Philosophy and Evidence of Miracles

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There has been a lot of recent posts and notes on Substack regarding whether claims about miracles have decent backing evidence. I thought I’d weigh in.

The overall reasons so many philosophers are highly skeptical about claims about miracles are two.

• First, some of them are irrationally wedded to kinds of secularism that rule out miracles.

• Second, some of them have looked at the evidence for some miracles, judged it to be meager, and grown tired of bothering to address the topic anymore.

In my experience, more people are in group 2 than in group 1. You can fight over the percentages, but that’s something I don’t care about. Theists can rant about the irrationality of non-theists, and non-theists can rant about the irrationality of theists. Both ranters are right, as there are irrational people in both camps, but it doesn’t do much to settle the issue of whether the evidence for miracles is any good.

I am in group 2. But unlike many philosophers, I respect those who take seriously the case for miracles. Being open-minded about this is different, I think, in being open-minded about astrology, say (which is stupid). Yes, plenty of people who believe in miracles are suckers who let motivated reasoning rule their opinions. True enough. But that doesn’t mean everyone who believes in miracles is a moron. Neither does it mean there are no miracles.

Let’s go over four reasons why so many people like me are skeptical about reports of miracles.

One reason for being in group 2 is this: a colossal number of people are incredibly poor at reasoning, observing, and/or communicating. People with high IQs often radically underestimate this negative capacity of humans—especially if they hang out with smart people most of the time.

A second reason for being in group 2 is this: people lie or exaggerate a colossal number of times. Once again, high-IQ people underestimate this. In particular, people who care a lot about accuracy and truth radically underestimate it. I used to be one of those people. You don’t appreciate this unless you’ve spent a lot of time outside of intellectual circles. If you’re under 30 years old, forget it. You don’t have enough life experience.

A third reason for being in group 2 is more interesting than the first two: people are awful at dealing with probability judgments. Something genuinely highly improbable happens, it has the aura of being appropriately divine, and people jump to religious conclusions. Again, smart people significantly underestimate how often these evidentially hasty judgments occur. They also underestimate how epistemically poor the judgments can get. Sometimes it’s truly as bad as hearing a door slam, with no wind detected, and then the person concludes there are ghosts slamming doors. Other times, it’s not anywhere near as foolish. But if you understand how probabilities apply to ordinary life, then you won’t be fooled.

In brief, a zillion things happen to you every day, and the odds are very high that eventually bizarrely odd couplings are going to happen. For instance, a person is taking their morning shower and the thought hits them that their father is in trouble, even though he’s never had troubles before. Sure enough, he was in trouble that very morning! Obviously, that’s a highly improbable coupling of events 1 and 2: event 1 is thinking dad’s in trouble, and event 2 is dad’s really being in trouble. Even so, it’s virtually guaranteed that weird shit like that is going to happen to you. It’s like flipping a coin a trillion times. It’s virtually guaranteed that you’re eventually going to get ten heads in a row, at some point. Anyone looking at you during that time is going to conclude that the coin isn’t “fair”. It must be unbalanced in some way, they say. But no, it’s not. If you flip a coin enough times, weird but random shit will happen.

Similarly, if you live long enough, weird but random shit will happen. You have all sorts of thoughts all day, most of which occur over just a few seconds and then you forget all about them. Virtually none of them are remarkable. But if you live long enough, then of course weird, improbable couplings will happen. In fact, it’s kind of a giveaway that elderly people typically have the most claims of alleged miracles. They have had so many more experiences, and thoughts, than younger people that the odd couplings happen more often to them.

So, it is very highly probable that highly improbable couplings or other events are going to happen to you—even if it’s happening randomly. Some of them are going to have the aura of being divine, simply because they fit one of the molds you’ve heard about. The mere great numbers guarantee it. Hence, we don’t need gods for there to be events that look exactly like miracles.

A fourth reason for being in group 2, the miracle-skeptics, strikes me as more interesting than the first three because it has been around for only a couple decades. It’s this: if there were miracles occurring nowadays, then we would have excellent video evidence of them. (I actually made this point in a Substack note months ago, but it didn’t generate any discussion because people weren’t getting upset about miracles back then.) If people levitate, predict the future, perform telekinesis, grow new legs, or whatever, then given that for years now most people have phones equipped with cameras in most populated places on Earth, we would have a great many excellent videos of those miracles—videos just as good as the ones we see every day on YT, IG, and so on. But that didn’t happen. And nowadays? Well, with the AI tools, it’s hard to believe new videos anyway—for good reason.

As you might expect, some believers in miracles will respond by saying that miracles are really rare now, so we don’t have video of them—even though there are far, far more people around today than in centuries past. How convenient. If these people are clever, they will invent reasons to support their view. “You see, God doesn’t want to reveal himself explicitly, so he just gives hints”. Uh huh, okay. The reasons offered for the quoted claim are never terribly impressive.

Look, none of the above says that miracles don’t occur. None of it even faintly suggests that all beliefs in miracles are foolish or not based on evidence. But it does explain why so many educated people are highly skeptical about stories about miracles.