Belief in Miracles is Irrational

No rational person can believe in miracles, to put it simply.

A miracle is by definition a given act or revelation of a supernatural being that defies and denies the natural order and the cosmological laws.

Miracles, ergo, mock nature and disregard reality. The belief in them, quintessentially, tears at the fabric of intelligence.

Thomas Paine greatly understood and boldly states in his 1793 work, “Age of Reason: Part I,” that something revealed to one individual is a “revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.”

In the paragraph following, Paine adds, “[A]nd though he [the individual to which the revelation was revealed] may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.”

One must notice that lying is a part of the human condition; all human beings at one point or another become economic with the truth and commit, thusly, their fair share of perjury.

With this fact, how can one rationally side on the abrogation of nature’s laws in the light thereof of human nature itself?

One simply cannot.

Paine illustrates, “When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so.”

Another example, Paine uses, “When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.”

To consider Christianity, a religion with its unmitigated doctrine entirely based on the notion that the miracles of Jesus Christ denoted in the Gospels are nonetheless true; thusly, proving that Christ was the son of God and worthy of worship. A textual problem arises, since everyone recognizes the Gospels were penned no less than a generation after Christ’s supposed crucifixion.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author, explains that “The truth is even if we had multiple contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of the miracles of Jesus it still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.”

One might ask, Why not?

Harris continues, “Well, the problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common even in the 21st-century.” He tells further about hundreds of Western educated men and women who think “their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The powers ascribed to these gurus are every bit as outlandish as those ascribed to Jesus.”

The foundational Christian claim that miracles of the sort, as by the present Hindu swami Satya Sai Baba, Harris explains, “become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence.”

With at least a million eyewitnesses to certain miracles of Sai Baba, this man still does not, as Harris states, “even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel.”

Man’s two countering dispositions, as a creature, are to question and to accept. These two temperaments led man to battle himself socially and personally. However, only through questioning, not by accepting, did he come to a better understanding of his place in nature.

He began to simply understand. He began to place miracles in the same drawer as commonplace parlor tricks.


The paragraph before “To consider Christianity...” did not appear in the column published in The Parthenon, due to my attempt to be under 600 words this week. I like the paragraph because it hits on another religion. I dig this column.