A World of Empathy, Part Three: Graham Greene and Miracles

To a fundamentalist, a miracle is something that must violate the patterns of nature. Therefore if medicine heals a sick person, they must deny that it was the medicine; they must believe that God did it in some spiritual way, if only that God “guided the hands of the doctor” as if the doctor had become some kind of automaton who watched his hands being moved by a mysterious force invocable by fundamentalists. Even mainstream Christians, such as Catholics, believe this: Jesus’ conception could not have been a sperm finding an egg, but had to be immaculate, that is, through some kind of miraculous creation of a sperm nucleus already inside of Mary’s ovum.

But to many religious people, there is no clear distinction between natural events and miracles. God works through natural laws (including evolution). To those of us who are skeptical, this means that the religious explanation might as well not even be there. But to some religious people, such as those of whom the novelist Graham Greene wrote, it might be us skeptics who are taking the wrong interpretation.

Here is a passage from The Power and the Glory, presenting this idea. The communist atheist captor told the priest, “I can’t think how a man like you can believe those things. The Indians, yes. Why, the first time they see an electric light, they think it’s a miracle.”

“And I dare say the first time you saw a man raised from the dead you might think so too,” [the priest said.] “It’s funny, isn’t it? Oh, it isn’t a case of miracles not happening—it’s just a case of people calling them something else. Can’t you see the doctors round the dead man? He isn’t breathing any more, his pulse has stopped, his heart’s not beating: he’s dead. Then somebody gives him back his life and they all—what’s the expression?—reserve their opinion. They won’t say it’s a miracle, because that’s a word they don’t like. Then it happens again and again perhaps—because God’s about on Earth—and they say: There aren’t miracles, it is simply that we have enlarged our conception of what life is. Now we know you can be alive without pulse, breath, heart-beats. And they invent a new word to describe that state of life, and they say that science has again disproved a miracle.”

Even if we succeed in showing that everything that happens is due only to physical causation, we should be careful not to dismiss them. To a person with religious sensitivities, such as a Christian agnostic, even ordinary events are “everyday miracles” for which we can feel deep gratitude.