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 4 of 6)

Previous 15 Comments | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Most Recent | Next 15 Comments

46. I DO NOT THINK BELIEVING IN MIRACLES IS APPRECIATED IF LIFE ITSELF IS NOT A "MIRACLE",THEN, INDEED THERE ARE NO "MIRACLES",SCIENCE RECOGNISES NO MIRACLES ,ONLY PROCESSES THAT ARE OBSERVABLE AND REPEATABLE (LIFE QUALIFIES)SCIENCE PROVIDES NO ULTIMATE ANSWERS IN EITHER DIRECTION, RELIGION'S "GOD",PROVIDES BOTH,GENESIS/REVEALATIONS,SCIENCE CANNOT IMAGINE A "DIVINITY",WHITCH BY IT'S VERY NATURE STANDS OUTSIDE THE PURVIEW OF THE THE "SCIENTIFIC APPROBATION"

frankenmier at 11:22PM on Oct 16th 2007

47. To "prove" anything is to use the Scientific Method we all learned about in grade school. But where did the Scientific Method come from?

We learned it from observing the physical world around us, the "world we percieve" taught us how to prove the "world we percieve." The rules it taught us work well to prove itself - Again, "IT" made the rules!

Now, if there was a "miracle", by definition, it would lie outside the physical world we percieve.

Why would we expect the rules the physical world taught us to apply to a miracle, or be at all useful in proving or disproving one?

So no, the Scientific Method of proof would be useless in "proving" that miracles exist. So anyone who expects to ever "prove" miracles either do or do not exist, I think, will be disapointed, At least as long as they use current standards, the Scientic Method, as the method of proof.

Nick kolodinsky at 11:25PM on Oct 16th 2007

48. Miracles do happen but if you do not
believe it, that is OK with me. If you
want proof they do go to:
http://hometown.aol.com/williamehlert/myhomepage/index.html

There you can see the price of oil and gas both
come back down and thats a miracle to anyone.

William Ehlert at 11:26PM on Oct 16th 2007

49. So, we don't even rate an original article anymore? Now we are getting retreads of articles that are retreads of your book? What happened, nothing to blame Dems for in the news?

Geo at 11:29PM on Oct 16th 2007

50. "The Constitutionalist"

You said:

"I tire of all of you godless heathen picking at believers. Go to the devil, eh? You love him so much. He's your god. You're too stupid to even realize how deceived you are. You get what you deserve. Roast in peace."

I say:

It's ignorant, intolerant people like you that create the backlash you're railing against.

Tem at 11:30PM on Oct 16th 2007

51. It is all about F(f)aith...no matter which side of the "fence" you stand and that is truly a miracle. Q.E.D.

L. Jordan at 12:18AM on Oct 17th 2007

52. If, one day, Dinesh gets a clue, it will be a miracle indeed. As a Christian, I pray every day for him to figure out that embracing the right is an embrace of the dark side.

Amelie at 12:30AM on Oct 17th 2007

53. Paul, you say that going against the odds is a miracle. If that's the case, then every time someone wins the lottery, it's a miracle. I am a person of reason, and I call beating the odds 'luck'.

Did you know that a person falling from 18000 feet, and a person falling from 250 feet hit the ground at the same speed? It's called terminal velocity. The fact that these people lived when their chutes didn't deploy properly isn't a miracle. It all depends on where they land, how they land, what the wind currents were doing, the density of their bones, the amount of fat on their bodies, and many more things. A frail, sickly person has a much less chance of surviving a massive fall than a big-boned person.

Also, please show me some examples where people were clinically dead for hours and magically revived. In my experience, clinically dead is no heartbeat, no breathing, and no brain activity. Please, if you can, find an example of someone being buried when declared dead, ressurecting after three days, and moving a boulder ten times his own size.

clud at 2:23AM on Oct 17th 2007

54. Just because a computer simulation cannot duplicate an actual occurrance means little. This is due to the fact that computer simulations are not accurate representations of reality. If they were hedge funds using computer simulations would succeed at all times - they don't. The laws of probability do exist, if by chance you believe in miracles then its more a statement about your lack of intellectual competance or personal laziness.

There is a logical proof used to disprove the existence of God by Emmanual Kant posulated by St. Thomas Aquinas. In short Aquinas asserted that God is perfect. Therefore God exists. Kant's rebuttal is that the word and concept of existance is not a predicate, it not in itself a descriptive term, and must be subject to actual physical proof. If proof was a predicate then the mere description of a thing would make it come to be. That does not happen. The same can said of miracles. The proclamation of the existence of a miracle doesn't make it one, rather the limitations of science and reason has not provided the answer.

If miracles occur on the basis of mere description, then neo-cons would not exist and Bush would never have become president and Cheney would have gone to Vietnam, getting his fill of killing he wouldn't have to vicariously live the holocaust of Iraq through the sacrifice of our soldiers.

DaleF at 2:27AM on Oct 17th 2007

55. I think DD is Keralese. They have a Christian tradition that goes back to Saint Thomas. The rest of India may have a Hindu background, but this part of India does not.

I'm no expert, but Kant also wrote a lot of inscrutable, verbose stuff. Getting through ten pages an HOUR is speed reading. If I'm remembering correctly, he makes a point of saying that man cannot know the mind of God due to some sort of partition (not his terminology) that separates man from God. He's not disproving God, he's stating a perceived weakness in Aquinas' proof. But Aquinas had other proofs. And recall that Aquinas was an Aristotelean. He was repackaging arguments first made by Aristotle. But I'm not too sure Kant was right, anyway.

If Christianity weren't such a reasonable faith, historically, however, we wouldn't even have science as we know it. A lot of other traditions had technology and philosophy, but no one else can claim science. If you read the who's who of science, this is clear - from Copernicus to Newton. (Einstein wasn't a Christian, but he was no atheist, either.) And by the way, Copernicus gave us a heliocentric view of the solar-system, but remember that the old geocentric view was first suggested by Ptolemy an Egyptian philosophy in the Greek tradition, not the Catholic Church.

But I personally wonder about evolution in the following sense: How can you observe any process in a lab that's supposed to take millions of years; and what about it is reproducible? This is not like testing aerodynamics, ballistics, or drugs. All the articles I've ever read assume evolution to explain what's going on in the fossil record. But the totality of these studies are presumed to prove evolution. Isn't this a logical fallacy?

steve-o at 5:58AM on Oct 17th 2007

56. If this blog did NOT shill DD's book, I would say that yes, miracles do happen.

stuart joshua at 8:20AM on Oct 17th 2007

57. Philosophy has taught that miracles may be one way of proving the existence of God: okay, maybe. How many people have seen or experienced verifiable miracles? This is not a good way to prove the existence of God. If we are Christians, we may look through our New Testament to find stories of miracles there. So what? If we believe in miracles based on the accounts of others, that suggests we have faith in the accounts of people who lived nearly 2000 years ago. Belief in miracles may have little relevance to faith. Fatima, Lourdes, et al may be events that happened based on observation, but what import do they have for us?
What I am getting at, is that belief in miracles is much different than real Faith. Belief requires a cognitive assent; very little is required of the human person to believe something miraculous happened.
Faith calls for much more. It involves trust. Faith involves Love as well. Out of faith, a person may give over his/her whole life to someone: ie Jesus Christ. Outside of faith, the life of Jesus was a miserable failure, by any standard. In faith, Christ rose from the dead, and lives in glory with God the Father. It is in faith that we have hope. In faith, a person may overcome doubts and selfishness, experience conversion, and live a changed life. Faith can do all things, because it involves love.
Belief can do little, unless you love ghost stories.

Tom B at 1:20PM on Oct 17th 2007

58. Belief in miracles is a very weak way of coming to faith. It is merely a passive suspension of disbelief. People believe when and what they have seen or heard. This is not faith.
Faith comes through relationship. We trust in someone and act out of that trust. Trust springs from love, as does faith. When we love someone, all things are possible. Christ responds to that love and faith. We receive hope, joy, perseverance, etc.
These come out of relationship however.

Tom B at 1:13PM on Oct 17th 2007

59. After reading your most recent blog entries, I'm beginning to wonder if an atheist kicked your dog recently or something. You have gotten purely delusional on the subject.

All right, a few atheists have written books you don't like; books that pan Christianity and insistently say that religion should be banned. Well, as an atheist lesbian, I feel obligated to point out to you that there are entire sections of bookstores devoted to fundamentalist Christian writers, many of whom espouse vicious intolerance toward people of other religions, atheists, and homosexuals. These books are also far more widely read.

While you are ranting about the atheist culture of America, do you bother to find out how big the atheist population actually is? A 2005 poll by AP/Ipsos found that only about 2% of Americans consider theirselves atheists, and 4% consider themselves agnostics. The U.S. census for 2001 showed a bit higher, around 15% atheist/agnostic combined, but that's vs. 79.8% of Americans identifying as some sort of Christian. And yet you have the gall to paint yourself as a poor, persecuted minority!

Well, I'm sick of it, and sick of Christians who share your reality-challenged viewpoint on this matter. Atheists are, according to a study done in 2006 by the University of Minnesota, the least trusted minority in the US, coming even after gays and lesbians. And yet you say we have too much influence? As someone living in Texas, one of the hearts of Christian fundamentalism, I feel pressured on a near-daily basis to lie about my religious beliefs or face job discrimination, scorn from family, and hate from neighbors.

America has an attitude that religion is a sacred topic and that your beliefs cannot be questioned, but far too many put that idea on hold or dismiss it entirely when confronted with someone whose belief is that the entire idea of God is a fallacy. Your blogs are the perfect example of that. The kind of research you have done is the same as if I had read some books by James Dobson, Fred Phelps, and Jerry Falwell, selected the quotations that put them in the worst light, and then used this "research" to "prove" how all Christians think.

All that is happening in America recently, with all the lawsuits regarding separation of church and state, is that atheists are finally gaining the courage to push for the right to freedom of religion that the First Amendment guarantees. Yes, you have the freedom to pray, to go to church, to tell me I'm going to hell- but the moment you try to force my child to pray in school, or to say "under God," that Congress-added phrase to the otherwise lovely Pledge of Allegiance, or sneak religion into the science classroom under a new name, I will fight for MY right to religious freedom. Because, like it or not, it includes the freedom to not believe.

Louisa at 10:00AM on Oct 17th 2007

60. steve-o:

Evolution isn't really assumed, it's accepted because there's a very large amount of evidence for it. There's mountains (literally) of evidence that show that life has changed over billions of years. We don't find flowering plants (*or* their pollen) before the Cretaceous, for example. None of the life that's on Earth today was present a hundred million years ago, and all the living things that were present then are extinct now (though derived forms still exist).

Now, Darwin (and others) noted this fact of change, and even in the 1800s it was clear that the geological and paelontological evidence just could not fit within 6,000 years. The first attempt to explain this proposed that God had made 'multiple creations' and the current one was the most recent.

Darwin proposed life changing by natural selection. This accounted for a lot of otherwise hard-to-explain facts (Like, why does life fall into a nested hierarchy? Why no six-legged animals? Why no lizards with nipples?) and has proven to be of great explanatory power.

Living things that breed quickly can be used to run tests of many evolutionary hypotheses (the drosophilia fly is famous for this, since it's cheap to care for and prolific), evolution can be used to predict intermediate fossils (like the missing links between ungulates like cows and aquatic mammals like whales, found in the early 2000's) and DNA sequences (which can then be tested), and many companies use evolutionary algorithms every day to solve problems with computers. (Look up Tierra and Avida sometime - very enlightening.)

Evolution is accepted (not assumed) because it works - it ties together a huge number of otherwise unrelated and inexplicable facts and makes solid predictions that are borne out by testing. Evolution isn't 'proven' - theories in science aren't proven - but it's stood up to a *lot* of attempts to falsify it, the same way the heliocentric model of the solar system has.

Ray Ingles at 10:14AM on Oct 17th 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.