Some People You Know Have Experienced an Apparent Miracle

Ask around!

One of the compelling arguments in favor of theism is the argument from miracles. It is not a very socially respectable argument. If you tell secular audiences that you think miracles happen, they will look at you as an ill-informed Baptist hick, and tune you out. But mere prejudice is not an argument, and there are a great many extremely well-attested miracles. For details on some of them, I recommend Caleb Jackson’s work, my friend Ethan’s blog series which focuses on Catholic miracles, and these articles where I discuss some of the most convincing miracles.

It’s hard to do philosophy! There are lots of arguments both for and against the existence of God. Debates on the subject get extremely technical and complicated. The history of science seems to indicate that reliance on empirical evidence is a better methodology than reliance on the kinds of a priori arguments that proliferate in debates about God’s existence. For this reason, we should prioritize empirical evidence for miracles over philosophical speculation.

One reason to believe in miracles is that there are many that have been well-documented, for which there is no plausible naturalistic explanation. If one looks into the reports of, say, the miracle of Calanda, they will be left either with the conclusion that Pellicer regrew a limb or that something very bizarre happened involving:

1. Five eyewitnesses claiming to have witnessed an amputation of Pellicer’s leg. Two of them even claimed to have performed it and one reported burying the leg. These people reported having seen him in the hospital for months when he was recovering, and they claimed to know him well. All of this would have to be false.

2. Dozens of eyewitnesses who said they saw Pellicer without a leg, including ten who said they felt his legless stump, would have to have been hallucinating or misremembering.

3. Pellicer applied for a beggar’s license twice, where they investigated his condition before approving it. If you applied for a beggar’s license in Spain and were a fraud, they would kill you. Thus, you’d have to think that Pellicer applied for a beggar’s license twice, despite huge personal risk, and got approved twice. Somehow, the people tasked with investigating whether he had a leg didn’t notice that he did. Quite a serious oversight, if you ask me.

4. Pellicer had no incentive to do this. He went from being a farmer to being a poor beggar.

5. Pellicer would sometimes sleep outside. One source reports “He lodged at the Mesón de las Tablas; when he couldn’t pay, he went to the hospital courtyard and slept on a bench.” This would be very personally risky and costly if he hadn’t been missing a leg.

You could also think that he never regrew the leg, but then you’d have to think that a year-long investigation of his miraculous leg regrowth overlooked the fact that he didn’t have a leg, and somehow despite this made repeated very specific descriptions about his leg (noting, for instance, that it shared the scar he’d gained when he was younger). You’d also have to think his leg somehow disappeared from where it was buried, and reports of it being blue and stiff (as modern science has confirmed reconnected legs tend to be) were bizarre fabrications.

If this is true, this would be the weirdest thing that ever happened! It requires a very substantial conspiracy, and is the sort of theory no one would entertain in a non-religious setting.

But one other way to be pretty sure miracles happen is just to talk to people. Now, in skeptical circles, it’s seen as pretty taboo to think that a miracle happened. But if you talk to religious people, they will very often tell you about extremely hard to explain experiences. To explain away what they witnessed, without invoking a miracle, requires either bizarre lies or something extremely strange happening.

For example, I once met a guy, Bob Dutko, giving a talk at my university. He’s a well-known apologist, slightly crazy, young-Earth creationist, etc. I was an atheist at the time, and I came to the talk wanting to argue, not really expecting to find evidence. Throughout the talk he made various bad arguments (e.g. that evolution is a statistical impossibility—big iff true!) But after it, he and I were talking, and he mentioned a very surprising story (here’s him recounting the same story in a YouTube video).

Right after he was engaged, he was cuddling on the couch with his wife. For his entire life, his heart had beat irregularly. He described it as like three bowling balls in the back of a truck. His fiancé, who later became his wife, asked what was up with his heart. He mentioned, for the first time, that his heart beat irregularly. Then, after about 30 seconds, his fiancé told him to feel his heartbeat—her head was pressed against his chest. For literally the first time in his life, it beat regularly. She had apparently prayed to Jesus for it to beat regularly, and then about 30 seconds later, it had begun doing so. His wife was there too, and she confirmed the story.

Now, it’s possible that both Dutko and his wife were lying to me. But absent that, it is very hard to see what the naturalistic explanation is. Now, if this was the only apparent miracle report in the world, it could be explained away by the fact that improbable things happen sometimes. But if you talk to people, you will find a great many of them have similar reports—more than one in a million people you meet will report one in a million events.

My friend Aron Wall, who knows more people who believe in miracles than I do, has a nice post where he recounts some of the apparent miracles that have happened to people he knows. Aron writes:

And yes, I do know of situations where God told people to do things which only made sense in light of circumstances which they didn't already know. For example, St. Wesley Tink (the former pastor of the church I attended in Princeton), once woke up very early in the morning and felt like God was telling him to drive to his mother-in-law's house, several hours away. When he got there, she was in a diabetic coma. The doctors said she probably would have died if he hadn't stopped by. Go ahead; sit down and calculate the odds of him having that urge at the exact right time. I'll still be here when you get back.

Another time, when I was a postdoc in Santa Barbara, we were about to go to Europe when we learned that our professional cat-sitter had died! But one of my wife's friends offered, out of the blue, to look after our cat Lily. She knew we were going to Europe, but she had no idea what had happened, and we'd travelled many times before. When I asked her why, she hesitated a long time and then said that she felt God prompting her to make the call. (Evidently, despite what the Zoroastrians teach, God loves cats too!)

Another pastor I know, St. Dick Dickenson, once prayed over a man in the hospital whose appendix had burst. He said he heard himself praying out loud that the poisons would collect at the man's colon—wondering all the while why he was praying out loud the names of various organs, that he had only the sketchiest notion where they might be located—and the doctors opened the man up and, according to him, it was exactly so. If you knew this man, you would find it difficult to believe him to be insincere.

These are just some of the stories Aron lists, and the stories he lists are just some of the ones he knows. I also trust Aron’s account, because he is both morally decent, honest, and has the best memory of anyone I know.

The reason I list the stories people I know personally have witnessed is that this goes towards establishing how commonplace they are. If you just read about a few reports in the paper, you can dismiss them as one in a million events. But if one in a million events happen to several people you know, at some point you should suspect that they are not really one in a million events, because there is a God who brings about things that would otherwise be shockingly improbable.

Or take an event that happened to Michael Shermer, that seems, to my mind, a pretty clear example of a miracle. Shermer is a skeptic, and has no incentive to make up stories like this (this should illustrate that these events don’t just happen to credulous religious people). Shermer married a woman named Jennifer, and her grandfather had been the closest thing she’d had to a father figure. However, he’d died when she was 16. His belongings, including his 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio, were shipped overseas to Shermer’s house. Shermer had tried to fix the radio using various methods, but none of them worked.

Three months after getting married, the two were exchanging their vows. This is when something rather extraordinary happened:

Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.

At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”

Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.

Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.

This is very surprising! It’s not the kind of miracle that should be expected to convince a skeptic, but if it happened to you, you should seriously entertain the possibility that a miracle occurred. If this was a one-off event, that would be one thing, but it is not—were it to be a one-off event, it would be quite surprising that it happened to arguably the foremost critic of miracles and the paranormal in the world.

The position that miracles never happen isn’t actually supported by the evidence. To believe it, one must implausibly explain away a very vast body of data. Explaining away empirical evidence because one’s philosophical predilections prohibit that evidence is dogmatism, not open-mindedly following the evidence. Every time you have to explain away data, you take a probabilistic hit to your worldview. Theism increases in probability dramatically from the fact that it doesn’t have to tie itself in knots explaining all these surprising results; it can simply go with the natural explanation, that miracles sometimes happen!

One thing that Craig Keener documents well in his book: at least hundreds of millions of people claim to have witnessed a miracle. About a third of Americans claim to have witnessed divine healings. Belief in the supernatural is a historical universal. For nearly all of history, it was taken for granted that miracles happen, and there is overwhelming empirical evidence for this position. It is thus rather ridiculous when people—not naming any names, but you can find them on substack—act like this position, believed by nearly everyone who ever lived, is so totally absurd that they will dismiss any amount of empirical evidence in its favor, and act as if you have cognitive impairment so long as you are moved by the mountain of empirical evidence.

Neglecting inconvenient hypotheses, no matter how much empirical evidence supports them, is something, but it’s certainly not skepticism and it’s certainly not rational.

People in the comments: I’d be curious to hear if you or anyone you know has ever experienced something that seems supernatural! My guess is a lot of people will have stories that are hard to explain absent miracles.