Why Really Convincing Miracles Are a Problem For Theism

Turns out, it might be better for God to leave a little mystery

Pictured: God tuning out the prayers of children sick with cancer so he can focus on the much more important task of finally liquefying the blood orb

Yesterday, I saw a Catholic friar claim that God had miraculously turned the desiccated blood of a third-century martyr back into liquid form during a mass in Naples. I don’t know anything about the chemical composition of ancient blood or what sort of conditions would be required to re-liquefy it, so it wasn’t clear to me how miraculous the whole thing actually was. But it did get me thinking about miracle claims in general, and whether they could provide a reliable grounds for accepting that theism is true. Many theists seem to think that some miracle claims are so well-evidenced and otherwise inexplicable that they constitute something like a proof for theism, or at least are so compelling that a neutral, rational observer has no choice but to accept theism as the most plausible explanation. There are already plenty of atheistic arguments against the idea that any miracle claim could reach this level of evidential power, but I want to take a different approach here and give an internal critique, aiming to show that rationally compelling miracles might cause more problems for theism than they solve. To help explain why, I’m going to frame things in terms of analagous thought experiment, which I’ll call Bugsy’s Rigged Casino:

Bugsy’s Rigged Casino: The famous gangster Bugsy owns a popular casino that claims to be completely fair. However, police suspect that Bugsy is actually manipulating the results of every single game, such that no hands are dealt randomly, all dice are loaded, and every jackpot is planned in advance. So far, Bugsy has been able to avoid arrest because he meticulously covers his tracks; he makes sure to keep wins and losses roughly pegged to where they would be in a fair casino, and he even makes sure to consistently allow big wins that seem to run counter to his interests while also making sure friends and family receive no obvious advantage. Every once in a while, there will be a little inconsistency that piques the detectives’ interest - almost like it’s a hint that’s meant to keep them searching - even though nothing ever rises to the level of conclusive. But just when the police are beginning to think their suspicions are unfounded, there comes a day where every patron in one section of the casino gets extraordinarily, consistently unlucky in a way that should be mathematically impossible. Every slot machine just misses the jackpot, every throw of the dice lands on ones, and there isn’t even so much as a pair in any dealt hand. Baffled, police go looking for an explanation and realize it happens to be Bugsy’s birthday.

Intuitively, I think most people would be happy for the police - after all, they just got the big break they were looking for, right? But you can imagine thing souring once the lead detective heads to break the news to his unusually philosophical police chief. After giving his summary of the situation, their conversation might go something like this:

Chief: Okay… so you’re sure Bugsy did this?

Detective: Absolutely - he intervened in such a way that it’s not even remotely plausible to blame random chance. Only Bugsy rigging the casino could properly explain what happened.

C: But why would Bugsy do that? Didn’t you just tell me he’s spent the last few years working to meticulously obscure his control of the casino? Your theory last week was that he intentionally lost millions of dollars on a jackpot just so no one would know he was behind the payouts.

D: Oh yeah, most of the time he’s very careful to make sure his control stays a secret. We suspect he leaves little clues every once in a while, but they’re the sort of thing you could always ignore unless you were really looking for them. Otherwise, he works hard to make sure there’s an appearance of neutrality. Except on his birthday, I guess. Then he makes it obvious.

C: But if he makes it obvious once a year on his birthday, why would he hide it the rest of the year?

D: Well, that’s easy to answer - if the casino patrons were extraordinarily unlucky every day, then people would know he was rigging the games! He doesn’t want that to be common knowledge. He wants there to be at least some mystery involved.

C: That makes no sense. All it takes to conclusively demonstrate that Bugsy is rigging the casino would be one single instance of obviously intentional meddling being directly connected to him. Once you have that, all the other obfuscation would be pointless. I mean, everyone knows the casino is rigged now, right?

D: No, not everyone knows. There are a lot of people who weren’t in that area of the casino, or didn’t even visit that day. Only the few patrons who were in the ultra-unlucky section are aware of what happened, and plenty of other patrons haven’t heard their reports about it, or else don’t believe them. That means Bugsy’s control of the casino is still pretty much hidden.

C: So you’re telling me Bugsy doesn’t want his control of the casino to be obvious, but he sometimes provides irrefutable evidence of that control to random groups of people and just counts on them being unable to convince others? Because otherwise his meticulous efforts to prevent those other people from having that exact sort of certainty would be thwarted?

D: Yeah, pretty much. It’s not always clear why Bugsy wants some people to be aware that he’s rigging the games, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s still obvious that he is rigging them, based on what we saw on his birthday. We can work out the details later.

C: But it can’t be obvious, because if it was actually obvious, it would thwart Bugsy’s established desire to keep his control of the casino from being immediately apparent. The theory that Bugsy is rigging the outcomes in general only makes sense if you assume that he’s desiring to keep that rigging secret. Otherwise, it just wouldn’t explain the data. But if you then say that Bugsy occasionally intervenes in ways that make it impossible for rational thinkers to deny his meddling, then that entails he doesn’t have a desire to keep his meddling hidden, and that undercuts your ability to believe that he was ever meddling at all.

D: Hmm, I’m not understanding what you mean. Maybe rephrase things a bit?

C: Sure, think about it this way: Either Bugsy wants his control of the casino to be hidden, or he doesn’t. If he does want it to be hidden, then he wouldn’t rig games so openly in a way that would be immediately linked back to him. So that means he can’t possibly be the one behind this particular day being so ultra-unlucky, and we should look for some alternate explanation. But if he doesn’t want his control to be hidden, then he can’t be the one responsible for the games that appear to be fair, because him meddling in those games would only make sense on the (now rejected) assumption that he was intentionally obscuring his role while doing so. And presumably, our original reason for thinking he might explain the ultra-unlucky day is that we thought he was behind all the outcome of all those other games on all those other days as well; if you decide the casino has actually been fair this whole time, then why is Bugsy even a suspect in the first place? It just seems like either way, he just isn’t a good candidate for explaining what happened.

D: I think I understand what you’re saying. It’s true that, if Bugsy really doesn’t want his influence to be common knowledge, he wouldn’t have made everything ultra-unlucky in such an obvious way. And you’re also right that, if he doesn’t care about making his influence known, then he wouldn’t be rigging the games to appear fair, and that means the best explanation is just that they are fair. But even if he hasn’t been rigging the games normally, it sure seems like the ultra-unlucky day was rigged by someone, and Bugsy is just generally a good candidate because he runs the casino and it was his birthday. So this ultra-unlucky day is still good evidence he’s rigged things at least once!

C: I’m not so sure, detective. After all, you’ve reported multiple instances where the casino paid out millions of dollars in jackpots, right? That made sense when you assumed that Bugsy was trying to keep from blowing his cover, but if he doesn’t care about revealing his control of the casino, then presumably he would never want to pay out anything! If there’s one thing we know about the famous gangster Bugsy, it’s that he’s supposed to hate losing money. So if he has no qualms about openly meddling, and some open meddling would be the perfect way to avoid an outcome he despises, then we would expect him to be meddling all the time. But he doesn’t - he just lets people win, over and over again. So either we’re wrong about Bugsy’s motivations completely, or we need to accept that he has an intense bias towards not intervening that overrides his acknowledged desire to not lose money. But both of these conclusions undercut the explanatory power of your theory entirely. Poor work all around, detective.

And so on. Hopefully, the central point of this dialogue is clear: Bugsy is something like God, the ultra-unlucky day is something like a supposedly rationally compelling miracle, and the jackpots are something like human and natural evil. (Here, Bugsy’s “miracles” are bad for the patrons, whereas of course God’s would be good, but that divergence shouldn’t matter for the point being made). Rather than going through the exchange line-by-line and drawing out the analogical target of every little detail, I’ll just quickly recapitulate the two basic points that it was meant to illustrate.

The first point to make is that we should see an obvious, intuitive conflict between the idea that God has overriding reasons to keep his providential control of the world’s events obscure (or at least non-obvious), and the idea that God occasionally provides seemingly random groups of people with rationally compelling evidence of exactly the thing he wants to hide. I think most people would recognize this right away in the case of Bugsy and the rigged casino; if a particular criminal was known for meticulously covering up the evidence of his crimes, you’d be immediately skeptical if the police said he was caught because he delivered a personalized confession to a bunch of random strangers. So if theists want to rely on appeals to rationally compelling miracles, we should expect them to have an explanation that resolves this tension before we take their claims seriously.

The second point to make is that there aren’t really any good ways to resolve this tension. If you’re confident that God has overriding justification for remaining hidden, then you’re forced to accept that there’s some high bound on just how compelling a miracle could ever be. God couldn’t come out one day and write YHWH in the sky with giant fiery letters, or announce that Muhammad was the final prophet in a booming voice that every human being on the planet could hear at once. If God did something like that, then he obviously wouldn’t remain hidden, and the goods theists point to that justify hiddenness would be lost. Since most theists accept at least some kind of hiddenness, this concern should undercut most theists’ ability to say that rationally compelling miracles are even a priori possible. At best, they can say that miracle claims have some evidential weight in a cumulative case for theism. But this just pushes the problem back a step; that cumulative case can never be rationally compelling, for the same reasons the individual miracle claims couldn’t be.

On the other hand, if a theist is comfortable tossing out divine hiddenness and saying some miracles really are rationally compelling, then the fact that the world so often seems to be unguided becomes completely inexplicable. When we assumed that Bugsy was trying to keep his meddling a secret, all the jackpots he was letting go made sense; losing that money was worth it, if it meant the police were thrown off his trail. But if we say it’s no problem for him when certain acts make his meddling obvious, then his motivational set becomes incompatible with the idea that he’s rigging the games to look neutral. He simply has no reason to, so the best assumption is that he isn’t. The same is true for God and human or natural evil: If God doesn’t mind revealing his providence, then we have no reason to believe he has any control at all over the events of this world, because events that appear legitimately unordered being actually providentially arranged is only plausible under the assumption that the arranger wants their arrangement to be kept hidden. And the fact that he isn’t plausibly taken to be an explanation for worldly events in general obviously undercuts any reason for thinking he’s a proper explanation for any specific miracle claim.

But it’s even worse than that for the theist, because there are instances where God refuses to intervene even when his indisputable preferences apart from hiddenness entail that he should. It’s part of what it means for God to be God that he, for example, loves his creation. And there are situations where God could easily intervene in a miraculous way to spare humans or non-humans from extreme suffering and pain, but chooses not to. None of the traditional explanations for this puzzling fact are friendly to the idea that rationally compelling miracles sometimes occur. Obviously, the theist can’t rely on hiddenness, because the desire to remain hidden would necessarily rule out announcing his existence in ways that were rationally compelling. But if you believe that God doesn’t care about hiddenness, and that he does sometimes intervene, then the desires or goals that motivate God to intervene in some instances but not others are totally incomprehensible. And if you take that radically skeptical view of God’s motivational set, it makes you unable to properly account for rationally compelling miracles in the first place; if no one can figure out why God does or doesn’t do things in general, then we have no grounds for evaluating the probability of him performing a rationally compelling miracle at all.

In short: Either God has a desire to remain at least partially hidden, in which case the existence of rationally compelling miracles is immediately ruled out, or else he doesn’t, in which case 1) God’s refusal to intervene in the world more consistently becomes completely inexplicable, which undercuts our ability to determine when and where he would plausibly intervene, or else 2) we have no reason to believe God ever intervenes in the world at all, which makes him a correspondingly worse explanation for any particular event that does take place. Either way, an actually rationally compelling miracle would be a serious problem for the idea that God exists. Far from convincing us that theism was true, it would go a long way towards showing us that it was incoherent.