Atheist Incuriosity

A reader found this after about five seconds of Googling.

Of course, when presented with things like this, the atheist has to shift his ground from simply banging away on Thomas’ Objection #1 (“Life sucks. So there’s no God.”) The only *reasonable* way to do this is to shift to Thomas’ Objection #2 (“Everything Works Fine Without God. So There’s No God” or, more briefly “Everything Has a Natural Explanation”). The quickest natural explanation is “This story is false”. The trouble is that when you make Objection #2 a de fide dogma, it is you who become the dogmatist. And you’ve been advertising yourself as the Free Thinker who is just following the evidence where it leads. However, being a New Atheist who worships the intellect rather than using it, you usually don’t think of this. Instead, as “Padding the Case for the New Atheism” points out you do everything but go and see whether or not there is actual evidence that the miraculous occurs by flinging out a series of fallacies instead of getting off your fat butt and looking:

Theists, you will recall, are dogmatists utterly closed to empirical evidence that challenges their tidy little universe. The New Atheists, in contrast, are realists who just follow the evidence where it leads, and luckily it leads to what they “simply knew” since they were nine years old. Yet curiously, we so often meet New Atheists like London Times columnist Matthew Parris.

Recently, Parris wrote his coolly intellectual reaction to the story of Sr. Marie Simon-Pierre, who, as doctors confirm, was suddenly healed of a well-documented case of Parkinson’s Disease on the night of June 2, 2005, after praying for the intercession of the recently deceased Pope John Paul II. By way of careful scientific examination of these facts, Parris deployed the following analytical algorithms:

1. Link the story with crazy dispensationalist notions about the Second Coming;

2. Call for “intelligent Christians” to voice their “righteous anger” and “contempt” for this “nonsense” (apparently meaning “any belief in the supernatural”);

3. Ridicule the “excesses of Lourdes”;

4. Lament “the woeful confusion of faith with superstition”; and

5. Categorically condemn anyone stupid enough to “honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.”

Parris concludes this dispassionate pursuit of the evidence with the following de fide definition:

“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.

Simple-minded folk might think that the truly rational first step is to find out if the nun had Parkinson’s and then find out if she was cured. Why not research the strange and well-documented deeds of St. Pio of Pietrelcina? Or the miracles at Lourdes?

Instead, the tactics of Parris are defended with a sort of mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This slogan is designed to persuade us that the debate is over what the facts are — not over whether the New Atheist materialist dogma permits him to so much as look at them.

The reality is that extraordinary claims are established on the basis of human evidence every day. No man can prove in a lab that his wife loves him, yet for millions of men it is an extraordinary fact more certain than the age of the universe, accepted entirely on human testimony. For centuries, extraordinary claims were brought back from Africa of a mysterious manlike creature that dwelt deep in the jungles. The way the reality of this creature was determined was not by sitting in a lab parroting “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but by going and seeing whether or not gorillas were there.

And that’s the thing: The believers go and see. Credo ut intelligam. New Atheists stay at home and rail at what Hitchens calls the “ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage.”

Seventy-thousand eyewitnesses (including atheists and skeptics) to the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima are told by the stay-at-home dogmatist that it was spontaneous mass hallucination unprecedented in history.

People who have experienced scientifically documented and inexplicable healings at Lourdes are commanded by New Atheists to believe they are victims or perpetrators of some sort of unnamed “excess.”

A Host begins bleeding human blood at a Mass in Betania, Venezuela, and the whole thing is caught on video by an ordinary tourist? Conspiracy and trick photography, despite the fact that the Host (still preserved in a monstrance after being subjected rigorous tests) continues to bleed now and then to this day.

And when the resolve to Just Not Look begins to crumble under the suspicion there might be something to the supernatural after all, the solution is “Pop in a DVD of the Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller debunking something and repeat to yourself ‘Some claims of the supernatural are bunk, therefore all are.'”

As the Prophet Chesterton hath said:

Any one who likes, therefore, may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who ask questions to find things out and those who ask questions to keep from finding things out. The author of the Why Won’t God Heal Amputees site stands squarely and resolutely with the latter. His mind is made up and he does not want to be confused by facts or evidence. He calls this “rationality”, as do all such folk who worship, rather than use, the intellect.