Miracles †<

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." - Albert Einstein

“Can miracles be established except by miracles?”

All theistic religions claim to have been miraculously founded. The priests and prophets of all have claimed to have messages direct from God, and claimed to have a certain authority for this reason. And the miraculous has always been for the purpose of substantiating the message. But why does god always talk to just the few why not appear to us all and announce his presence. Philosophers do not seek to excite wonder, but to make plain that which was wonderful, to know the unknowable. They do not endeavour to amaze, but to enlighten. In this integrity, the intelligent man has absolute confidence. It is useless to tell them that there was a time when fire would not consume the combustible, when water would not fall in obedience to the attraction of gravitation, or that there ever was a fragment of a moment when the earth did not orbit the sun. No one expects to find a circle the diameter of which is just one fourth of the circumference. If one could find such a circle, then there would be a miracle in geometry.

We know that the writers of these miracles may have been mistaken. It is possible that they may have manufactured these accounts themselves. The witnesses may have told what they knew to be untrue, they may have stated simply what they believed to be true or the stories may have actually been true. Imagination may have added greatly to them, like a religious game of Chinese whispers so that after centuries of addition and translation a very simple truth was changed to a miracle. The effect of human testimony depends on the intelligence and honesty and free will of the witness and the intelligence and independence of him who weighs it. A man living in a community where the supernatural is the explanation for any of the unknown, where the claims of the miraculous are a daily occurrence, will believe that all things of wonder are the result of the supernatural. He will expect the miraculous, and therefore, his mind will pursue the path of least resistance, and will account for all phenomena by what to him is the obvious truth. Such people, with the best intentions, honestly bear false witness.

In an age when reading and writing were unknown but to the privileged few, a time when historical events were carried down by word of mouth nothing was rescued from oblivion except the amazing, the miraculous and the horrific. The more incredible the story, the more likely it’s survival. Matters of fact where of little interest as stories are told to entertain not to inform. Rather the stories of acts of god, of religious miracles of illusion and magic became the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Some would say this could not be the case, but look at the stories of alien abductions in modern times; amazing tales (even false ones) get the attention that the ordinary simply doesn’t. How could this happen? This question is answered by reading the history of those nations that believed in the supernatural as the answer to the unknown. There is no imaginable event that was not established by their testimony. Every law and fact in nature, physics, chemistry, or reality was ignored. Children were born without parents; people lived for thousands of years; the blind where cured by touch; animals spoke to their owners; stars (that’s right suns) fell to the earth; thousands were possessed with evil spirits and demons; many more thousands confessed themselves guilty of impossible offences, in courts impossibilities were substantiated by the oaths, affirmations, and confessions of men, women, and children. Why did no one deny these wonders? Why? Because denial was a crime punishable by death and those who questioned these things did not wish to die. 

Every intelligent modern man is satisfied that the religions of India, of Egypt, of Greece and of Rome, were false, and that all the miracles on which they rest are mistakes, that our religion and ours alone is the exception to this universal truth. Every intelligent Christian or Hindu, Muslim or Jew discards all religions and all miracles except his own. When will people see the defects in their own religion as clearly as they perceive the same defects in every other? The answer simply is never, the truth as they see it is all they will witness, anything else is suppositious mumbo jumbo. Yet all these false religions were substantiated by miracles, by signs and wonders, by prophets and martyrs, precisely as their own. Their witnesses are no better than those of other religions, if all the other miracles were false, how can theirs be true. The nature of society was equally suppositious in Palestine as it was in India.

Is life itself a miracle? Mathematically the chance of complex life, such as ours, evolving on earth without intervention of an intelligent designer is almost impossible. That is working backwards lets imagine that we are playing cards, I deal you five cards and five to me. We could deal in the same way thousands, maybe millions of hands of cards and never again deal the exact same cards, in the exact same order. For that reason fact we dealt that particular hand appears miraculous, but of course mathematical probability can not be viewed in this backward manner. Another example is when a baby is born. People will always say they are a little miracle now mathematically this is true. To work out the odds of the birth of any particular child coming into existence after the event you would have to look at every single thing that lead to its arrival the meeting and subsequent mating of it parents those exact parents coming together at that exact time, Then you would have to include all the possible problems that could of occurred during pregnancy, the odds of it being the sex it is, the odds of the mother becoming pregnant that specific time etc. Then on top of those odds the odds of the parent’s parents doing all of the above and the odds of those parent’s parents doing the above ad infinitum. The odds of each of our births must be billions to one, and yet here we all are and thousands upon thousands of other individual humans are born every day. Life is a miracle, a wonderful miracle, but it is a natural miracle nonetheless. 

- Duncan Rossiter