I and a friend were joking about some problem at work and she said, “My husband has a sign that says, ‘Trust God. Everyone else must provide data.'” But then it struck me: even God provides data.
God didn’t have to part the Sea of Reeds to evacuate the Israelites from Egypt: He could have teleported them out – He had the technology and the budget. And He didn’t have to make it showy: He could have sent Jesus to walk them quietly across the surface of the Sea of Reeds.
But He didn’t do that. He parted the waters, and He did so in the most showy way, with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire at night to mark His presence – so that the faithful would be talking about it thirty-five hundred years later.
Similarly, Jesus didn’t just do miracles quietly: He raised Lazarus from the dead publicly so we would have confidence in Him when He later came back from the dead, and He came back from the dead Himself to give us confidence that He could do the same from us at the Second Coming. In fact, He showily Ascended into Heaven in part as a way to let us know He’s coming back.
There’s a big trend in philosophy that says that there is no evidence in favor of religious statements, and since there is no evidence, those statements don’t mean anything. But that isn’t true at all – that’s nonsense following David Hume’s circular logic in “On Miracles“. If you’re not familiar with that, Hume essentially says that one shouldn’t believe in miracles, because if someone testifies that they’ve seen a miracle, it’s always more likely that they’re mistaken or lying. But that itself increases the incidence of false miracles … thus increasing our confidence that there are no miracles, which is where we started.
Much of modern probability theory is based on Bayes’ Theorem, which itself was an attempted refutation of Hume’s argument. Now we know the situation is somewhat worse: if you think an event is sufficiently improbable compared to the alternatives, then not only will no amount of evidence convince you otherwise, it can actually make you more convinced of your original position … whether it was true or not.
Now, the actual problem going on isn’t logical at all: it’s emotional. People of a disbelieving bent don’t want to simply say “I simply don’t believe in that”; they want to create some structure around it which says, “No-one should believe in that.” Which is how you go from saying something like “I don’t find the evidence of miracles in the Bible to be credible” to “there is no evidence of miracles in the Bibles” to “there can be no evidence of miracles” to “statements about miracles aren’t meaningful.”
But all that’s nonsense. The correct thing to say is something like, “I’m sorry, I just don’t believe in your classical-era reinterpretation of a Bronze Age god. There are too many people believing in too many things, and most of them believe the things that their parents or the people in their region believe, and even if I did, the stories told about this Jesus fellow seem too similar to other religious figures of the era.” And you know what? That’s okay if that’s your stance. It’s a logical stance. I don’t agree with you, but like many Christian thinkers, I don’t think God is going to be particularly mad at you if you sincerely, based on your best judgment, don’t find the stories that you’ve been told about Him to be credible.
But He did want you to believe, and He did want his believers to understand what He was capable of, so He performed a lot of miracles to get our attention. You don’t have to believe that they all happened exactly the way they were recounted in the Hebrew Scriptures or the early Christian Gospels to get the point – any amount of miracles performed by God is enough to show that He is operating in the world. And the same thing is true for all of us: if we want to convince someone of something, we should show the data.
Trust God. But even He provides data, because He knows we need it to believe.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Um … Westminster Abbey, I think?
