I haven’t said much about the miracle talk here. I don’t think miracle claims rise to the level of sufficient plausibility to be worthy of serious investigation or discussion by most people. This doesn’t mean I think people shouldn’t investigate these claims, but they should be handled the same way we’d investigate claims about alien abductions, magic powers, and so on. It’s a niche topic that a handful of skeptics can dispense with. Generally speaking, people should approach these issues with their skepticism hat firmly affixed. Sure, any of these things could be real. But the approach I’ve seen people take on here is so laughably credulous I just shake my head in dismay.
To some, this may seem overconfident or dismissive. But a person is only dismissive if they never acted with due epistemic diligence in the first place. It’d be reasonable to call a person who has just heard about miracles dismissive if they wouldn’t consider them and had no antecedent reasons to be very skeptical. But we do have a capacity for inductive and abductive reasoning, and we can build up a stock of experience that can warrant skepticism about new and similar cases to those we’ve encountered previously.
General experience can also warrant skepticism within a particular domain of inquiry. Experienced doctors are in a good position to be skeptical of medical claims. Experienced physicists are in a good position to be skeptical of claims about perpetual motion machines. The same generalizes to claims that the ordinary course of events has been subverted: when one has knowledge of many similar claims and prior cases, and has seen these claims collapse under scrutiny, one becomes well-positioned to be skeptical on inductive and abductive grounds about the likelihood that some new case is the exception. So I want to say a little about why I think miracle claims are so implausible and why, as a result, I am not very interested in them.
I’ve always been fascinated by certain kinds of mysteries. Not murder mysteries. Not missing people. But rather the kind that would interest Fox Mulder. That “I want to believe” spirit animated me throughout my youth. I was fascinated by cryptids and ancient astronauts. Crystal skulls. Bigfoot. Alien abductions. The Mothman. Mysterious beings, entities, sightings, experiences. All of it. It was thrilling to look out at this mundane world and envision mysteries lurking deep in the woods, in the ocean’s abyss, in remote mountains and hidden glades. Maybe aliens once visited the earth and had contact with humanity. Maybe ghosts lurk in moldering crypts and quiet, abandoned places. Maybe eldritch entities loom outside our radar and telescopes, with malevolent intent. I read every book and article I could on these topics. I had a collection of little crystal skulls.
Had the internet been as much a fixture of our lives, I’d have been on forums and consuming podcasts and TikToks with unmitigated ferocity. But it was perhaps the isolation of the pre-internet and early internet days that kept me insulated from reality for so long in the first place. Either way, at the time, I was a believer.
I believed aliens had come to earth on numerous occasions and were among us now, possibly infiltrating the upper echelons of power. I believed our world had potentially been engineered and human civilization steered by the hand of extraterrestrials. I believed in astrology. Witchcraft. Numerology. Magic. Ghosts. Zombies. Aliens. Ancient, lost civilizations. Mysterious monsters. Telepathy. Astral projection. If it was paranormal, or dubious, or the kind of thing you’d find in a new age store, I was into it.
Then I encountered James Randi. I was speaking with a person who was into numerology and the paranormal. They told me a “psychic investigator” was coming to give a talk. I went to the talk expecting to see a person who solved crimes or found missing people using psychic powers. I was wrong. What I encountered was a person who investigated psychics themselves. Randi was a magician with a penchant for debunking claims of the paranormal. I won’t digress to give his whole backstory, since you can find far better accounts elsewhere. The tl;dr version is this: Randi was an expert at exposing charlatans and bullshitters. His presentation shook me to my foundations and I began rethinking everything. Yet it was the accumulation from subsequent interactions, as well as reading his books and the work of other skeptics who debunked claims of the paranormal that eventually led me to flip from a credulous conspiracy theorist into a skeptic.
Over that span of time, I obsessively read or listened to countless instances of paranormal or supernatural claims: psychics, ghosts, aliens, miracles. In many of these cases, a superficial summary of the situation would often appear compelling, prompting one to wonder: how could this possibly be explained in mundane terms? Again and again, they’d be debunked. I’d hear about a case. I’d feel that thrill of excitement:
Wow! Incredible! There’s no way anyone could explain that!
And then they simply would be explained. Claims about alleged reports or verified data weren’t actually that credible. Witnesses couldn’t be located. It was a hoax and we caught the perpetrator. Clever sleuthing uncovered the legerdemain at work behind the scenes. Over. And over. And over. Case after case. Story after story.
And eventually the lesson sunk in. Randi would frequently point out how easy it is to fool ourselves, to overlook something, to not notice what’s going on behind the scenes.
Magicians often have a special insight into how easy people are to fool. I once stood behind Randi while he was performing sleight of hand, and got to see what he was really doing. From that vantage, I was also able to see the looks of bewildered delight on the faces of people as he performed what to them looked like magic, but I could see what was actually going on. Magicians become masters of misdirection, of exploiting expectation, attention, gaze, belief, confusion, awe, and naivety, blending it all into a cocktail of confusion. They come to see how readily we misremember. How readily we distort the past, or warp our perception of ongoing events in a vain effort to make sense of them. They know how this can happen quickly, in real time, in front of a crowd. They know how gullible we are. How credulous.
And they know this scales up and generalizes and extends to all aspects of our lives. People misremember events, blending reality with narrative coherence and distortions that lend gravity to an account, conveniently inclined to impress others. The fish was smaller than we recall. Our survival was less extraordinary than we make it out to be. The coincidence of a friend calling just when we thought of them is far less coincidental because we forgot it was our birthday or we’d commented on a social media post.
Anthropologists could readily describe the many fascinating paranormal accounts from around the world: ghosts, goblins, duende, zombies, witchcraft, curses, sorcery, spirits. The people who provide these reports are most likely sincere. And yet none of these things exist. That people are nevertheless sincere, often in droves, is testament to how malleable the human mind is, and how vulnerable we are to superstition.
Did everyone here on Substack forget this? Or did they never learn the same lessons I did? To truly establish the existence of miracles, or Bigfoot, or telepathy, we need more than testimony, or blurry photos, or reports from doctors. Doctors are trained to be doctors. They are not trained to avoid being duped, or fooled, or deluded. People would often present cases of scientists and other (hopefully) credible and capable thinkers reporting instances of people with paranormal or inexplicable powers, only for Randi to offer an incredibly simple explanation. My recollection of some of these stories is from more than twenty years ago, but I’ll try to describe a specific instance. Randi received a call from physicists who encountered a person who seemed to have telekinetic powers. They could raise and lower a matchbox placed on the back of their hand. No strings. No air blowing. No tape, or props, or sticky substances. No clear indication of what the trick was.
Randi asked them to check if the person had pinched a bit of skin and closed the matchbox on it, enabling them to raise and lower the matchbox by tensing their hand. They checked. They hung up the phone. No reports of wondrous telekinesis were ever forthcoming. That, at least, is roughly the story I recall. It didn’t occur to the physicists that the person they were dealing with was a bullshitter using a simple method to fool them.
I’m a psychologist. And I know a bit about how people can fool themselves and others. I am not impressed with reports from doctors or scientists. I’ve seen no good reason to believe they typically have the skeptical faculties, training, or general competence to appropriately assess these cases. At least most of the time. And witness testimony is reliably unreliable. That people could put so much stock in such evidence is a testament to their own poorly calibrated critical faculties. But I don’t hold people at fault for this all that much. The kind of experiences I’ve had are not ones you can simply read about or pick up overnight. They’re the result of repeated exposure over an extended period of time. No book, algorithm, or procedure can compensate for the wisdom of experience, or repeated subversion of one’s expectations not one or even a dozen but hundreds of times. There’s nothing like a bit of conditioning to really come to internalize a well-calibrated epistemic foundation.
So I won’t be spending much time on Zeitoun or Fatima. I’m not interested. Sure, they’re worthy of investigation. But they’re worthy of investigation for the same reason any other fraud or delusion is worthy of investigation; we are entirely within our rights to presume in advance, with a very high level of confidence, that these cases are rubbish, and I predict that were I somehow compelled to investigate, I’d find these cases to be a mess of inconsistencies and questionable evidence, while the basis for confidence in them would be grounded in credulity and dubious inference. I’ve seen it many times before, and I predict these cases are no different. Of course that doesn’t foreclose the possibility that these could be the real deal. Of course I don’t think nobody should bother to investigate, seriously or thoroughly. But if you’d read what I’ve read: case after case after case of alleged miracles or alien abductions or ghost encounters or people with psychic powers gets bulldozed by people with an aptitude for skeptical inquiry, you’d feel the same way I do: utterly dismissive.
I take instances of Catholic miracles to be far less likely than an alien abduction conspiracy or a moon landing hoax or any manner of other, similar events. Hoaxes and conspiracies require implausible levels of coordination or planning. And there’s no particularly good reason to think aliens couldn’t come here, nor is their existence at odds with my understanding of what the world is like. But miracles are inconsistent with my understanding of how things are. Does this mean they couldn’t happen? No; it just means that conditional on my current beliefs, miracles are much less likely than these other events occurring. So much less likely that I’d need considerably more evidence than sketchy accounts of miracles to be convinced they’ve occurred. And since I think we are entitled to be dismissive, and even contemptuous towards the serious and sustained insistence that the moon landing was somehow faked (it wasn’t), I see little reason to take cases of Marian apparitions appearing any more seriously.
Really good read. I especially liked your point at the beginning - "I don’t think miracle claims rise to the level of sufficient plausibility to be worthy of serious investigation or discussion by most people."
I've been thinking about that in connection with the Schmid conversion recently. There's an argument that Christians make which looks something like: "if we can convert an atheist/agnostic who has spent years investigating the truth of our religion, that's a sign of how strong our arguments are."
But I think it runs the other way: somebody who spends years investigating the truth of a religion probably already finds the religion plausible enough to justify the investigation. And it's by no means self-evident that a serious philosopher or thinker would have to regard any religion as plausible enough to warrant that degree of effort; or even that a philosopher would have to regard religion as an object of philosophy at all, alongside the primary objects like knowledge or ethics.
Of course, that risks entering into a kind of closed circle where you dismiss religion on insufficient grounds, and then don't consider the evidence when it's presented. But I think you're right in general that a lack of interest can be the result of prior experience or understanding, not merely of prejudice - with the question just being the strength or validity of that prior experience and understanding.
As many people pointed out, you need some specific skills to evaluate miracle claims and come up with a specific, tailored debunking story, or to evaluate them and decide they are credible. I'm not in the habit of dunking on analytic philosophers, but I'm not confident that their skills are the best fit for such a task. So when Joe Schmid said he was convinced by miracle claims my reaction was not "oh, so they might be legit, if a smart guy like Joe thinks they are legit". I remember one of your livestreams, when someone called you and asked you whether you can look into some eucharistic miracle. In retrospective, that was very funny.