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Why and how I believe in miracles

I don’t struggle with their plausibility. i do struggle with their consequences..

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I’ve been asked this question many times since leaving the faith tradition of my childhood, but I have yet to answer it in a way that feels honest and complete. This is partly because the question isn’t a straightforward one; it contains a host of questions within it: Do you believe that Jesus literally walked on water and turned water into wine and cured the sick and raised the dead? Do you believe that miracles happen now? Do you pray for them? Have you ever experienced one?

So my struggle with the Gospels’ cures, exorcisms, angelic visitations, and resurrections isn’t with their plausibility. It’s with their consequences. “The problem with miracles,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor in Bread of Angels , “is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of your own.”

In the Christian tradition, belief is more about trust than intellectual assent. So yes, I believe in miracles. Which is to say, I surrender in trust to a God who will stop at nothing to bring about our salvation. A God who is intimately close, present, and involved. A God who is in all things, interacting with all things, restoring all things in the name of love.

Debie Thomas

Debie Thomas is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories .

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C.S. Lewis on Miracles: Why They Are Possible and Significant

Why they are possible and significant.

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One is very often asked at present whether we could not have a Christianity stripped, or, as people who ask it say, “freed” from its miraculous elements, a Christianity with the miraculous elements suppressed. Now, it seems to me that precisely the one religion in the world, or, at least, the only one I know, with which you could not do that is Christianity. 1

No doubt Lewis considered miracles to be a crucial topic. I originally decided to delve into his writings on the subject several years ago when asked to speak at a conference that focused on the legacy of C.S. Lewis. As usual, I was not disappointed with the time and effort I spent to understand his thinking. There is a reason why all of his books remain in publication, and he is still one of the most popular Christian authors of the twentieth century.

On September 8, 1947, C.S. Lewis was featured on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “Oxford’s C.S. Lewis, His Heresy: Christianity.” The six-page article identified Lewis as “one of a growing band of heretics among modern intellectuals: an intellectual who believes in God… not a mild and vague belief, for he accepts ‘all the articles of the Christian faith.’” One of these “articles” was the belief in miracles. The emergence of public intellectuals such as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others was in clear contrast to many of his colleagues at Oxford, as well as intellectuals throughout Europe, who were securely convinced of a naturalistic worldview that ruled out the possibility of miracles. Lewis described this version of naturalism as “the doctrine that only Nature — the whole interlocked system — exists.” 2 He was able to insightfully critique naturalism because he had previously embraced a naturalistic worldview but later became convinced of the truth and beauty of a classical Christian worldview.

Before we delve deeper into Lewis’s approach to the possibility and significance of miracles, it is helpful to give a brief overview of how the Bible and classical Christianity approach the topic of miracles. The Scriptures reveal a God who is living and personal (Exod. 3:14). He is free to act in history to reveal, create, sustain, redeem, heal, judge, and so forth. Reality is not limited to physical realities, but also includes spiritual realities (Col. 1:16). The seen and the unseen worlds are both real and interactive (Gen. 1; Eph. 6:12). The creator God is unique in that He is both above and beyond the rest of creation (transcendent, Isa. 55:8–9; Eccl. 5:2), and He is also personally present to His creation (immanent, Ps. 104:29–30; Acts 17:27b–28). God actively created everything (Gen. 1:1), and through Him everything holds together (Col. 1:16– 17; Heb.1:3); therefore, we live in an orderly, consistent world which we can investigate with confidence. Because the God of classical Christian theism is transcendent, He is not restricted to act from within the patterns of nature that He established and upholds but is free to act in unusual ways to reveal, save, heal, and surprise (signs and wonders).

Philosophical Skepticism Concerning Miracles 3

In contrast to the supernatural view of reality, there are individuals, groups, and movements who embrace worldviews that challenge the rationality and historical witness to the miracles of the Bible using what we will refer to as a philosophical argument. For instance, many naturalists claim that miracle reports are necessarily false since the “Cosmos is all there is and all there ever will be.” 4 C.S. Lewis encountered many people who rejected the belief in miracles — the rejection being a common view in the academic circles of his day due to the impact of the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A good place to start when addressing any controversial question is by defining terms. Lewis defined a miracle as “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” 5 The most significant point about this definition is that it requires the existence of a power beyond nature that can decide to act within nature. This is important to emphasize, because many skeptics, in his day and ours, are not open to evidence but operate on the assumption of naturalism. Lewis writes, “Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence ‘according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry.’ But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are.” 6

Later he writes, “If Naturalism is true, then we do know in advance that miracles are impossible: nothing can come into Nature from the outside because there is nothing outside to come in, Nature being everything.” 7 This is simply a case of begging the question (assuming what one wants to prove). If naturalism is the “whole show,” then everything, even our reasoning process, can be explained from within the whole system of nature. But then it is difficult to see how our knowledge can be anything other than the result of natural processes. So why should we assume that naturalism is true? After all, we have good reasons to believe that our experience of reasoning, moral oughtness, and beauty point to transcendent realities. 8

Scientific Skepticism Concerning Miracles

Any day you may hear a man (and not necessarily a disbeliever in God) say of some alleged miracle, “No. Of course I don’t believe that. We know it is contrary to the laws of Nature. People could believe it in olden times because they didn’t know the laws of Nature. We know now that it is a scientific impossibility”. 9

Robert Funk, founder of the radical Jesus Seminar, is a good example of someone making the scientific argument.

The notion that God interferes with the order of nature . . . is no longer credible… Miracles… contradict the regularity of the order of the physical universe… God does not interfere with the laws of nature… The resurrection of Jesus did not involve the resuscitation of a corpse. Jesus did not rise from the dead, except perhaps in some metaphorical sense. 10

Experiential Skepticism Concerning Miracles

Debates about the possibility of miracles have sometimes led to considerations of probability. So the question of miracles is stated like this: In light of the constant experience of natural law, doesn’t it always make more sense to doubt the report that an exception to the laws of nature has taken place (i.e., a miracle) than to believe the report of miracle? I will refer to this an experiential argument against miracles. One name that is frequently associated with this type of argument is the eighteenth-century skeptical philosopher David Hume. Hume is a good example of a person making this type of argument against the probability of miracles because his views were considered conclusive by some in his own day and are still thought to be convincing by many contemporary skeptics, such as Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins. 12 Hume defined a miracle as a “violation of the laws of nature.” His argument could be summed up by the statement: since natural laws are firmly established on the basis of uniform human experience, it is always much more likely that there is some natural explanation for a supposed miracle than that an exception to the uniform natural laws has occurred. Lewis described Hume’s probability argument with clarity:

The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature’s course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by “firm and unalterable experience”. There is, in fact, “uniform experience” against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred. 13

Lewis writes that from Hume’s point of view, “historical statements about miracles are the most intrinsically improbable of all historical statements.”14 In Hume’s way of thinking, not only are miracles most improbable due to the uniformity of nature, but miracle reports are also unreliable because they are dependent on the testimony of witnesses who were ignorant and superstitious. For Hume, as was the case with many Enlightenment deists, personal experience was much more reliable than the testimony of prescientific people. Lewis and others have pointed out that Hume proceeds through his argument against the possibility of an exception to the regularities of nature (i.e., miracle) with the assumption that experience proves the “uniformity of nature.” But the answer to the question of whether we can know if a miracle has taken place should not be predetermined by an assumption of the uniformity of nature since this would also be a case of begging the question.

Concerning Hume’s questioning of the credibility of ancient witnesses to miraculous events, I would point to the earlier responses made to scientific arguments. I would also point out that perhaps Hume’s conclusions about the possibility of miracles were based on his own limited experience. Maybe miracles were occurring more frequently in Hume’s day than he was aware of, but they were happening outside his sphere of contact. In our own day, contemporary New Testament scholar Craig Keener has investigated thousands of eye-witness miracle accounts from all around the world and found many to be highly credible. He presents the results of his investigations in a two-volume work (1,172 pages) titled Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. He writes,

a priori modernist assumption that genuine miracles are impossible is a historically and culturally conditioned premise. This premise is not shared by all intelligent or critical thinkers, and notably not by many people in non-Western cultures. 15

Much more could be said in response to David Hume’s objections to miracles, but contemporary philosopher of science John Earman says it well in his book Hume’s Abject Failure:

It is not simply that Hume’s essay does not achieve its goals, but that his goals are ambiguous and confused. Most of Hume’s considerations are unoriginal, warmed over versions of arguments that are found in the writings of predecessors and contemporaries. And the parts of “Of Miracles” that set Hume apart do not stand up to scrutiny. Worse still, the essay reveals the weakness and the poverty of Hume’s own account of induction and probabilistic reasoning. And to cap it all off, the essay represents the kind of overreaching that gives philosophy a bad name. 16

Concerning the Grand Miracle

Lewis is in agreement with the apostle John, who wrote concerning Jesus, “the Word was God” (John1:1) and “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14 ESV). So questions concerning the possibility of miracles are related to even larger questions such as, What is God like? How does God interact with the world? Does God care about His creation? Having done the hard work of asking and answering the right preliminary questions, Lewis winsomely shines a light on the reality in which a creative, powerful, and loving God has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. This is unquestionably the Grand Miracle.

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son into the world that we might live. (1 John 4:9–10 NIV)

Bill Smith is the Director of C.S. Lewis Institute Atlanta. His desire is for others to grasp God’s perspective and experience God’s presence throughout all of life. Bill teaches and facilitates discussions in a variety of contexts including schools, churches, businesses, conference/retreat centers, coffeehouses, bookstores, and homes. His interest in the life and writings of C.S. Lewis has resulted in a book titled Conversations on the Question of God with C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud . Bill holds a B.S. in Biblical Studies from Toccoa Falls College and a M.Div. from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

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Do you believe in miracles? Why they make perfect sense for many

Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, Indiana University

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This year, one of the most essential holy days in the Christian calendar, Easter, coincides with perhaps the silliest of annual secular celebrations, April Fools’ Day. Easter commemorates a miraculous event, the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. April Fools’ Day is marked by practical jokes and hoaxes.

The conjunction of these two days raises a question: Is the belief in miracles the mark of a fool? One major thinker, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, said yes.

Hume’s definition

Hume published perhaps his most widely read work 270 years ago, the “ Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding .” A milestone in philosophy, its 10th section, which he entitled “Of Miracles,” was intentionally omitted.

Hume later explained that he excised the section to avoid offending his readers’ religious sensibilities – and perhaps also to spare himself the censure to which doing so would give rise. Yet the 10th section is included in all modern editions.

In “Of Miracles,” Hume claims to have discovered an argument that will check what he calls “all superstitious delusion.” It is based on this definition of a miracle: “A transgression of a law of nature by a deity or invisible agent.”

Though not original to Hume, this definition quickly gained wide assent. Just 60 years later, Thomas Jefferson had produced his own version of the Bible, “The Life and Morals of Jesus,” from which all of the miracles had been expunged as offenses against reason.

A bit about Hume

Born in 1711 in Edinburgh, Hume entered university there at the remarkably young age of 12, but he never graduated. He read voraciously. As a young man, he suffered something close to a mental breakdown. His initial attempts to write philosophy fell “dead-born from the press,” but he landed a post as a librarian at the university. He subsequently wrote a best-selling history of England . In a number of important philosophical works, he exemplified skepticism, the view that certain kinds of knowledge are impossible, and naturalism, the belief that only natural forces can be evoked as explanations.

Hume’s skepticism led him to reject many speculations about the nature of reality, such as belief in the existence of God. Though he produced a number of important philosophical works, his views on religion encumbered his career. He died, likely from some form of abdominal cancer, in 1776.

Concerning the role of miracles in Christianity, Hume wrote in “ Of Miracles ”:

“The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.”

By defining miracles as either highly improbable or perhaps even impossible events, Hume essentially guarantees that reason will always weigh strongly against them. He points out that different religions have their own tales about miracles, but because they contradict one another on multiple points, all of them cannot be true. He also argues that those who claim to have witnessed miracles are gullible and hopelessly biased by their own religious beliefs.

Hume’s enduring influence

Hume’s views on miracles have many defenders in the present day. For example, the biologist Richard Dawkins defines miracles as “coincidences which have a very low probability, but which are, nonetheless, in the realm of probability,” implying that they can be accounted for by science. The late polemicist Christopher Hitchens rejected claims of miracles by saying, “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

So pervasive is Hume’s account of miracles that it can even be found in the dictionary. Oxford Dictionary’s definition of a miracle is “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.” If miracles do not contradict science outright, the definition suggests, they at least resist explanation by scientific principles, and thus stand out as supernatural, a category of events that many people reject out of hand.

Augustine’s alternative view of miracles

Of course, other accounts of miracles are possible. Augustine of Hippo , writing in the fifth century, explicitly rejected the idea that miracles are contrary to nature, holding instead that they are contrary only to our knowledge of nature. He went on to argue that miracles are made possible by hidden capacities in nature placed there by God. In other words, our knowledge of what is naturally possible is limited, and new potentialities may over time reveal themselves.

At prior points in history, many capabilities we take for granted today would have seemed miraculous. Human flight, the wireless transmission of the human voice, and the transplantation of human organs would have struck men like Hume and Jefferson as impossibilities. It is likely that as history continues to unfold, new capacities in nature will be identified, and human beings will command new powers that we cannot imagine today.

Miracles versus science

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the course of history inexorably moves unusual events from the domain of the miraculous to the scientific. Augustine also famously wrote:

“Is not the universe itself a miracle, yet visible and of God’s making? Nay, all the miracles done in this world are less than the world itself, the heaven and earth and all therein; yet God made them all, and after a manner that man cannot conceive or comprehend.”

Augustine does not argue that human understanding cannot advance, or that science is impossible. Nor does he regard science and miracles as opposed to one another. To the contrary, Augustine is highlighting an account of science and the human desire to know that treats the world as we experience it every day as no less miraculous than any event that science cannot explain. From this point of view, daily life is full of wonder, if only we see it rightly.

Miracles today

As a physician, I regularly experience this sense of wonder in the practice of medicine. We know a lot about how babies are made, how human beings grow and develop, how infections and cancer arise, and what happens when we die. Yet there is also a great deal we don’t understand. In my experience, deepening our scientific understanding of such events and processes does not diminish our sense of wonder at their beauty. To the contrary, it deepens and enriches it.

Inspecting cells through a microscope, using CT and MRI to peer into the inner recesses of the human body, or simply listening carefully as patients offer up insights on their lives – these experiences open up the realm of wonder to which Augustine is pointing. Of course, many people outside of medicine enjoy similar experiences, as when sunlight filters down through the leaves or forms a rainbow as it passes through drops of rain.

Some, Hume among them, might say that it would be a blessing to drive out all trace of the miraculous from our view of the world, perhaps even dismissing the possibility of miracles outright. Others – myself included – think otherwise. Far from seeking to expunge the miraculous from life, we strive instead to reawaken our awareness of its presence. To those who see the world in such terms, April 1 this year is less about hoaxes than the blossoming of a renewed sense of wonder at the fullness and beauty of life.

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This I Believe

I Believe in Miracles

I believe In miracles. Ata very young age I began to get an Idea of what a miracle was. Dialing H. Oaks defines a miracle as “a beneficial event brought about through divine power that mortals do not understand and themselves cannot duplicate. ” When I was SIX years old I had my first experience when a miracle took place In my life. I was in our small front yard taking golf lessons from my father in a small CUL-De- sac. My father laid down the golf ball on the freshly cut grass.

As he swung and hit he ball across the street, my two older brothers Jeremy and Michael ran as fast as they could to retrieve the ball, but shortly found out it had landed in the dog kennel. As the dog viciously barked they backed away and didn’t dare go in to get it. Being the brave little kid I was; not thinking twice, I decided I would retrieve the ball. I ran quickly but never made it across the street. My neighbor at the end of the CUL-De-sac was driving an old rusty gold station wagon, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.

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I don’t remember much, but my dad said when I collided with the car I was eke a wet noodle being flung through the air. I flew ten feet and rolled five more. My body was limp. My father for sure thought I was dead. My two brothers and dad ran to me but there was no sense of life. They picked me up off the gravel covered road and laid me in the grass. After a few minutes I came back to and took my first breath. My skin was covered in cuts and scrapes and they were worried something might be wrong. They quickly rushed me to the hospital where the doctor cleaned the gravel from my skin, but found no broken bones or any other damage.

Was this a miracle or incidence? Many people have stopped believing in miracles. It is much easier for me to believe In them. Than to pretend they never happened because they cannot be explained. Miracles happen in many ways, they can be a mighty change in heart, a new born baby, or even overcoming a trial. You have to believe in miracles for them to exist. Miracles happen because of faith. Dialing H. Oaks quotes In his talk (Miracles) ” It shall come to pass that he that have faith in me to be healed, and is not appointed unto death, shall be healed. Though many miracles have happened wrought my life, I would like to discuss one where the power of the priesthood was key to my healing. At age twenty three I was in Paris, Illinois. I had a very bad headache so took a pain killer. Shortly after I had taken one, I got into the medicine cabinet and unconsciously took the whole bottle. Several hours later, after the medicine was in full affect, my grandparents realized something was wrong. They immediately called the ambulance. By the time I got to the hospital I had gone into a coma; the doctors were scared my kidneys were going to shut down, and that I would to make it through the night.

It was too late to pump my stomach; all they could do was put me on an IV and wait to see if I would pull out of it. They called my father and told him that I was going to die, and to make arrangements to get my body back to Idaho. My dad changed his schedule and flew down to Illinois. I made it through two nights. The third day my grandfather gave me a blessing and I came out of my coma. The doctors believed there would be lots of Internal damage and possibly brain damage but the test came out clear, and I was able to leave the hospital that ay.

When the doctors tried to explain to my father what happened, all they could say miracles has been strengthened. I know miracles happen every day. The Lord is constantly reaching down to bless our lives. You have to believe in Him, and have faith so that His mighty hand can perform the miracles we seek. You will never fully understand what happened, but there is peace in knowing the Lord was there with you. We are all his children, he watches over each of us, and will continue to perform this miraculous work we call miracles.

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A “miracle” in the fullest sense is an event of God’s providence, in which the outcome goes beyond what the natural properties of the created things involved could have produced.

This essay gives a summary of the traditional Christian way of describing nature and miracle and shows how understanding these helps in reading the Bible, living faithfully, and meeting the challenges of skeptics appealing to science.

Most Christians are aware that “miracles” play a big role in the Biblical story — from the creation, to the rescue of Israel from Egypt, to the incarnation, ministry, and resurrection of Jesus, not to mention his final return to bring us all to judgment. We also wonder whether the miracles in the Bible are the only ones God has done — are there any going on today? You can easily do an internet search on the terms “miracles all around us” and find plenty of people who talk about miracles today. The excesses of such talk can make us shy of the subject altogether in response; and that shyness is even more enhanced by the skepticism that comes with the so-called “modern scientific outlook.”

Can we understand what miracles are? And do we have to drop all pretense to intellectual integrity if we believe that any of them have happened (even if it’s just those in the Bible)?

Defining Terms

Almost every word in every human language has more than one meaning, and we have to be sure we’re talking about the same thing: hence, definitions are crucial for good thinking. Otherwise, we’ll have to face the disapproval of Inigo Montoya (in The Princess Bride ): “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

We use the word “miracle” in a variety of ways. We can speak of the miracle of modern technology, meaning, say, that we are impressed with the power of surgery and medication to heal diseases that would have killed our ancestors. We can call a sudden healing from cancer a “miracle,” meaning we don’t know how it happened. In the 1980 Winter Olympics, the US Ice Hockey team defeated the superior Soviet team, which led Al Michaels (who called the game for ABC television) to ask the viewers, “Do you believe in miracles?”

In The Princess Bride , Inigo and his friend Fezzik go to a man called Miracle Max, because Westley, the Man in Black, is (mostly) dead and they need him resuscitated. They want Max to provide them with a “miracle.” What he does give them is a chocolate-coated pill that will revive Westley; but its working is more in the category of mysterious medical technology. This is clear when Inigo and Fezzik carry the Man in Black away to give him the pill, and Max and his wife Valerie wish them luck storming the castle. Valerie says, “Think it’ll work?” Max replies, “It would take a miracle” — meaning what we might call a miracle in the fullest sense , that goes beyond his technology.

Some philosophers and theologians have proposed that a “miracle” is anything that impresses its audience with God’s presence and power. Some of them have suggested that we are wrong to suppose that created things have any causal power of their own; everything happens by God’s direct action. This has been called “occasionalism,” since what we call “events” are really just the “occasions” for God to exert his power. Others suggest that the natural effects of created things are the whole story in God’s world, even if we do not know how everything has worked; for example, the crossing of the Red Sea was the fortuitous result of various forces such as wind, just at the right time for Israel. This view may be called “providentialism,” since it asserts that everything happens as a result of God’s providential ordering of natural processes. Both of these perspectives would then say that what makes an event “special” is the way it makes God’s presence known; but effectively, they are saying that everything (at least in principle) is a special event — which, as Dash (from The Incredibles ) muttered, is just another way of saying that nothing is.

However, if we follow what Christian (and Jewish) theologians have offered, we will have a sturdier way of thinking about these things.

Natural and Supernatural

We will first summarize the traditional Christian (and Jewish) understanding of how God works in his creation, and then show how it captures well what the Biblical texts do.

Traditional theologians have described things this way:

creation , by which God made all things from nothing, and imparted natural properties to the things he has made;
preservation and concurrence , by which God keeps his creatures in being and confirms the interaction of their properties;
government , by which God orders all things in his world according to his purposes; and
supernatural occurrences , in which the outcome goes beyond the natural properties of the components involved; these are “miracles” in the proper sense.

The Biblical presentation builds on ordinary perceptions of the world, such as the way that plants and animals reproduce after their own kinds; no one in Israel would have sown barley with a hope of harvesting wheat (see also Matt. 13:24–30), or tried to breed camels from his goats! The Bible affirms this perception of natural properties and their causal powers and traces it to the reliability and goodness of the world God made (Genesis 1).

This perspective also shows how God is directly active in every event, whether the natural or supernatural. Genesis 30 can speak of God giving and withholding children and also of Jacob and his wives spending the night together. Even in passages that stress God’s pervasive activity, such as Psalm 104, God causes the grass to grow so that it feeds the livestock (v. 14); we can say that God feeds the animals. God’s action and creaturely action are not an either-or, or a zero-sum game.

The idea that God orders all events to fulfill his purposes runs throughout the Bible — but not in such a way as to abolish creaturely responsibility (see Isa. 10:5–7, 15–16). Biblical authors do not try to resolve this tension; instead they invite us to embrace it, and to trust that they are not genuinely contradictory.

Further, this Biblical picture allows us to see the world as having a network of cause and effect, without falling into the trap of thinking that the network is closed. That is, God is free to do with his creation whatever he wants; and God wants to pursue relationships with human beings. Should God — the benevolent Maker and Ruler — choose to infuse new energies into his world in pursuit of these relationships, why should that surprise anyone? This is exactly what such events as prophetic inspiration, the virgin conception and resurrection of Jesus, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the conversion of so many diverse peoples, are — and the return of Jesus and general judgment will be a further exercise of God’s freedom to rule his world, unlimited by the properties he made it to have.

Finally, this perspective shines light on the practice of prayer. When Christians pray for something, they properly focus on the outcome, and leave it to God to decide what mix of “ordinary providence” and “miracle” to use. A healing is no less God’s gift for having come through a physician’s skill (1Tim. 5:23)!

Special Providences

In this framework, all providences are “special,” because they reflect God’s particular interest in each of his creatures; but some make God’s governance especially clear, and some of these are recognizably supernatural (such as the resurrection of Jesus). It is true that many of the Biblical depictions of God’s “great works” do not distinguish between visible expressions of God’s presence and power that employ “ordinary providence,” and those that include a “supernatural” component. However, some of these depictions do. Many think that the plagues in Egypt made use of natural phenomena associated with the Nile River. The text of Exodus allows that and also allows a more “miraculous” scenario; at the very least, God made sure the timing was just right for Israel! Further, the death of so many firstborn must have involved more than natural factors. In the same way, the strong east wind that parted the Red Sea was just right (Exod. 14:21).

It is natural and right to ask God for reassurance by way of visible special providences, when the world seems dark; this is just what the lament psalms do. At the same time, these psalms prepare the faithful for the possibility that God may choose to withhold such visible signs of his government and equip them to hold on to their faith even so.

Miracles as Signs

While these special events in the Bible often address crises of human need, they primarily play two roles: first, they authenticate divinely-approved messengers (prophets and apostles: Deut. 18:21–22; 2Cor. 12:12), and second, they make God’s interest in the corporate well-being of his people — Israel and the church — especially clear (Exod. 14:30–31). An additional role is that of testifying about God’s interest, to those outside his own people, with a view toward leading them to faith (e.g., Exod. 15:14–16).

The miracles of Jesus in the Gospels certainly display his kindness toward human need and suffering (e.g., Mark 1:41), building the readers’ trust in the Savior they love and follow. They also accredit Jesus as a divinely authorized spokesman for God, to whom all people should listen (Acts 2:22). They also reveal his unique person, with divine power over all the creation (Mark 4:41) and even over the demons (Mark 1:27), building the readers’ confidence in the ultimate victory of the Lord’s purposes in the world. The resurrection serves as the vindication of Jesus before the world (1Tim. 3:16). Hence the miracles of Jesus are inseparable from his work.

Christians disagree on whether we should be expecting miracles today. Where they should agree, however, is that miracles, say, of healing, cannot be the measure of our spirituality: after all, everyone eventually dies, even the most faithful, and therefore at least one healing miracle is denied to everyone! Further, we do not expect any canonical revelation to add to the Bible and apply to all Christians everywhere, and therefore we do not look to miracles as authenticating apostolic messengers.

A more important kind of supernatural event is in the way the Holy Spirit changes people’s hearts to heed the Biblical message, strengthening them to live faithfully (Ezek. 36:25–27). This will go on and will be open to all kinds of people!

Miracles, Science, and God-of-the-Gaps

Further, this conventional approach points the way to criteria by which we may discern some events as actually supernatural. An example of this discernment would be the resurrection of Jesus: Bodies that are “ all dead” (to use Miracle Max’s taxonomy) do not rise, unless some great power is infused into the ordinary natural processes. For that, it would take a miracle in the fullest sense. To be sure, the event itself does not answer the question of who supplied that power; but it certainly sets a lower limit on the level of power needed. Most of us think that it must be the Power that created life to begin with!

We are sometimes told that science has made the notion of miracle obsolete; that it has shown that the web of cause and effect is closed. But it has done no such thing, nor can it. That strong kind of denial is a worldview perspective and not a result of empirical study.

Nevertheless, the advance of science can help us to frame our understanding of miracle so that we do not commit what is called the “god of the gaps fallacy”: that is, we had called something a miracle when we did not understand how it happened, and now a scientific explanation has shown a natural path. We had simply used the words “God did it” to fill in a gap in our understanding. A natural event is no less God’s providence, since all natural processes are God’s processes; but if our faith in God had depended on the event being genuinely miraculous, our confidence is now undone.

With most events in our lives, we take it by faith that they express God’s wise and benevolent purposes — because we cannot see how all things are working together for good. At times, however, the Lord makes his purposes more visible. Most events could have turned out otherwise than they did (Israel might have remained in Egyptian servitude). In some cases we had a right to expect the event to have been otherwise (Egypt was a strong military power, and Israel were brickfield slaves). It is here that we begin to find reassurance, if we already believe in God. Further, some of those remarkable events should have turned out otherwise, in view of what we know about the things involved. These are the “miracles” in the proper sense; and our discernment of them depends, not on our ignorance, but on our knowledge. As C. S. Lewis put it so well, “No doubt a modern gynaecologist knows several things about birth and begetting which St. Joseph did not know. But those things do not concern the main point — that a virgin birth is contrary to the course of nature. And St. Joseph obviously knew that ” (Lewis, Miracles , ch. 7). On the other hand, an astounding recovery from a deadly disease is surely a welcome provision from God; we do not call it a proper miracle, however, when all we mean is that we do not know how it happened. We must not confuse the miraculous with the mysterious, nor despise either of them!

Christians disagree on whether the miracles serve in our evangelism. The Biblical writers do, at times, present them as having a role to play in alerting people to the presence of great power (e.g., Exod. 8:19; 14:22; Josh. 2:10–11; John 10:25, 37–38; 14:11; 20:29). Certainly Jesus’ resurrection is offered as a public event, with a virtual dare to anyone to disprove it (1Cor. 15:6). Events on their own are not self-explanatory; but these events do fit with and support the Biblical explanations and should be commended to all for their belief.

Is it rational to believe in miracles?

Although miracles are extraordinary, there are good reasons to take the miracles of Jesus seriously and consider what they might tell us about his identity and mission.

The miracles of Jesus

Craig Keener discusses whether miracles can be taken seriously, and what purpose the miracle stories have in the gospels.

SIMON SMART: I’m speaking with Professor Craig Keener, an author and New Testament scholar. Craig, I wanted to ask you about miracles. Don’t the miracle aspects of the Jesus story bring the whole thing into question?

CRAIG KEENER: That’s what people a lot of times used to argue. The majority of scholars today actually acknowledge that Jesus was a healer and an exorcist. Now, they may not believe that people were actually supernaturally healed, but they believe that people experienced Jesus in that way.

SIMON SMART: That people believed that he was a healer, is that right?

CRAIG KEENER: Right, that’s how people approached him, and some of the people must have gotten better obviously or they wouldn’t have continued approaching him that way. And Josephus, even, in the very little clip that he has about Jesus, Geza Vermes a Jewish scholar at Oxford points out that Josephus is best interpreted as not only speaking of Jesus as a teacher, but a worker of paradoxa , of miracles. And again, it’s in every stratum of gospel tradition, every stratum of early Christian tradition, it was acknowledged by Jesus’ opponents – it’s not something that’s very easy to doubt by historical means. Now the question is, what do those things mean? Historically, people have said, “Well, we don’t believe these things happened, because we just know from modern experience that these things don’t happen.” David Hume formulated that argument, but it’s actually kind of a circular argument, even when David Hume formulated it, because what Hume said was, “We can discount witnesses if they claim to have seen miracles, because we know from uniform human experience that true eyewitnesses would not claim the experience of miracles.” In his own essay on miracles, he actually dismissed some pretty good evidence that already existed in his day. Pascal’s niece was healed, at a Jansenist monastery, from a running sore in her eye. It was clearly organic, people could smell the sore, and the results were so dramatic and so instantaneous that the Queen Mother of France sent her own physician to investigate and he came back with a report that this was a miracle. Hume acknowledged all this, and then simply dismissed it by saying it’s against uniform human experience to believe in miracles.

Now, after Hume, this was developed into a principle that has often been used by New Testament scholars – the principle of analogy, saying that we know from analogy, from modern times that miracles don’t happen, therefore they couldn’t have happened back then. The problem with that argument today is many scholars are arguing that the argument from analogy is better stood on its head, because today we have multiple eyewitness claims that miracles took place. Now you can explain them however you want to, but you can’t deny that eyewitnesses claim to have seen miracles. And this is not a few eyewitnesses. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey of just 10 countries, somewhere around 300 or 400 million people claimed to have witnessed or experienced divine healing. Now that’s a lot of people. However we explain those things, we can’t deny that credible eyewitnesses claim these things, something that Hume said should not have happened.

SIMON SMART: Hume’s idea comes from a worldview, doesn’t it, that’s already ruled out the possibility of miracles. If you believe in the possibility of a god, then I guess these thoughts of miracles are actually kind of small things, really, easily achieved. Nonetheless, we’re right to critique these claims, both the modern claims and the more ancient ones, aren’t we?

CRAIG KEENER: That’s true, because not every claim is an accurate claim. One thing you have to look at is how reliable the witnesses are. And another thing you have to look at is, well, if you’re asking whether it’s a miracle or not, because that’s a separate question from whether people experienced these things or not, if you’re asking whether it’s a miracle or not you need to look at whether this is something that could just naturally happen on its own.

SIMON SMART: What purpose do the miracle stories play in the gospels?

CRAIG KEENER: The most important is the Christological purpose, emphasising the greatness of Jesus. Another purpose of the miracles I think is to encourage people to have faith in the God who did these miracles – both when we approach him for our own needs and, whether or not God does a miracle for us, we can approach him with faith because He’s the God who can, and who cares, He’s not some distant God who doesn’t act in history. And I think that also the miracle stories sometimes teach us about things, for instance the word ‘save’ that appears in the gospels, the world that’s translated ‘save’ most often, it can mean physical restoration, but of course it can also mean spiritual restoration. And I think the gospel writers are also teaching us that the Lord who has the power to restore people physically is also the Lord who has the power to bind up the brokenhearted and to transform people and make them new.

Wonderful Deeds

Darrell Bock discusses the purpose of Jesus’ miracles and why people find them hard to believe.

SIMON SMART: I’m speaking with Darrell Bock, Professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary. Darrell, I want to ask you about miracles. Why is it hard for modern people to accept the miracles of the Jesus story?

DARRELL BOCK: Well, I think it’s because, particularly in the West, there’s a difficulty with the idea of things that you can’t see and explain, we like to be able to experiment, test, repeat, see. We’re very materially oriented. And so I think there’s come into our tradition a hesitation to know how to explain things that we can’t actually see and measure. And that would be the basic reason. I think it’s important to remember though that even in our world today, there are huge swaths of the world that have no trouble with miracles at all. Craig Keener has just written a major two-volume work on miracles, and it’s worth looking at because in the first part he deals with miracles in the ancient world but the rest of it deals with documenting the kinds of miraculous claims that exist around the world particularly in situations where there doesn’t seem to be another explanation for what took place. And what he’s showing, the point that he’s trying to make is that there are huge swaths of our world even today that are open to the idea of miracles.

SIMON SMART: It comes down to worldview doesn’t it – if you believe in a closed universe, any of these stories are going to be hard to take.

DARRELL BOCK: If you believe in a closed universe, that the universe kind of operates on its own natural tick and there is no outside Creator or element or personality that’s involved in it, then everything that you read in the Bible where it says God does something – and that happens to be a lot of the pages – you’re going to have another explanation for what’s going on. And so the idea that people would say that there’s myth associated with the Bible isn’t surprising if they’re closed to the idea of the possibility of God acting.

SIMON SMART: Now as you go through as an historian going through these documents, what gives you confidence in the way that a story’s been reported, in terms of Jesus’ miracles?

DARRELL BOCK: Well there are certain aspects of the historical documentation that are really fascinating. For example, Josephus, who’s a Jewish historian writing in the 90s and there’s a little debate about this but you all did a wonderful interview with Chris Forbes explaining the citation out of Josephus from Antiquities 1863 and 64 where he speaks about how Jesus was the doer of ‘wonderful works’, well that’s one way you can translate it, the Greek word is paradoxa where we get our English word ‘paradox’ from, it’s something unusual, so Jesus was the doer of unusual works. This actually fits other texts in the Jewish tradition that say that Jesus was a sorcerer or a magician or he cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub. These texts run for the first to the fifth century and they’re consistent. And so what’s interesting about the idea in Judaism that Jesus did something that needs an explanation – we don’t think it’s a positive power we think it’s a negative power that did it, but the thing that’s not on the table is it didn’t happen.

SIMON SMART: Right, so something happened?

DARRELL BOCK: Something happened that you have to explain, something unusual happened that you have to explain, something unusual happened that you have to explain that even the people who opposed Jesus recognised that you had to explain.

SIMON SMART: What was the purpose of the miracles?

DARRELL BOCK: Well the miracles really are a way of trying to substantiate claims that otherwise you can’t see. The story of the paralytic is a wonderful example of this. The paralytic comes in and he’s lame and he comes before Jesus and Jesus says to him “Your sins are forgiven.” And I like to tell students when I’m telling this account, “Now you’re the paralytic, you’ve come to Jesus so that you’ll be able to walk, and what he says to you is ‘your sins are forgiven’, what are you thinking?

SIMON SMART: Thanks a lot.

DARRELL BOCK: Yeah exactly, “Gee, that isn’t why I crashed this party.” But what Jesus does is he turns around and says, “In order that you might know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you ‘Get up and walk’”. And what’s interesting about that of course is that he’s tying something you can’t see to something unusual you can see. I mean I tell people, “Have you ever see how sins are forgiven? Like “bye sin, please stay away, for a very, very long time.” No, you can’t see forgiveness of sins, but you can see a lame person who is made able to walk, so when Jesus says “The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins, I say to you get up and walk”, the walk talks, and the walk says “The Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So the miracles are – and I’m being cute here – power points . They are points about Jesus’ power and authority to accomplish certain things, they’re audio-visuals of things that you can’t see by doing unusual things that you can see. This is why the Scripture calls them signs .

SIMON SMART: They’re also acts of compassion, too.

DARRELL BOCK: The certainly are, and they show Jesus dealing with a variety of conditions: health, in terms of sickness; death; disease; exorcisms; all kinds of things that Jesus does. He raises from the dead an only daughter, he raises from the dead an only son, all these things are acts of compassion showing God’s care for people.

SIMON SMART: Are these in a way signposts of a future redemptive act of God in the world?

DARRELL BOCK: Absolutely, in fact a picture that God can cleanse, God can make the person who can’t walk able to walk, God can make the dead alive, God can make the person who can’t see able to see, God can make the person who can’t hear able to hear, and it isn’t just the physicality of that, it’s what it pictures about spiritual truth that’s also part of the point.

Behind the Life of Jesus: Can it be rational to believe in miracles?

John Dickson and Greg Clarke discuss why people are so sceptical about miracles.

JOHN DICKSON: Greg, we’re here in Capernaum, the site of many of Jesus reported so-called “miracles”. Now historians, interestingly, all agree that Jesus enjoyed a reputation as a healer – I mean the historical evidence for that is overwhelming. But I know the scientists chime in at this point and say, “Hang on, it doesn’t matter how good the historical evidence is, miracles don’t happen.” Plenty of people think that, don’t they?

GREG CLARKE: Well they do, and science has done a great job of describing to us how the universe operates, but it really hasn’t contributed to the discussion of whether miracles are in fact possible. Your beliefs on the matter of God are really significant here: if you believe there is a personal God who is involved in the universe, well of course miracles are possible – the universe itself is God’s first miracle, so of course they’re possible. If you don’t believe there’s that kind of personal God, well, miracles are a much bigger ask. So your base beliefs really do play a role here in how you answer this question.

But it’s also important I think that we define miracles fairly. Many thinkers have defined miracles as violations of the laws of nature, which isn’t so much a definition as a way of ruling miracles out from the offset rather than probing whether they’re possible. I think a fairer definition is something like: miracles are unusual events that display unexpected power, often to make a kind of teaching point about God.

JOHN DICKSON: Actually, that’s how the gospels describe them, it uses the word “powers” for these things, and also the word “signs”. But I’m still curious to know why people are so darn sceptical about this stuff.

GREG CLARKE: Yeah, it goes back to the arch-sceptic, the 18 th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. So Hume decided he was only going to believe in things that happened regularly and repeatedly, and he kind of defined miracles out of the question by doing that. He looked at the miracles of history and said no reasonable person would believe these things took place. In fact, Hume said that even if a miracle took place in front of him, if he witnessed something like a resurrection from the dead, he’d be disinclined to believe it because he’d already made up his mind that these kinds of things can’t take place.

JOHN DICKSON: That sounds so dogmatic to me.

GREG CLARKE: Oh, it is, he’s totally decided his view already, and I just think Hume was too sceptical. I mean, it’s good to be sceptical of claims about the miraculous, I mean I’m very sceptical myself about all sorts of claims people make, there are lots of bogus claims out there, but he just took it too far, because if you believe there is a God and miracles are possible, then the historical testimony that you mentioned has weight to it and needs to be considered. And I don’t expect everyone to come to the same conclusions about Jesus when they look at the testimony, but I just hope people will start from an attitude of open inquiry rather than sarcastic dismissal.

Miracles, Mary, and Modern Belief

Is it reasonable to believe in miracles and if so, how might they provide evidence for faith?

We asked Australians if they believe in God or the supernatural. Here’s what they said

Natasha Moore comments on a recent survey which suggests that Australians may still be open to spiritual beliefs.

Thomas Jefferson, Easter, and the legacy of the Godless Gospel

Mark Stephens reflects on Thomas Jefferson’s “Bible”, and what happens when you take the miraculous out of the Jesus story.

As a class, using Mentimeter or a similar program, create a word cloud for words that come to your mind when you think of miracles .
Think-Pair-Share : Has something strange or unusual ever happened to you (or to a friend or family member) that you find hard to explain?
Listen to these vox pops from CPX’s Life & Faith podcast Miracles in an Age of Science (from 0.01-0.41). In small groups, record your own answers to the question: Do you think it’s possible that miracles can occur?
Do the results from the survey about Australians’ belief in miracles surprise you? Why or why not?
I believe this exists
I am open to the possibility that this exists
I am unsure if this exists
I think it’s unlikely that this exists
I believe this does not exist

Understand & Evaluate

What is your reaction to David Hume’s argument that we know that miracles don’t happen, so we can discount witnesses who claim to have seen miracles? Are there problems with this argument?
Greg Clarke says that there are dangers of being too sceptical, but also not sceptical at all, when it comes to miracles. Do you agree with him? Why or why not?
What points does he make throughout the article to support these conclusions?
Write an email to Richard sharing your thoughts and questions about his conclusions.
Highlight three sentences in the article that stand out to you.
Draw two pictures of Jesus: one based on how he is portrayed in the unedited Bible, and one based on how he is portrayed in the Jefferson Bible. Which picture of Jesus do you find more compelling, and why?

Bible Focus

Jesus’ greatness – his power and authority to accomplish certain things
Jesus’ compassion
A glimpse into what Jesus’ kingdom is all about

Some examples of Bible passages are listed here:

Jesus calms the storm (Mark 4:35-41)
Jesus restores a demon-possessed man (Mark 5:1-20)
Jesus heals a sick woman and raises a dead girl (Mark 5:21-43)
Jesus feeds the 5000 (Mark 6:30-44)
Jesus walks on water (Mark 6:45-52)
Jesus causes a miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5:1-11)
Jesus changes water to wine (John 2:1-11)
Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead (John 11:1-44)
Revisit your answers to Engage Questions 3 and 4 . Have your answers changed, or stayed the same? What extra piece of evidence would you like to see to strengthen the case for the existence of miracles?
Prepare a TED talk on the topic ‘Can rational people believe in miracles?’ Incorporate content from this lesson, as well as your opinion and any personal stories from your life.
Complete the 3,2,1 Reflection Thinking Routine based on what you have explored this lesson.
Listen to the full podcast episode Miracles in an age of science . Then, in pairs, record your own 5-10 min podcast episode exploring the question ‘Is it rational to believe in miracles.’

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Guest Essay

How Would You Prove That God Performed a Miracle?

An illustration of a dove with its wings spread, perched on the hand of a person wearing a blue medical glove.

By Molly Worthen

Dr. Worthen is a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who writes frequently about America’s religious culture.

Josh Brown directs the program in neuroscience at Indiana University Bloomington. He has published dozens of articles on topics like the neural basis of decision making in the brain. He has wire-rimmed glasses and a calm, methodical way of speaking. And after almost two decades of keeping relatively quiet, he is now speaking openly about his most surprising research finding: He believes that God miraculously healed him of a brain tumor.

Christmas is a time when miracles happen, according to the Hallmark cards and cartoon specials. But Dr. Brown and his wife, Candy Gunther Brown, who did her doctorate in religious studies at Harvard and is also a professor at Indiana, believe that God does intervene to cause miraculous healing, all the time. Partly to understand the healing that shocked their family, they have traveled as far afield as Brazil and Mozambique to collect documentation purporting to link Christian prayers and revivals to sudden, inexplicable medical recoveries. But is it possible to prove that a miracle happened? Is it dangerous to even try?

We are not talking about metaphorical, wow-what-luck, “I can’t believe I got that parking space” sorts of miracles. The Browns seek out stories of healings that are impossible to account for by natural means, based on current medical knowledge (although they believe that God mostly heals through modern medicine). “I don’t see a conflict between investigating matters of neuroscience and investigating claims of divine healing,” Josh Brown told me. “The question is always empirical: What does the evidence say about what happened?”

Polls suggest that about half of American scientists and three-quarters of doctors believe in a higher power. But the Browns are among the few who refuse to compartmentalize their faith — who treat God’s supernatural action as a legitimate object of research. This can be unnerving, especially in an era of anti-vaxxers, climate change denialism and the replication crisis that has shaken the social and medical sciences. Public trust in scientific expertise is already wobbly.

But the Browns’ experiences and research — not to mention the abundance of healing testimony from other witnesses, especially outside the West — deserve serious consideration. Watertight proof of divine causation may be an impossible goal, but the search for it forces us to confront the assumptions that prop up our own worldviews — whether one is a devout believer or a committed skeptic.

Candy Brown was nine months pregnant when her husband had a seizure in the middle of the night. “I went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in an ambulance,” he said. Two and a half weeks later, newborn in tow, they got his diagnosis: an apparent brain tumor called a glioma . (He provided The New York Times with medical records to support this account.) He was 30 years old. “Chemo, radiation and surgery don’t statistically prolong the life span with what I had. There was nothing to do but get ready to die, basically.” Doctors prescribed no treatment other than anticonvulsant medication to manage symptoms.

The Browns grew up in Christian families but not the sort that expected God to intervene ostentatiously in modern life. Still, he was desperate. He started traveling the country seeking out Christian healing revivals, dragging along his wife and baby daughter. “I needed to find out what was going on,” he said. “If there was any reality to it, I wanted a miracle.”

Candy Brown recalled more disturbing details: the morning after her husband’s diagnosis, they began to pray together, but mentioning the name of Jesus seemed to trigger a frightening physical response. “Josh shoots out of bed, starts turning somersaults,” she said. “I’d say, try worshiping Jesus, and he couldn’t say the name Jesus. I was thinking of the herd of pigs,” she said, recalling the unlucky swine run off a cliff by demon possession in the Gospels. “He was hoarse and exhausted. For that 45 minutes, there was such a palpably evil presence in that room that hated the name of Jesus. If I ever had doubted whether Jesus was real, I couldn’t now.”

Josh Brown began traveling with healing missionaries. He told me he saw things he couldn’t explain — like a blind man on a street in Cuba who appeared to instantly regain his sight after missionaries prayed for him. Months later, after many sessions of prayer for healing and deliverance, an M.R.I. revealed that his tumor had turned into scar tissue.

He quickly volunteered to me that he never had a biopsy, but doctors often diagnose this type of tumor on the basis of M.R.I.s and the patient’s symptoms. “One way or another, the tumor went away,” he said. “I’ve been symptom-free for 19 years. The doctors said very little.” The Browns felt grateful — and perplexed. “At that point I wondered why, when I had seen so many things that seemed miraculous and difficult to explain, why was there so little careful investigation of these things?” he said.

In 2009, on a grant from the John Templeton Foundation , the Browns flew to Mozambique to investigate the healing claims of Global Awakening and Iris Global , two ministries focused on healing and revival. They brought audiometry equipment and eye charts to test people who requested prayer for deafness and blindness. The sample size was small — they tested 24 people — but they found statistically significant improvement beyond placebo effects and hypnosis.

“I was standing right there next to this woman who could not tell how many fingers were held up when you were a foot in front of her,” Candy Brown told me. “Then five minutes later, she’s reading an eye chart with a smile on her face.” She and her colleagues published the results in The Southern Medical Journal — not a prestigious publication but a respectable one with peer review — and she drew on the research for her 2012 book , “Testing Prayer.”

Skeptics complained about the Browns’ methods and field conditions. They pointed out that the hearing tests were in a noisy setting, there was no control group and test subjects would naturally want to please those who prayed for them by showing results. “That simple trick explains why both hearing and sight appears to have dramatically improved among these poor, superstitious villagers,” one critic declared . (The study explained in detail how the researchers did their best to weed out false data.)

If you want to evaluate people’s experiences at a revival in rural Africa, you probably need to give up on double-blind studies in a perfectly controlled environment. But let’s imagine for a moment that researchers could meet such standards (and that an all-powerful deity humors us and submits to this scrutiny). They might persuade skeptics that something strange happened. But is there any evidence that would persuade a nonbeliever that God was behind it — that we do not live in a closed system in which all causation is a matter of natural laws?

Christians have sought to scientifically evaluate miracle claims at least since the 16th century, when the Council of Trent tightened up the verification process for canonizing saints. But the Christian God does not work in randomized, repeatable trials. He works in history. So maybe medical histories are a more appropriate approach. “Medical case reports rely on a different epistemology, which is more of a historical epistemology,” Josh Brown said. “It’s not something you can necessarily recreate, whatever the time course of a disease.”

In 2011 the Browns helped found the Global Medical Research Institute, which publishes case studies on the small number of inexplicable events that its staff members can scrupulously document — like a blind woman who, while praying one night with her husband, regained her sight and a teenage boy who depended on a feeding tube until his stomach suddenly healed itself during an encounter with a Pentecostal minister. “When we write these case reports, we’re not claiming these must have been a miracle of God, but these are the facts of the case,” Josh Brown told me.

Most professional scientists won’t go for this. “Case methods are fine as a way to start,” Michael Shermer , the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a historian of science, told me. “But how do you shift from case studies to more experimental protocols that are the gold standard?”

Dr. Shermer sometimes asks believers about all the times prayer fails to heal. “Their answer is, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ It’s just hand-waving,” he said. Divine mystery is central to Christian faith, but it creates problems for a scientific method premised on the assumption that the laws of cause and effect are uniform — and will yield up their mysterious ways if you test and measure again and again.

The Browns’ experiences are striking because they operate in one of the most antisupernaturalist subcultures in the modern world: secular academia. But in a global context — and we are in the midst of a worldwide Christian revival — stories of unexplained healing in response to prayer are common. (Although healing is central to Christianity, other religions claim their share. One Christian response is that God shows himself to non-Christians in partial ways, and some Christians I interviewed described non-Christian healings that, they claimed, later proved false.)

Scholars estimate that 80 percent of new Christians in Nepal come to the faith through an experience with healing or deliverance from demonic spirits. Perhaps as many as 90 percent of new converts who join a house church in China credit their conversion to faith healing. In Kenya, 71 percent of Christians say they have witnessed a divine healing, according to a 2006 Pew study. Even in the relatively skeptical United States, 29 percent of survey respondents claim they have seen one.

You can quarrel with the exact figures, but we are talking about millions of people who say something otherworldly happened to them. Yet most secular people — and even many religious believers — are oblivious to this or shrug off miracle stories on principle as motivated reasoning, hallucination or fraud.

When Ifeanyi Chinedozi came to the United States for college in 2009, he “was shocked, as a young man from Nigeria, at the discomfort in talking about spiritual experiences and marvelous things that happen as part of routine Christian discourse in Nigeria and across the world,” he told me. (According to Pew, 62 percent of Nigerians say they have witnessed a divine healing; 57 percent say they have experienced or seen an exorcism.)

Dr. Chinedozi went to medical school at Tufts University and is completing his residency in general surgery at the University of Maryland, as well as a cardiac surgery research fellowship at Johns Hopkins. He also leads a ministry called Healing Vessels International, which brings both prayer and medical resources to people in need. He has been a healing evangelist since the age of 7, when, he said, Jesus appeared to him in a dream and asked if he would like to heal people. His family was not Christian at the time, but after his frightened parents heard him speaking English in his sleep (they spoke only Igbo), they took him to a local minister, who proclaimed that the boy was anointed as a healer.

In 2007, when he was in high school, a family sought his help to raise their mother, who had been declared brain-dead at a hospital. He told me that he initially refused because he had tried and failed to raise someone from the dead before. Finally, he agreed to pray over a bottle of olive oil for them. “I lifted it up and said, ‘Father, let this represent me and be unto this girl and her family as their faith has demanded, in the name of Jesus Christ.’ They didn’t thank me, just rushed out, and I thought, ‘I don’t have to go with them and be embarrassed. Whatever happens happens.’”

He heard later that the woman’s daughter poured the whole bottle onto her while praying; the woman coughed and opened her eyes. The family gave a party to celebrate her recovery, where Dr. Chinedozi said he met her.

God instituted prayer “to communicate to his creatures the dignity of causality,” according to Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French philosopher. But for those whose prayers are answered, there is a temptation to take credit. Dr. Chinedozi told me that his family and friends address him as “man of God,” but he stressed that the woman’s recovery proved he has no special powers, not even superhuman faith. “People say God only works when you have faith,” he told me. “I don’t think that’s true. God sometimes overrides our unbelief and high-mindedness and proves himself to be God. He doesn’t need our faith to be God.”

Why are stories like this so much more common outside the West? Skeptics say that naturally, people pray more often and overinterpret lucky breaks when they don’t have antibiotics or doctors close by — although the raising that Dr. Chinedozi described took place in a hospital. In the Bible, humans see wondrous signs of God’s power where the Gospel is spreading to new lands, and Jesus refuses to perform magic tricks for skeptical Pharisees but heals those whose desperation drives them to faith.

J. Ayodeji Adewuya is a professor of New Testament at the Pentecostal Theological Seminary in Tennessee. He saw his share of miracles in his home country, Nigeria — including, he believes, the raising of his stillborn infant son after he spent 20 minutes shouting and pacing the room in prayer. “I joke, you don’t really need to pray the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Give us our daily bread,’ when you have everything provided by Walmart and your fridge is full,” he told me. “When you’re in a place where you have nothing, the only thing you can do is depend on God, and at that point you’re expecting something. The average white evangelical Christian doesn’t expect anything.”

Western skeptics have disregarded witness testimony from places like Nigeria at least since David Hume complained in his 1748 essay on miracles that “they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” Such dismissal is more awkward for 21st-century secular liberals, who often say that Westerners should listen to people in the Global South and acknowledge the blindnesses of colonialism. “Some people claim that the best thing to do is to listen to people’s experiences and learn from them,” Dr. Chinedozi said. “Yet these people will be the first to find a way to disprove experiences in other cultures and contexts.”

Witness testimony in general has come in for a drubbing lately. Courts have overturned convictions when DNA proved that witnesses who sounded sure of themselves on the stand turned out to be horribly mistaken . Yet we rely on it all the time in the course of ordinary life. “If your epistemology is that eyewitness evidence doesn’t count, then there goes most historiography, journalism, even anthropology and sociology,” Craig Keener, a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, told me. (He included Dr. Chinedozi’s and Dr. Adewuya’s stories in his book “Miracles Today.”)

Among those who deny miracles, “the presuppositions are so strong,” Dr. Keener said. “There’s a dogmatism there, just like a religious dogmatism. It looks to me like it’s so ideologically driven — if you’re starting from the standpoint that a miracle claim is not true if we could possibly come up with another explanation and one of the explanations can be, ‘We don’t have an explanation now, but maybe someday we will.’” When I asked Dr. Shermer what he thought about this analogy, he objected. Belief in future scientific discovery “is not faith,” he said. “It’s confidence that the system works pretty well from experience.”

Well-documented testimonies can suggest that something very strange happened, but they can never settle the crucial question of causation; this is, whether you are religious or not, a matter of faith. (Even Hume, in a way, granted this.) So do efforts to prove miracles miss the point — and miss other signs of God’s presence?

I put this question to Kim O’Connor, a nurse, and Hamilton Grantham, a pediatrician, who help lead the British Lourdes Medical Association , a group of medical professionals who accompany critically ill pilgrims to the Catholic shrine of Lourdes in France. They described startling cases of cancer remission and unresponsive people with dementia getting up to dance. But most of their stories emphasized internal transformation, the acceptance of approaching death by pilgrims and their families. “A lot of people we take are too humble for themselves. They don’t expect a miraculous cure,” Ms. O’Connor said.

The Catholic Church has officially acknowledged 70 miraculous healings associated with Lourdes since pilgrims began traveling there in 1858, but “they’re the small pinnacle of a much bigger blessing,” Dr. Grantham said. “The reality is that when we think of ourselves as doctors and nurses, as people who want to heal, healing comes in many different forms.”

If God can heal, why does he do it so rarely? The world is full of suffering people who pray with no relief. “Even people who believe in miracles often don’t pray for them because they’re afraid of disappointment,” Candy Brown said. “I’ve had people die on my watch. It’s incredibly painful. You ask, ‘Is it my fault?’” She speculated that many Christians’ belief that miraculous healing ceased after New Testament times springs from “protection against pain, protection against feeling ill will toward God or other people. It takes hope and vulnerability to be open to healing.”

For Christians, it also takes spiritual maturity to remember that miracles are not the point. Miracles are signs meant to help humans see the greatest miracle of all, the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ— God’s ultimate intrusion into ordinary life, by which he eventually “shall wipe away all tears,” according to the Book of Revelation.

For now, stories of suffering in this fallen world vastly outnumber reports of miraculous healing; believers must search out God’s power in all these things. William Dembski is a Christian writer and proponent of intelligent design who completed a doctorate in mathematics at the University of Chicago (and later one in philosophy). He is an expert in probability theory, so he is well aware that statistically rare things do happen randomly.

“I believe in miracles, but I think they require scrutiny,” Dr. Dembski told me. “I don’t tend to see things as flamboyant as in the New Testament.” He published a moving account of his family’s disappointment at a healing revival, where he sought prayer for his autistic son. “There can be quite a bit of self-delusion on the part of people looking for miracles, and it troubles me,” he said.

Dr. Dembski’s family has learned to look for the miraculous in everyday loving encounters, like when a teacher’s aide made it her mission to help his son learn to use the bathroom on his own. “His life is so much better because of this person who wouldn’t give up on him,” he said. “It was no miracle, in terms of a magic wand that touched him and everything was fine. It was people who were willing to love him and do the hard work.”

Molly Worthen is the author, most recently, of the audio course “ Charismatic Leaders Who Remade America ” and an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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I believe in miracles because i am one and there’s no doubt in my mind that the only reason i’ve made it this far is because god made a way for me. can i get an amen.

More Related Quotes:

“a grateful heart is a magnet for miracles.”, “never lose hope. just when you think it’s over, you’re sent a miracle.”, “miracles come in moments. be ready and willing.” ~wayne dyer, “where there is great love there are always miracles.” ~willa cather, “never stop believing in hope because miracles happen every day.”, “sometimes miracles are just good people with kind hearts.”, “miracles start to happen when you give as much energy to your dreams as you do to your fears.” ~richard wilkins, “life is a series of thousands of tiny miracles. notice them.”, “miracles happen every day, change your perception of what a miracle is and you’ll see them all around you.” ~jon bon jovi, “don’t look for miracles. you yourself are the miracle.” ~henry miller, “remember to enjoy the miracle of existence.”, “we live on a blue planet that circles around a ball of fire next to a moon that moves the sea… and you don’t believe in miracles”, “when we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another .” ~helen keller, “miracles sometimes come in pairs.”, “and as to me, i know nothing else but miracles.” ~walt whitman, “to walk in nature is to witness a thousand miracles.”, “i believe that tomorrow is another day and i believe in miracles.”, “there are only two ways to live your life: one is as though nothing is a miracle. the other is as though everything is a miracle.” ~albert einstein, “don’t wait for miracles, your whole life is a miracle.” ~albert einstein, “it is a quiet multitude of little miracles that makes life sweet.”, “cupcakes are muffins that believed in miracles.”, “life is a journey filled with unexpected miracles.”, “where hope grows, miracles blossom.” ~elna rae, “out of difficulties grow miracles.” ~jean de la bruyere, “when gratitude becomes an essential foundation in our lives, miracles start to appear everywhere.”, “love is a flower that grows in any soil, works its sweet miracles undaunted by autumn frost or winter snow, blooming fair and fragrant all the year, and blessing those who give and those who receive.” ~louisa may alcott, “if you don’t believe in miracles, perhaps you’ve forgotten you are one.”.

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1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Can We Believe in Miracles?

Author: Tomás Bogardus Category: Philosophy of Religion Word Count: 1000

True story: My friend’s daughter failed a hearing test when she was two years old, and was subsequently diagnosed with a rare hearing disorder. The doctors recommended a battery of follow-up tests and procedures, both expensive and invasive. My friend was, of course, crushed by the news. I suspect most parents would grimly set their teeth and proceed with the doctors’ orders for the child’s sake. Fortunately, my friend was a philosophy student in those days, studying probability theory. What he learned allowed him to decline further treatment and still sleep in peace. For he knew that, though this test was highly reliable, it was not infallible. It occasionally, though rarely, issued false positives. And he knew that the incidence of this hearing disorder—its base rate , its frequency in the general population, the prior probability that his child had the disease, before the test—was low enough to de-claw the test’s result.

Just how low is low enough? Suppose the disease is as common as the test’s failure rate: One in a thousand. Now picture my friend’s child standing last in a line of one thousand anxious children waiting to take this hearing test. Let’s say every child before my friend’s gets a true negative result from the test; they all check out fine. Now my friend’s child steps up and receives the dreaded positive result. On the one hand, we feel cause for concern: This test fails only 0.1% of the time, so isn’t the diagnosis overwhelmingly likely to be accurate? But, on the other hand, we know that, after 999 true results, this test was “due” to fail, like a bald tire approaching its last mile. So, should we be concerned? The correct answer is that, given the low base rate of the disease—and despite the test’s very low failure rate—there is only a 50% chance that the child who tested positive actually has the disease. Maybe it’s the real deal, but just as likely it’s a false positive. And, of course, the rarer the disease—the lower its base rate—the more likely it is that this child pulled the “false positive” card rather than the “rare disease” card. If the base rate of the disease is vanishingly small—as it was in the case of my friend and his daughter—a positive result from a test that rarely fails can, paradoxically, be almost certainly false.

Careful attention to probabilities might yield many more useful conclusions, beyond my friend’s. For example, philosopher Larry Shapiro believes that what we just learned should convince us that no one can justifiably believe in miracles, e.g., that God raised Jesus from the dead. His argument follows my friend’s right down the line. Shapiro generously grants to the miracle-believer that those who tell us about these miracles—St. Paul, say—are as reliable as the hearing test we discussed, falsely reporting miracles only 0.1% of the time. The problem, according to Shapiro, is that the base rate of miracles like resurrection of the dead—the frequency of resurrection, its “prior” probability, before the testimony—is vanishingly small. It’s a miracle , after all. And so, Shapiro says, any testimony of a miracle, even from a highly reliable source, is almost certainly false. So much for Christianity, Shapiro concludes: It’s irrational. As is any other religion based on miracle reports.

Shapiro’s argument is as smooth as wind on ice, as menacing now as it was when David Hume premiered it back in 1748. But perhaps it’s too quick. Before you give up on miracles, let me develop a response to Hume offered by Peter van Inwagen. Try this colorful experiment for yourself. Find some lipstick and the nearest mirror. Pick an improbable string of numbers or letters—maybe, “Miracles do happen, Larry!”—and write them across your forehead. Stare into the mirror. Look at what you’ve become. Can you believe you wrote that message on your face just because the internet told you to?

Seriously. Can you? Yes, of course you can. In fact, you do and you should . That belief is highly rational, given the testimony of your eyes. But hold on: While your eyes are reliable, they’re not infallible. Occasionally they’ll issue false positives, reporting something’s there when it’s not. Presently, they’re reporting that message on your face. But what’s the base rate of that ? Prior to reading this essay and watching it happen, how likely would you have thought it that you would be standing there with a lipstick message on your face? Nothing just like that has ever happened before in the history of the universe. So the base rate of that event—its prior probability—must be vanishingly small, right? But then doesn’t the general form of Shapiro’s argument lead us to the conclusion that it would be irrational to believe what’s staring you in the face?

Perhaps this shows that something’s wrong with Shapiro’s argument. Most likely it’s his assumption that, because something has never happened before, or only rarely, its base rate—its prior probability—must be low. The lipstick message on your face had never happened before. But we know of things like that, we know how such a thing easily might happen, so its prior probability need not be low. That would explain why the reliable albeit fallible testimony of our eyes convinces us that it’s happening. And, if that’s right, the miracle-believing Christian could reason this way: “Before Jesus, the dead rose rarely. Or maybe even never. It needn’t follow that the prior probability of God’s raising Jesus from the dead is small. For we know of things like that, how such a thing easily might happen. It’s God, after all, who can do as he likes, and he may like resurrecting people. And that’s why, contra Shapiro and Hume, it may be fully rational for the reliable albeit fallible testimony of St. Paul et al. to convince us that it happened.” So says the miracle believer. What do you say?

Hume, David (1748) “Of Miracles”

Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky (1996) “On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions”

Shapiro, Lawrence (2013) “A Drop in the Sea,” Aeon Magazine , 11/1/2013

Van Inwagen, Peter (1998) “Of ‘Of Miracles’”

Related Essays

Take My Word for It: On Testimony by Spencer Case

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About the Author

Tomás Bogardus is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. https://sites.google.com/site/tbogardus

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Magical Thinking

Do you believe in miracles probably., research on how miracles manifest "in the valley of the shadow of death.".

Posted August 19, 2020 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

Do you believe in miracles? I do. With temperatures in Death Valley (130ºF) breaking records as the hottest ever recorded on Earth , I've been reminiscing about all the miraculous experiences I had when the broiling conditions there made it feel as if I was "in the valley of the shadow of death" during the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon . A few days ago, I recounted some of these otherworldly and seemingly supernatural experiences in a post, " Pursuing Frictionless Flow Gave Me the Stamina to Keep Going ."

This morning, with Death Valley on my mind, an August 18 news release about a recent study, "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Insecurity and Miraculous Experiences," jumped out at me from a sea of polarizing political news and grim coronavirus updates. Of note: The data used for this recently published research on miraculous experiences was from 2013, long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The latest evidence-based research ( Eschler, 2020 ) on people's propensity to believe in supernatural "miracles" by Ed Eschler, a sociology of religion professor at Baylor University, was published on July 7 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Religious Research .

What defines a miracle?

Eschler describes a miracle as "any experience in which a person believes supernatural agents influenced an event or outcome." According to Eschler, there's often a presumption that someone's likelihood of believing in miracles is associated with "a lack of rational, scientific explanations of phenomena as measured with education or class." However, until now, surprisingly little research has been done on the "who, what, when where, and why" of our belief that we've had miraculous experiences.

For this study, Eschler set out to investigate if being college-educated, having higher socioeconomic status (SES), and other factors affected someone's statistical odds of believing in miracles.

"Looking at 15,400 respondents from 16 separate countries, I analyze the extent to which experiencing miracles is correlated with education, SES, financial insecurity, cultural traditionalism, and several religious variables," Eschler explains in his paper. For this study, he focused on countries in Latin America and used data from the 2013 Pew Research Center survey of religious beliefs and experiences.

3 Key Findings

First, Eschler found that, in general, when someone experiences a threat to his or her existence—which can include economic or political instability—they become "ripe" for having a miraculous experience. Notably, 57 percent of respondents "believed they had experienced a miracle of some kind."

Second, he did not find any correlation between someone's degree of education and their likelihood of experiencing miracles; people with college degrees were just as likely to report that they'd experienced a miracle as those with no formal education.

"There's a societal assumption that wealthy and educated people favor scientific, more 'rational' explanations for these [miraculous] events," Eschler said in the news release. "However, there is rising evidence that it has more to do with the security that being rich and educated brings: people who experience fewer existential threats do not rely on religious explanations of events."

Eschler's third finding is that income levels don't appear to influence someone's likelihood of experiencing a miracle unless they're living in "absolute poverty" and unable to afford food, clothing, or medicine. "The richest and most well educated are still more likely to experience miracles if their lives become uncertain or threatened," Eschler noted.

In a recent Baylor University Q&A, Eschler was asked, " How has the perception of miracles changed throughout history? " He responded:

"Historically, because basically everyone believed in the supernatural, miracles were more common. But as the world has become more secular, we are aware that it could all just be random chance, even if we believe in the divine. What has not changed is that attributions to the divine are a way to bring order into a world where people feel they do not have control."

Eschler added:

"If we try to define other people's experiences using our own criteria, there's a lot we can miss that hinders our ability to hear and understand what they're saying. An important part of studying people, especially a group that is seen as fringe, is just extending the courtesy of looking at them with empathy and acknowledging that most people believe what they believe because of their life experiences."

During these times of widespread insecurity, many of us feel like we're walking "in the valley of the shadow of death" every time we leave the house. As a realist , I'm skeptical that having faith in miracles would ever improve the outcome of a public health crisis or reduce a politician's Machiavellianism . (See " Optimism May Not Save You, but Pessimism Is Pernicious ")

Nevertheless, believing in miraculous experiences is uplifting and can give us hope in something divine at a time when the constant barrage of existential threats makes so many of us feel beaten down and hopeless.

Edwin Eschler. "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Insecurity and Miraculous Experiences." Review of Religious Research (First published: July 07, 2020) DOI: 10.1007/s13644-020-00419-w

Christopher Bergland is a retired ultra-endurance athlete turned science writer, public health advocate, and promoter of cerebellum ("little brain") optimization.

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Do You Have To Believe In Miracles To Be A Christian?

Miracles are a super natural action by God on the Earth on behalf of His people (you and I). If you are a Christian, does one have to believe in miracles? The answer is very simple, let us show you. Of course, the Bible is a spiritual book, but it’s also filled with science, history, poetry, music, and even some sensual love stories to name a few areas.

When you read the Word of God (the Bible), you see that it’s all about people who refuse to allow God in their lives, and contrasts those unbelievers with those who engage Father God. Cain and Abel, Abraham and Lot, Martha and Mary, Judas and the disciples… we see many instances of why it is better to get into God’s light than stay in the darkness of this world

Does A Person Who Thinks They Are A Christian Need To Believe In Miracles?

Being a Christian is founded on the fundamental truth or as Jesus called it the “rock” confession we each have to make as in Matthew 16:18. That personal proclamation Jesus is the Messiah and our Savior. If you want to be a Christian, the first miracle you must accept is that Jesus’ birth is a miracle through a young girl named Mary. How many women can have a baby without a man involved? None. The seed, or semen, of a man is required. But God, came in the form of man, to save man as Jesus is God, God is Jesus. The birth of Jesus is a miracle.

What About Other Miracles?

Did Jesus turn the water into wine? Did He walk on the water? Did the donkey speak to Balaam? Did Moses part the Red Sea? Did the world’s most powerful army of the tie drown in the Red Sea. Did the plagues hit Egypt to force Pharaoh to release the Israeli people? Did Samson destroy the enemy who stood against God? Did the walls of Jericho fall down? Did Abraham become the father of a nation?

These are all miracles. They all happened. We can see their results in history. The Bible is full of miracles. It is all about getting God involved in the lives of believers. It may sound harsh but one pastor said, “If a person doesn’t believe in miracles, they are not a Christian”. Although it is very direct, it is very important to acknowledge God in your life. When you do that, that’s when the miracles start to happen.

Are you ready for some miracles in your life? First thing, you need Jesus. You can learn how to meet Him here . Secondly, you need the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Find out more about that here .

Buckle up! God has miracles for those who believe. Amazing!

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I Believe in Miracles

When you find out that your cousin has cancer it feels scary and devastating and sad. Then when you find out your cousin’s cancer is rare and it can’t be cured, it feels just hopeless. My cousin Joey Luvera was only twelve years old when he was diagnosed with brain cancer. Joey was suffering from headaches at school and couldn’t concentrate. His parents took him to the eye doctor because they thought he probably needed glasses. But, right away, the eye doctor saw something that didn’t look normal and referred him to a brain specialist; that was scary. When his parents took Joey to Children’s Hospital in Seattle, there were no doctors who wanted to treat Joey’s cancer because our grandpa Paul is a personal injury attorney and he has sued Children’s Hospital and their doctors in the past. The doctors were afraid to help Joey because they didn’t want to get sued. My Uncle Dan and Aunt Kelli felt devastated and didn’t know where to turn. A wonderful doctor, named Dr. Ellenbogen, heard about Joey and offered to treat him. He said his job was to treat and take care of cancer patients and that’s what he was going to do. Dr. Ellenbogen found two tumors behind Joey’s right eye in his brain. He helped Joey and my Aunt and Uncle make a treatment plan beginning with Chemo Therapy and Radiation. Joey had to be at Children’s Hospital many days each week and his life became a ritual of car rides to the hospital, medical testing and only rare days did he get to attend school with his classmates. The Chemo therapy made him sick and he started to loose weight. It also did not do what it was supposed to do; it did not diminish the cancer. He became sick and could not eat. And, before Joey turned thirteen years old things began to get worse. Joey began to experience back pain and his doctor was concerned. He had to go through many more medical tests and doctor visits. It didn’t take long to find out that Joey had another form of cancer. It was a rare cancer in his spinal fluids. Dr. Ellenbogen said there were two tumors shaped like a pencil one on top of the other. They could not operate on the spinal fluid because it was too risky. That was devastating Dr. Ellenbogen wasn’t going to give up. He took Joey’s medical case to the Children’s Hospital Tumor Board where a group of Oncologists review complex cancer cases and discuss treatment options, care issues and all aspects of cancer care. The Tumor Board recommended gamma knife surgery for Joey’s brain cancer tumors and they made plans for the brain surgery right after that. Gamma knife surgery doesn’t actually involve cutting out a brain tumor with a scalpel, it is uses high-energy gamma rays to pinpoint and destroy tumors. As a family, we were scared but hopeful of this procedure that could possibly save Joey’s life. When Joey was just fourteen years old he was fighting two types of cancer. One so deep in his brain that it was dangerous to try to get out and one in his spinal fluid that was so rare that not enough research had been done on it to know what to do. Joey was one of six people in North America that had this spinal cancer. When it was close to the time for surgery Joey went bravely to Children’s Hospital to get it done, but Dr. Ellenbogen was waiting for him with more bad news. He told Joey that the gamma knife surgery could not be done on his brain tumors. They were too close to the nerves of his eyes. After another two years of chemotherapy, Joey saw Dr. Ellenbogen for the last time at Children’s Hospital. At seventeen years old he was told that they had done everything that could be done but the cancer would not go away. He was sent home and hospice nurses came every day to help Joey with pain management and to help us as his family with the process of dying. What does it mean when your seventeen year old cousin is going to die? It was sad. In November Joey got to have a huge party with all of his friends through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. His wish was to go to a Husky football game, but he was too sick to go. Retired Coach Jim Lambright heard about Joey and even though he was battling cancer himself at the time, Coach Lambright came to Joey’s party. He gave Joey a Rose Bowl ring, a Husky football helmet and jersey and a football signed by all the Husky players. Joey sat in a chair and held Coach Lambright’s hand. All of his friends from high school and his family were there. I think there were about 200 people there. At Christmas time we had a party with Santa and presents, but I don’t think Joey knew that he was even there. He was so thin and his eyes were so big. He lay on the couch and we all kissed him and held his hands. He had blankets piled on him and his favorite Huskies purple and gold ski cap on his bald head to keep him warm. We all took turns saying goodbye to him. We cried and we went home to wait I guess. I wish I knew what is the right thing to say or to do when someone is dying? It is so uncomfortable and scary. Then you feel guilty going home to go to bed to sleep knowing you will probably wake up tomorrow morning just fine, but Joey probably wouldn’t wake up ever again. After a few days, Joey began to eat a little bit. He told his parents that more than anything he wanted to graduate with his senior high school class. It was touching and sad, but the funny thing is that he kept saying it. Every day he told his parents he wanted to graduate with his class and every day he kept eating a little bit. We didn’t think he would make it past Christmas Eve, but he kept on living and kept on talking about graduating from high school. How can someone be so strong on the inside that is so weak on the outside? Joey never lost hope. He believed so strongly that he was going to graduate with his class. Joey’s mom looked at him and felt like he was getting better. At least she thought so. His parents took Joey back to see Dr. Ellenbogen. Joey had rare forms of cancer; so deadly that one in a million survives. Well Joey was that one in a million. Dr. Ellenbogen did some tests on Joey and couldn’t find the cancer in his brain or in his back. It was gone. After 6 long years of fighting cancer Joey had defeated it. Joey was cancer free and it was a miracle. And of course, Joey got to graduate with his class. His brother Tyler pushed his wheelchair across the podium and the high school Principal handed him his certificate of achievement. She gave the most beautiful speech on how brave and strong Joey was and how he never gave up. His classmates stood up for him and clapped as he held his certificate in his hand with his arm raised up high above his head. He was smiling so brightly that people cried. After Joey finished his GED he began giving speeches at high schools talking to students about never giving up, to always have hope and to believe in your dreams. Joey made an impact on so many lives. After he was completely well, he shaved his head in an assembly to raise money for cancer research and he still participates in the Walk for Life every single year. Cancer changed Joey’s life; not only by the physical effects of the scoliosis he developed after the chemotherapy, and short-term memory loss caused by the pressure of the brain tumors, but cancer helped Joey find his passion to influence other peoples lives, including mine. Lidia Chiabai

A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

AQA Philosophy

Realist vs Anti-realist understanding of Miracles

Realism is the view that we can have knowledge of an objective reality. Realist views of miracles are thus those views which regard miracles as objective (mind-independent) events that are caused by God.

Anti-Realism is the view that we should be sceptical of the ability of the human mind to understand the true nature of objective reality. Anti-realist views of miracles are those views which regard miracles as subjective (mind-dependent) events taking place within our mind.

Anti-realism is not the view that miracles are not real, nor is it the view that miracles are real. Anti-realism is the view that the question of whether miracles are real or not real is beyond our human ability to understand. We should just focus on the meaning and significance of the miracles to our minds, therefore.

Aquinas’ realist understanding of miracles

Aquinas identified three types of miracles:

Events done by God that nature could never do, e.g create something out of nothing.
Events when God does something nature can do but not in the order God does it in. E.g resurrection of Christ. Nature can make someone live, just not after they have died.
An event which nature could do but God breaks the rules or principles of nature. E.g God curing someone of a disease. Nature could cure them of a disease, but it’s part of the principles of nature that curing a disease takes time. God does it instantly, thereby breaking the principle of nature despite doing something nature could nonetheless do.

Hume’s realist understanding and rejection of miracles

Hume thought that the realist understanding of miracles accurately captured the theological belief in miracles held by Christians. However, he argued that we are never justified in believing that realist miracles happen. Hume is an empiricist, meaning he thinks our beliefs should be based on evidence and experience. Throughout our life, we gain an understanding the laws of nature through such experience. A miracle for Hume is ‘a violation of the law of nature’. Hume argues that there are various reasons to doubt testimony of a miracle:

Miracles are rare and thus belief a miracle has occurred more likely mistaken than not.
Miracle stories tend to come from ignorant and barbarous nations rather than people of good sense and education.
Humans have a tendency to believe wonderous things without justification.

Hume’s argument from evidence and probability

Our evidence for a law of nature is evidence that a miracle which violates that law did not occur.

When judging what to believe, we should proportion our beliefs to the evidence. So, the evidence we have for the miracle (testimony) must be weighed against the evidence for the law of nature (scientific experiments). Only if the evidence for the miracle outweighs the evidence for the law of nature is the evidence for the miracle is stronger. It seems very difficult for the evidence of testimony to outweigh the evidence for a law of nature gained by scientific experiment, however. Hume concludes:

“ no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish”

“When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probably that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not til then, can he pretend to command my belief”

For Hume, anyone who claims to have seen or heard about a miracle has to ask themselves a simple question – what is more likely, that a miracle really did occur, or that they are mistaken? According to Hume, a miracle by definition goes against our regular experience of how the world works, which means the evidence for the miracle must outweigh the evidence for the regularities in order for believing a miracle to be proportioned to the evidence.

Swinburne’s response: Hume is wrong to think that the only evidence for a miracle is personal testimony from eyewitnesses. There could also be evidence of physical traces left by the miracle. Scientific experiment could in principle discover such evidence and the amount of that evidence could increase to huge proportions, just like the evidence for the natural laws. In that case, in principle Miracles could be justified through evidence.

Scientific evidence of medical miracles could be an example of Swinburne’s point.

Arguably Hume’s view is unempirical. If we followed Hume’s logic we would reject all new evidence that hadn’t been experienced before if it contradicted our current understanding of the natural laws since it’s simply ‘less likely to be the true’. However, it may well in fact be true. Empiricists should not be closed to that possibility otherwise knowledge would never progress. We could never gain new knowledge. Also, while the laws of nature may indeed be fixed, our knowledge of them is not. How could we possibly improve our understanding of the laws of nature if we simply rejected any contrary new evidence as unlikely to be real?

Hume on the low quality of testimony for miracles

There is no miracle witnessed by multiple people who were of good sense, education, integrity and reputation. Instead, miracle stories come “chiefly” from ignorant and barbarous nations and when found in civilised people, they tend to be inherited from ignorant and barbarous ancestors.

“The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events … with what greediness are the miraculous accounts of travellers received, the descriptions of sea and land monsters, their relations of wonderful adventures … But if the spirit of religion join itself to the love of wonder, there is an end of common sense; and human testimony, in these circumstances, loses all pretensions to authority. A religionist … may know his narrative to be false, and yet persevere in it, with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause”

It is human nature to feel drawn to surprise and wonder, which makes us likely to believe strange and unusual things despite the belief not being justified.

Swinburne argued for the principles of testimony and credulity. The principle of credulity argues that you should believe what you experience unless you have a reason not to. The principle of testimony argues that you should believe what others tell you they have experienced, unless you have a reason not to. Swinburne is an empiricist who argued that an experience of a miracle should count as evidence towards belief that it occurred, although it doesn’t constitute complete proof.

Swinburne argued that whenever we gain some new evidence, we can’t dismiss it for no reason – that would be irrational. It is only if we have other better-established evidence which contradicts that new evidence that we may rationally dismiss it. This is the rationale behind the principles of testimony and credulity. Experiencing a miracle is evidence, unless we have some other evidence to justify dismissing the experience.

Naturalistic explanations are always a reason not to believe. Any supposed miracle could be explained by mental illness, epilepsy, random brain hallucinations, fasting, drugs, alcohol, lack of sleep, etc. So, we will always have a reason not to believe any religious experience.

Defence of Swinburne: We could defend Swinburne by pointing out that we could check for the presence of physiological and psychological causes of people’s experience of miracles. If none are present in a particular case, then we have no reason not to believe the experience in that case. Although we cannot rule out random brain hallucinations or unknown medical causes of religious experiences, but we have no evidence for those explanations and therefore must accept such cases as evidence for God.

Hume’s multiple claims argument

Any testimony for a miracle has the problem that similar testimony exists but by people in other religions. However, all religions cannot be true because they make conflicting claims. Hume argued this means that testimony for miracles “destroys itself” . Any miracle claimed to occur in a religion and thought to “establish” the truth of that religion, thereby aims to destroy the truth of other religions, including the testimony of miracles in other religions. The testimony for miracles is full of conflicting testimony from different religions and we have no basis to decide which testimony is more accurate. So, testimony cannot be a valid method for justifying belief in miracles.

One could reply with pluralism – the view that all religions are just different cultural manifestations of the divine, therefore all are true. This view is held by William James and Hick. James thinks that mystical religious experience occurring in all religions shows that they are all true. Hick argues that the different religions of the world are like blind men each touching a different part of an elephant. They each report they are feeling something different, yet that is because they are just too blind to see how they are really part of the same thing.

Swinburne’s response to Hume’s multiple claims argument: “If Hume were right to claim that evidence for the miracles of one religion was evidence against the miracles of any other, then indeed evidence for miracles in each would be poor. But in fact evidence for a miracle “wrought in one religion” is only evidence against the occurrence of a miracle “wrought in another religion” if the two miracles, if they occurred, would be evidence for propositions of the two religious systems incompatible with each other. It is hard to think of pairs of alleged miracles of this type. If there were evidence f or a Roman Catholic miracle which was evidence for the doctrine of transubstantiation and evidence for a Protestant miracle which was evidence against it, here we would have a case of the conflict of evidence which, Hume claims, occurs generally with alleged miracles. But it is enough to give this example to see that most alleged miracles do not give rise to conflicts of this kind. Most alleged miracles, if they occurred, would only show the power of god or gods and their concern for the needs of men, and little else.

My main conclusion, to repeat it, is that there are no logical difficulties in supposing that there could be strong historical evidence for the occurrence of miracles. Whether there is such evidence is, of course, another matter.” – Swinburne

Swinburne arguably fails to respond to Hume’s argument. It seems Hume is arguing that a miracle supposed to come from, e.g. the Christian God is evidence for the proposition “The Christian God exists” being true. Similarly, miracles in ancient Greece might have been supposed to be evidence for “Zeus exists”. It is the feature of a miracle that it was done by a particular God which is the evidence against miracle stories from other religions, since they are taken as evidence for the existence of different God(s).

For example, the resurrection is the central miracle of Christianity – as St Paul said, ‘If Christ is not raised, your faith is pointless”.

R F Holland’s anti-realism: contingency miracles

Holland argued that miracles are nothing more than an extraordinary coincidence that is interpreted in a religious way. Holland gives the example of a boy stuck on a railway track with a train approaching. The train driver faints, causing the train to stop which saves the life of the boy. The boy’s mother sees it as a miracle, even though she understands that there is a naturalistic explanation as to why the driver fainted which had nothing to do with the boy on the tracks. Therefore, for Holland miracles depend on interpretation and a sense of divine purpose and significance.

‘A coincidence can be taken religiously as a sign and called a miracle’

If miracles are confined to descriptions of subjective perceptions in our mind, then they become subject to the same criticisms as religious experiences. They could just be naturalistic phenomena such as random brain hallucinations, drugs, fasting, sleep deprivation, mental illness etc.

Paul Tillich’s anti-realist understanding of miracles

Tillich defines miracles as having these three components:

1: “an event which is astonishing, unusual, shaking, without contradicting the rational structure of reality” 2: “points to the mystery of being, expressing its relation to us in a definite way. 3: “an occurrence which is received as a sign-event in an ecstatic experience”

This defines miracles as part of our subjective experience, not as something occurring in objective reality. Tillich is clearly also anti-realist because he regards objective reality or ‘being’ as a ‘mystery’ that we do not understand. We can understand something about our own experience, however, and that is how we should understand miracles; as relating to our subjective experience.

Tillich’s view of God is of being itself, or the ‘ground of being’. This also fits with an anti-realist view. If God is being itself, and God is beyond our understanding, then being is beyond our understanding; a ‘mystery’. We should therefore not try to understand whether miracles happen objectively, since that is beyond our understanding.

Essential tenants of Christianity require a realist view of miracles. The resurrection of Jesus was a miracle. Without a realist view of miracles, a Christian couldn’t believe that that miracle really happened.

Anti-realism has a point, however, that miracles, being the actions of God, are beyond our understanding and thus we cannot judge whether they are real or not and should instead focus on their subjective meaning.

The point of faith is to accept on trust revealed truths about God that we would be unable to know by ourselves. As St Paul says: “If Christ is not raised, your faith is pointless” (1 Cor 15:17).

Some liberal Christians do view the resurrection of Jesus as purely symbolic, however. Anti-realism combined with a liberal approach to the Bible would work.

Maurice Wiles on miracles.

Wiles believed in God but argued that God would not cause miracles. Wiles rejected miracles from a moral perspective. For example, if God acted in the world to cure a child at Lourdes or to make statues weep or help some individual in relatively trivial ways, yet did not intervene in events like the Holocaust or earthquakes or the Rwanda Genocide, then Wiles argues that God would not be worthy of worship because the arbitrariness and caprice of his interventions would mean he lacked omnibenevolence. Wiles pointed to the example of Jesus turning water into wine. Given the immense suffering that was occurring in the world at that moment, it seems odd for Jesus to direct his supernatural interventionist powers in such a trivial manner. So, there are two options – either God is not omnibenevolent or he never does miracles. Wiles accepted the latter option.

Wiles claims that “The world as a whole is a single act of God”. Since God created this world and all of its features, including its natural laws, it seems strange the God would have to intervene in the world, either to rearrange objects or break his own laws. That does not sound like an omniscient omnipotent being – it sounds like someone having to fix their mistakes. It is more logical to think that the world in its entirety was created in one action and God does not keep returning to it to fix things.

Arguably things go wrong because of human free will, however, which takes nothing away from God’s omni-qualities but does make intervention make sense to fix the mistakes of humans, not the mistakes of God.

The biggest mistake humans made was the fall . God has not corrected that mistake because we do not still live in the garden of Eden. So, it looks like God does not fix our mistakes.

Wiles’ view is unbiblical. The Bible contains miracle stories. The central event of the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus, was a miracle. It seems contradictory for a Christian not to believe in miracles.

Wiles argued that the bible is to be interpreted metaphorically. The bible stories where God or Jesus did miracles like healing sick people were just meant to tell us about God’s loving and powerful nature – not factual descriptions of events which occurred.

Peter Vardy criticises Wiles for judging what an omnibenevolent God would and wouldn’t do, but such judgements are beyond human ability. How do we know there wasn’t some reason God allowed the Holocaust or Hiroshima to occur? Isn’t Wiles claiming to know more than a human can?

What is the point of Prayer if God actually can’t answer prayers which request intervention?

Wiles responds that Prayer is about helping a person understand the will of God.

Polkinghorne argues however that this doesn’t really fit with what Christians experience when they pray to God – they really do feel like they are making requests

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Is it Rational to Believe in Miracles?

A recent conference in Rome communicated that while miracles may seem irrational if viewed solely through the lens of natural causality, they remain a profound reality in the context of faith and God’s transcending omnipotence.

ROME — Over the first weekend in March, scholars and experts from the world over met in Rome to discuss one of the core features of the Christian religion: Miracles.

The event was organized by the Thomistic Institute, which exists to promote the theological and philosophical thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, and to encourage its dialogue with other contemporary schools of thoughts and sciences.

“We try to organize events that bring together scientists, philosophers and theologians on various topics,” Dominican Father Thomas Davenport, a physicist and philosopher working with the Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, also known as the Angelicum, told the Register.

Each year, the Thomistic Institute in Rome organizes a conference on the topic of “Science and Religion.” In past years, topics such as the origin of life, teleology and eschatology have been explored.

“This year, the topic was on miracles,” Father Davenport said, “and how we understand God entering into the natural world from theological, philosophical and scientific point of views.”

“From a popular perspective, miracles seem to be a central point in issues on the relationship between faith and science,” the U.S. priest added. “People tend to think that ‘If you believe in miracles, you clearly can't be taking science seriously,’ and ‘If you’re taking science seriously, you clearly can’t believe in miracles.’”

This prevailing mode of thinking about miracles, Father Davenport contended, is “too simplistic” — a shortcoming the conference aimed at challenging.

The Enigma of Biblical Miracles

“Every aspect of biblical miracles is controversial,” Dominican Father Justin Schembri, head of the biblical section in the faculty of theology at the Angelicum, explained during his talk “ Human Flourishing and the Enigma of Biblical Miracles . ”

The Bible presents us with two types of miracles, the Dominican priest noted: “nature miracles” such as the 10 plagues or the calming of the storm; and healings and exorcisms, such as the restoration of Bartimeus’ sight or the raising of Lazarus. However, in both cases “from their historical validity and theological value, there is little agreement among biblical scholars.”

The problem, Father Schembri said, is that many scholars decontextualize miracles.

“We cannot forget,” he said, “that miracles do not happen in isolation, but rather within the great context of creation and the history of salvation.”

Instead, miracles need to be viewed in the context of interpersonal relationships and man’s covenantal relationship with God. Thus, one could say that miracles are “vehicles of encounter,” brought about to either heal or establish a relationship with God.

Indeed, Father Schembri underscored, “the theological objective of miracles is to either bring about human flourishing, or to externalize a human withering already present, with the hope that such action elicits a return to flourishing.”

Father Schembri used the 10 plagues of Egypt as an example of God “undoing the order of creation” to show humanity his sovereignty, and call it to flourish under him. While the plagues could be explained by natural causes, such as by a nearby volcanic eruption or toxic algae bloom, the account is an example showing how God works “through and in creation.”

“To deny the very existence of the possibility of miracles is to deny the very core of the Bible itself,” Father Schembri asserted, “and that the omnipotent Creator, distinct from creation, is continually active in sustaining the universe.”

God Acting Beyond Creation

“For St. Thomas Aquinas, the most important and appropriate place to discuss the possibility of miracles is when discussing the power of God and how God acts in nature as the primary cause of all natural causes,” Ignacio Silva, professor of theology and science at the Universidad Austral in Argentina, said during his talk “ Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Working a Miracle . ”

St. Thomas never really uses the terminology of “miracles” in his writings, but instead considers whether God can do things outside the order of natural things.

“Aquinas is quite adamant about the possibility of God acting besides natural causes,” Silva explained. Indeed, Aquinas’ argument goes as follows:

“If God is omnipotent creator of all that is, then, God can certainly perform new things in nature that appear to be contrary to or besides the order he has established in it by creation, simply because he has established that order and is not subject to it.”

For St. Thomas, a miracle is a free act of God that goes besides or beyond the natural created order — which he himself has created. God can so “transcend nature” by either “producing in natural things a new form that nature is unable to produce or by producing a form in a particular matter, as sight in a blind man” or by “restraining the action of nature from doing what it would naturally do.”

Scientists and Miracles

“The question ‘can a scientist believe in miracles’ would have seemed very strange to 17th-century natural philosophers,” Dr. Denis Alexander, founding director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, past chairman of the Molecular Immunology Program and head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signaling and Development at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, said in his talk “ Can a Scientist Believe in Miracles? ”

He pointed out natural philosophers and physicists of the early modern period all believed in miracles and accepted them as historical events. Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell are only a few examples of Christian physicists with such beliefs.

Today, however, belief in miracles is not as evident among scientists. Eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume’s assertion that miracles are “violations of the laws of nature” dominates the modern understanding of miracles.

Ironically, Alexander added, “the belief of the early modern natural philosophers in the biblical miracles, who at the same time established the idea of ‘laws of nature’ and were the founders of modern science, undermines the suggestion that belief in miracles by scientists today leads to acceptance of ‘weird and wonderful’ beliefs.”

“Today’s scientists very often forget the theological roots of the idea of laws of nature,” Alexander noted.

“In 1610, it was universally and very frequently observed that all astronomical bodies orbited the earth,” Alexander explained. “According to Hume’s argument, the rational reaction on hearing reports that there were moons orbiting Jupiter would be to dismiss the report, on the argument that it is more likely for the observer to have been mistaken than for the well-established regularity of nature to be broken.”

One could argue that the modern understanding of laws of nature as exceptionless norms governing the way things act rather than as a mere term used to describe the uniformity of repeated observations in nature, lies at the root of the doubt in miracles.

Alexander said that when miracles are understood as “exceptions” — not as anomalies contrary to the order of nature, but as “unique and unusual historical events” occurring within an observably regular yet not strictly unchangeable created order — there seems no reason to reject their existence, even if it remains that “science has no investigatory tools to be useful in such circumstances” since the events are not reproducible nor explicable by known natural causes.

In fact, miracles could be understood as being part of nature, as St. Augustine argued in his “ Literal Commentary on Genesis ”: “When such a thing [as a miracle] happens, it appears to us as an event contrary to nature. But with God it is not so, for him ‘nature’ is what He does.”

God Engaging With the World Today

“As a physicist, I am really interested in understanding how miracles work,” Father Davenport, who earned a doctorate in physics from Stanford University studying theoretical particle physics prior to joining religious life, told the Register.

After all, “miracles are a central, inescapable part of our Christian faith,” he added, mentioning the Incarnation and Resurrection as miracles central to our faith.

“They are one part of a complex network of the ways in which God engages with his creative order,” he explained, “and a beautiful and striking aspect of the multiple ways in which God interacts with His people to this day.”

““If we imagine the physical world to be this fixed, hard, unchanging machine for which miracles somehow break pieces, then miracles seem to be unpleasant and problematic,” Father Davenport said. “But if we understand the natural world as a beautiful order reflective of the glory of God, then the fact that there are times when that order is transcended to bring our attention more perfectly to God’s order is something very beautiful and perfectly reasonable.”

Bénédicte Cedergren Bénédicte Cedergren is a Swedish-French freelance journalist. After graduating from the University of Stockholm with a degree in Journalism, Bénédicte moved to Rome where she earned a degree in Philosophy at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. She also sings sacred music and works as a photographer. Passionate about spreading the truth and beauty of the Catholic faith, Bénédicte enjoys sharing the testimonies of others and writing stories that captivate and inspire.

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Prompt engineering embraces new essay-compression technique that expands on getting very constructive generative ai results.

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Handy new prompt engineering technique to do compression on essays and other text is examined and ... [+] showcased as being quite useful.

In today’s column, I am continuing my ongoing coverage of prompt engineering strategies and tactics that aid in getting the most out of using generative AI apps such as ChatGPT, GPT-4, Bard, Gemini, Claude, etc. The focus here is on a brand-new prompting approach that enables you to cleverly compress essays and other text-based narratives. This is a handy technique that ought to be in your prompting best-practices toolkit.

For my in-depth comprehensive guide on over thirty other keystone prompting strategies, see the link here .

Here’s the essence of today’s discussion.

One of the most popular uses of generative AI entails creating summaries of entered text, see my prior coverage on prompting strategies for summarization at the link here and also the chain-of-density technique (CoD) at the link here . The deal is this. You might have a lengthy document that needs a helpful summary covering the crucial points so that you don’t have to wade through a convoluted textual morass. The simplest prompt to achieve a summary will merely tell the AI to go ahead and summarize the material. Boom, you are done, or so it seems.

The problem is that the summary might not be very good. Odds are that the generative AI might omit points that a human would have realized are vital to include in a summary. There is also a significant chance that the source material will be interpreted rather than carried straight ahead into the summary. Loosey-goosey interpretations of what was said in the source could be way off base.

Into this realm comes the act of compression.

Rather than producing a summary that might veer from the source, you can ask to do a compression. The idea of compression is that the source is reduced in size by a thinning process, but no adaptations or rephrasing takes place. You are still seeing the same words that were in the source. A thinning process is undertaken to try and keep just the needed meat on the bones conveying the crux of the source material.

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To clarify, compression is not a silver bullet. Issues about compression can arise. For example, it is conceivable that as generative AI thins out a source text, some key points might inadvertently get weaned out. Another possible issue is that the resulting compressed text might seem nearly unreadable or incomprehensible. The words removed that might have seemed inconsequential by the AI were possibly integral to the intelligible reading of the text.

The bottom line is that anyone proficient in the use of generative AI should know both techniques by heart, freely welding the best ways to do prompting that encompasses summarization and astute prompting that does compression. You can then wisely decide which approach befits a given circumstance. Sometimes you pull out the hammer of summarization, and other times you reach for the screwdriver of compression. They are two distinct tools that require suitable handling and must be selected for the appropriate situations.

A frequent question I get during the prompt engineering classes that I teach is whether summarization is better than compression, or whether compression is better than summarization. This always brings a smile to my face. The conveyed conundrum is a false choice. None is especially better than the other in the abstract. Each provides a set of benefits and drawbacks. I don’t think you can in the abstract make a solid case that a hammer is better than or worse than a screwdriver since the situation at hand dictates as such. The same goes for summarization versus compression.

Okay, now that we’ve got that foundation established, there are already various recommended ways to word a prompt to do summarizations and compressions. A recent research study explored the topic and proffered a prompt for compression that they extensively tested and found to be quite useful. I will walk you through their research efforts and results.

I opted to try out the compression prompt by doing some of my own testing as a mini-experiment using ChatGPT and GPT-4. This allows you to see the compression prompting in action. I will discuss the matter and aim to arm you with how to suitably use the clever technique.

Before we get into the specifics of this new compression technique, it would be useful to make sure we are all on the same page about the nature and importance of prompt engineering.

Let’s do that.

The Nature And Importance Of Prompt Engineering

Please be aware that composing well-devised prompts is essential to getting robust results from generative AI and large language models (LLMs). It is highly recommended that anyone avidly using generative AI should learn about and regularly practice the fine art and science of devising sound prompts. I purposefully note that prompting is both art and science. Some people are wanton in their prompting, which is not going to get you productive responses. You want to be systematic leverage the science of prompting, and include a suitable dash of artistry, combining to get you the most desirable results.

My golden rule about generative AI is this:

The use of generative AI can altogether succeed or fail based on the prompt that you enter.

If you provide a prompt that is poorly composed, the odds are that the generative AI will wander all over the map and you won’t get anything demonstrative related to your inquiry. Similarly, if you put distracting words into your prompt, the odds are that the generative AI will pursue an unintended line of consideration. For example, if you include words that suggest levity, there is a solid chance that the generative AI will seemingly go into a humorous mode and no longer emit serious answers to your questions.

Be direct, be obvious, and avoid distractive wording.

Being copiously specific should also be cautiously employed. You see, being painstakingly specific can be off-putting due to giving too much information. Amidst all the details, there is a chance that the generative AI will either get lost in the weeds or will strike upon a particular word or phrase that causes a wild leap into some tangential realm. I am not saying that you should never use detailed prompts. That’s silly. I am saying that you should use detailed prompts in sensible ways, such as telling the generative AI that you are going to include copious details and forewarn the AI accordingly.

You need to compose your prompts in relatively straightforward language and be abundantly clear about what you are asking or what you are telling the generative AI to do.

A wide variety of cheat sheets and training courses for suitable ways to compose and utilize prompts has been rapidly entering the marketplace to try and help people leverage generative AI soundly. In addition, add-ons to generative AI have been devised to aid you when trying to come up with prudent prompts, see my coverage at the link here .

AI Ethics and AI Law also stridently enter into the prompt engineering domain. For example, whatever prompt you opt to compose can directly or inadvertently elicit or foster the potential of generative AI to produce essays and interactions that imbue untoward biases, errors, falsehoods, glitches, and even so-called AI hallucinations (I do not favor the catchphrase of AI hallucinations, though it has admittedly tremendous stickiness in the media; here’s my take on AI hallucinations at the link here ).

There is also a marked chance that we will ultimately see lawmakers come to the fore on these matters, possibly devising and putting in place new laws or regulations to try and scope and curtail misuses of generative AI. Regarding prompt engineering, there are likely going to be heated debates over putting boundaries around the kinds of prompts you can use. This might include requiring AI makers to filter and prevent certain presumed inappropriate or unsuitable prompts, a cringe-worthy issue for some that borders on free speech considerations. For my ongoing coverage of these types of AI Ethics and AI Law issues, see the link here and the link here , just to name a few.

All in all, be mindful of how you compose your prompts.

By being careful and thoughtful you will hopefully minimize the possibility of wasting your time and effort. There is also the matter of cost. If you are paying to use a generative AI app, the usage is sometimes based on how much computational activity is required to fulfill your prompt request or instruction. Thus, entering prompts that are off-target could cause the generative AI to take excessive computational resources to respond. You end up paying for stuff that either took longer than required or that doesn’t satisfy your request and you are stuck for the bill anyway.

I like to say at my speaking engagements that prompts and dealing with generative AI is like a box of chocolates. You never know exactly what you are going to get when you enter prompts. The generative AI is devised with a probabilistic and statistical underpinning which pretty much guarantees that the output produced will vary each time. In the parlance of the AI field, we say that generative AI is considered non-deterministic.

My point is that, unlike other apps or systems that you might use, you cannot fully predict what will come out of generative AI when inputting a particular prompt. You must remain flexible. You must always be on your toes. Do not fall into the mental laziness of assuming that the generative AI output will always be correct or apt to your query. It won’t be.

Write that down on a handy snip of paper and tape it onto your laptop or desktop screen.

Using Special Prompts Including Chain-of-Density

There is a slew of somewhat remarkable prompt phrases that are essential for anyone seriously doing prompt engineering. One such phrase involves telling generative AI to work on a stepwise basis, something commonly known as invoking chain-of-thought responses by the AI, see my coverage at the link here . Another popular ploy entails telling the AI to take a deep breath, see my analysis of this prompt at the link here . One of the latest favorites involves commanding the AI to take on a Star Trek consideration when devising an answer, see my discussion at the link here .

I previously covered in my writings the various prompts that are particularly suited for getting summaries of text that you might provide to generative AI. Summarizing text is a very common use of generative AI. You can simply paste a whole bunch of text into generative AI and get a pretty good summary of the text. That being said, summaries can diverge from the original content and potentially contain misleading or even outright incorrect summarized content, see my analysis at the link here .

In short, summarizing can be risky due to the generative AI opting to rephrase the original content. The rephrasing might fail to depict the proper meaning and intention of the source content. Envision using summarization on doctor’s notes via generative AI, which is then handed to a different physician and they only have the summary at their purview, see my exploration of these matters at the link here .

Thus, a conventional summarization could be disturbingly problematic.

There is a method of devising summaries that use a prompting strategy that aims to bolster generative AI toward attaining especially superb or at least better than usual kinds of summaries. The technique is known as chain-of-density (CoD). Anybody versed in prompt engineering ought to become familiar with this insightful technique. Consider chain-of-density as not only helpful for producing summaries but there are a lot of other benefits garnered by understanding how the technique works and how this can power up your overall prompting prowess all-told.

For my detailed coverage of the chain-of-density prompting technique, see the link here .

Allow me a moment to share some of those elicitations with you here.

When you are trying to craft a summary, you often might do so in a series of successive attempts. Your first shot might be to craft a summary that has only a few of the biggest points that need to be included. After considering the initial draft, the odds are that you might further refine the summary by adding more elements to it. This can go on and on. Depending on how thorough you are, you might do a handful or more of these refining iterations. Each iteration can be construed as a chain of iterative summaries, one leading to the next for a given instance of trying to write a summary.

That’s the “chain” part of this process.

Let’s add some further terminology to describe the summary-making effort.

A summary typically starts as somewhat sparse when you first toss it together. There isn’t much of any substance in the summary. You are usually seeking to further pack substance into the summary and do so while fighting the length of the summary. The more substance that you can jam into the summary, the higher the density of the summary.

We can give a name to the substance by saying that we are trying to identify important “entities” within the original content. Those entities might be facts or figures. The entities are said to be anything especially instrumental to the overall meaning of the original content. A hope is to carry over as many of the demonstrative entities as feasible into the summary.

Your summary-making process then is to iteratively devise a summary by starting with a sparse version and then adding more and more entities or substances to increase the density until you reach some desired or suitable end-state. The series of iterations acts as a chain. Each is used to connect to the next. You usually will retain the entities from one version to the next version, and be decidedly adding more of the entities available in the original as you seek to jampack the summary accordingly.

Reflect on the adage of putting five pounds of rocks into a three-pound bag.

Maybe you put one pound of rocks into the three-pound bag at the initial attempt. The bag is considered sparsely populated. There is still room to spare. The density is low. You then put a second pound of rocks into the bag. The density is increasing. The sparseness is lessening. Finally, you put in a third pound of rocks. You have hit the maximum density and the sparseness has presumably dropped to near zero.

Suppose that the bag can be elongated.

Wonderful, you exclaim, being overjoyed at having more available space. Imagine though that you are going to hand the bag over to someone else. The larger and heavier the bag, the less useful it becomes. The same applies to summaries.

A rule of thumb is that you want to minimize the length or size of the summary, meanwhile maximizing the summarization content. The two factors are often in contention with each other. You are tempted to increase the length to get more substance included. The length being increased will potentially undercut that the summary is supposed to be a summary.

A person might seemingly just go ahead and read the original content if the summary approaches the size of the original material being summarized. The summary isn’t especially a summary anymore at that juncture. Indeed, sometimes a summary turns out to be longer than the original content that is supposedly being summarized.

How can this be, you might be thinking?

The answer has to do with being extractive versus being abstractive.

During the summarization process, you are looking at two possibilities of the content being carried over into the summary. First, you aim to be extractive, primarily extracting key aspects and shoveling those into the summary. Second, you might at times be abstractive, whereby you go beyond the words themselves of the original content and begin to reinterpret or perhaps elaborate beyond what the summary per se has to say.

A purely extractive summary is more likely to be construed as a fair and balanced reflection of the original content. You are not changing things up. You are only carrying the essentials (entities) over into the summary. The problem with an abstractive summary is that you are potentially changing up things and will be biasing or in some manner altering the meaning found within the original content being summarized. The danger is that this kind of summary is no longer seen as fair and balanced, and instead is based on the perceptions and opinions of the summarizer.

In a sense, if you want an unadorned straightforward summary, you are better off with an extractive summary. If you want an adorned or embellished summary, that goes beyond the words presented in the original source, you might seek an abstractive summary. The thing is, the abstractive summary might no longer be an apt reflection of the original source. That is also how the summary might become longer than the original since the embellishments can possibly increase the size of things and you could find yourself looking at a summary that is much longer than the source used for the summary.

Focusing On Compression As An Extractive Form Of Summarization

The usual parlance when you want a strictly extractive form of summarization is to say that you want a compression of your text.

I should warn you though that the word “compression” means different things to different people. Some are willing to be abstractive when doing a compression. Others would be aghast at someone veering into an abstractive mode when doing what they consider to be a rightfully done compression. To them, compression must be stridently adherent to not rewording any aspect of the source text being used.

I will be showing you in the next section some examples of using prompts related to asking generative AI to do compression. You will immediately see that the word “compression” is relatively ambiguous to most generative AI apps. They might interpret the word to imply purely extractive, but more likely they will assume this means to be abstractive. You will need to nail down in detail what you want the AI to do. I will show you this.

What else should you be thinking about when it comes to doing compression in generative AI?

I am glad you asked.

A recent research study entitled “LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression” by Zhuoshi Pan, QianhuiWu, Huiqiang Jiang, Menglin Xia, Xufang Luo, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Victor Rühle, Yuqing Yang, Chin-Yew Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Lili Qiu, Dongmei Zhang, arXiv , March 19, 2024, made these salient points (excerpts):

“This paper focuses on task-agnostic prompt compression for better generalizability and efficiency.”
“We formulate prompt compression as a token classification problem to guarantee the faithfulness of the compressed prompt to the original one, and use a Transformer encoder as the base architecture to capture all essential information for prompt compression from the full bidirectional context.”
“Recent years have witnessed the emergence of various prompting techniques for large language models (LLMs), such as Chain-of-Thought (COT), In-context Learning (ICL), and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). These techniques empower LLMs to handle complex and varied tasks through rich and informative prompts that may exceed tens of thousands of tokens.”
“However, the benefits of such lengthy prompts come at a cost of increased computational and financial overhead, as well as the degraded information perception ability of LLMs. Prompt compression is a straightforward solution to address these issues, which attempts to shorten the original prompts without losing essential information.”

I’d like to explain some of those notable points to you.

First, one ongoing consideration is whether a compression prompt is written to be task-specific or task-agnostic.

A task-specific prompt is worded to fit a particular task at hand, such as if you were doing a compression of medical notes and you wanted the prompt to emphasize particular characteristics associated with medical lingo. The prompt is devised for that domain.

A task-agnostic prompt is broader and allows you to use it in a wide variety of circumstances. It is always best to have in your tool chest a task-agnostic prompt since you can use it on a generalized basis, plus you can tweak the wording for task-specific settings. The aim of the above research study was to focus on task-agnostic prompts for compression, which is handy for our purposes herein.

Second, we often speak of compression prompts as hopefully being faithful to the source material.

Faithfulness refers to the notion that the compression tries to retain crucial wording and not goof by removing something that will substantively undercut the meaning. Imagine that a sentence said “Do not cook for more than two minutes” and the compression lopped out the word “not”, leading to this compressed version of “Do cook for more than two minutes”. Ouch, your souffle might be ruined by your having used an unfaithful compression.

Third, an aspirational aim of compression is to be bidirectional, allowing that besides going from the source to a proper compressed version, you potentially can use the compressed version to get back to the source. This is not necessarily the case and opens quite a can of worms. Not everyone needs or expects to be able to return to the full source.

Fourth, it is worthwhile to note frequent circumstances whereby compression really shines.

Suppose that you are importing a ton of text into generative AI, see my explanation of importations prompting strategies at the link here . Or maybe you are using in-context modeling and relying on an external source of text, doing so via the use of RAG (retrieval augmented generation), see my discussion at the link here . And so on.

An important question that comes up is whether it is sensible to bring in the whole ball of wax or whether to try and somehow shorten what you need to bring in.

If you bring in a massive amount of text, you are fighting against the potential limits of generative AI. Those limits can severely degrade the results of the AI trying to cope with the text overload. You also have to consider potential costs. If you are paying for the use of generative AI, the longer-sized text is bound to be a costlier charge than if you could thin it down. Likewise, the servers used to compute the generative AI actions will consume more computational cycles and you will get a double whammy on cost.

I am sure that you immediately discern that a potential solution would be to compress the content, thus, you don’t have to confront the technical limits of the generative AI and might be able to keep your costs lower too. Whenever you are considering bringing into generative AI any large-scale body of text, please have alarm bells go off in your head that tell you to consider doing either compression or summarization. You will be glad that you considered the option.

Returning to the above research study facets, let’s see what they did and the results they found (excerpts):

“We conduct extensive experiments and analysis on both in-domain (i.e., MeetingBank) and out-of-domain datasets (i.e., LongBench, ZeroScrolls, GSM8K, and Big Bench Hard).” (ibid).
“Despite being small in size, our model shows significant performance gains over strong baselines and demonstrates robust generalization ability from GPT-3.5-Turbo to Mistral-7B.” (ibid).
“Additionally, our model is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods, while accelerating the end-to-end latency by 1.6x-2.9x with compression ratios of 2x-5x.” (ibid).

You can see that they were able to attain some impressive results.

I especially applaud research on generative AI that includes multiple generative AI apps. I say this because each generative AI app differs from the other, ergo if a study exclusively uses only one generative AI app it is hard to claim that the same approach will work equally well on other generative AI apps. Here, it is good news for us that they tried different generative AI apps and essentially found similarly positive results.

I am sure you are eager to see an example of what their compression prompt was able to achieve.

Here is one such example from their study, in this case compressing a meeting transcript snippet from a database of such transcripts (excerpt):

Original Text: “Item 15, report from City Manager Recommendation to adopt three resolutions. First, to join the Victory Pace program. Second, to join the California first program. And number three, consenting to the inclusion of certain properties within the jurisdiction in the California Hero program. It was emotion, motion, a second and public comment. CNN. Please cast your vote. Oh. Was your public comment? Yeah. Please come forward. I thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Members of the council. My name is Alex Mitchell. I represent the hero program. Just wanted to let you know that the hero program. Has been in California for the last three and a half years.”
Compressed Text: “Item 15, City Manager Recommendation adopt three resolutions. Join Victory Pace program. Join California first program. Consent inclusion properties jurisdiction California Hero program. Emotion, motion, second, public comment. Cast vote. Public comment? Come forward. Alex Mitchell, represent Hero program. Hero program in California three half years.”

The original text has 109 words, while the compressed text has 46 words. The compression removed 63 words (that’s 109 words in total minus 46 words remaining = 63 words removed). You could say that roughly 58% of the source was removed (i.e., 58% of 109 is about 63). Well over half of the source has been removed.

Now comes the tough part.

Does the compressed version suitably capture the crux of the original text?

Has anything been removed that is essential and thus the compressed version has missed the boat?

I think you can likely see how hard a problem it is to do a proper compression if you try doing the same task yourself by hand. Here’s what I am saying. I want you to look at the original text and try to compress it. What would you remove? What would you leave in? How far can you go on this process, yet still ensure that the result has the needed points and is intelligible?

A twist involves settings where the original text itself is not necessarily that intelligible. A transcript is a great example of a thorny problem. The odds are that a transcript will contain filler words and utterances. Are they worthy of being retained or should those be removed? If you exhort it is obvious to remove the utterances, the issue there is that the tenor or tone of what was said could end up being removed. Perhaps that aspect is vital to comprehending the matter.

Besides deciding whether a compression has done a good job, you might also be wondering whether there is even more compression that can be performed.

Envision that we use a compression that does a good job and reduces the size of the source to half in size. But along comes a better approach that can do the same job and achieve a three-quarters reduction in size. Assuming that all else is equal, you would naturally seek to use the three-quarters reduction approach.

This can be tricky to compare. The greater the compression in terms of reducing the size, the more likely the odds that the compression isn’t going to be as intelligible or otherwise isn’t as apt. The criteria are usually battling with each other. The more reduction, the less of a good job in the sense of being usable and appropriate. The more of a good job you want, the less reduction you can usually achieve. Darned if you do, darned if you don’t.

The Compression Prompt As A Task-Agnostic Template

Congratulations, you have waded through the weeds to get to the crescendo.

Let’s see what the prompt template of their task-agnostic compression prompt consists of (excerpt):

“System Prompt: You are an excellent linguist and very good at compressing passages into short expressions by removing unimportant words while retaining as much information as possible.”
“User Prompt: Compress the given text to short expressions, such that you can reconstruct it as close as possible to the original.”
“Unlike the usual text compression, I need you to comply with the 5 conditions below:”
“1. You can ONLY remove unimportant words.”
“2. Do not reorder the original words.”
“3. Do not change the original words.”
“4. Do not use abbreviations or emojis.”
“5. Do not add new words or symbols.”

-“Compress the original aggressively by removing words only. Compress the original as short as you can, while retaining as much information as possible. If you understand, please compress the following text: {text to compress}”

I will be using that same prompt in a moment when I show you examples using ChatGPT and GPT-4.

Let’s briefly review the prompt and see what it contains.

First, the prompt tells the generative AI to invoke a persona. For my extensive coverage of personas in generative AI, see the link here and the link here . This is a powerful prompting technique.

Personas get the AI into a computational pattern-matching mode that can significantly aid whatever task you are trying to perform. In this instance, they are telling the AI that it is to pretend to be an excellent linguist and good at compressing passages of text. Nice touch.

Many users of generative AI fail to lean into personas when doing so would be especially advantageous. The use of a persona for amping up compression is a good move. Make sure to keep personas in your mind whenever using generative AI. You’ll be glad that you did.

Second, they provide five stipulated conditions for the compression. This is good since you want to provide as much guidance as you can when asking for a compression. I mentioned earlier that the word “compression” can be ambiguous. Spelling out the five stated conditions will give the AI important clues about what to do.

Third, the phrasing for AI that you use in a prompt ought to at times be emphatic. If you aren’t emphatic, the instructions might be ignored or downplayed. For example, telling the generative AI to aggressively do the compression is a means of guiding the AI toward doing a strident job. I should note that your being emphatic has a downside. The emphatic wording, if it goes way over the top, can trigger a mathematical and computational pattern-matching storm that will distract from what you are trying to undertake.

I believe that sufficiently outlines the keystones of the prompt. Just like buying a new car, we need to take this shiny new vehicle for a drive. Get yourself strapped in and ready for a wild ride.

Showcasing The Topic Via Examples In Generative AI

I will next proceed to showcase what happens when you use compression prompting while in a conversation with generative AI. I am going to use ChatGPT and GPT-4 to showcase my examples. ChatGPT and GPT-4 are sensible choices in this case due to their immense popularity as generative AI apps. An estimated one hundred million weekly active users are said to be utilizing ChatGPT and GPT-4. That’s a staggering number.

A few quick comments before we launch into using ChatGPT and GPT-4.

If you are going to try to do the same prompts that I show here, realize that the probabilistic and statistical properties will likely produce slightly different results than what I show here. That’s the nature of generative AI and how it is devised.

You also should expect that different generative AI apps will respond in different ways. Not all generative AI apps are the same. The key is that sometimes a particular prompt will work in one generative AI app and not another. You will need to undertake a series of trial-and-error attempts to ferret this out.

There is also the timing factor. A prompt that worked today might not work the same way tomorrow. Most of the generative AI apps are continually being updated. The updates might alter internal facets that could change how the AI reacts to your prompting.

We are ready to get underway and I will begin with ChatGPT.

You can do the same in whichever generative AI app that you are using.

As a heads-up, I decided to use Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address as the text that I wanted to have compressed. There are variations of his speech that can be readily found online. I opted to use a version that contains 271 words. Our aim in this mini-experiment will be to do a compression and see if we can reduce the size, along with retaining intelligibility and vital points.

I’m sure that you already know the speech, which starts this way “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…”

Here we go.

My entered prompt into ChatGPT: “I want you to compress an essay that I am going to give you. Are you ready?”
ChatGPT generated response: “Yes, I'm ready to help compress your essay. Please provide the essay, and I'll assist you in condensing it.”
My entered prompt into ChatGPT: “Here is the text of the Gettysburg address. Go ahead and compress it.”
ChatGPT generated response: “Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, delivered during the American Civil War, reflects on the nation's founding principles of liberty and equality. He honors those who sacrificed their lives on the battlefield, emphasizing the ongoing responsibility to preserve freedom and uphold democratic government. Lincoln urges dedication to the unfinished task of ensuring the nation's survival and the continuation of its principles, emphasizing the importance of honoring the fallen and ensuring their sacrifice was not in vain.”

Take a look at the so-called compression that I got.

You right away certainly observed that the generated response is not a compression. It is more of a summary. Well, maybe not quite a summary either. It has indications that go beyond the text that was provided. This likely was tapped into by ChatGPT as per other prior data training about Abraham Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address in general during the initial setup of ChatGPT.

I’m glad this happened. You see, I wanted to show you this kind of an example to emphasize my earlier point that the word “compression” can be ambiguous. This was not the kind of compression I had in mind.

If at first, you don’t succeed, try and try again, as they say.

My entered prompt into ChatGPT: “Let’s start over. I want you to compress the material. You are to use only the material provided and compress the contents. Don’t make any interpretations. Don’t do any rewording.”
ChatGPT generated response: “Understood. Please provide the material you'd like me to compress, and I'll follow your instructions accordingly.”
My entered prompt into ChatGPT: ”Here is the text to be compressed…”
ChatGPT generated response: "87 years ago, our fathers founded a nation dedicated to liberty and equality. Now, in a great civil war, we honor those who sacrificed for our nation. It's fitting to dedicate this ground, yet their deeds surpass our words. We must continue their work, ensuring their sacrifices were not in vain. Let us resolve to uphold freedom and democratic government.”

I valiantly tried to convey to ChatGPT that I wanted a compression.

Though the result is more so a compression than the first run, it still isn’t a compression of the caliber we are looking for. One irksome thing was the “87 years ago” which is a kind of summary or interpretation of what the source says. Didn’t want that.

But I am somewhat pleased that the result came out badly because it shows that even if you try to be instructive about compression, the result still might not come out as hoped for. I think we are primed and ready to see if the compression prompting template will do any better with ChatGPT.

Are you ready to see?

Hold your breath.

My entered prompt (based on the research prompt template): “You are an excellent linguist and very good at compressing passages into short expressions by removing unimportant words while retaining as much information as possible. Compress the text I am going to give you and compress the text into short expressions, and such that you (ChatGPT) can reconstruct it as close as possible to the original. Unlike the usual text compression, I need you to comply with 5 conditions. First condition: You can ONLY remove unimportant words. Second condition: Do not reorder the original words. Third condition: Do not change the original words. Fourth condition: Do not use abbreviations or emojis. Fifth condition: Do not add new words or symbols. Make sure to compress the original text aggressively by removing words only. Compress the original text as short as you can, while retaining as much information as possible. Do you understand these instructions?”
ChatGPT generated response : “Yes, I understand the instructions. Please provide the text you'd like me to compress.”
My entered prompt: ”Here is the text to be compressed…”
ChatGPT generated response: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, a final resting place for those who gave their lives. It is fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, consecrate, hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, consecrated it. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living to be dedicated to the unfinished work they who fought here have nobly advanced. It is for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause—that we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish.”

Finally, we got a compression.

We are now in the right ballpark.

The compressed result has 217 words.

The original text has 271 words, while the compressed text has 217 words. The compression removed 54 words (that’s 271 words in total minus 217 words remaining = 54 words removed). You could say that roughly 20% of the source was removed (i.e., 20% of 271 is about 54). Approximately one-fifth was removed.

I dare say that’s not a compression ratio to be overly elated about. Look, I’m glad that we got the 20%, and I don’t like to look a gift horse in the mouth. It would seem intuitively we might be able to do better.

Note that the prompt doesn’t give a target level of compression. This is something you might consider adding to the prompt. I would first start without a target and just see what you get. Once you’ve seen the result of a first run, go ahead and consider redoing the prompt with a desired target level.

We must also of course consider whether the compressed version is any good at the get-go.

In the case of something like the Gettysburg Address, we could argue forever about the portions that were removed. It is tough since the entire speech is remarkable. Nearly every line and each word is astounding. Imagine trying to compress a poem, and the odds are that you will be leaving out facets that will break your heart.

Another reminder is that you should carefully consider what text you are going to compress and whether the compression, no matter how it works, will be able to reasonably do justice to the original text.

I went ahead and played with the compression prompt template and tried all kinds of variations. In the end, I decided that ChatGPT just doesn’t have the gravitas to go much further on this. I became exasperated and thought that for sure GPT-4, being more advanced than ChatGPT, would do a better job.

Let’s try using GPT-4 and see what happens.

My entered prompt into GPT-4: “I want you to compress an essay that I am going to give you. Here is the text to be compressed…”
GPT-4 generated response:

“To compress the text while retaining its essence, I'll remove some parts and rephrase others for brevity.”

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers founded a new nation on this continent, dedicated to liberty and the belief that all men are created equal. We are now in the midst of a great civil war, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived, can endure. We meet on a battle-field of that war, dedicating a part of it as a final resting place for those who gave their lives for this nation's survival. It's fitting and proper we do this.

“Yet, we can't dedicate, consecrate, or hallow this ground beyond what the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have done. The world may not remember our words, but it can't forget their deeds. It's our task to be dedicated to the unfinished work they've advanced so nobly. From these honored dead we take increased devotion to their cause, resolving that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of, by, and for the people shall not perish."

“The compressed text has been reduced to 176 words.”

End of GPT-4 response

You can see that I first tried a vague prompt about compression.

Sure enough, the compression included rephrasing, which isn’t what I had in mind. No problem. You can’t expect generative AI to be reading minds (well, you soon can, as I explain is being researched, see my coverage at the link here ).

Similar to what I had done with ChatGPT, I will next try a compression prompt based on some simple wording. I will also include a target level of compression so you can see how that impacts the result.

Here’s what took place.

My entered prompt into GPT-4: “Do the compression over again. You cannot do any rephrasing this time. You can only remove words. Compress as much as possible while abiding by these rules. Try to aim for a result that has 100 words or less.”

“To compress the text by only removing words without rephrasing, I'll select key sentences and phrases that capture the essence of the original message while significantly reducing the length. Given the constraints, this selection process aims to preserve the core themes of unity, dedication, and the importance of the struggle while adhering to the word count limit.”

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. It is for us the living, to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced."

“The condensed version of the text is approximately 99 words in size while adhering to the rule of only removing words without rephrasing.”

Seems like GPT-4 did what I asked.

As always, it is important to gauge the intelligibility and aptness of the compression. I won’t delve into that here, other than to say it seemed basically on par with what might be expected, especially given the severe constraint of being around 100 words or less.

We are ready to try the compression prompt template.

My entered prompt into GPT-4 (based on the research prompt template): “You are an excellent linguist and very good at compressing passages into short expressions by removing unimportant words while retaining as much information as possible. Compress the text I am going to give you and compress the text into short expressions, and such that you (ChatGPT) can reconstruct it as close as possible to the original. Unlike the usual text compression, I need you to comply with 5 conditions. First condition: You can ONLY remove unimportant words. Second condition: Do not reorder the original words. Third condition: Do not change the original words. Fourth condition: Do not use abbreviations or emojis. Fifth condition: Do not add new words or symbols. Make sure to compress the original text aggressively by removing words only. Compress the original text as short as you can, while retaining as much information as possible. Do you understand these instructions?”
GPT-4 generated response : “Yes, I understand the instructions. Please provide the text you'd like me to compress.”
My entered prompt into GPT4: ”Here is the text to be compressed…”
GPT-4 generated response: “Four score seven years ago fathers brought forth continent, new nation, conceived Liberty, dedicated proposition men created equal. Now engaged great civil war, testing whether nation, any nation conceived dedicated, can long endure. Met great battle-field war. Come dedicate portion field, final resting place who gave lives nation might live. Altogether fitting proper do this. But, larger sense, can not dedicate—not consecrate—not hallow—ground. Brave men, living dead, struggled, have consecrated, above our power add detract. World will little note, nor long remember say here, but never forget did here. For us living, rather, dedicated here unfinished work fought have nobly advanced. Rather for us here dedicated great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead take increased devotion cause gave last full measure devotion—that here highly resolve dead not died in vain—that nation, under God, shall new birth freedom—and government people, by people, for people, shall not perish earth.”

Note that I didn’t give a target level this time and thus the size of the result was based on the general tenor of the compression prompt about being aggressive on the compression.

The original text has 271 words, while the compressed text has 156 words. The compression removed 115 words (that’s 271 words in total minus 156 words remaining = 115 words removed). You could say that roughly 42% of the source was removed (i.e., 42% of 271 is about 115). We were nearing maybe half being removed. Remarkable.

I’ll mention that as always, we would want to closely scrutinize the compressed version. All the other caveats I’ve mentioned still apply.

My recommendation to you is that you try doing some compression prompting exercises via whichever generative AI app you are customarily using. Do so now, before you suddenly discover the need to do a compression. It would be wise to be prepared.

Proceed as follows. First, make use of vague compression prompts and see what happens. Next, fine-tune those prompts and look anew at what happens. Then, try the mentioned compression prompt and gauge how it goes for you. Tweak the prompt as needed. Keep on practicing until you feel you’ve gotten the right swing of things. Reward yourself accordingly.

A final thought for now on this matter.

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, the famed British statesman, and journalist, said this about compression: “The essence of a quote is the compression of a mass of thought and observation into a single saying.”

Compression is not an easy task. Any wanton approach can easily do compression if you are willing to toss intelligibility and aptness out the window. Getting generative AI to do erstwhile compression requires soundness on the part of the person entering the prompts. They also need to carefully review the result and not wantonly hand off the compressed version to others who might be unaware of what the original had to say.

Please remember that I energetically asked you to consider practicing doing compressions in generative AI, so that when the day arrives that you must do so, you are ready with the axe firmly in hand.

The last line today suitably goes to Abraham Lincoln: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax."

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Why and how I believe in miracles
So yes, I believe in miracles. Which is to say, I surrender in trust to a God who will stop at nothing to bring about our salvation. A God who is intimately close, present, and involved. A God who is in all things, interacting with all things, restoring all things in the name of love. This column appears in the June 2023 issue.
C.S. Lewis on Miracles: Why They Are Possible and Significant
Notes: 1 C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 81. 2 C.S. Lewis, Miracles (1947; reprt., San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 18. 3 My approach to explaining Lewis's perspective on miracles has been influenced by Art Lindsley's excellent book C.S. Lewis's Case for Christ: Insights from Reason, Imagination and Faith (Downers Grove ...
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In "Of Miracles," Hume claims to have discovered an argument that will check what he calls "all superstitious delusion.". It is based on this definition of a miracle: "A transgression of ...
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I believe In miracles. Ata very young age I began to get an Idea of what a miracle was. Dialing H. Oaks defines a miracle as "a beneficial event brought about through divine power that mortals do not understand and themselves cannot duplicate. " When I was SIX years old I had my first experience when a miracle took place In my life.
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The miracles of Jesus in the Gospels certainly display his kindness toward human need and suffering (e.g., Mark 1:41), building the readers' trust in the Savior they love and follow. They also accredit Jesus as a divinely authorized spokesman for God, to whom all people should listen (Acts 2:22). They also reveal his unique person, with ...
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In 2007, a survey of almost 36,000 Americans, age 18 to 70-plus, found that 78 percent of people under age 30 believed in miracles, and 79 percent among those older than 30 (Pew Research Center ...
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834 Words. 4 Pages. Open Document. Believing in Miracles. An important stage in this course of RE is that of the belief in God. The belief in God has many different aspects to learn, one of which is the belief in miracles and how miracles lead us to believe that God exists. This essay will look at the two sides of believing in miracles.
Is it rational to believe in miracles?
Extend. Listen to the full podcast episode Miracles in an age of science. Then, in pairs, record your own 5-10 min podcast episode exploring the question 'Is it rational to believe in miracles.'. Although miracles are extraordinary, there are good reasons to take Jesus' miracles seriously and consider what they say about his identity.
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Perhaps as many as 90 percent of new converts who join a house church in China credit their conversion to faith healing. In Kenya, 71 percent of Christians say they have witnessed a divine healing ...
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"To walk in nature is to witness a thousand miracles." "I believe that tomorrow is another day and I believe in miracles." "There are only two ways to live your life: One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." ~Albert Einstein "Don't wait for miracles, your whole life is a miracle."
Can We Believe in Miracles?
Hume, David (1748) "Of Miracles" Kahneman, Daniel and Amos Tversky (1996) "On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions" Shapiro, Lawrence (2013) "A Drop in the Sea," Aeon Magazine, 11/1/2013. Van Inwagen, Peter (1998) "Of 'Of Miracles'" Related Essays. Take My Word for It: On Testimony by Spencer Case. Conspiracy Theories by Jared ...
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The answer to the question is straight and simple. Being a Christian is all about believing in miracles. Following Jesus and receiving abundance in life is all about believing ( John 10:10 ). As the Word says in 2 Corinthians 5:7, a true believer walks by faith and not by what we sight. In other words, we walk and live our daily lives by what ...
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Hume on Miracles Essay. It is evident in David Hume's writing of "An Equity Concerning Human Understanding" that he does not believe that miracles take place. Hume is a man of logic, who believes in experience over knowledge. Of course it is hard for such a man to believe in extraordinary claims without being there to witness them.
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Essay on Miracles
A miracle is a difficult term to define because it depends on the individual's perspective and experience. Generally speaking, miracles can be considered to be natural and unnatural acts of God or series of unlikely events occurring concurrently- coincidences. I believe miracles and coincidences can both be seen as a series of unlikely ...
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Paul Tillich's anti-realist understanding of miracles. Tillich defines miracles as having these three components: 1: "an event which is astonishing, unusual, shaking, without contradicting the rational structure of reality". 2: "points to the mystery of being, expressing its relation to us in a definite way.
Is it Rational to Believe in Miracles?| National Catholic Register
"People tend to think that 'If you believe in miracles, you clearly can't be taking science seriously,' and 'If you're taking science seriously, you clearly can't believe in miracles
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Miracles are important to Christians because it gives them even more faith and makes them believe god is real, helping and watching over them. Many Christians believe that miracles in which people are healed of incurable illnesses are proof that God exists and that he is involved in the world today. Even scientists cannot explain these cases.
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Order custom essay Do You Believe in Miracles with free plagiarism report 450+ experts on 30 subjects Starting from 3 hours delivery Get Essay Help. Although the belief in miracles have seemly been acknowledged as factual for centuries in works such as the Bible, many philosophers and scientists still question the validity of a miraculous event ...
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