How Science Helps Me Believe in Miracles

By Ben Molyneux

This is a response to another recent post on miracles, Modern Day Miracles, written by Peter Whittle.

I’m quite a cynical person. When I’m trying to kid myself, I might conclude that I’m a realist, but the reality is that cynicism is hard-wired into the way I view the world. So when it comes to the subject of miracles, my gut response is fairly unsurprising:

Miracles really just don’t happen.

The whole thing seems at least a little bit silly. We no longer live in an uneducated pre-modern world, where everything is governed by fairies and capricious gods. We don’t need miracle accounts to prove which religion is right, particularly as every religion seems to claim some sort of miraculous proof. Miracles just aren’t necessary to us any more, so we should just drop them and move our faith into the 21^st century.

So when I read Pete’s blog on miracles, I found myself instinctively nodding along. Let’s just forget about demanding the supernatural and be prepared to find the miraculous in living out the command to love one’s neighbor.

And yet… I can’t quite give up on it all. I still can’t work out how God interacts in the world, but something in me can’t quite buy the idea that he doesn’t. A world without a God who steps in to do something from time to time just seems so hopeless. Even Pete, in his blog, acknowledges, “there are many things that happen that science can not adequately explain.”

This should leave me in a very a convoluted position. I’m naturally suspicious of any reports of supernatural events and I’m likely to reject them, whilst at the same time believing that they could be possible and desperately wanting at least some of them to be true. It gets even more complicated on a practical level; what do you do if someone asks you to pray for them? It’s a problem I used to struggle a lot with. Responding, “I can if you want, but I don’t really know if anything will happen or not, so it might be better to ask someone with a stronger faith” only leads to some very British awkwardness, but when I agreed I always felt like a fraud and a hypocrite.

Pete’s comment, in response to my question about this, is perhaps more extreme than I am, but gets at the same idea: “I struggle a lot with the concept of 'supernatural miracles', I don't want to deny them, but I find it impossible to affirm them either.” The practical, every-day implications of this were, for a long time, very confusing and very difficult. Then something strange happened.

Science saved my belief in miracles.

It’s a bit of an odd one, I admit. Traditionally, the opposite has tended to be true. As we discover more about the power of the human brain, particularly placebo effect and psychosomatics, there seems to be more and more basis to discredit supernatural origins for miraculous healings. But I wonder if we aren’t looking at this the wrong way round. After all, these explanations prove one thing: Science says praying for people actually works. It might not always work the way we expect, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. How many people cured of life-threatening illnesses will be demanding their illness back if they suddenly prove it was a placebo effect that healed them?

This means that I can have a confident, rational basis for maintaining that miraculous healings can happen. My doubts about the mechanics of supernatural intervention don’t get to stop me acting, but at the same time I don’t have to reject all claims of the supernatural. There’s a helpful unknowability about it all; I can’t separate the supernatural healings from the naturalistic ones, meaning that I can maintain that both can and do occur. So I can absolutely believe that God intervenes miraculously, even if I have no idea how that works, whilst maintaining that not all the miracles have supernatural origins and acknowledging that Science can explain at least some miracles and will probably go on to explain many more. It doesn't stop me feeling deeply awkward and self-conscious about the whole thing, of course, but I don't think any theology in the world would.

At the end of the day, I guess I agree with Pete’s original post – miracles are to be found when the people of God get up and do something. But that “doing something” should include praying for the miraculous and expect it to come about – regardless of how exactly it does come about.