we should love God selflessly and as the one who alone really matters, the bigger the justification we need.
The only thing I can prove to myself 100% is that I exist. I can prove myself, and my existence is the one thing I am most sure of in the fullest sense. This is not solipsism — it does not mean I should think that other people are mere opinions. In fact, who I am is connected to others, so I may prove myself and be a bit less sure they exist without downgrading them as mere dreams.
It follows that I have to experience apparitions and miracles to justify and help me to love God. They have to be so powerful that they can nearly prove God as much as they prove me.
And these experiences need to be frequent. I need nearly constant apparitions and miracles to justify me loving God. They have to be frequent, for to experience something most or all of the time makes it more sure than something you experienced before but don’t anymore.
I should not believe in miracles as signs telling me what to believe. One reason is that we need very good quality evidence for miracles, and it is often lacking, and there is a window for fraud and error. I need to see them myself. You would not believe Jake if he said a brick floated in mid-air. You would need to see. So imagine how much bigger it is if Peter says to you that he saw the risen Jesus?
Suppose I see a miracle myself and have a level of certainty about it. I may be mostly certain, if not totally certain, about it. But God could improve my certainty. He has the power to make me see mystically and rationally that the miracle was real. If he gives me the power to be totally sure that I exist, he can give more confidence in other things too. If he wants me to love him with all my heart, he can help reconcile this or link this to how I know of his love.
I have to believe what the evidence says about normal non-miraculous things, for I need to. It is because I am so sure of my own existence that I have to do this in order to be as safe as I can be.
Imagine this: a miracle reveals that chemotherapy will kill me if I ever have it. I could be at risk of dying from cancer without treatment. I may believe what the miracle says. I trust nature that bit less, for I believe I have experienced something bigger than it — so if science says it will not kill me, I will ignore it. That is my belief doing that. But the miracle itself inherently says that nature might not do what it should — intervention is possible.
Why go as far as to believe that miracles indicate the existence of God, or that his love is working for you in some particular way? Why not just think they indicate the existence of some psychic ability that causes a miraculous hallucination? It is possible that deep down you do think that way — but you prefer to listen to the miracle anyway, for once you admit a higher power, it has to be given the upper hand.
Then there is the influence from other miracle believers. Miracle believers say you are denying the worth of human testimony if you refuse to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Yet they are the ones that reject human testimony when it is testimony to fairies or something that contradicts their dogmas. So they are applying psychological pressure, and maybe their hypocrisy confuses you.
I am fully entitled to refuse to listen to any testimony about miracles, for God could make me know that he is there and that whatever religion the miracle supposedly supported is true. He could do it by increasing my liking for theology and my understanding. Many of our desires are implanted in us anyway. The desire of the homosexual cannot be changed. For me then, to endorse miracles despite how God has not formed me to learn correctly implies that wishful thinking is driving me.
Therefore, to believe in a miracle is degrading unless it can be shown that it is beyond reasonable doubt.
Belief/unbelief in miracles is not just a matter of belief/unbelief but also of decency and virtue. We have to forbid and condemn belief like we condemn somebody’s derogatory remarks. If God expects you to degrade yourself by accepting somebody’s miraculous testimony, then ignore him.
Further Reading ~
A Christian Faith for Today, W Montgomery Watt, Routledge, London, 2002
Answers to Tough Questions, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Scripture Press,
Bucks, 1980
Apparitions, Healings and Weeping Madonnas, Lisa J Schwebel, Paulist Press, New
York, 2004
A Summary of Christian Doctrine, Louis Berkhof, The Banner of Truth Trust,
London, 1971
Catechism of the Catholic Church, Veritas, Dublin, 1995
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, San Francisco,
1988
Enchiridion Symbolorum Et Definitionum, Heinrich Joseph Denzinger, Edited by A
Schonmetzer, Barcelona, 1963
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
Miracles, Rev Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society, London, 1937
Miracles in Dispute, Ernst and Marie-Luise Keller, SCM Press Ltd, London, 1969
Lourdes, Antonio Bernardo, A. Doucet Publications, Lourdes, 1987
Medjugorje, David Baldwin, Catholic Truth Society, London, 2002
Miraculous Divine Healing, Connie W Adams, Guardian of Truth Publications, KY,
undated
New Catholic Encyclopaedia, The Catholic University of America and the
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
Raised From the Dead, Father Albert J Hebert SM, TAN, Illinois 1986
Science and the Paranormal, Edited by George O Abell and Barry Singer, Junction
Books, London, 1981
The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Headline, London, 1997
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline, London, 1996
The Case for Faith, Lee Strobel, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2000
The Encyclopaedia of Unbelief Volume 1, Gordon Stein, Editor, Prometheus Books,
New York, 1985
The Hidden Power, Brian Inglis, Jonathan Cape, London, 1986
The Sceptical Occultist, Terry White, Century, London, 1994
The Stigmata and Modern Science, Rev Charles Carty, TAN, Illinois, 1974
Twenty Questions About Medjugorje, Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D. Pangaeus Press,
Dallas, 1999
Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer, Freeman, New York, 1997
THE WEB
The Problem of Competing Claims by Richard Carrier
www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/indef/4c.html