Miracles in a Sane Life
I once watched a person run from a meeting cursing God. My father followed the man out of the meeting and rebuked demonic powers in the name of Jesus. The fleeing man flew up in the air exactly as if he had been cross body blocked. He did not crumple, he did not fall, he flew through the air and landed in the dirt. He got up in his right mind.
What do I make of this?
This will depend on my previous understanding of reality. Given what I saw, two possibilities seem most likely to me: the person was “merely” mentally ill and my Dad’s prayer was helpful in restoring his sanity or spiritual powers were oppressing him and Jesus started setting this poor man free. If you are already sure that demons cannot exist or any other supernatural beings, then any natural explanation of such events will be better than any supernatural one. *
I have stood before a weeping icon. Could it be a fraud? Of course it might be a fraud, but there is no good reason to think it fraudulent and very good reason to trust the people involved. Again, if one is persuaded that there must be fraud, then nothing will persuade a person. Frauds exist and Google lets you find them quickly or explains how it all could have, sort of, been done.
My body was weak, my parents prayed for me, and I have never felt that kind of sickness again. I felt better immediately. This is not something I use as evidence for you if you do not accept that miracles can happen. It is my experience.
How we react to on-going study of the Shroud of Turin will be controlled by prior assumptions.**
It is certainly the case that improbable claims need massive evidence, but then what counts as improbable is itself the subject of debate and is dependent on a point of view. Now of course if one is using a miracle (like those at Lourdes) to argue for the existence of God, the burden of proof will be quite high. Consider however a person who for philosophical reasons (cosmological arguments, the ontological argument, for example) and personal experience already believes in God. She prays and her prayer is answered. For example, if she prays for a sick friend and the friend recovers. She would naturally thank God and move on. She knows that perhaps this was a happy coincidence, but is within her rights to consider this a probable healing.
This isn’t evidence for her beliefs, but confirmation that her beliefs work out in the real world.
We must all be modest about what our experiences show. We can be duped by con men and magicians, sometimes foolishly. Our desires for something to be true (or even not be true!) can make us gullible or overly skeptical. As a result, the sensible soul lives by faith: he is not certain, but he has evidence for his hopes.
If we are modest and live prudently, we don’t have to worry too much about mistakes. Outrageous claims that prayer does nothing or everything will not impress us. We look at the evidence and see good reasons that confirm our experiences. We go wrong when we are too certain. Sometimes we believe things that do not work and are very harmful. These harmful ideas are almost always extreme claims with insufficient evidence. I have met crazy religious people who say that if one engages in certain religious rituals, all sorrow or depression will vanish. This is false.
Avoid anyone who says all can be helped by “x” who cannot immediately demonstrate the truth to the strong claim. If God wanted us all to be rich if only our confession was good, we all would soon be rich. If a “cure” is universal, it will soon be accepted. In most cases, the causes are complicated and in every case people are different from each other, so solutions will rarely be simple.
A Useful Application in Politics for this Approach to Miracles
Because I have seen frauds in religion, people who preach for money, and I have also seen and experienced things that were real, I have had to think hard*** about these things. The tools of philosophy of religion (thank you University of Rochester!) were useful. Friends in philosophy like JP Moreland and good pastors like my Dad helped me work out a good approach.
Many people have been burned by secularism, missing the supernatural aspect to reality, and so look to this sane way. Many more (given the numbers) have fallen prey to religious extremism that made everything “spiritual.” As a result, most people walk the middle road between fanatic skepticism and credulity. Skepticism (in the form of wondering) and Faith (belief with evidence that is not certain) are two good tools we need in living a full life.
This is the narrow way taught by all sane Christians in all places at all times.
We forget to apply this rule to other areas because most of us pray and few of us politic. We have to make sense of seemingly unanswered prayer and harder still of seemingly answered prayer! God is present, so present that few fail to feel His presence and those that say they do often spend huge amounts of time talking about the failure.
Politics is more distant and less practical and so we are less thoughtful. We are more easily taken in by con artists who sell us either “miraculous” or “secularists” visions of Utopia. There are “conspiracies” of “others” (Globalists! The Jews! Mexicans) that must be opposed to bring on a better time. If only we lower corporate taxes or nationalize health care or take on the banks, things would be better. Buy into the theory that free coinage of silver will cure all that ails us and suddenly all evidence will appear to fit the theory. Evidence that does not fit the theory can be blamed on the conspirators in the Republican Party like Mark Hanna, the banks, or the British. Of course, decide that free coinage of silver is a stalking horse for radicalism and ruin and you can turn the pious William Jennings Bryan into a budding Bolshevik. All evidence that shows that the farmers of Nebraska are suffering under overly tight money will just be propaganda from the Nevada silver barons.
Just as thinking about overly simple answers regarding miracles keeps us religiously sane, so application of that thought to politics will help avoid dangerous zealotry. If a problem required a simple or universal solution, it would already be done. Just as demons exist, so do crooked and powerful people. However, just as the forces of Hell are not nearly as powerful as some fanatics make them, so the rich or the “conspirators” are rarely the root cause of all that ails us.
Does big business harm us? I am sure it does.
Does big government harm us? Who doubts it?
What should we do?
The minute someone tells me that they can explain it to me on their website, I doubt what they are saying.
We will muddle through (I hope) with some combination of many solutions because the national problems are complicated. Some of them are spiritual. Some of them are physical. Some are not in our control and a few are. Sometimes we are to blame for our problems and sometimes we are being harmed by “bad guys.”
The temptation is to be merely skeptical and believe in nothing and in nobody. I reject this as overly simple. Many good men and women work in Washington (a few are former students!) and I have spoken with them. Not everyone is corrupt while we alone in Texas are pure. In fact, many of us are worse than the civil servants trying to help us.
Being involved means making mistakes (and I have made them), but also living and being part of a community. So I stay involved, but don’t put my trust in simple answers or any particular politician.
At the same time, my skin crawls when some politician wraps himself or herself in messianic language and promises to fix Washington. If we just pray or have a Christian president, then all will be well. This view of politics is damnable heresy. We have a living Messiah and He reigns now. He does not need any politician to be His regent and any politician who makes that claim is deluded or anti-Christ and probably both.
Politics is a muddle of solutions, false starts, and frauds. We do the best we can to form a prior political philosophy based on our reason and experience, commit ourselves, and then we see. We pray to God for His mercy and we build schools, churches, and strong community structures.
We will see some miracles and some hard work that pays. We will fail, but we never need to be overly skeptical or credulous. God helping us.
___________
*As I have stated often: mental disease is real. A person should visit a physician and a psychologist and engage in the best treatment medical science can offer. This does not prevent (or should not prevent) seeking a miracle. Some problems have natural causes and need natural solutions. Some are spiritual in nature. Many are a combination of both. It is a complicated world. I never trust anyone who tells me every problem is spiritual or physical in nature.
**This brief piece is not an argument of the existence of miracles of any kind. It is merely pointing out the amount of evidence required for a putative miracle will depend on a prior position on the probability of such events happening.
***Much harder than I can express in a few hundred words!
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