A Mess
of Miracles
In
my opinion, miracles are much more trouble than they’re worth. Often
used as a line of defense on behalf of religion, they are actually just
giving your enemy more targets to shoot at.
Even if
a miracle actually happened, if a contemporary could have videotaped it,
still, without benefit of time travel, today’s historian could never
render the judgment that it “probably” happened (the best verdict the
historian can ever render). The rarity of such an event (reported or
actual) means there will be no historical analogies at hand with which
to compare it and render it likely. What sort of mark does a freak
phenomenon leave behind? How do you verify such a thing? What signs do
you look for? If we read that Samson slaughtered 1, 000 men
single-handedly (Judges 15:15), we cannot consider it “probably
authentic” because, while there may be fictional or legendary parallels
to it, there are no known historical examples. If there were, it might
look different. Say, if we had other cases that showed us how it had
been done or might be done.
Then
there is the nagging fact that the miracles of the gospels were “done in
a corner,” unlike the Technicolor wonders of Exodus and Elijah. The more
spectacular gospel miracles are set in private. The Transfiguration
(Mark 9:2-4) was seen by only three people who were told to keep it
under their turbans (Mark 9:9). No one but the twelve disciples knew
about the multiplication of loaves and fish (Mark
6:35-44;
8:1-9), not the crowd. Only the twelve were on the scene when Jesus
stilled the storm (Mark 4:35-41) and walked on the water (Mark
6:45-52).
Only the steward at the
Cana
wedding feast understood what had happened, besides the disciples (John
2:1-11). The risen Jesus appeared to a grand total of two people on the
Emmaus road (Luke 24:13-35), to disciples on lonely beaches (John
21:1-14) and behind locked doors (John
20:19-29).
(The 500 brethren appear only in 1 Corinthians 15:6, a sure sign the
story did not yet exist when the gospels were written.) We have to ask
reasonably whether all this is clever excuse-making for why no one knew
about it at the time. (The question of exorcisms and healings, performed
before many crowds, is different. Such scenes are common today and were
in the ancient world; no one would have denied that such things
happened. They don’t prove anything today, and they didn’t then.)
Theologians tell us that the miracles function as signs to create faith,
but this is a vicious circle. If we are just supposed to believe
something for its own sake, why are proofs offered? Is it supposed to be
faith, or not? And if miracles are deemed needful, why are they
ambiguous and indefinite, in need of proof themselves? Since they become
the object of their own apologetics, they become objects of faith in
their own right, obstacles rendering the original object of faith
secondary. Tillich calls this “idolatrous faith.” The resurrection is
supposed to aid and abet faith in Jesus, but then we need evidence for
the resurrection, so we must believe in the resurrection of Jesus, and
not just in Jesus himself. An irony. It’s like bringing in the Shroud of
Turin as proof, then having to defend it! So now it’s Jesus, the
resurrection, and the shroud! The line of defense just keeps growing!
Also,
the very idea of historically verifying miracles is utterly ironic
because an event that can be comprehended by the criteria used to verify
it cannot transcend those criteria. They will explain it adequately. If
they don’t, if there is an inexplicable element left over that science
cannot explain, to that extent the miracle has not after all been
verified. By contrast, K.A. Kitchen, in his book Ancient Orient and
Old Testament (as James Barr points out in his great book
Fundamentalism), defends the historical nature of the Egyptian
plagues in Exodus by showing that most of them occur naturally in the
wake of the periodic flooding of the Nile. So why should the historian
have any trouble accepting them? (Or, more to the point, why not accept
the unity of the Exodus narrative, chapters 7-12, which contains the
whole series, instead of divvying them up between J and E, each of which
mentioned only a few plagues?). The Plagues have been rendered
historically likely precisely to the extent that we need no longer
consider them miraculous! Same with Mathew’s star: if it really turned
out to be a nova or a planetary conjunction, then is Matthew right? If
so, it was no miracle after all. Apologists do not see that they are
playing the old game of the eighteenth-century rationalist theologians.
Where did the Swoon Theory of the crucifixion come from? It is a piece
of apologetics! You see, the historian can see his way to accept the
Easter stories if he decides there was no silly miracle connecting one
gospel scene (the cross) with the other (the appearances of Jesus). Both
scenes can be accepted if we simply omit the supernatural causation!
Voila! The resurrection narratives are true, even though the
resurrection itself isn’t! That’s where they’re headed and they don‘t
see it.
And the
silliest apologetics arguments are those pointing to archaeological
verification of the Bible (e.g., Sodom did exist) as if it confirmed a
miracle story involving the place (fire and brimstone rained down on
it--though this one is often explained on purely scientific grounds and
rendered no longer miraculous, too!). If a village called Nain existed,
does this mean Jesus raised a dead person there? We know
Oral
Roberts University exists. What we don‘t know is whether an 800 feet
high Jesus appeared to Oral there.
Another
common approach to defending the miracle stories of the Bible is to blur
the line between the supernatural and the natural. What seemed
miraculous might turn out to be then-unknown science. The biblical
authors just didn’t know how to explain what was going on in terms that
would satisfy modern science. Suppose we knew that Jesus was virginally
conceived by means of advanced science. What are we saying? If it wasn’t
supernaturalism, was it space aliens? If Jesus did things that seemed
miraculous to his contemporaries but it was actually scientific, how’d
he know how to do it? Was he a time-traveler from the future? Like Dr.
McCoy in the barbaric 20th-century hospital in Star Trek IV?
Philosopher D.Z. Phillips has pointed out something else relevant to
this point. He asks just how mind-blowing a dining hall would have to be
for a Viking to conclude it was
Valhalla. Old Thorlief, knocked out (or killed?) on the battlefield,
awakens surrounded by tall, buxom redheads treating his wounds. They
head him into a banqueting hall, lined with shields and filled with
warriors quaffing jacks of mead, munching joints of beef. Where should
he conclude he is?
Valhalla?
It’s pretty impressive all right, but can it live up to his lifelong
fantasies of the posthumous Hall of Heroes? No matter what he saw,
couldn’t it always be imagined as just a bit snazzier?
I think,
too, of an old Penthouse cartoon: two guys are sitting on a
splitting Naugahide couch in a shabby room with cracked plaster and a
single naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. They are wearing
starchy sheets with wire haloes over their heads. On the wall, a tilted
plaque reads “Heaven.” One guy says to the other, “Somehow I always
thought it would be classier than this.” Suppose, as he once tried to
do, Pat Robertson managed to videotape the descent of Christ to the
Mount of Olives and televised it. Wouldn’t even the most pious believer
have to wonder whether he were the victim of an elaborate joke? “Wait a
minute... how can I be sure that’s really the Second Coming?”
What would it take?
Phillips
says all this implies people are not really believing in literal
realities even when they imagine that they are! What would it take to
measure up to what they secretly imagine? Anything at all? Nothing could
match it because really there is no literal referent! Ask a
fundamentalist, what does he think it looked like for Jesus to multiply
the loaves? Did they stretch like sponges? Ask him if the divine Christ,
treading the dusty roads of Palestine, remembered the good old days when
he created the planet Pluto.
Ask him
what he expects to happen and not to happen to him because a
miracle-working God is watching over him. What concrete difference does
it make? Does he expect the angelic cavalry to march over the hill to
get him out of a tight spot? Has it even happened? Why not? Doesn’t his
pious rhetoric suggest it? Or is he just a Stoic, willing to take
whatever Fate happens to dish out to him? He doesn’t really believe
alleged miracles of the past provide any guide for what he may expect in
his own experience. What does he really have in mind, besides a worn-out
slogan?
In the
end, I think people’s “beliefs” are not really assertions and
affirmations about supposed events. I suspect they are slogans, and that
if you repeat the right ones, you’re in the group, in with the in-crowd.
The whole thing’s more a matter of social psychology than of
metaphysical belief. I guess I’m no longer in the club. If I were,
believe me, it’d be a miracle.
By Robert M.
Price