Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science. Story 1: The Man Who Could Work Miracles

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

 

The stories in this book are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air. I will post an essay about each story in this blog. All of his fiction books can be found on his author website, where the fiction books are at the bottom.

The first story, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, is also a short story by H. G. Wells. And as in the Wells story, the main character ends up destroying the world—almost. At the last minute, in both stories, the main character rejects his miracle-working ability. No human being is good or smart enough to have this ability.

Rice’s twist on this situation is that the main character, Irwin, only has the ability to work miracles—and then only one at a time—when the odometer on his old car lines up with the same number at least five times. Then, his miracles can only alter the laws of probability, no other natural laws. When Irwin sent the arrogant co-worker to Hell, it was something that was going to eventually happen anyway. When Irwin got incredibly rich from lotteries and investments, it was something that would have happened to someone anyway. Irwin’s patient girlfriend found out where his powers came from, and Irwin used his ability to make her forget what she had learned about him—but he did not expect this would cause her to have a stroke and become brain-dead. But she would have eventually had a stroke anyway, right? But this was enough to make him revoke his ability just seconds before his old car would have collided with a truck in the opposite lane.

When the protagonist revokes his ability in Wells’s novel, it saves the world. In Rice’s novel, it saves only the people Irwin knows. He realizes all he needs is a job and his devoted girlfriend.

Human intelligence evolved only to deal with local, immediate circumstances, and then only imperfectly. It did not evolve to give humans—any humans—the ability to understand the world and control it. Sometimes I wonder if God could allow some of us to do just a few little miracles to make life easier, but I then realize that this is a slippery slope that would lead to everybody doing everything by miracle. Or maybe not. God could set limits and know everyone’s motivations, couldn’t He? Just sayin.’

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.

It's a Miracle!

I walked into a dark restroom and the lights suddenly came on. It must have been a miracle! Anyplace else and I would have assumed it was a motion detector. But I was in no ordinary place. I was at the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague. This shrine is an example of how convoluted religious reasoning can become. I have to start at the beginning.

In the late middle ages, there was a wooden statue of a baby boy with royal garments, a crown, and holding a sceptre and globe of the world. To my knowledge, Jesus never did this, at least when he was a child. But this statue was reputed to have special powers if you made offerings to it. After various adventures, the statue ended up in Prague (now in the Czech Republic). Meanwhile, there was a Catholic priest from Prague, Oklahoma who somehow ended up with a replica (souvenir copy) of the original statue. He apparently thought that there was some significance in his town in Oklahoma having the same name as the European city, and before you knew it, the replica statue was reputed to have special powers if you made offerings to it.

So here is the line of causation that comes into play if you visit this Oklahoma shrine. 1. Stick some money in a hole at the shrine. 2. The souvenir copy statue projects spiritual energy across the Atlantic to the European statue. 3. The European statue has some influence on the Virgin Mary. 4. The Virgin Mary is obligated to tell her Son to answer your prayer. 5. Jesus is more likely to answer your prayer this way than if you just asked him directly.

Wow. All this was happening less than twenty miles from where I was born, and I knew nothing about it until I was 52.

I considered my options. Nobody was around except the woman in the office behind the gift shop. First, I considered telling her that I had walked all the way from California (on my knees? no; backward? no) just to venerate the statue. But it was obvious that I had not been outdoors that much. Second, I considered using my fake eastern European accent which I learned from Boris and Natasha and saying I was from the shrine of the original statue and wanted to inspect it. But I realized that I did not know the secret catatonic handshake (if I remember correctly, this is the Catholic version of the secret Masonic handshake that my Dad never taught me) and my imposture would be revealed. Third, I considered proposing a statistical study to determine whether offerings to the statue actually increased the chances of having a prayer answered, as in the Benson heart study. But I didn’t do any of these things. I just went home and wrote this.

A version of this essay will appear on my evolution web site.