Miracles are rare except when they aren't

-- how science actually makes miracle claims unlikely

In #unbelievable #religion

In this week's Unbelievable Podcast the topic was miracles. I've written about miracles a number of times, but there always seems to something new to say. In this episode, the skeptic is Michael Shermer whose approach by and large I don't like. I find he isn't very direct, has long explanations and stories -- which is inefficient in this format -- and many of his responses are not actually relevant.

The theists presented two main specific miracle claims:

  1. Bruce Van Natta who had a truck fall on him, destroying much of his intestine, but shortly after prayer his intestine miraculously regrew.
  2. Chris Gunderson who was born with an incurable disorder called Chronic Pseudo Obstruction Syndrome, which was cured by prayer

and then they referred to the Heidi Baker ministries work in Mozambique healing many. You can read about it in the journal article here.

Despite my attempts, I can't find medical journal descriptions of the two cases for Van Natta and Gunderson. However, I did find the original study on the work of Heidi Baker, but I had already responded to that source and those claims elsewhere. TLDR -- the study has serious problems and is unconvincing.

Here's another way to put it. What would we expect in a universe that is complex, that we understand reasonably well but with significant gaps in our understanding, but that we also tend to understand better over time? What would we expect if there really is an agent that answers some requests, and has the ability to do truly miraculous things?

It's the same sort of question one asks about alien abductions. What would we expect in a universe where the aliens aren't here, and our own understanding and tech increases in time, vs if the aliens are here from time to time?

In both of these cases, we'd expect the situation without external agencies to be a smattering of weird cases that remain unexplained currently, but with no obvious pattern to them. We'd also expect that we'd get fewer of these cases (normalizing to population number and rate of information spread) over time. We'd expect geographical areas that have less access to our best understanding and technology to have more of these cases. We'd expect that the more skeptical we look at the claims, the more closely we look at the evidence, that the evidence for the claims tends to evaporate. It is no coincidence that UFO claims have gone down as we've put a camera in everyone's pocket. This is the hallmark of a false claim. The same occurs with miracle claims -- they have every hallmark of a false claim. The smattering of currently unexplained miracle claims lack available evidence to inspect, show no real pattern, and are against a backdrop of claims that have been debunked. These miracle claims are also against a backdrop of nearly universal prayer across the population, with little to no effect. Finally, where I have been able to find the evidence, the actual strength of the evidence on the ground is profoundly weak. In all other cases, I have not been able to even find the evidence -- only the claims.

This backdrop of failed prayer and debunked miracle claims highlight the fact that miracle claims are likely to be false, lowering their prior probability. If prayer were a new claimed medical procedure, no one would take it seriously with such a false claim and negative result rate.

One of the guests, Craig Keener, stated that Heidi's Baker's miracles were happening regularly, yet none of the guests seemed willing to address why that might not be happening in a country with the technology able to discern false from true effects? The single study they quoted is riddled with problems, and you'd think they'd want to perform a more detailed study here. They claimed that miracles are hard to study, because miracles are rare events and can't be predicted ahead of time, but that seems a convenient excuse -- and not always the case, if Heidi Baker is to be believed.

Craig Keener also hinted that there was a pattern to the miracles, but didn't come out and say what he was strongly suggesting, that Christian miracles were the ones that were mostly happening. Any pattern that Keener might have been hinting at would be testable! It certainly would go a long way to supporting the veracity of miracle claims if you could specify a pattern.

I find myself still unconvinced by the few claims, with little pattern or evidence, but perhaps as our understanding grows we'll get more confirmed cases, as we would expect for a true effect. My bet is that these claims will continue to be in retreat just as the UFOs seem to have left us as our ability to detect them has increased.