Are Miracles Possible in an Age of Science?

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Are Miracles Possible in an Age of Science?

Posted 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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Reader Comments ( Page 2 of 6)

Previous 15 Comments | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Most Recent | Next 15 Comments

16. I think the arguments regarding miracles is much like the discussion as to which is better Superman or Mightymouse. The miracles cited in the New Testament are, at best, the worst kind of hearsay meant to reinforce a belief in Jesus. Miracles are invoked to ratify the legitimacy of the claims that jesus is the messiah in much the same way that miracles are contrived in the sainthood process. I think trying to explain miracles is a total waste of time because the mechanics of the miracle is not imporatant as they are all fiction as are the religious narratives, in general. All religious have fictitious narratives and I marvel at how objective Christains can be regarding the narratives of religions they don't accept and see the naaratives for the fiction that they are and yet, when it comes to the Chritian narrative the objectivity goes out the window. even such highly regarded academics as Toynbee was blinded by his Christianity when it came to analyzing history. There are no miracles as there are no poes in the pizza. just an invention of the human mind.

eric at 1:37PM on Oct 16th 2007

17. FAITH is the one word that separates Christians from those that try to bring God down to mans level of understanding. Has anyone heard of "... men professing themselves to be wise becoming fools"? And "Gods ways being higher than our ways"? There will always be people who try to rationalize and figure God out. Who knows for sure, and is able to prove, what science has to say about the judgements of God after a mans death? And how long is eternity?

larry maddox at 1:45PM on Oct 16th 2007

18. 1) "A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature"
2) "I say that...there are no known laws of nature"

Therefore, according to Mr. D'Souza's logic,
3) There are no miracles

Eric at 1:47PM on Oct 16th 2007

19. Sorry, but I don't buy "miracles". I don't buy organized religion, either. My opinion of the miracles cited in the Bible is that the majority can be explained away as natural phenomena that human knowledge of the era was as yet unaware of. The rest are most likely overt deception by a few cult leaders looking to further their agenda and personal power.
"Miracles" will exist as long as humans are gullible and ignorant enough to believe in them. The "raising" of the "dead" Lazarus is a good example when you consider how many "dead" people were buried alive as late as the 19th century, as subsequently demonstrated by later exhumations demonstrating how desperately they tried to claw their way out of their premature graves.
The fact that we do not know why many phenomena that we observe around us occur simply illustrates the depth and bread of our ignorance. Time, human curiosity, and freedom from those whose beliefs compel them to attempt to undermine scientific investigation will remedy that, as our capacity and knowledge grow.

grussoedit at 2:30PM on Oct 16th 2007

20. To quote a character in Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" - "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable."

Lightning used to be considered a direct expression of divine fury, until Benjamin Franklin and others did experiments in the 1700's and devised lightning rods. Reproduction and healing used to be so mysterious that a famous physician, J.S. Haldane, argued that it *must* have a spiritual explanation, no 'mechanistic theory' could explain it. Now we have DNA and molecular biology. Just because something is unexplained doesn't make it *inexplicable*.

The only way to determine if something is understandable is to try to understand it. If you figure it out, then it was comprehensible. But if you don't figure it out, you can't conclude that it's forever inexplicable - maybe you just haven't had the right insights yet.

The notion of the 'inexplicable' or 'supernatural' is useless. There is no way to tell the difference between something 'unexplained' and 'inexplicable' - they have the same practical consequences - so why even bother assuming the latter?

Ray Ingles at 2:07PM on Oct 16th 2007

21. The other problem with D'Souza's conception of scientific laws is that they are indeed descriptive, not prescriptive. They describe how things actually do behave, not how they 'should' behave. (One reason why the conception of a god as 'lawgiver' is confused.)

But even in Newton's time, there were indications of problems. The odd precession of Mercury around the Sun didn't fit Newton's laws. People kept speculating on another planet closer in to the Sun, 'Vulcan', but never found it. There were other oddities, as well, but that's one of the more famous. Einstein explained it quite well as the Sun curving space nearby, affecting Mercury's orbit. And, gee, Einstein's predictions matched the observations.

The two current best theories about the universe are Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. However, we *know* our understanding is incomplete. Both of these theories have been *very* well confirmed (the GPS system would not work without relativistic corrections, QM predicts atomic-level events to high numbers of decimals) but they make different prediction about what happens around black holes.

At most one of them can be right, but they are probably both wrong in some ways. However, that's not the same thing as saying they are completely wrong - recall the Isaac Asimov essay I quoted replying to another blog post: "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

Ray Ingles at 2:19PM on Oct 16th 2007

22. Mr. Sousa is really lingering on in Fantasy Land here. Every column seems to be devoted to the "all-important" issue of atheism v. religious dogma. Oh, that's right, he's published a book. Sousa, get a life and put a lid on the religious hysteria before you lose what little intellectual credibility you presently enjoy. You are turning into an absurd bore with your longwinded attempts to prove the unproveable.

I suggest we all live our lives as well as we can, and let the Afterlife take care of itself.

Norma at 2:37PM on Oct 16th 2007

23. The arguments by D'Souza for the existance of miracles are well written and clearly represent what many of us, believers and non-believers, have either seen or experience.

I attended college late in my professional career and was astounded by the number of professors that had either doctorates or masters degrees that agruged time and again that science was science, "because nothing is absolute and we are always searching for the truth."

How Hume can argue the case against miracles is just one of the problems with modern thought, or what is touted by "educators" as "critical thinking". The existance of something is only possible if you can experience it with the five senses.Taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell.

If that is the case then what about the feeling of Joy? The feeling of Sorrow or Grief?

Miracles do not happen and Christ was not raised from the Dead. We are told by scientists that this is Absolute truth...yet how many times a year is someone declared clinically dead BY MEDICAL professionals only to awaken hours after that scientific declaration, alive.

Most professors that I encountered explained this way by the phrase "Science cannot explain nor should it be expected to explain EVERY occurance". Oh, so if you die and suddenly awaken in a hospital or mortuary, science has no answer according to certain educators or scientists.

If a parachute fails to open at 18,000 feet and someone plummets that distance, over 3 miles to the Earth they die each and every time, right? Think again. It happenned in WW2 in Europe and the case of the Canadian flyer that survived is well documented. True, he struck some pine trees and there was snow on the ground, but still, in a what some would term a miracle (including the flyer)odds are that the odds against this happenning a second time, under similar circumstances are, say, 1 in 1 million? One in 10 million?

So what is that 1 in ten million incident called? What is that exceeption to the rule that really is no rule at all? I call it a miracle.

Paul at 2:35PM on Oct 16th 2007

24. What Hume said was that we can never know with CERTAINTY that the future will resemble the past, but when we are dealing with something like gravity the effects of which have been observed billons of times, the PROBABILITY that something dropped in the future will fall to earth is so high as to be, for all intents and purposes, a certainty.

How many resurrections from the dead have been observed by credible witnesses? And I've always wondered why the faith-healers never seem to be able to cause amputated limbs to grow back. I mean, such a "miracle" would lead to conversions in droves!

emelpe at 3:08PM on Oct 16th 2007

25. The problem with your argument is that it never really gets around to addressing the issue of miracles; it only addresses the issue of previously undiscovered facts. Black swans were not miracles; they were simply previously undiscovered facts. What your argument boils down to is the same thing that you earlier criticize some theologians for arguing -- that there are real physical explanations for "miracles" which we may not understand -- but which we are capable of understanding in scientific terms, once we know more facts.

What this ignores is the essential nature of a miracle -- a genuinely supernatural phenomenon, as opposed to an imperfectly understood natural one. In defending the possibility of miracles, you have actually marginalized them to the point of irrelevance.

It's fine by me -- I'm not a believer anyway. But I understand the nature of faith, and I am repeatedly bewildered by "the faithful" who feel compelled to harness science and logic to "prove" their faith. The desperate need to prove the object of faith is a pretty powerful argument that faith is in fact lacking. The person of faith simply accepts, without need of proof.

Yee of little faith.

Frank Chadwick at 3:21PM on Oct 16th 2007

26. Dinesh,

First, what's up with so many words in your article being smushedtogetherwithnospaces? Don't you have a proofreader?

Secondly, my understanding of Hume's argument is different than the one you laid out here. It has been awhile since I was an undergrad philosophy major, but here's how I recalled it.

Most people will hear of a miracle from the report of another person. In every case, we have to ask ourselves which is more miraculous:

Is it more miraculous that the laws of nature have been violated and a true miracle has occurred?

Or is it more miraculous that the witness is telling the complete truth?

The answer is that unreliable witnesses are always less miraculous than miracles themselves. See it wouldn't take a miracle for our witness to be lying, to be deceived, or to misunderstand what they saw. There is no violation of the laws of reality for that to happen.

Ergo, miracles don't happen.

David at 11:53AM on Oct 17th 2007

27. The topic of miracles is like the topic of believing in God or not to believe. Some of us [like me] DO believe in God & miracles & the Bible versus those who do NOT believe. NO problem for me that many do NOT believe like I do. NO problem whatsoever. Have a great day. Next subject.
[ www.Heisnear.com ]

Patmos Ministries at 3:48PM on Oct 16th 2007

28. Hume, interesting example. Modern thought of the Philosophy of Science goes more like this. Scientific laws are only rules that we use to understand and predict in a particular paradigm. Ptolemy, Galileo, Newton, Einstein or Hawking and beyond are merely paradigms that help us manipulate the world around us. The rules may change from time to time and cannot be considered absolutes.

If you want proof of God's existence I would recommend Kirkigard(sp?). He puts and end to all of this bickering. He calls belief a "leap of faith" and that neither science nor philosophy can prove or disprove his/her or a universal spiritual existence. Good luck with your journey. Probably best to not call names or cast aspersions on your way. It might be considered bad Karma.

Steve Seivers at 4:06PM on Oct 16th 2007

29. "Miracles" do NOT happen in an age of science or any time else.

I get tired of people who say things like "it was God's miracle that we weren't killed in the car crash" or like Sacre Coeur in Montmartre (p. 77 of Hitch's "God is Not Great") with its bronze plaque of a pattern of Allied bombs that missed the church but hit the neighboring houses, probably killing people who were actually useful!

No. There are no miracles now nor were there ever any.

Agkistrodon at 5:52PM on Oct 25th 2007

30. The problem with this line of evidence is that "miracle" must be defined before we can talk intelligently about one. "Miracle" is a specifically religious/spiritual term. Because of this everybody has a specific definition based on his or her experience and training. And so whether miracles are possible depends on which event(s) we are talking about and how we define miracles. I doubt anybody can make a convincing case for the existence of God relying soley on the possibility of a "miracle". Even a discussion of the existence of God must rely on the definition of "God". I do not know about Anselm's definition of God. I will need to think about that. However I can assert that many of the gods we men construct by our definitions do not exist. However I do believe in a God who brought the cosmos and all that lives in it into existence. I believe that this God made us men in some way to reflect his person in our intellect, emotions, and volition. Because of this I believe it is possible for us to seek Him and for Him to show himself to us in some way, even if we cannot fully comprehend Him. I think that is what men have attempted to record for us in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. And because I believe that because God would have us find Him he has protected those writers and writings in such a way that he can still be found by those who diligently seek. And yet finding God is still a miracle.

Dale Greenlee at 4:44PM on Oct 16th 2007

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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.