In modern times some people may use miracles to try to prove the existence of God or of a higher being as something that is causing these miraculous events to happen in the world. Spinoza (1670) criticized the credulity of those who used miracles as evidence for the existence of God as he saw the events in the Bible as symbolic not literal, yet his view was biased as he was an atheist.
Jesus often performed miracles to inspire faith or because people had faith in him as in Mark when the woman who touched Jesus’ cloak was healed, Jesus said ‘daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’ It was because of her faith that this miracle was performed. In Matthew 17 when the disciples could not call the demon out of the boy and they asked Jesus why, Jesus said, ‘Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, `Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you’. Because the disciples did not have faith, they could not perform the miracle. This shows that from a Christian point of view, faith has to be present before miracles can be performed. One problem of the belief in the God of classical theism is that whilst some miracles are answered, there are plenty of people who have faith yet are not healed. This surely goes against the idea of an all – loving and omnipotent God as in Matthew it says ‘Ask and you will receive’ yet this clearly does not happen no matter how much faith you have that it will. According to Maurice Wiles a God who intervenes at Lourdes to cure a man of cancer but doesn’t stop millions starving in Africa (who helps the individual but not the masses) is not worthy of worship. Although some people say that this may only include a spiritual healing or means entry into heaven, in the time Jesus was on earth he healed many a physical ailment so this shows that God is not averse to healing the physical body as well as the spiritual being.
The essence of the Christian religion is faith and miracles and the two are very much integrated; without miracles there would be less faith and much of the authority of the Bible is dependent on miracles. The Christian religion believes that miracles are reliant on faith. Accepting the miracles in the Bible for example, Jesus turning the water into wine are based on faith as this happened around two thousand years ago and there is no enduring evidence. Religion itself could be seen as a miracle for example, Kierkegaard believed that moving from the image of a human person (in this case Jesus Christ), to putting faith in him requires a leap of faith. For Kierkegaard, this leap of faith itself is a miracle.
Science and religion are in conflict; where science fails to explain, religion tries. For some people, science is their god who explains the intricate workings of the world. Week by week scientists are discovering new things about the universe which before were seen as inexplicable and this means that the chance for miracles is getting smaller and more events, that were before seen as unaccountable, are getting explained everyday. In the past, things which were seen as miraculous (in this case being defined as something out of the ordinary) have now been explained. Science however, cannot and has not managed to explain every miracle for example, in 1999 Jean Piere Bely who suffered from multiple sclerosis, went to Lourdes. He returned from Lourdes fully cured and this was confirmed by two separate medical and scientific committees and science is at a loss. Jean Piere Bely went to Lourdes ill and returned recovered. However, it is only fact that something inexplicable happened, whether it was a miracle or not depends on interpretation. To a believer, his recovery would probably be perceived as a miracle yet an atheist would probably look for another factual explanation, for example self – healing. Hume believed in the weight of testimony – that improbable events need a substantial number of witnesses of a very high credibility because it is human nature to have faith in the paranormal and miracles tend to be reported amongst the ignorant. At Lourdes there were a team of expert scientists both Christian and atheist who could not explain how Jean Piere Bely’s cure happened. Would then Hume accept this as a miracle?
At the moment, science is trying to explain the feeling of the divine that people get when they witness something they consider miraculous. Scientists found that during meditation or when witnessing something spiritual, a brain scan showed that the part of the brain that is responsible for orientation of the body in physical sleep, the parietal lobe, actually went to sleep and that this could account for the different feeling experienced. This feeling is what some people could have thought of as the presence of the holy or as Rudolph Otto calls it the ‘numinous’ – something which is wholly other. This means that the feeling of divine presence, which many people have reported experiencing throughout a miracle, may not be based upon religious experience at all but upon different brain patterns. Also, as humans only use at most twenty percent of our brains it is possible that those who go beyond that usage maybe able to do things that can be seen as miraculous (like the fictional Roald Dahl character Henry Sugar).
An argument against miracles being fact rather than faith is that many people find it necessary to believe in an ultimate power so that their lives seem to have more meaning and to stop them from being a victim to the untamed forces or a natural, ungoverned world. Bertrand Russell said ‘religion is based on fear, it is partly the terror of the unknown…the wish to feel you have some elder brother who will stand by you’. Convincing themselves that something is miraculous may be a way of proving to themselves subconsciously that there really is a God or higher power. Freud said that religious ideas are illusions, fulfillment’s of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. Humans are generally drawn to the supernatural (perhaps looking for a sense of fulfillment that we just can’t find in everyday life), so they may turn something that is merely a coincidence into something miraculous. Feuerbach (1804) saw accounts of miracles as projections of human desires.
The question ‘does a miracle depend on fact or faith?’ really depends on the definition of a miracle to each person. People that define a miracle as an event which is ‘contrary to the laws of nature’ are inaccurate because the laws of nature are not fully known, they can be more understood over time as knowledge improves which means they cannot dictate what is going to happen. In this sense every event is unique in where, what and how it happens. If there is a natural order anything that transcends it would be seen as miraculous although it could actually just be obeying a law we have not discovered yet. To those people who see creation as a miracle then miracles are happening every day all around them and are based on fact; they would think, ‘there is a flower, I don’t know what it’s origin is, it is a amazing that its actually alive and respiring therefore it is a miracle’. People who think miracles are ‘an event with fortunate results’ then miracles are very much based on faith because otherwise it could be seen as a coincidence. For example, a woman comes home from holiday two days early and walks into her house to find that her kitchens about to catch fire, this woman may have faith that it’s a miracle or may just believe it’s a very lucky coincidence. Holland suggests how easy it is for simple coincidences to be called miracles although one might argue that this would mean that it is just as easy for miracles to be called coincidences. Those who think a miracle has some sort of ‘divine presence or intervention involved’ believe that a higher power has to be present and also believe that this power will actually intervene in life on Earth. They have to have a belief in the God of theism rather than the God of Deism who is totally transcendent and above the world.
There is nothing to stop anyone saying that miracles are not just unexpected events in an unprecedented future and that there is no such thing as miraculous just the unexplained, after all as Spinoza said, ‘Human limitations prevent us from understanding the true character of reality.’
Bibliography
Internet
– information on Kierkegaard
- information on Kierkegaard
– information on Spinoza
– information on Holland
- information on apparent weeping statues
– information on Henry Sugar
Books
Religion and Science, Thompson Chapter 9
The Puzzle of God, Vardy Chapter 17
Reason Science and faith, Forster and Marston Chapter 5
Philosophy of religion, Richards Chapter 7
Teach yourself Philosophy of Religion, Thompson Chapter 6
Philosophy of Religion for A – level, p169
Report on Hume and miracles by Dawson and Gribben
Video
Everyman video – information on the human brain
Comes from Hume’s book ‘Enquiry concerning the human understanding’ taken from ‘David Hume and miracles’ by Martin Dawson and Dominic Gribben
Comes from Hume’s book ‘Enquiry concerning the human understanding’ taken from ‘David Hume and miracles’ by Martin Dawson and Dominic Gribben
From Kierkegaard’s book ‘Practice in Christianity’ taken from
Henry Sugar focused his mind so that he could see without his eyes
From Russell’s book ‘Why I am not a Christian’ taken from ‘A reason science and faith’ by Forster and Marston
From Fraud’s book ‘The future of illusion’ taken from ‘The puzzle of God’ by Vardy
Information is from ‘Philosophy of Religion for A – level’
Quoted from www.prs-itsn.leeds.ac.uk