The Irrationality of Miracles

Jason Engwer pointed out the following.

Gary out of one side of his mouth:

"Some of the miracle claims are just downright stupid. Any educated Christian with a college degree should be embarrassed that Keener included these claims in his book. One such claim is that a woman who had previously undergone a complete hysterectomy prayed to Jesus for a child and nine months later she delivered a healthy child. If that story is true, that is more miraculous than the virginal conception of Jesus!"

Out of the other:

"When Jesus puts back together the thousands of pieces of tissue of a victim of a bombing, or reattaches the head of someone who has been decapitated, or reattaches a severed leg from an amputee, you will have my full attention. Until then, since prior investigations of 'miracle' healings have demonstrated that there is always a possible (and more probable) naturalistic explanation (such as the previous chemo and radiation treatment finally kicked in), I'm not buying your magic tales."

So, Gary apparently wants Jesus to produce miracles that he's already dismissed as "downright stupid" in principle.

It’s a common atheist tactic to claim that to believe in miracles is irrational.  This is why Gary feels comfortable saying it’s “downright stupid” when he disparages certain miracles.  But, I argue that it’s not irrational to believe in miracles, even on purely materialistic grounds.

To be clear, when I talk about “irrational” I’m referring to something that would be logically impossible, or something that it absolutely impossible to occur.  Furthermore, when I say it’s not irrational for miracles to happen even on materialistic grounds, I’m not referring to atheist claims of “spontaneous recovery” or “we’ll eventually figure out how to pretend God didn’t do this”-of-the-gaps arguments.  I mean legitimate miracles are perfectly consistent in a materialistic universe.

First, as I pointed out in one of my previous exchanges with Atheist Lehman, atheists assume that the supernatural is an impersonal force.  But God is a person.  It’s why He has the pronoun “He” (not because He’s gendered, so feminists can chill, but because He is not an It).  When we are looking at miracles, we are not looking at something that will happen due to machine-like causality, but instead we are looking at the choices of a personal agent.

One of the arguments that Gary brought out was that there are billions of people who pray to be healed, but not all are healed.  But this would only be a problem if God was obligated to answer all prayers.  We can easily imagine a hospital ward full of patients who have a bacterial infection.  A doctor may choose to give certain patients an antibiotic that he doesn’t give to other patients.  Those who receive the cure are cured, but those who do not aren’t.  Regardless of whether one wants to debate the ethics of a doctor making such a selection, it is clearly not irrational to stipulate that a personal agent could make such a decision for his own reasons.  In other words, it’s not like gravity (which functions no matter what someone wishes or desires) and so the fact that some, but not all, people who pray to be healed actually are healed is not grounds to rule that praying for a miracle is irrational.

But let me delve into this further with my second point.  The impetus for how miraculous healing works doesn’t have to be “magical” in any sense of the word.  All it requires is the existence of a higher dimension, something which string theory already teaches.  In fact, nearly all (if not all) of the miracles that Jesus performed could be adequately explained as the actions of someone who has the ability to use the fourth Euclidean dimension (I use the term “Euclidean” here to differentiate between it and Einstein’s use of the fourth dimension as time).

The easiest way to demonstrate this is to use the example of Flatlanders.  This work examined a theoretical two-dimensional space where creatures lived on a plane.  We can imagine a square drawn on a piece of paper with a heart-shaped icon inside the square.  To a creature that exists two-dimensionally, they would see only a line in front of them (they have only the x and y coordinates, no depth).  They would therefore see just the surface of the square and they would have to dig through the surface of the square in order to get to that heart icon.

You, existing in the third dimension, can see all sides of the square simultaneously, inside and outside.  You can even put your hand over the square and touch all points within the square simultaneously.  Neither of these concepts makes sense to a two-dimensional being, however, because they can only touch the outside of the square—never the inside, unless they burrow in.

Now consider some of the miracles of Jesus.  He walked through a locked door.  Irrational?  Well, a three dimensional being can use the third dimension to bypass a two-dimensional door.  To the perspective of a two-dimensional creature, we can walk through doors.  If Jesus could access the fourth dimension, bypassing a three-dimensional door is trivial.

Jesus turned water into wine.  Well, we can imagine a locked room in two-dimensional space that’s full of a substance—say, red chalk.  We can easily imagine erasing the substance out of that space and replacing it with something else, like black ink.  To the observer in two-dimensional space, a miracle has happened whereas for us, it’s just a natural aspect to the third dimension.

Jesus healed people.  Imagine what a doctor could do if he could see all points of a human body, inside and out, without having to cut into the body.  Just as we can reach in and touch the heart-icon inside a square without digging in, a fourth-dimensional being could see our entire heart and reach in to remove plaque or to repair arterial damage, all without cutting into our body or needing to use surgery.  Gary, being in the medical field, ought to appreciate how much one could do with this ability.

Again, extra dimensions are believed by many in modern physics.  It’s certainly not prima facie irrational to hold to their existence.  And it wouldn’t take a “magical” being to do anything.  If we had some way to access the fourth dimension ourselves, we could already do all of these things and we certainly aren’t magical beings.

Now atheists still might not like God.  They might even say that just because it’s possible that there could be a being in fourth-dimensional space doesn’t mean there actually is one.  But that “rebuttal” misses the point.  Atheists are claiming that Christians are irrational for holding to beliefs that are perfectly rational even on purely materialistic grounds.

What does that say about how rational atheism is?