Philosophy of Religion for A Level

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Based on Philosophy of Religion for A Level, Anne Jordan, Neil Lockyer and Edwin Tate, Nelson Throne Ltd, Cheltenham, 2004

Definition:

Miracles are religiously significant events that involve striking coincidences according to Holland.

Miracles are religiously significant events that break natural law according to Hume.

The first definition does not mention a break in natural law and the second does. If Holland is right, chaos and confusion will result for every religion is able to report striking coincidences that it says show its particular kind of faith is true. Jains will report them in support of their religion that does not believe in God. Christians will report them in support of their religion that does.

A miracle you see yourself comes before any miracle that is reported by another. If you try a black mass to kill somebody and the person dies the following week, it will follow that you are justified in saying a miracle has happened to prove you have black magic powers. That will override any evidence you are given that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and has power over the universe not you. The definition is not helpful at all!

It can only lead to the assumption that any faith besides yours that claims these striking coincidences happen is lying. Also, for a Catholic the miracle of Jesus rising from the dead is not a striking coincidence. No word can be used for it except magic.

And the coincidence of a person rising from their deathbeds days after touching a mitten that had belonged to St Padre Pio might be just that - a natural coincidence!

If coincidences happen too often they are not coincidences any more. For example, if a prophet predicts a bolt of lightning will hit a certain tree and it happens that is a remarkable coincidence. A statistician will determine mathematically what a great marvel it is. But if it keeps happening every day it won't be a marvel anymore.

Miracles are not signs from God if they are striking coincidences and not exceptions to or breaches of natural law. That is because they are not something only God can do. Satan or some other kind of spirit could be able to do miracles quite easily if they are just striking coincidences.

Suppose fifty people go to an apparition site and they see an apparition of Mary. Perhaps it is a striking coincidence that they thought they saw her though they didn't. The striking coincidence idea implies that miracles are really religiously useless. We would be believing what people say they think God did and not in what God did. We would be making Gods of their opinions or hopes. To make a God of what somebody says about God is to retreat from God not to go to him. We are forging a relationship with a false God not the real thing. That is the whole point of religion condemning idolatry.

Suppose somebody was cured of cancer. How do you know that the striking coincidence was not just the doctors making a mistake about this person meaning he never had cancer in the first place? The events that people say are evidence of a supernatural being making exceptions to natures normal ways or flouting them would have to be thought to be tricks done by the power that makes striking coincidences. In other words, there would be no evidence for genuine miracles at all for a striking coincidence is not much of a miracle!

The striking coincidence theory of miracle just doesn't work. It does nothing to make any religion more believable.

If miracles break natural law, then God is setting up laws and changing his mind about them meaning he is not much of a God. This would imply that miracles prove that there is no God worth worshipping if they prove anything. No God could be that stupid so the idea that the miracles are really lies or based on mistakes is better.

Is the idea that a miracle is not an event that breaks natural law but an event that is just an exception to natural law better? The problem is that if dead men stay dead and Jesus rises we can only guess if its a violation of nature or an exception. Also, we see that dead men stay dead. We need to have expectations of what nature is going to do in order to be able to live in the world. Jesus rising would be a violation of what we normally would expect to happen. A violation of what we normally expect is as bad as a violation of natural law as far as we are concerned.

No matter what definition we have, we see that belief in miracles, whether they are real or not, is undesirable and at least potentially harmful.

Looking at all three definitions, a miracle would have to be very uncommon and rare to be a sign from God. Miracles are like marriages, get married too often and soon it means nothing and nobody takes it seriously. Any case where lots of apparitions from Heaven are reported and/or lots of miraculous healings would have to be suspect.

Religion has produced what seems to be strong evidence for miracles that are philosophically impossible. This would advise us to disbelieve in every miracle claim even if the evidence is very good. Believers might say that that we are tarring all miracles with the same brush and that is unfair for some of the miracles might be real. We are not if we mean to say that the miracles may have happened or may not have happened but we see no reason to believe and cannot be expected to believe. And we can't be expected. If miracle claims imply that we are then they are asking us to violate our logic and self-respect.

If good evidence exists for the reality of miracles that can't have happened we are entitled to pay no attention to the evidence for miracles in general or for other miracles. We are entitled to pay no attention to what a person says if we have caught them out in a few lies. Same principle.

Let us take an example. In a few cases, there is strong evidence that spiritualist mediums were able to issue ectoplasm from their bodies to make the spirits appear in bodily form temporarily. This contradicts the Bible where only God can raise the dead. Then you have strong evidence that God spoke through the Virgin Mary's apparitions at Garabandal to say the Bible and Catholic faith was true. Its contradiction all the time.

To say, for example, that a cancer vanished by magic is to make a very serious claim and so the scales should weigh in favour of it not having happened because it is one of the biggest claims that can ever be made because it is so outrageous. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. This is not being biased but it is being fair.

Are miracles immoral?

Maurice Wiles held that miracles are immoral for they present one person as being miraculously cured by God's intervention while God refuses to help others. He is right for two reasons.

We should look at religion and spirituality using the measuring stick of "Is this good for people in the best possible way?" Thus nobody should say, "God has his own reasons for helping one and not another and that is that." That is the first reason.

The second reason is that a miracle even when it does good is basically bad as we have seen meaning that if God does bad to cure a person he should do bad to cure all.

Miracles are supposed to be signs from God. But first and foremost they are marvels. Secondly they may point us toward a faith that is good for us and helps us live good lives. But the fact remains they are more about showing off than anything else. It is hardly flattering to God to say he is doing them! Why should the cured person be grateful to a God who helped him primarily because he wanted to show off? If we are impressed, then we don't think much of the cured person.

Is the evidence for a miracle ever sufficient?

Hume and many philosophers have insisted that because a miracle is so rare it is always more likely that a miracle testimony is wrong than that it is right.

They have also said that because we see natural law working time and time again such as men dying and staying dead it is unlikely that a report saying a man has risen is correct.

They have said that the evidence that dead men stay dead is so strong that the evidence for a dead man coming back to life would have to outweigh this evidence in quality and/or quantity.

These thoughts can apply whether you think a miracle is a violation of nature or an exception to natural law. Exceptions need to be very rare.

So Hume and the philosophers have shown that miracles are very implausible as they would have to be very very rare. Despite their obviously being correct, religionists ignore this and still go about saying they are wrong.

To answer the complaint that miracle testimony is not believable or is very hard to believe, religionists say that our belief in natural law is based on the same kind of testimonies as miracles is based on. That is exactly the point. It is because belief in natural law and belief in miracle is based on testimony of the senses and of people that we need to decide what testimony to accept and what to reject. It is because we believe that water can freeze that we should find it hard to believe a claim that there is pure water that can't freeze even if its put at the north pole.

Religionists are pretending that the evidence for saying such and such is what nature does is as good as the evidence for saying that a miracle - or exception to what nature normally does - has happened. We sometimes treat what we take as normal and what we take as unusual as equally verifiable as if the amount and quality of evidence for one should be the same as the amount and quality of evidence for the other. But we shouldn't. We need more evidence that X can score 10 goals in normal soccer match than we do that he can score a few or zero. The more unusual the claim the more evidence we need or the better the evidence we need. We need vastly more evidence for a miracle than for a murder which is a natural but uncommon event.

The believers in miracles are arguing that those who hold that "miracles don't happen because nature doesn't change" are depending on the same evidence and testimony as those who hold that they do. This argument fails. Its failure proves that we are right to reject belief in miracles. We have refuted the only answer they can give.

They say that miracles are only exceptions to natural law so the evidence for them does not have to outweigh the evidence for natural law. We have just refuted this. To say that we accept that natural law exists because of the evidence and to say we do the same for miracles is to imply that you don't need more evidence for miracles than for natural law. Its another way of stating what we have refuted.

But let us go on. Religion says that to say that as miracles are exceptions, belief in the general normal way nature works does not have to exclude the idea that an exception or miracle may happen. Religion says that to say you need more evidence for a miracle than for a natural event is assuming mistakenly that nature and the exception are mutually exclusive. Religion says that it was natural law that man couldn't walk on the moon. Man walking on the moon in recent times is an exception. They say that if we are going to reject exceptions to the general rule or to what has been the rule up to now we won't be able to believe in any new scientific developments. They say if we deny that miracles happen because we want to believe natural law never changes that is what we are agreeing to do. We are refusing to believe in any changes or exceptions to the common and normal ways of nature.

Are they right?

There is a world of difference between science putting a man on the moon and on Jesus raising a man from the dead! Putting a man on the moon involves using the way nature works to do it. A miracle does not use the way nature works. We can believe miracles don't happen and still believe that the way nature works now can be changed. But we change nature not by finding exceptions to its laws but by discovering new laws. Putting a man on the moon was not making an exception to natural law.

Unknown laws of nature doing things you wouldn't normally expect of nature is not an exception to nature. They know that fine well.

Their claim that a miracle is possible for it is an exception even if it is correct still does not allow us to believe in miracles.

There is no reason for us to believe that exceptions to nature happen. Is it not better to surmise that so-called exceptions are really not exceptions but simply different laws of nature at work? It is easier for it to be unknown laws of nature than for it to be an exception. Assume no more than what you need to assume. They assume too much.

They guess that a miracle is an exception not a violation. If its a violation the evidence however good will never be good enough. And if it is an exception that is rare enough the evidence will nearly be never good enough either. And it if it neither an exception or a violation it is simply not a miracle but the product of unknown natural laws.

We conclude then that the objections of Hume and Co to miracles being believable are valid and correct. Religion resorts to lying and stupidity to avoid them. Religionists know fine well that the criticisms they make of them do not work for they have been answered billions of times by philosophers in the past.

Different religions report miracles

Hindus report miracles that seem to show that God is doing them as signs of approval of their doctrines. Catholics report miracles that seem to show that God is doing them as signs of approval of their doctrines. Protestants report miracles that seem to show that God is doing them as signs of approval of their doctrines. So the miracle accounts from different religions cancel each other out.

Some ecumenically minded religionists reply that the miracles may still be real and that the religions may be wrong in claiming them as signs of their own specific doctrines. They think God can do a miracle to comfort and encourage belief in God among Hindus and Catholics and Protestants while caring little for the other doctrines of these faiths.

Then how can the miracles really be from him when he knows people will use them to back up their religions? He doesn't need to do miracles to bring them to himself.

Others say that the miracles of other religions do not cancel out the miracles of their religion because their religion has the real miracles while the others are just hoaxes or mistakes have been made.

This is simply a bigoted lie pure and simple for there have been miracles such as those involving Daniel Dunglas Home the spiritual medium that are more convincing than the resurrection of Jesus Christ. At least we know who the witnesses were and the written evidence is better.

Religion says that a cup of tea turning into cranberry juice would not be a miracle for it has no religious importance. There are testimonies that such events occur. Religion ignores these. Yet it says its miracles should be believed in because there is solid testimony. This is inconsistent and hypocritical. If silly and random miracles happen it could be that the miracles of religion are random too for it must be some random power that is doing the non-religious and the religious miracles. In that case, religion could not use miracles as evidence for its doctrines being true.

Conclusion

The philosophical proof that miracles should be discarded as superstition and harmful is unassailable.