Why Miracles are Impossible

Carlo, the math -accountant monkey in Barbados. Is he a "miracle"? Hardly! Just well trained with an abacus!


"Unless a man can quantify or measure what he’s talking about, he’s not talking about anything."

- Lord Kelvin


In the last set of logical fallacies, I noted a number of examples that would cover the claim of "miracles" which include: non-sequitur, ignotum per ignotius, and affirming the consequent. Feeling I may have left some loose ends untied, I want to explore these in more detail, and also show why miracles are impossible in our universe - and merely a misunderstanding of natural laws.

A good starting point, is Philosopher David Hume's principle of what it would take to accept any "miracle":

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."

This is one of the most important principles underlying much of empirical science, and also tied to the Ockham's Razor principle of parsimony. It is what inheres at the back of any physicist's mind when a claim is made for others about having beheld "miracles".

In his essay collection Unweaving the Rainbow biologist Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist, chose to examine the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people "reportedly saw the sun move", to apply Hume's principle: As Dawkins observed:

"On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people," Dawkins writes. "This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

The dual –tandem improbability associated with this is less than getting a royal flush in poker 6.5 million times in succession. It is actually less than the proverbial monkey on a typewriter re-typing Hamlet in its entirety, and with no errors.

As another example of applying the Hume principle, consider the claim of the miracle of "Jesus “walking on water”. (Forgetting for the moment this was copied hook, line and sinker from the Ized's account of Mithra in Persia!)

Prof. Hugh Schonfeld has a simple explanation for this: a mistranslation of the Hebrew word “al” which can mean “by” or “on”. So, when a scribe supposedly wrote “walking by the water” it was translated to “walking on the water”. Now let us apply the Hume test: Is the Schonfeld claim of mistranslation MORE or LESS miraculous than a man actually violating the law of gravity and walking on water? It doesn’t require a lot of thought or effort to see that the mistranslation of a passage of the New Testament is LESS miraculous (or if you prefer, less improbable) than that a man actually, literally walked on water.

Thus, applying Hume's principle, one opts for the less dramatic explanation, and the more conservative in terms of preserving natural principles.

During one extensive press debate I had with a fundie named Terence Mahon in Barbados, he asserted that laws are subject to sudden alterations to permit the occurrence of "miracles". However, as far as we know (and I don't know what sci-fi comic books Mahon has been reading) these laws are not violated anywhere in the universe. If one claims, therefore, that a "miracle" occurred such that thousands of loaves and fishes were produced from only a few (a clear violation of the law of conservation of mass-energy) he needs to show how or where there are ANY single exemptions in the cosmos. No one I know has ever, EVER proven any!

Indeed, if we did not expect these (physical) laws to hold everywhere and at all times then anything could happen! One minute this keyboard could be here on my desk, and the next it could rise up and vanish! Or, Mahon (or some other fundie) might be penning another reply to me when presto! his pen dissolves into a bunch of dispersed atoms and molecules. Or, his car stops working one day on gasoline and requires water instead!

This is the sort of haphazard universe one gets when physical laws are treated frivolously and with total disdain for their inherent predictability and repeatability. It is also a common treatment I have found from people who have never taken even a basic high school physics course. These people, bereft of exposure to detailed natural laws, can really believe six (or one hundred) impossible things before breakfast. If you want "tomfoolery", then this is it to the nth degree. What miracle seekers need to bear in mind is that physical laws are not simply repealed on a whim, or on the basis of a pet fantasy of how we'd like the universe to be, they have to be shown by serious scientific work to be subject to such. No fundie I know has ever published such work, say in Physical Review D, and I doubt they ever will. All they have is a specious, mistranslated book for which they can't even reconcile the thousands of contradictions within. And they expect us to take their claims seriously?

Physical laws may be suitably modified or extended, however, should there be sufficient observational and empirical data to warrant it. This is exactly what was done to Newton's law of gravitation by Albert Einstein. This has resulted in a new law of gravitation which applies to the entire universe (i.e. taking into account its shape or curvature) instead of just a small region like the solar system. The major error of the idiot fundies is asserting miracles are "allowed exceptions" when they've never bothered to give the necessary and sufficient conditions for a miracle "exception". All they do is dream up words then fling them out as if the mere saying so is ample. What we do know is that any physical law so defined (e.g. gravitation or parochial 'law of gravity' on Earth) cannot be accepted as being liable to "exceptions" unless the claimants can prove such exist that aren't tied to their stupid, ancient and pathetic good Book. But it's doubtless these thick-headed morons will ever process that!

Contrary to most fundies' misperceptions, scientists do not willy-nilly accept violations (or "exceptions" to) of physical laws without demanding empirical support for the claim. If you insist that water can be changed into wine, a scientist will demand to see your evidence for such a feat. The same applies to the claim of a man "walking on water", or "brought back to life". In each case, the evidence by which a natural law is violated must be thoroughly scrutinized. In this process, all alternative natural explanations must be considered-- including outright trickery or fraud, before the violation of a physical law is conceded. If you instead simply quote an ancient text, you will be summarily dismissed as a babbling idiot.

And this is all I ask of miracle proposers. I do not deny "miracles" because they are "miraculous", but because I've never seen any convincing evidence which would compel me to accept them without question. If anyone has such evidence in his possession then by all means he should share it with us skeptics-- that is, if he wishes to be taken as more than a drunk or on drugs. Again, the barometer is simply the one MAKING the claim must substantiate it, since extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. And bear in mind you cannot use your bible for backup or support, since this is one of the logical fallacies I listed: the appeal to authority. So - either SHOW a man can walk on water, or change water to wine, or survive three days in a whale's belly - or SHUT THE HELL UP! As in put a sock in it, rather than making bigger asses of yourselves.

Those lamo fundies wedded to ancient texts, mostly mutilated and mistranslated, perhaps need to just follow the advice of fellow atheist Larimore Nicholls': go for Mother Goose fables instead. At the very least, you'll look like less of a loony in need of serious electro-convulsive therapy!