True Miracles

The word ‘miracle’ has entered the common vernacular as a description for anything that seems surprising or unlikely. But this represents a cheapening of the word’s original meaning. A true miracle is not something that is just unlikely; rather, it is something that is believed to be impossible, something that violates the laws of science and nature as they are normally understood.

However, this of course immediately brings up the question – what does it mean for something to be impossible? Is anything really impossible or do things just seem impossible because they don’t fit in with the popular perspective of the moment? And what role do skeptics play, since they do not believe that true miracles can ever happen, no matter how many eyewitnesses claim the contrary?  In order to explore the concept of miracles more fully, it is necessary to look a little more closely at some of the occurrences that have been labeled miracles over the centuries.

Religious Miracles

Religion provides us with our largest category of miracles, in part because western religions in particular frequently point to miracles as proof of God’s existence. Naturally, in Christianity the resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate miracle but many who have been later canonized as saints by the Catholic Church were renowned for performing miracles in front of many witnesses. St. Francis of Assisi, for example, was reported to have healed the sick, restored sight or hearing to the blind and the deaf, and helped the paralyzed to walk again. Faith healers claim to channel the powers of God just as so many saints did, and there are thousands of anecdotes from people who claim to have been healed by the touch or presence of these men and women.

One of the most famous types of Christian miracle is the spectral or visionary appearances of the Virgin Mary. In 1858, in Lourdes, France, 14-year-old peasant girl, one Bernadette Soubirous, claimed to have seen a vision of a beautiful lady who told her of a nearby natural spring whose waters were blessed with spiritual powers. The waters of Lourdes eventually became famous for their reputed healing abilities and many of the thousands who have made – and are still making - the pilgrimage to this sacred place claim to have been cured of mysterious ailments that had previously resisted medical treatment.

Another famous religious site is Fátima, Portugal, where visions of the Virgin Mary were allegedly seen in 1917 by three girls on the 13th day of each month for six consecutive months. The three cousins, aged ten and under, were witnessed in ecstatic trances by crowds that eventually numbered in the thousands, as they claimed to be receiving important information directly from a translucent lady in white. This lady told the girls she would produce a miracle on her last appearance, on October 13, 1917, and a throng of 70,000 people gathered to await this promised event. Thousands of those who were in attendance claim that at the appointed time, the Sun began to spin and move in the sky, changing both its shape and color. Fátima remains a popular destination for miracle seekers to this day, and no astronomical explanation was ever found that could explain what so many claimed they saw.

Religious miracles are not confined to Christianity. Eastern holy men from Hindu or Buddhist traditions are frequently reputed to be capable of performing miracles. Sathya Sai Baba, for example, an Indian Hindu spiritual teacher who died in 2011, reportedly was able to materialize religious objects on command and, and many claimed to have seen him appear suddenly in places where he could not possibly have been.

Miracles of Survival

Medical literature is full of anecdotes about people whose supposedly terminal illnesses have disappeared just as suddenly as they arrived. While faith healers have sometimes been involved in these cases, in most instances these miraculous cures involve no outside intervention. Diseases or supposedly fatal conditions simply disappear without explanation or apparent cause.

Many people have survived accidents that should have killed them. Nicholas Alkemade, a flight sergeant in the British Royal Air Force in 1944, bailed out of a burning plane over Germany to avoid death by incineration. Falling 18,000 feet to the ground below without a parachute, Alkemade first hit some pine trees, then fell into a snow bank below. Not only was he not killed, he was barely even injured, walking away with only a sprained leg! After being taken prisoner by the Germans, he was honored as a hero for his incredible story of survival. Stories like this are not as uncommon as would be expected - amazingly, many skydivers have somehow survived falls that should have completely pulverized them.

In every category of accident, there are amazing stories of survival. There have been many lone survivors of fatal plane crashes, for example Vesna Vulovi?, the Yugoslavian flight attendant who survived a fall of an astounding 33,000 feet after her airplane exploded in mid-air following a terrorist attack. In many cases, these lone survivors have been children, which has tended to reinforce the idea that something truly miraculous has occurred.

The Skeptics Respond

Of course people who don’t believe in miracles always have alternative explanations for events like these. Good luck, incredible coincidence, sleight of hand and fakery, mass hallucination, wishful thinking and outright lying are some of the explanations they have come up with to explain away reports like the ones we have just examined. Skeptics insist people believe in miracles based only on faith, and that they interpret events with more likely explanations as miracles simply because of their personal beliefs. Of course, it is only the belief systems of the skeptics that lead them to interpret miracles the way they do, but the irony of this fact usually escapes them.

A New Science of Tomorrow?

There is a possibility that both skeptics and believers in miracles are equally wrong. What is labeled as a miracle may be explainable by natural laws that we do not yet completely understand - such as the power of the mind to heal, or to shape and bend physical reality in ways that seem counterintuitive or impossible. Miracles may just be a sign that our consensus scientific and rational understandings of reality and the universe are not as complete as we think they are. In other words, today’s miracles could be tomorrow’s new science.

And then of course a whole new set of miracles will come along to confound believers and anger the skeptics all over again.