The Philosophy of Miracles

In a recent article, I defined a miracle as an event that requires action from God because it defies the natural laws or scientific explanation within His creation. I argued that miracles are everywhere, and that they are one of the best arguments for the truth of Christianity. Now I’d like to follow up with a philosophical piece that considers what it’s like for a sceptic who has never experienced a miracle, and the thought process that will hopefully aid their evaluation.

When it comes to miracles, an open-minded agnostic has two sets of propositions to consider.

Here is the first set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Christians claim to have experienced miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles occur.

Here is the second set:

P1: If an event is impossible in naturalism, then it is a miracle.
P2: If a proposition is known to be impossible, it is near-certain to be disbelieved.
P3: Atheists claim to have experienced no miracles.
C: Therefore, there is a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur.

Let’s unpack how we can arrive at the best conclusion about which set is most likely. Using the well-known Popperian black swan problem, the situation with miracles works like this. In philosophy of science, a “black swan” is something that seems impossible or extremely unlikely because it has never been observed - like how Europeans once believed all swans were white until black swans were discovered. The discovery of even one black swan overturned what people thought they knew. In the same way, when Christians testify that miraculous events occur, they are essentially saying that “black swans” exist - relatively infrequent events that challenge ordinary expectations. Remember, as noted in the previous article, these events are only infrequent relative to the enormous number of non-miraculous events that occur; they are frequent relative to the sceptic’s assumption that they do not occur at all. Unbelievers argue that since they’ve never seen such events, miracles probably don’t exist, much like someone who assumes all swans are white simply because they’ve never encountered a black one.

Starting from scratch, the empirical evaluation can be undertaken as follows. Statements that insist that black swans do exist cannot be falsified without a rigorous search throughout the whole swan domain to confirm that there are no black swans. But although showing that black swans exist is not easily falsified, their existence is more easily verified, because one example of a black swan is sufficient to verify the statement. Assigning a universal property to all items of a set and decreeing all swans are white can be falsified by one black swan. The trouble is, where the statement ‘all swans are white’ is relatively easy to falsify, in most empirical investigations it is not so easily verified, because the whole swan domain must be searched and checked before the statement “all swans are white” can claim to be verified.

Furthermore, one can seldom fully verify or falsify claims of a miraculous nature from the outside, because our observations are mediated through complex and variable conditions, through inward phenomenological experiences, and through a host of anomalous events that fall beyond the reach of ordinary empirical investigation. This difficulty is especially clear when we recall that verifying the proposition “black swans exist” requires only the observation of a single black swan - something straightforward in uncomplicated empirical science - whereas verifying the proposition “miraculous events exist” cannot be observed through quite the same straightforward process, since it requires us to probe a vast, complex, and often inaccessible domain of human experience.

The statement ‘all swans are white’ is testable by being falsifiable, yet it should also be remembered that deductive falsification is not the same as proposing an absence of verification. In order to comprehensively falsify a grand sweeping claim, one must compress all this hard to manage data into a true falsifying singular statement, and sceptics who do not wish to believe tend to dismissively shade over into selectively proactive induction as the objects they deal with get more complex, intractable and inaccessible. The epistemological pathways for miracles are not converged upon by this method because they are usually highlighted by a few known dots, which can be joined by large tracts of inference and a proactive search, rather like when one visits a single Internet web page with just a few search tags typed into a search engine.

Given that there is a fairly large degree of asymmetry when one compares empirical science and the establishing of evidence of the miraculous, the swan domain is best used analogically as a sense-making interpretive structure that seeks to piece together numerous testimonies and anecdotal claims (the more the better) and consider a more innovative method of investigation into the miraculous than most sceptics currently employ.

Because miraculous events, unless experienced first-hand, are not easily comprehended through standard empirical methods that rely on observing patterns and drawing general conclusions, one of the hardest things for unbelievers to apprehend is that the full scope of created reality, with its intractable and inaccessible web of human experiences and divine intervention, does not offer an easy epistemological route to explaining everything naturally. Instead, comprehending such events requires a methodology where one infers and evaluates the experience against their own background to determine if it is truly miraculous by the above definition.

Clearly, given that the miraculous seems to be a dish that is only consumed by those who experience it first-hand, we can be sympathetic as to why unbelievers remain unsatisfied with second-hand testimonies. However, sceptics must be careful not to quarantine themselves from investigation by adopting an attitude that allows them to hastily dismiss all anecdotal evidence as unsatisfactory and preclude themselves from proactive investigation. When God does act miraculously in people’s lives, one thing is abundantly clear, if you do not adopt some proactive search or radical thought process that brings you into contact with the real nature of the investigation, the chances of you finding this truth are seriously minimised.

To summarise at this point, the problem for unbelievers is that they cannot be sure that no black swans exist unless they know for sure that miracles are impossible, and they cannot know that miracles are impossible unless they are sure that there are no such things as black swans. Christians do not face the same epistemological problems because many (if not most) have experienced some kind of miracle that has demonstrated to their satisfaction that God is active in their life. Naturally, the unbeliever may claim that the Christians are using a debatable explanatory filter that defaults to intelligent agency as the best explanation of such events, but as I said in the first article, the Christian can rightly insist on two powerful things; 1) that the unbeliever has no experience of the Holy Spirit, so is not rightly placed to discern the miraculous; and 2) that miracles are everywhere if you know where to look, and remain one of the very best arguments for Christianity’s truth.

If an enquirer’s first steps lead him into huge sense-making structures that attempt to embed a very wide degree of life into a grand creation story narrative, where Christ is recognised as the Creator and sustainer, then he will undoubtedly find it gets more exciting the further he gets into it.  As above, a search engine only needs a few key search words to sift out a few web pages from millions - so, in principle, if this venture into the miraculous is seen as a join-the-dots experiment (that may well involve a lifetime of growth), a few dots may be enough to put one on a solid conceptual footing to begin the adventure.

All this shows why, between the consideration of the two sets - set 1 there's a reasonable chance that miracles occur, or set 2 there's a reasonable chance that miracles do not occur - set 1 is astronomically more likely than set 2. Even aside from the positive reasons to believe in miracles cited in the previous article, on philosophical grounds too, set 1 ought to seem more reasonable to an open-minded agnostic than set 2, because if miracles occur by virtue of God performing them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then you'd expect that in the vast majority of cases, Christians are the only people to have experienced miracles in terms of God's providence. But equally, if miracles occur because God performs them for our benefit within the context of relationship, then it is to be expected that most atheists have not experienced a miracle that would convince them that miracles, and ultimately God, exist.

Therefore, given the astronomically high number of claims of the miraculous in the world, you'd expect set 1 to have a higher probability of being the right set of propositions than set 2. Much like, if there were a group of people in the world who couldn't see the colour red, you'd expect them to be the people claiming there are no such thing as a red experience, even though a lot of other people are claiming to have had them.

And one final point that I think is vitally important but so often neglected. Miracles won’t just pop into the creation story in random fashion. Something as profound as the miraculous in the creation story is going to be a deliberate intervention from God Himself, and inevitably bound up in a deeper narrative related to how clearly and humbly we perceive Him and discern His will, much like in the case in Mark 8:22-26 with the healing of a blind man at Bethsaida.