Surveying the Miracle Record

Ever since my good friend Ethan Muse launched his career as an online Catholic apologist last year, there has been much discussion on philosophy substack concerning the Miracle Argument for Catholicism. This discourse has drawn in an impressive range of commentators, including my friends Matthew Adelstein and Amos Wollen, Dr. Dustin Crummett, Scott Alexander, James Fodor, and many others.

Despite having followed this discourse with interest for some time, I have yet to publish anything substantive related to it. This is mostly because of sin. However, by the grace of God, I have finally determined to begin the project of thinking through the issue publicly. I anticipate that doing so will be helpful for me, both because writing out my thoughts has always been a helpful way of clarifying them in my own mind, and because in this way I can solicit the help and feedback of competent and interested readers who happen to stumble upon my blog.

This article is intended less as a substantive contribution to the miracle discourse (though rest assured, I am working on some of those as well), and more as an introduction to and a call for help regarding a research project that may result in a future substantive contribution. In this article, I plan to outline one potential strategy for undermining the miracle case for Catholicism, as well as the criteria that such a strategy would have to meet in order to be successful. I will then briefly gesture towards some relevant leads in terms of substantiating this strategy. Finally, I will appeal to my readers to help me investigate the issues that I have raised further, as my time is limited and I do not wish to write exclusively or primarily about miracles on this platform for an extended period of time.

The argumentative strategy that I plan on outlining in this article and perhaps pursuing in later articles rests principally on the purported existence of evidentially compelling vindicatory miracles in non-Catholic religious contexts. This strategy, if successful, would not necessarily refute the existence of miracles, perhaps to the disappointment of some naturalists. It would, however, break the connection between the existence of genuine miracles and Catholicism in particular. As a theist with pluralist priors myself, I am fine with this outcome.

Whether one would like to conclude from non-Catholic vindicatory miracles, insofar as they exist, that all miracle claims are spurious or that the miracle record proves some more pluralist supernatural worldview is none of my business. In either case, the claim that the supernatural record proves Catholicism is rendered false. I of course do not take it as a foregone conclusion that this strategy, once explored more exhaustively, will render the Miracle Argument for Catholicism inert, but it seems to be an avenue that’s worth exploring insofar as we are interested in treating this topic thoroughly.

Obviously, the miracle argument for Catholicism takes as its point of departure the existence of evidentially compelling miracle claims which are in some relevant way connected to the Catholic tradition. However, this description does little to clarify how exactly the miracle record is supposed to vindicate Catholicism as the uniquely true religion. After all, purported miracles clearly occur across a wide range of religious contexts. One could of course argue that the only evidentially credible miracles occur in Catholic contexts, but that view is not tenable as our preeminent defender of Catholic miracle exclusivism himself acknowledges. There simply is not some bar of evidential strength that will successfully rule out all non-Catholic miracles while leaving the miracles which the Catholic needs for their case intact.

Thus, the central claim of the miracle argument for Catholicism is that while miraculous phenomena occurs across a variety of religious contexts, the evidence for vindicatory miraculous phenomena skews overwhelmingly Catholic. By “vindicatory miraculous phenomena” we mean, roughly, miraculous phenomena which was plausibly intended by God to indicate divine approval of some particular doctrine or belief system.

The miracle argument for Catholicism, therefore, relies both on the existence of evidentially compelling vindicatory Catholic miracles, as well as on the non existence of similarly evidentially compelling vindicatory non-Catholic miracles. Much ink has been spilled attacking the former leg of that conjunction- I myself will have much to say about it in coming posts- but so far comparatively little has been dedicated to the latter.

As I have indicated, what the Catholic must avoid conceding in order for the miracle argument for Catholicism to succeed is that any genuine miracles have occurred which vindicate any explicitly non-Catholic commitments. Therefore, any purported miracle tied to some non-Catholic context must be accounted for by a Catholic worldview in one of the following ways:

1. The miracle claim is naturalistically explicable.

2. The miracle claim is explained as a demonic deception.

3. The miracle claim is authentic, but it does not carry any vindicatory implications that are inconsistent with Catholicism.

The foregoing sketch already gives us some sense of what we need if we are to provide a refutation of the Catholic model of the miracle record- that is, an example of a miracle claim which the Catholic cannot plausibly fit into one of these three categories. It is worth noting that how difficult it will be for a Catholic to account for some supposedly miraculous phenomena is a matter of degree, and even if we can find some case that isn’t easy for a Catholic to explain, they are always free to appeal to the premise that their miracles are even harder for competing worldviews to accommodate, thus leaving Catholicism as the most plausible view on balance. How viable that response is will depend on the quality and quantity of adversarial miracle claims that we are able to produce.

This all leaves us with the question of how we discern whether some purported miracle can be plausibly explained by a Catholic in one of these three ways. Judging how likely it is that some miracle claim is naturalistically explicable is fairly straightforward- that is what many of us on philosophy substack have already been doing for the past several months. However, I do want to note the strategic peril of opting for this strategy too loosely for the Catholic. Obviously, the miracle case for Catholicism requires the existence of evidentially compelling Catholic miracles. The more Catholics want to appeal to convoluted naturalistic explanations in order to explain prima facie compelling non-Catholic miracles, the higher our prior should be that the miracles which Catholics need to appeal to are similarly open to some convoluted naturalistic explanation.

Discerning whether some purported miracle can be plausibly attributed to demonic activity is a thornier issue. Ideally, we want some principled criteria for distinguishing between divine and demonic activity. Moreover, these criteria should not have to assume that Catholicism is true. If the Catholic’s criterion for figuring out when it’s acceptable to call demons on a miracle is just whether the implications of the miracle are consistent with Catholicism, then the miracle argument for Catholicism becomes circular.

Helpfully, Ethan Muse, drawing from scripture and Catholic theological tradition, has provided us with just such a principled, non circular set of criteria:

• Theological: If God is explicitly or implicitly invoked in connection with some miracle, then we are to assume that the miracle is authentic unless there are clear signs of demonic deception upon investigation. God will not allow genuine supernatural prodigies to be performed in his name by demons without in some way making it clear to sincere truth seekers that this is what's happening

• Moral: If, upon a thorough investigation, it is clear that the seer/performer of some miracle is exceptionally morally virtuous and the immediate effects of the revelation connected to the miracle are morally good insofar as ethics can be discerned through natural reason, then a demonic origin for the miracle is excluded.

• Physical: If, upon a thorough investigation, it is clear that some miracle exceeds the power of demons as indicated by scripture and Catholic tradition, then a demonic origin for the miracle is excluded. For a more comprehensive treatment of the physical constraints on demonic activity, see Fr. Garrigou Lagrange’s on divine revelation.

We can see how, in practice, Ethan has appealed to these criteria to rule out demonic explanations for some of the miracles which he has invoked in defense of Catholicism. For instance, Ethan argues that Our Lady of Fatima cannot be demonic because 1) the Fatima seers were of exceptional moral virtue and 2) the proximate effects of the miracle (namely the conversion of atheists and lukewarm Catholics as well as the weakening of secularism in the region) do not plausibly align with demonic intentions. Ethan also argues that many of the healings which occurred in connection with Fatima are beyond the scope of demonic power, according to Christian scripture.

Now that we have some sense of how to discern whether an apparent miracle is authentic or demonic, we can turn to the question of what determines whether an authentic miracle is “vindicatory”. Here, Ethan wants to distinguish between miracles that are vindicatory in a proper sense, and miracles that are merely suggestive. For a miracle to be strictly vindicatory, there must be no room to reasonably doubt that the miracle was intended to endorse some particular religious sect. For God to perform a strictly vindicatory miracle in service of a false religious sect would amount to an explicit deception.

Obviously, non-Catholic vindicatory miracles are ruled out by Catholicism, whereas miracles that are merely suggestive of non-Catholic sects provide defeasible evidence against Catholicism. It is also worth noting that exactly how suggestive some miracle is will be a matter of degrees, and the strength of the evidence that some miracle provides against Catholicism will in turn depend on how suggestive it is.

Unfortunately, there seems to be little that can be said in terms of strict rules for declaring a miracle suggestive or vindicatory. Perhaps we just have to rest assured that we will know such cases when we see them. One sure way to hold Ethan’s model to a consistent standard, though, is to appeal to some of the same features that supposedly render Ethan’s own miracles vindicatory.

For instance, Ethan cites the Miracle of the Sun as a paradigm case of a vindicatory miracle insofar as it happened in connection with, and had the stated intention of lending credibility to, a series of private revelations which explicitly and implicitly affirmed numerous Catholic distinctive doctrines according to the primary seers.

Similarly, Ethan believes that the Miracles of Padre Pio vindicate Catholicism because 1) if Catholicism is false, it’s surprising that God decided to quantitatively and qualitatively privilege a Catholic friar who caused many conversions to Catholicism from other religions in terms of spiritual gifts, and 2) Padre Pio claimed various private revelations which, if veridical, imply the truth of Catholicism (e.g. visions of souls in purgatory, conversations with God about various Catholic distinctives, etc.).

Finally, Ethan thinks that Eucharistic miracles like Lanciano and stigmata cases like that of Padre Pio vindicate Christianity because these phenomena, in obvious ways, symbolically and perceptibly manifest specific Christian theological premises like the passion of Christ and his real presence in the eucharist. Ethan moreover thinks that Eucharistic miracles support Catholicism specifically insofar as there is a pattern of such miracles occurring only in Catholic contexts.

A good example of a miracle that is merely suggestive, on Ethan’s view, is Our Lady of Zeitoun, wherein large crowds of people supposedly witnessed an apparition of the Virgin Mary appear over a Coptic Orthodox Church. The religious context of this apparition is suggestive of Coptic Orthodoxy, but the details fall short of proving explicit divine endorsement of Coptic Orthodoxy. Unlike at Fatima, there was no reported verbal content from the apparition explicitly entailing the truth of the tradition in whose context it appeared.

From all of this, we can begin to construct a sort of rough spectrum of vindicatory strength:

• Bare contextual association: this category refers to miracles which merely occur in some specific religious context, broadly construed. An example of a miracle in this category is the miraculous healing of Barbara Snyder, wherein a Protestant woman was miraculously healed in response to a prayer campaign on her behalf. Miracles of this sort have basically no vindicatory strength considered in isolation from some broader pattern.

• Devotional association: this category refers to miracles which occur in connection with some specific religious devotional setting, such as a particular shrine, church, icon, tomb, ritual, or pilgrimage site. This category is a bit more strongly suggestive than the last since the religious context of the miracle is more salient, but does not yet rise to the level of constituting strict vindication. A paradigm case of a miracle of this sort is the aforementioned Our Lady of Zeitoun.

• Contextual association cluster: this refers to cases in which miracles of the last two kinds accumulate according to a distinct pattern which favors some specific religious context. For instance, if some sect, community, shrine, church, etc. seems to be the site of a dense and conspicuous pattern of miracles which are weakly suggestive in isolation, then the vindicatory strength of said miracles increases considerably. Depending on the strength of the pattern, this category might rise to the level of strict vindication.

• Personal authority association: this category refers to when credible miracles or prophecies are connected to some verifiably holy figure whose teachings and private revelations are clearly specific to and entail the truth of some particular religious sect. As mentioned, the paradigm example of a case like this is that of Padre Pio. According to Ethan Muse and his allies, miracle cases of this sort can indeed rise to the level of strict vindication.

• Doctrinal association: this category refers to miracles which perceptibly manifest or symbolize a doctrine or theological premise that is specific to some religion. For instance, Eucharistic miracles perceptibly symbolize the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Likewise, stigmata cases symbolically reproduce Christ’s passion. By Catholic standards, miracles of this sort, at least insofar as the doctrinal association is sufficiently clear cut, rise to the level of strict vindication.

• Explicit revelatory confirmation: miracles in this category are the cream of the crop as far as vindicatory content goes. Explicit revelatory confirmation occurs when a seer, prophet, apparition, etc. provides a specific message that entails the truth of some particular tradition, and then a verifiable miracle occurs which is clearly intended to confirm said message. Cases like this are even stronger when the entity who provided the message predicts or promises the accompanying sign in advance, as in the case of Fatima.

This, of course, is only a rough start to a fully mapped out model of various miracle types and their vindicatory strength. If I missed any salient categories (as I’m sure is true) or misclassified anything, feel free to let me know in the comments.

Now that we have some sense of what we should be looking for insofar as we wish to challenge the Catholic model of the miracle record, I will conclude by vaguely gesturing in the direction of some potentially promising future research.

Obviously, a strong start would be to look into other cases of miracle-types that Ethan himself cites in favor of Catholicism. For instance, my friend Matthew Adelstein has done a great job surveying the record of non-Catholic Marian apparitions. Others have been able to uncover at least one (supposed) non-Catholic sun miracle (though for transparency’s sake I should say that I have recently been made privy to information which casts doubt on its veracity). There is doubtless significant further research to be done on both of these subjects.

Another promising direction for research would be to survey the record of non-Catholic stigmatists. In particular, it would seem that a credible stigmatist with good moral fruit who claims private revelations which contradict Catholicism would be good evidence against the Catholic model insofar as it would fall into the “personal authority association” category of vindicatory strength.

More broadly, it would be fruitful to survey the empirical record of non-Catholic prophets and miracle workers in general. My guess is that you will have the most luck looking into the Eastern Orthodox tradition, which claims a rich history of miracle working saints. The best example that I know of is that of John Maximovitch, to whom numerous well-documented miracles are attributed. I have heard of miracles attributed to Sergei Bulgakov, Seraphim Rose, and several others, though I do not know how well attested they are. What remains to be seen is whether any of these men (or any others who I haven’t yet looked into) explicitly claimed revelation in connection with their miracles which entail the falsity of Catholicism.

Outside of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, a Muslim friend of mine has indicated that there are credible miracles attributed to various Shia imams, though I haven’t looked into the matter. If this is indeed true, and if any such figures display good moral fruits while claiming Catholic-incompatible divine revelations, that would presumably be relevant to our investigation.

It may also be instructive to do further research into the Baháʼí tradition- as far as I can tell, its founders (namely the Báb and Baháʼu’lláh) pass the fruit test pretty cleanly, and both explicitly claim private revelations which contradict Catholicism. Moreover, it appears that the Báb may have been the subject of a fairly compelling miracle. Many miracles are also attributed to Baháʼu’lláh, though Baháʼís tell me that they are discouraged from emphasizing and documenting miracles, so it is unclear whether any of them will be well supported.

Promising examples from Eastern religions are harder to come by, but of some interest is the case of Sri Ramakrishna, a Hindu mystic who seems to pass the fruit test fairly well and who, it is claimed, was able to perceptibly manifest avatars and deities through what are called Samadhi states.

Somewhat closely related is the much discussed rainbow body phenomena which has been reported in Buddhist contexts, and which I have heard some claim can be plausibly read as vindication of Buddhist views regarding Nirvana and holiness. There are also many levitation reports and incorrupt bodies in Buddhist contexts, though the vindicatory relevance of this is somewhat unclear.

Of course, the above is not meant to be an exhaustive list of potentially promising non-Catholic miracle claims. My central goal in this article was merely to clarify the rules of the game for those who are interested in challenging the exclusivist Catholic claim to miraculous vindication. My secondary goal was to point people in some potentially interesting directions. In all likelihood, we have only scratched the surface in terms of investigating relevant miracle claims across religions.

Obviously, I cannot feasibly investigate all of the rabbit holes I have mentioned- nor do I desire to. Moreover, insofar as various members of the substack community are interested in contributing to the sort of research project that I’ve begun to sketch here, it would presumably be useful to centralize our efforts. Thus, anybody who has relevant information, or is looking for it, is encouraged to send me a direct message for access to a collaborative document aimed at collecting relevant information.