Over the weekend, yours truly happened to leave a frighteningly prophetic comment on the website Totally-Useless in response to a post alleging the existence of miracles. The post highlighted the recent story of a baby who got a pencil stuck in its throat mere millimeters from the carotid artery. Subsequently, this was deemed a miracle because the child suffered no serious injury. In my comment, I wondered why the alleged miracle-maker didn’t prevent the pencil from getting jammed in the kid’s throat in the first place and at one point I made the following remark:
“All this talk reminds of people who, for example, point to the sole survivor of a plane crash as proof positive of the existence of miracles, while at the same time they ignore the other 300 people who weren’t so fortunate. What was wrong with them? Were they not miracle-worthy?”
At the time, I hesitated to posit this scenario since I couldn’t recall any major plane crash in which there was just a single survivor. After all, usually everyone dies in a plane crash, unless it’s a crash on a runway or some such thing and there are several survivors and fatalities alike. So even though my statement made its point, I wasn’t sure how realistic it was. That was until this morning when I read that a Yemenia Airbus had gone down near the islands of
Miracle at Sea: One Person Rescued from Deadly Jet Crash (ABC News)
“Miracle child” rescued after plane crashes into
Miracle: Child found alive after
Imagine the lack of cognitive dissonance required to believe this garbage. And yet, in the coming days we will hear all kinds of crazy pontificating in the media about the heartwarming tale of a plane crash that sent 152 people to their untimely deaths while one person somehow defied the odds and lived. That's a death rate of 99.3%. I love a happy ending, don’t you?
If the people who toss around the word “miracle” so readily stopped to think about the implications of what they’re saying, we might be on our way to ridding ourselves of this useless term. To be sure, the concept of a miracle falls completely apart upon even superficial analysis.
As far as I can tell, “miracle” is used in two senses. First, there’s the Humean sense. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume wrote, “A miracle may be accurately defined as a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” (Chapter X) Philosophically, this definition is far from perfect, but it will suffice for our purposes at the moment. There has never in the history of humanity been a documented, proven instance of a law of nature being suspended or altered in any way. (Sorry Christians, the magic tricks of your snake-oil salesman messiah don’t count. See above.) While credulous, weak-minded individuals are all too happy to attribute this fourteen year-old’s survival to divine intervention, rationalists know better. Although the details are unclear, reasonable people logically assume that for starters, there was probably something about the position of the girl’s seat inside the plane that insulated her against the undoubtedly violent impact, making her less vulnerable than her fellow passengers. Also, perhaps she happened to situate her body in a way that was somehow favorable to survival under the circumstances. Furthermore, it is almost certain that she had a relatively easy way out of the fuselage so she could escape before it sank. While these are just guesses, they are totally plausible. And as investigators gather more information, we will have a more accurate picture of what happened to the plane and how this girl was able to live through it.
Even if we were unable to develop a satisfactory explanation for an unlikely outcome such as this, this does not mean that the causes are divine. Indeed, which is more likely given a mysterious and improbable event: A supernatural divinity intervened in human affairs for some reason? Or there is a perfectly natural reason, but one which we have yet to ascertain? If you chose the former, stop reading this immediately and get yourself sterilized.
The second sense in which people use the word “miracle” is to describe not a suspension of natural law, but an event that while physically possible, is so unlikely and improbable that they nonetheless regard it as evidence of the intervening of a deity or “some invisible agent.” But notice how “miracle” is used only to describe improbable outcomes that are regarded as favorable. No one says that a miracle has occurred when some unlucky son of a bitch gets struck by lightning, not even people who believe in miracles. Why not? It was extremely improbable, wasn’t it?
You see, in ascribing such improbable positive outcomes to the handiwork of a deity, believers in miracles must ignore the lightning strikes, car wrecks, bear attacks, autoerotic asphyxiations gone wrong, and other freak incidents in which people are said to have been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Although miracles are always invoked as evidence of some benign deity or force, one can just as easily point to all kinds of improbable and crazy and horrible shit to advance the opposite case for a god who’s a total asshole.
Also notice that “miracles” almost always arise out of calamity. The plane crash. The man who survives a lightning strike. The woman who’s diagnosed with cancer and is given a 5% chance of beating it and does. A child who gets a pencil lodged in its throat millimeters from a major artery and recovers just fine. If these are indeed actual examples of miracles directed by a benign force, then why doesn’t the benign force just prevent the calamities from happening in the first place? That would seem a lot more benign to me. Why go through all that trouble? Does the deity want to show off? I hope that someday some miracle-believing mental invalid will be able to explain all of this to me because clearly I just don’t get it.
Until that day comes, I will define “miracle” as I always have: a word gullible people use to describe a highly improbable outcome which they happen to like.
- Max
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