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MIRACLES CANNOT GIVE FAITH

If there is a God who can do miracles that does not mean he does do them. The only reason people believe that God does miracles is because there are witnesses telling them that they saw them happen. They conclude that God does miracles to show which human institution is the true Church or the religion that teaches the truth. To say that we cannot dismiss all these witnesses says only that we must let human testimony tell us what to believe about God. That is a form of idolatry. It is letting man form your image of God and how you relate to him. It is faith in God because of people and not faith in God because of God.

In the defence of evangelical Christianity, Answers to Tough Questions, it is declared that a miracle is a unique event that has no precedent and cannot be explained like you can explain anything else (page 79). It then makes the extraordinary statement that when we hear of a miracle the first question we should ask is not can it happen but did it happen? Obviously miracle believers have to say this.

If you hear of something as incredible as a miracle you must ask can it happen before you ask did it happen. Because if it cannot happen, all the evidence in the world that it did happen is no good. Christians want us to be fools to please them. Let us prove this. If the police hear of a paralysed man committing murder and ignore the question, “Could it have happened?” and prefer to focus on, “Did it happen?” then they could easily end up charging him with the crime.

If a coven of witches said they managed to resurrect a dead witch the Christians would be asking then, “Can it happen?” Evidently, it is only when it is Christian miracles that you should ask, “Did it happen?” and not ask, “Can it happen?” at all. Their approach is dishonesty – all miracle believers who say that miracles provide evidence for their religion being correct are as bad.

The statement of the Christians, “Don’t ask can it happen but did it happen?” translates as,

1 “I will believe in the impossible such as a man rising from the dead if the evidence says it happened”. That is saying that you will believe that 2 and 2 are 3 if somebody can get evidence for it which is absurd for evidence needs 2+2 to add up to 4 to exist and to be acceptable.

2 “I believe that it is possible for men to rise from the dead so I will believe that they did if the evidence is good enough” because then you are assuming that a miracle is possible in order to believe the evidence. This is evil because you should only believe that that could happen as a result of evidence. But you cannot for you have to assume it can happen first. It is far more evil to assume a thing like that than it is to believe in it because of evidence because then you are regarding law, the thing that gives you your being and your welfare, as unstable all because of an assumption. Obviously it is evil to assume that the school will be closed by some miracle tomorrow. If you can assume miracles are possible and stake things on that then there is no reason why you shouldn’t do this.

Assumption in relation to the possibility of miracles is heinous in matters so serious and is as bad as assuming that when a murder happens that your neighbour did it. So whatever you do you are twisting logic and breaking its rules and yet only one of the translations can be right for they disagree or perhaps both translations are wrong.

And both are wrong – which means you can’t say you have to be open-minded for there is nothing to be open-minded about for both options are impossible. It follows then that faith in miracles perverts and despises reason. It is a faith that needs deception to survive and is not faith at all for faith that does not believe in reason is not faith for belief is what your reason tells you is likely. Miracles do not result in faith or belief at all. A counterfeit yes but not the real thing. Miracles are not intended to create faith no matter how much it looks as if they are. Religion has no right to use them to try and get people to believe in a God or a saint.

The view that miracles are for causing faith in the word of God is false. Christians, Muslims and Jews have to say it is not false but true for they claim to be intelligent faiths. Jesus claimed to be our hearts’ desire meaning he has to satisfy our rational and intellectual desires too. Certainly if these religions attest to faith in the word of man then there is no need to worry about them for man’s opinions are just man’s opinions and there is nothing intrinsically special or binding or sacred about them so we can reject them if we think they are wrong so the miracles would be a waste of time then. The religions of the book, that is the cults that think a book is the word of God, are guilty of claiming that their book says it is the word of God and therefore it is the word of God. This is illogical. Anything that puts dogmas before logic is bigoted and it is making any concern for humanity it has look superficial for without reason none of us would be alive. It is their opinion that the book is God’s word and they want us to treat their opinion ie them as God. Christians reply that they look for evidence that the Bible is historical and truthful first and then because they trust it they trust its miracle stories and since they accept the miracles they have to accept it as the word of God (page 138, Answers to Tough Questions). This is a lie because the question that comes first is, “Is the Bible good and right in all its moral teaching and are its doctrines, say that Jesus was the Son of God, respectful towards God and decency.” This question is the most important one and without it all the credibility as regards history in the Bible in the world won’t help it so it is the question that the other questions are no good without it. You have to assume the Bible is right before you can believe in it. Evidence has no place or relevance in this. If evidence is given it is not assimilated or accepted but just used as a bait to get attention for their creed. So the fallacy of circular reasoning that the Christians are using is this, “The Bible is the word of God for all its rules are good even though we can’t understand many of them or prove this for they are mysteries but we don’t care therefore it is the word of God.” They cannot bring in miracles to help them here at all. Miracles have no bearing on what teachings are the word of God. There is no connection at all. The Bible being right in history only means it is right in history. It could be wrong in matters of doctrine and morals and philosophy. A priest being an outstanding historian doesn’t make his beliefs true. There are atheists who are good historians too.

Jesus thought his resurrection proved he was the word of God in person. He was a fake for he was wrong and that is all the proof we need even if the evidence for it is as good as the Christians (deceitfully) say.

Any person or book that is supposed to give you the word of God is proven to be a fraud if they do miracles to verify this for it fails. And since faith in them is based on circular reasoning they oppose reason and yet they tell you what to believe as if you have no right to believe whatever you feel like while they are believing what they like themselves!

Miracles cannot bring you to the word of God, not really. Therefore miracles are not about God but about man using them to scare you into obedience to his doctrines. All who say that God did the miracles they tell you about say that God does not want to scare you which is why he only lets a few see miracles though they know fine well that many will be scared nonetheless and that is the way they are – oh the lies they tell! The miracles are anti-God and offer him indignities and blasphemies and they exploit him. Atheists will enter the kingdom of Heaven before the believers do. You couldn’t expect anything else for nature could replicate miracles when it can create life so it is wrong to assume any event is a miracle – blame renegade or unusual natural laws - there is never any need to bring in the supernatural.

How could miracles help religious faith for it is a crutch that is used out of fear in case one offends a being that might be out there and it is based on fear of death too? Atheism is not a crutch though some say it is. The only way it can be a crutch if you want to avoid God’s demands and forget them for they are too frightening and unpleasant (page 108, Answers to Tough Questions). This is untrue for right and wrong is right and wrong even if there is no God so the demands will still be there. If they are saying you need a God to believe in right and wrong then they are saying you need a God to invent right and wrong for you! Then it is clear that the Atheists are right not to believe so the believers are the ones using the crutch. If they are saying Atheists reject God because they hate the thought of his punishments this is ridiculous for if Atheists fear punishments from God then forgetting about them is a funny way of avoiding them for it is not going to work. And both Atheists and religious cultists believe that threats of punishment should have no influence on our actions which should be good and done because it is right and not to avoid punishment. If they are saying both then it makes no difference and it is clear that religious faith is a crutch and encourages people to have no guts and to need the crutch. This is superb for the clergy who want people to exploit. Anybody who promotes religion is exploiting whether they realise it or not and those who report miracles and defend them are the worst.

Most atheists have a Humanist self-help system which improves happiness and gives all the benefits of religion without religion. And they do not live reckless hedonistic lives nor fear death. They would find it easier being religionists due to the strength of character and courage it takes to throw off the religious crutch so how dare the Christians suggest that Atheism is a crutch. The atheists are living martyrs. Christian martyrs are used as evidence that the faith is true while atheist ones are treated with indifference! This is so unfair and this is a bad fruit and Jesus said bad trees bear bad fruit.

The Church is clear that there is no obligation to believe in any miracle that is not in the Bible even when the Church decides that the miracle was real and from God. To say otherwise would be to add to the faith taught by the apostles. The Bible and the Roman Church both say that faith is unnatural for us and so it is a gift from God and is caused by the inspiration of God and that this kind of faith is a virtue and is absolutely necessary for salvation. It is a virtue because it is opening your eyes and heart to God so it is a vice and a sin not to believe. Roman Catholicism says that faith, hope and charity are necessary if we are to be saved in Heaven. It says we only believe in miracles outside the Bible with natural faith. The help that God gives us to have faith in Jesus is absent with these miracles – it’s our business.

If you have faith you will have reasons for it that make you think it is credible. The reasons for faith are a part of the faith – they are distinct but not separate – they are like parts of the whole. The reasons are more important than the conclusions for the conclusions cannot exist without them. If I believe in God because the universe looks designed to me then if my belief in God is a gift from God then the reason that causes it must be a gift too and a bigger one! To sanction the faith is to sanction the reasons for it for they are co-dependent and interlinked.

So if you believe in Jesus and this belief and faith is the gift of God because of the Shroud of Turin and the visions of Lourdes and Fatima then God is telling you that Jesus was who he said he was on the basis of these visions and miracles. But God can’t do that for that makes them equal to faith in Jesus and they are not for they are not obligatory for faith and not part of the faith. (The apparitions and miracles that have not been accepted as real and even rejected by the Church still have the same effect for there are always people who will believe in them.) This means that if God gives you faith then he is confirming the reasons you have for that faith. The person who believes in Jesus because of the Bible and the person who believes because of an apparition may have the same conclusion but not the same faith. Faith is more in the premises than in the conclusion for they are more important. The doctrine of faith being a gift is meaningless nonsense. If the miracles of the Church testify as it claims to the primacy of faith, the basic gift from God that gives light and truth, then they are lying. Faith itself is a miracle for we cannot have it without God’s help. If there is a problem with miracles then the same problem exists for the miracle of faith.

If it is a gift to believe in Bible miracles like the Church says then when you cannot believe in them without God’s help which the Church teaches then these bizarre consequences pop up:

1 Though we believe in the non-biblical miracles by natural faith we cannot believe in the Bible ones except by supernatural faith which is a gift from God that makes our will and mind embrace the faith.

This is weird. The teaching about God inspiring and giving faith implies that God blinds us to cure us which shows he is neither very sane or decent or sensible. Who would trust anything he says? Plus your belief in both types of miracles will feel the same. To say one is natural faith and the other is supernatural faith is just arbitrary and dishonest.

2 To suggest that human beings cannot sincerely come to God unless he helps them denies the validity of self-esteem which is the root of all good so miracles are evil if they suggest otherwise which according to all believers they do.

3 If the Bible miracles are not signs unless God opens your eyes to make you see the truth about them and their message which nature prevents you from seeing then this is saying they are not signs except for those who respond to God and accept his gift of faith. But that is very subjective and what is to stop you feeling that faith that the devil has done them is a gift? Or that they are just done to keep us interested in the supernatural? There are millions of possibilities.

4 Jesus said that you can see that God did something by looking at the good fruits or good results of the deed. Fruits cannot tell you if an apparition was heavenly or not. It is not the apparitions that works the fruits but your perception which you imagine is a supernatural gift from God. To say that miracles are signs from Heaven is to say that miracles bear the fruits of faith and charity and other benefits. You now know that this is a shameless lie that nobody has an excuse for falling for because we should see that when different people with different faiths all think their faith is supernatural that this is purely their imagination. Miracles in a Christian context that say that Jesus shed his blood to save sinners by bearing their punishment are undermined by the fact that they result in big money. They give a message verbally and then they deny it by their results. So which message then should you listen to? For example, take the commercialisation of Knock and Lourdes. Is that compatible with the gospel of a man who wanted people above all to live simply and who said that all our money belonged to God and not us? Would God want people spending money on pilgrimages to holy places with his money that he would give to the poor if he were in our shoes? A God who was generous enough to give his life for us on the cross would have none of this pilgrimage stuff. The money spent on pilgrimages in the twentieth century alone would be more than enough to wipe out poverty in Africa.

5 The miracles deny free will if they back up the concept of supernatural faith. Yet they must back it up if they want us to believe in the God of Christianity who says that faith is a gift from him. The Bible miracles claim to be binding on us making it our duty to believe and no human thinking is sacrosanct. Therefore they claim to inspire supernatural faith.

To deny free will or to say that God made us defective is to say that God is evil. Free will is the nearest to a possible way to blame man and not God for evil – it doesn’t work but it is the believer’s only option. To see miracles as signs is to accuse God of being evil and them as beacons to slavery to this evil being.

6 To say you came to faith because of a miracle is to say if faith is a virtue – which it must be if it is a gift from God – is to boast before unbelievers, “I am better than you and holier for I have come to the virtue of faith.” This completely contradicts the parable of Jesus about the Pharisee and the Publican in which the Pharisee was rejected by God for telling God how good he was – another reason why I say there was a tradition in early Christianity that denied that Jesus did miracles. The Bible says it is great that Christians have nothing to boast about (Ephesians 2:8, 10). So miracles encourage the insulting and offending of unbelievers. They encourage division. That is terrible. We know how over time even a little looking down at a group can escalate into violence and hatred over time – just like what happened in Northern Ireland. Whatever is doing the miracles it is not a friend to people but a false friend.

Miracles always testify that the lie that you can love the sinner but hate the sin is true because they act like calls to love sinners which all believers know deep down fine well that it isn’t true for they for to say you did a bad thing of your own free will is to say you are a bad person and if you are a bad person you are despicable for bad is despicable.

The Bible teaches total depravity which means that all human goodness is unacceptable to God for it is deformed by selfish ulterior motives and the desire to be free of God. Christians may claim they can do good works but they cannot for the selfishness is always there. So miracles then are a waste of time. They look like the work of a being that is too stupid to see this.

It follows from all that the Church should reject all miracles and apparitions and say they are of the Devil if they are real. The Devil gives them so that the faith that God wants will be replaced by a shoddy substitute that resembles it and to their surprise they will find themselves in Hell when they die because they did not have and were resistant to real Christian faith. Even if the Church officially forbids using the extra-biblical miracles which it says we are not bound to believe in as the main or, what is worse, the only ground of faith, only a handful would remember or know of the prohibition and the Devil would have what he wants. And that would be most Catholics having faith that is not a gift of God the kind of faith that the Bible and Catholic dogma says is necessary for salvation. In other words, a counterfeit form of faith. The kind of faith that saves has to be based on a divinely inspired insight that the Gospel and its claims about the redeeming death and resurrection are true and reasonable – on the revelation that has full authority in other words. Apparitions and modern miracles are lacking in that authority for they cannot add to the canon of the Bible or be infallible sources of truth like the Church.

Incidentally, the Church praises the conversions at Medjugorje and other spiritual playgrounds and these are not down to finding the Church convincing but finding the apparitions appealing and believable. The Church takes advantage of the counterfeit faith when it suits itself. That is why it has not suppressed those apparitions. It does not care how it gets converts as long as it gets them. The Church cares more about power and money and doesn't mind if it wins them through fraud. The apparitions could be fraud and the Church does nothing about them. The bishop did condemn the apparitions but the Church did not really give him much help and has declared that it is overjoyed at the conversions taking place in Medjugorje.

Jesus said we know prophets who pretend to be from God by their bad fruits (Matthew 7:15-23). The Church has no right to say any apparition has good fruits – anything from God should have good fruits so apparitions lead away from God by getting us to misperceive the fruits as good. The apparition could cause many who had real saving faith to switch to a faith based on the apparition. The basis of faith would be shifted. Because they love the apparition so much they would lie and say it increased their faith which was a gift of God to avoid bringing the apparition into disrepute.

The Church admits that it cannot conclusively prove every miracle reported of Jesus in the Bible or outside of it when you consider every miracle by itself. The Church for example has only the word of the gospel of John that Jesus turned water into wine at Cana. The gospels say that Jesus even concealed some of his miracles like when he warned nobody to tell that he raised the daughter of Jairus from the dead. If Jesus does ten miracles and you can verify them all but the last then you can’t believe in the last one. You must consider him a liar if he asks you to believe in it and of course he does for in the John gospel he tells skeptics to believe in his works if they can’t believe in him. If a man commits ten murders and you can only prove he committed nine of them you are not permitted to believe he committed the odd one out. You need better evidence for miracles than murders for miracles are stranger and more unusual. To claim a miracle happened is such a serious claim that naturally the evidence has to be very serious as in strong and good and convincing and every individual miracle requires it. You can’t say the resurrection of Jesus is provable so the other miracles of Jesus must have happened as well. Even if Jesus rose to prove his teachings and claims and miracles to be real as the gospels say, that remains true. Bearing in mind that we need very strong evidence the stranger or more unlikely a claim is this is unacceptable. Every miracle is so serious so it has to be checked out on its own.

Even if a miracle doesn’t suspend natural law or change it, it still looks and acts as if it has. How a strange event like a miracle looks comes before any other consideration. For example, if you see an alien in your fridge ice box and it looks like an alien then you are justified in taking it as an alien. You have no reason to believe anything else. It is the same with a new employee. You assume he is honest on the basis of his CV even though it could be a fake. You believe in his innocence until evidence to the contrary appears. To report a miracle then is as serious as to report that sperms are no longer going to fertilize ovum. It is as serious as saying a comet is about to appear miraculously in the solar system and hit the earth. All these have in common not the consequences which vary but the nature of the event is the same, it’s a change in nature.

Christians know that miracles are very serious for they as good as suspend or change natural law and you need near if not actually impossible evidence to believe in them. Imagine the evidence you would need to justify believing in the tooth fairy – a miraculous being. A miracle that doesn’t have extraordinary evidence backing it up isn’t worth talking about. The failure of the Christians to prove every individual miracle in the gospel accounts and Jesus failure to prove the miracles reported by God in the Old Testament prove that the miracles never truly happened. It is blasphemy against God and reason to say that they did. A God who does miracles should be able to preserve the proof for them. If Jesus does ten miracles to prove he is from God and you can only prove nine of them then the one that can’t be proved proves that whatever did the miracles it was not God so we can dismiss Jesus from our minds with a clear conscience. One failed proof proves that the resurrection, even if supernatural, was not a miracle from God.

Belief in miracles is dangerous and unhealthy and has led the world into the hands of dangerous religious leaders. Anything that promotes bad thinking or wrong thinking is bad.

Conclusion

Miracles don’t assist in faith. People that say they help them to believe should realize that it is not the miracles that do that but their assumptions about miracles that does it. They assume miracles are evidence and that is no good.