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Are Miracles Possible in an Age of Science?

Dinesh D'SouzaPosted Oct 16th 2007 7:40AM by Dinesh D'Souza
Filed under: Christianity, Controversy, Atheism

This article, which appeared in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times, is adapted from my new book What's So Great About Christianity.

Are miracles possible in an age of science? A host of bestselling atheist books, from Sam Harris' The End of Faith to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, all sneer at the notion of miracles. Dawkins,for instance, writes that miracles are "flatly contradictory not just to the facts of science but also to the spirit of science." Reasonable people in his view "have to renounce miracles."

Some Christians are so intimidated by the authority of science that they do their best to explain away the miracles reported in the Bible. How did Jesus feed thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes? Perhaps he had a secret store of food, or people brought their own packed lunches. How did Jesus walk on water? Maybe there was a platform floating beneath the surface. How did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Lazarus might simply have been in a trance. These explanations have actually been suggested by theologians.

In getting rid of miracles, these people are getting rid of Christianity. Some religions, such as Islam, do not rely on miracles. Others, such as Judaism, report miracles but are not dependent on them. Christianity, however, is based on miracles, from the virgin birth to the resurrection. Without the resurrection, Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, "our preaching is useless and so is your faith."

I intend to show that miracles are possible by refuting the strongest argument against them, that of the philosopher David Hume. Hume'sargument is widely cited by atheists; Dawkins and Hitchens both invokeit to justify their wholesale rejection of miracles. I am not trying to defend the veracity of any particular miracle. And of course miracles are improbable-that's why we use the term "miracle." I will, however, show that the possibility of miracles is completely consistent with modern science and modern knowledge.

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,Hume argued: 1) A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature,2) We know these laws through repeated and constant experience, 3) Thetestimony of those who report miracles contradicts the operation ofknown scientific laws, 4) Consequently no one can rationally believe inmiracles. My refutation will show that: 1) Amiracle is a violation of the known laws of nature, 2) Scientific lawsare on Hume's own account empirically unverifiable, 3) Thus violationsof the known laws of nature are quite possible, 4) Therefore, miraclesare possible.

Why are scientific laws unverifiable? Hume'sanswer was that no finite number of observations, however large, can beused to derive an unrestricted general conclusion that is logicallydefensible. If I say all swans are white and posit that as a scientific hypothesis, how would I go about verifying it? By checking out swans. A million swans. Or ten million. Based on this I can say confidently that all swans are white. Hume's point is that I don't really know this. Tomorrow I might see a black swan, and there goes my scientific law.

This is not a frivolous example. For thousands of years before was discovered, the only swans people in the West had seen had been white. Consequently,the entire Western world took it for granted that all swans were white,and expressions like "white as a swan" abound in Western literature. It was only when Europeans landed in that they saw, for the first time, a black swan. What was previously considered a scientifically inviolable truth had to be retired.

Atthis point one might expect today's champions of science to startpatting themselves on the back and saying, "Yes, and this is thewonderful thing about science. It is always open to correction and revision. It learns from its mistakes." Theatheist philosopher Daniel Dennett writes, "The methods of sciencearen't foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible....There is atradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and whereverflaws are discovered."

Tosay this is to miss the force of Hume's reasoning, which is thatscience was not justified in positing these rules in the first place. All scientific laws are empirically unverifiable. How do we know that light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second? We measure it. Butjust because we measure it at that speed one time, or ten times, or abillion times, doesn't mean that light always and everywhere travels atthat speed. We are simply assuming this, but we don't know it to be so. Tomorrow we might find a situation in which light travels at a different speed, and then we will be reminded of black swans.

But can't scientific laws be derived from the logical connection between cause and effect? No, Hume argued, because there is no logical connection between cause and effect. We may see event A and then event B, and we may assume that event A caused event B, but we cannot know this for sure. All we have observed is a correlation, and no number of observed correlations can add up to a necessary connection.

Consider a simple illustration. A child drops a ball on the ground for the first time. To his surprise it bounces. Thenthe child's uncle, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology, explains to the child that dropping a round object like aball causes it to bounce. The uncle might explain this by employing general terms like "property" and "causation." If these are not meaningless terms, they must refer to something in experience.

But now let us consider a deep question that Hume raises: what experience has the uncle had that the child has not had? The difference, Hume notes, is that the uncle has seen a lot of balls bounce. Every time he dropped a ball it has bounced. And every time he has seen someone else do it, the result was the same. This is the basis-and the sole basis-of the uncle's superior knowledge.

Hume now draws his arresting conclusion: the uncle has no experience fundamentally different from the child's. He has merely repeated the experiment more times. Soit is custom or habit that makes him think, "Because I have seen thishappen many times before, therefore it must happen again." But the uncle has not established a necessary connection, merely an expectation derived from past experience. How does he know that past experience will repeat itself every time in the future? In truth, he does not know. In this way Hume concluded that the laws of cause and effect cannot be validated.

Hume is not denying that nature has laws but he is denying that we know what those laws are. When we posit laws, Hume suggests this is simply a grandiose way of saying "here is our best guess based on previous tries."

Bythe way it is no rebuttal to Hume to say, "Admittedly scientific lawsare not 100 percent true but at least they are 99.9 percent true. They may not be certain, but they are very likely to be true." How would you go about verifying this statement? How would you establish the likelihood, for instance, of Newton 's inverse square law? Itsays that every physical object in the universe attracts every otherphysical object with a force directly proportional to their masses andinversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This law cannot be tested except by actually measuring the relationships between all objects in the universe! Since that is impossible, no finite number of tries can generate any conclusion about how probable Newton 's statement is. Tenmillion tries cannot establish 99.9 percent probability-or even 50percent probability-because there may be twenty million cases thathaven't been tried where Newton 's law may be found inadequate.

At this point we should pause to consider astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson's exasperated outburst. Tysonbelieves it is simply ridiculous to say that scientific laws are notreliable: "Science's big-time success rests on the fact that it works." Ifscience did not accurately describe the world, then airplanes would notfly and people who undergo medical treatments would not be cured. Airplanes do fly and sick people are healed in the hospital, and on that basis science must be taken as true. Betterto fly in an airplane constructed by the laws of physics, Tysonscornfully says, than to board one "constructed by the rules of Vedicastrology."

Iagree that science works-and you won't get any argument from me aboutthe limits of Vedic astrology-but it doesn't follow that scientificlaws are known to be true in all cases. Consider this dismaying realization. Newton 's laws were for nearly two centuries regarded as absolutely true. They worked incredibly well. Indeed no body of general statements had ever been subjected to so much empirical verification. Everymachine incorporated its principles, and the entire IndustrialRevolution was based on Newtonian physics and Newtonian mechanics. Newton was vindicated millions of times a day, and his theories led to unprecedented material success.

YetEinstein's theories of relativity contradicted Newton, and despitetheir incalculable quantity of empirical verification, Newton's lawswere proven in important ways to be wrong or at least inadequate. Thisdoes not mean that Einstein's laws are absolutely true: in the futurethey too might be shown to be erroneous in certain respects.

From such examples, philosopher Karl Popper concluded that no scientific lawcan, in a positive sense, claim to prove anything at all. Science cannot verify theories, it can merely falsify them. When we have subjected a theory to expansive testing, and it has not been falsified, we can provisionally believe it to be true. This is not, however, because the theory has been proven, or even because it is likely to be true. Rather, we proceed in this way because, practically speaking, we don't have a better way to proceed. We give a theory the benefit of the doubt until we find out otherwise.

There is nothing wrong in all this, as long as we realize that scientific laws are not "laws of nature." They are human laws, and they represent a form of best-guessing about the world. What we call laws are nothing more than observed patterns and sequences. We think the world works in this way until future experience proves the contrary.

I am laying out the skeptical case here not because I want to endorse without reservations Hume's (or Popper's) philosophy. Rather, my goal is to overthrow Hume's argument against miracles using his own empirical and skeptical philosophy. Humeinsists that miracles violate the known laws of nature, but I say thatHume's own skeptical philosophy has shown that there are no known lawsof nature.

Miracles can be dismissed only if scientific laws are necessarily true-if they admit of no exceptions. But Hume has demonstrated that for no empirical proposition whatsoever do we know this to be the case. Miraclescan be deemed unscientific only if our knowledge of causation is soextensive that we can confidently dismiss supernatural causation. From Hume we learn how limited is our knowledge of causation, and thereforewe cannot write off the prospect of divine causation in exceptionalcases.

Sothe atheist case against miracles fails, and by the very standards ofreason and evidence advocated by the great skeptic, David Hume. The case against miracles in the name of reason is shown to be unreasonable. Faith is vindicated, not in any particular miracle, but at least in their possibility. Miracles can indeed happen, and nothing in modern science or modern knowledge shows they can't.

Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great About Christianity has just been published by Regnery. Website: dineshdsouza.com.

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Mo Rocca appears on a bunch of shows, including CBS News Sunday Morning (with the indescribably wonderful Charles Osgood), The Tonight Show on NBC, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He's a sometime judge on Iron Chef and was featured on Telemundo's Amore Descarado. Last year he starred on Broadway in the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. His expose "All the President's Pets" was published by Crown in 2004.

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News Bloggers

Mo Rocca appears on a bunch of shows, including CBS News Sunday Morning (with the indescribably wonderful Charles Osgood), The Tonight Show on NBC, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! He's a sometime judge on Iron Chef and was featured on Telemundo's Amore Descarado. Last year he starred on Broadway in the 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. His expose "All the President's Pets" was published by Crown in 2004.

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