Sunday Argument #9: Against miracles

It occurred to me not long ago that, on some popular definitions of the term, the recent shenanigans occurring at CERN may constitute a miracle.

It's one of those incredulous questions you get from some people when they find out that you're an atheist: "do you believe in miracles?" An odd thing indeed, since you've just told them that you reject the existence of the being whose entire job it seems to be to perform miracles, but you get the question anyway. Do you ever stop and wonder what the word actually means?

Looking at a list of its common uses and its common correlates, you get at the cluster of associations generally meant by the term: divine, improbable, fortunate. Just the other day, I referred to my car starting after getting a jump by AAA as "a fucking miracle." In the spirit of that particular exclamation, I most certainly do believe in miracles, if all that is meant are extremely improbable, fortunate events. That my car started was extremely fortunate and (at the time, seemingly) improbable, so in this common colloquial sense, the concept of the miracle is perfectly compatible with my atheism and such things are certainly true.

But when you start talking about the more formal component of miracles, that involving supernatural or divine intervention, certain issues of clarity and plausibility immediately make themselves apparent. Not all divine actions are referred to as miracles - for example, Christians don't normally construe God's commands to his angels as "miracles" in the same way they construe the parthenogenesis of the Messiah as "miracles" - and many supposed miracles contain no particularly beneficial component, such as the transmutation of wine into blood or the ghostly apparition of Jesus's mother to usually small crowds of incredulous peasants. They do very little for humanity other than testify to the power of God to do absolutely pointless things for no reason other than to dazzle us. And these pointless "miracles" come by the thousands; the Vatican has hundreds of "documented" cases of such miracles, over and above the weekly miracles of transubstantiation and actual church attendance.

Presumably, though, God designed the universe knowing full well what all future events would entail; he not only creates but sustains the universe, and so there is one sense in which every event that occurs in the universe meets somebody's definition of a miracle. If the creation of the universe was a fortuitous act of divine intervention, and each instant in which the universe is sustained by God is a fortuitous act of divine intervention, then this "miracle" category seems a little pointless since everything qualifies as a miracle.

The turn is that miracles must be extraordinary, or at least out of the ordinary in some way. Whether or not God created or sustains the universe, the growth of my toenails is no miracle, even though it is fortuitous that I have something covering the fleshy parts of my feet, and it is, all else being equal, amazingly improbable that, of all the possible configurations of atoms in the universe, a few trillion of them just happened to end up organized such that my toenails would grow. Yet such is not a miracle, because it lacks that certain expressive component of miracles, not just that they are unlikely, but that they are otherwise impossible- that they violate the laws of physics, like the sun dancing in the sky at Fatima (an impossibility, since no force that acted on the sun in that way could do so without wreaking gravitational havoc on the Earth), or are physically possible but so remotely implausible that they would constitute an absurdity if merely hypothesized (like the bodily resurrection of Jesus).

This is where the (as-yet unconfirmed) new CERN data purporting to show neutrinos violating an established law of physics comes in. It seems that we have a genuine dilemma in the philosophy of science here, which is inextricably bound to a certain dilemma for David Hume's argument against miracles as advanced in his classic Of Miracles. Hume argued essentially along the following lines:

• The likelihood that something is true requires an inquiry into the totality of the circumstances- if you reach into an opaque jar and pull out a red ball, you don't know anything about how unlikely your particular pull was without knowing what else was in the jar.
• The totality of the circumstances in the universe is the sum total body of all empirical information.
• Every possible subject of empirical information is totally governed by the laws of physics, without exception.
• Miracles are principled violations of the laws of physics.
• But the likelihood that the laws of physics have ever been violated requires that we know the totality of the circumstances surrounding that event, which show that without exception the laws of physics are obeyed- that is to say, we have good reason to say that, for any given event, there has so far been a 100% chance that that event was governed by the laws of physics. If you looked into the jar and saw that there were nine blue balls and one red one before drawing a ball, you would know that someone else who drew a ball in your absence would be reporting a rare, but not impossible event if she reported drawing a red ball. But if she reported drawing a green ball, then there is virtually no chance that she is reporting accurately.

In short, no amount of testimony could ever command assent to a miracle because any testimony to a principled violation of the laws of physics is precisely the same thing as testimony to a green ball pulled from a bag of only red and blue balls: something either odd or improper is afoot.

Yet it seems that with the recent CERN shenanigans we have a green ball. We don't have merely the testimony of some wide-eyed true believers, we have data generated and testing using the very empirical methods that atheists and naturalists say is the best guide towards truth. So perhaps we do have a principled violation of the laws of physics, yet I do not think that most theists would refer to neutrinos exceeding the speed of light by sixty parts in one million as a "miracle."

To wrinkle this angle a little further, consider just how many times the laws of physics have been apparently defied. Newtonian laws of motion and gravitation utterly fail to capture the quantum bizarrity of the subatomic world. The cosmological constant was long a staple of mainstream physics, but not so much any more. These have appeared to be violations of what were thought to be laws of physics, yet I don't think that most theists would classify these things as "miracles."

Here's what we've learned so far: in order to qualify as a miracle, you must be:

• beneficial, though not all beneficial events are miracles.
• wildly improbable or physically impossible, though not all wildly improbable or apparently physically impossible events are miracles.
• divine in origin, though not all divine action counts as a miracle.

So perhaps miracles are all three: physically impossible or wildly implausible beneficial apparent acts of God. The mundane constituents of this definition ("impossible"/implausible) cannot alone make a miracle, since for example non-Newtonian quantum effects probably do not count as miracles, nor can we say for sure that future changes to what we think the laws of physics are is impossible, since we extrapolate what we think the laws are based on our observations and our observations could give us new data at any moment (we may, for example, observe neutrinos moving faster than light). But we know what a violation of the laws of physics would look like. Likewise with wildly implausible events, and likewise with beneficial events.

But these mundane properties in combination reveal only wildly implausible or seemingly impossible fortuitous events, which cannot count as miracles without the divine intervention aspect. How might one go about actually verifying that some act was one of divine intervention, though? I can't imagine, myself. God has never revealed the means of his action to us; he's never shown us his universe-making factory, never had us watch under a microscope as he transmogrifies a starchy wafer into a bloody Messiah. We simply have no method whatsoever for separating improbable, handy events that were caused by God from those that weren't.

This is why the CERN shenigans are not miracles: they are unbelievably weird, and they challenge quite a few established scientific precepts. But there's no indication that neutrinos move faster than light solely because of the intervention of a divine superintelligence, the absence of which would make the events observed impossible. We don't even know how we would go about looking for evidence to that effect, we have merely our intuitions that God is more in the business of healing the sick and zapping the gays than he is in the business of making physics even more esoteric just to piss off science students.

So do I believe in miracles? No. I don't even know what it would be like to start looking for evidence of a miracle. How could I assent, even provisionally, to the mere possibility that a miracle occurred when there are no good ways of knowing what would identify one thing as a miracle and another as merely an improbable but fortuitous chance event.