At my Roman Catholic boarding school, it was a requirement to get down on one’s knees at bedtime and pray for miracles. There was a good reason for this injunction. Every pupil had been repeatedly told that firm evidence of miracles was the only way in which the school’s patron, the Blessed Michael Garicoïts, could be raised from mere Blessedness into full-blown Sainthood. Three miraculous happenings were required before the Pope could confer such spiritual promotion. The Blessed Michael had so far only managed two such fundamental violations of the natural law. (As I remember, these involved the miraculous restoration to health of an elderly nun, and the transformation of a cauliflower into a bunch of grapes.)
Alongside these official calls for miracles, there were the numerous miraculous requests made by the school’s boarders. Some were purely selfish. Boys routinely prayed for God to intervene in the calculation of their examination marks or in the promotion of their favourite football team. But I also remember regularly going down on my knees to invoke God’s help in the reincarnation of a third-former’s mother and the furtherance of world peace.
I’d like to be able to say that my faith in miracles withered with time, but even at the age of 18 I was still asking my patron saint (Saint Lawrence, who was burned to death over a gridiron in 258 AD) if he would do his level best to bring on Maureen Dobson’s period. Thankfully, I was spared the strain of fatherhood at such a tender age.
I’d also like to be able to say that my current scepticism about miracles was based on some firm philosophical ground, perhaps upon John Stuart Mill’s powerful argument that “We cannot admit a proposition as a law of nature, and yet believe a fact (a cited miracle) in real contradiction to it. We must disbelieve the alleged fact, or believe that we are mistaken in admitting the supposed law.”
But it was not Mill – or such other philosophic sceptics as Auguste Comte, David Hume or Ludwig Feuerbach – who finally applied the coup de grace to my lingering belief that there might just be “more things in heaven and earth” than Horatio had dreamt of in his philosophy. It was none other than the American magician David Blaine.
Even before I’d encountered Blaine and his awesome feats of magic, I’d come to regard Jesus’s miracles as somewhat lacking – not only in credibility, but also in invention. Quite frankly, turning water into wine was poor stuff, as was catching a bumper load of fish on the Lake of Gennesaret. Neither could one be unduly impressed by the news that he had turned a group of demons into a herd of pigs.
Indeed, when compared to David Blaine’s achievements, it has to be said that Christ’s inventory of miracles is decidedly second-rate. I don’t wish to labour the point, but was Jesus able to hold his breath for 17 minutes, submit to electrocution while standing on top of a pole, or levitate a foot in the air in front of a crowd of New Yorkers? Blaine was buried alive for seven days; Jesus only managed three. Not only did Blaine triumphantly accomplish all these miraculous feats, but they also usually took place in front of passers-by in the streets, people who – in these irreligious times – were likely to be far more sceptical than the multitude of God-botherers who inhabited Jerusalem in 27 AD.
But although Blaine’s magic can startle and fool entire modern-day audiences, there are several websites devoted, with varying degrees of success, to unmasking his deceptions. As far as I am aware, there is no similar site devoted to unmasking the claims of the divine magician. This fact is no doubt indicative of the peculiar manner in which our world allows the truths of science to happily intermingle with the deceits of religion.
I recently asked an elderly and rather reclusive philosopher about this apparent paradox. He was reluctant to comment.
I pressed him. “If you had to choose”, I persisted, “which of Christ’s miracles would you select as the most amazing?”
He closed his eyes and thought for a several minutes. “Quite simple, really”, he said. “It was having as many as 12 friends after the age of 30.”
This piece is from the New Humanist spring 2023 edition. Subscribe here.
