On the fifth of November, 2009, Nidal Malik Hasan, a mentally disturbed US Army Major, walked into the offices where he worked at the US military base at Fort Hood, Texas. After bowing his head for a few seconds, Hasan, a Muslim, reportedly jumped on a table, shouted “Allāhu Akbar” (“God is the greatest” in Arabic) and opened fire, killing 13 people and wounding 30.
Immediately after the incident, the same thing happened that happens after every such tragedy. People saw the hand of god all over the incident. Their god. The badly injured proclaimed it a "miracle" that they had survived the shooting, the slightly injured saw a miracle in the fact that they were not badly hurt, and to those unaffected, but in the proximity of the shooting, it was a miracle that the gunman had passed them by. Each person basically looked one circle in closer to the tragedy and declared it a miracle that they were one circle out.
Meanwhile, those nowhere near the disaster proclaimed it a miracle that more people weren't killed and still others saw a miracle in the (true and admirable) heroism of police officer Mark Todd in taking down Hasan before he took more lives. Paradoxically, but predictably, Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Muslim Imam, who allegedly inspired and incited the attack, proclaimed it a miracle from Allah that the attack occurred in the first place and that 13 "American Infidels" were killed.
So many miracles. Overlapping and inconsistent.
This is nothing peculiar to the Fort Hood shootings. It happens every time there is a tragedy or near tragedy of any kind, anywhere in the world. Captain "Sully" Sullenberger pilots a distressed plane to land safely the Hudson River in New York City and nobody is killed, and it's a miracle from God; a young girl is found in India, totally terrorized, but alive after being abducted and raped for a week, and it’s a miracle from Rama (or Vishnu or Shiva) that she is returned to her parents; an earthquake kills 5,000 people in Tibet, it's a fortune not of a god, but of Karma that more people weren't killed; or a family in Northern Pakistan survives an errant American drone attack, and it’s a miracle from Allah.
What all these proclamations of miraculous intervention miss is the downside of the incidents. The fact that the passengers and crew of Flight 1549 were terrorized and the plane destroyed, that 13 innocent people are dead at Fort Hood, that the girl was held for seven days, raped and sodomized and will be traumatized for the rest of her life, the 5,000 dead and 20,000 injured in the quake, or that a number of innocent civilians were killed by the drone.
Of course, none of these incidents really are "miracles," they are tragedies, from end to end. And that's just the point. When the totality of facts are taken into account, "miracles" turn out to be nothing more than people ignoring the downside of a set of facts, focusing solely on the "good" and calling the quarantined "good" a "miracle." One might as well ignore the four legs of a table and declare it a miracle that the tabletop remains suspended in midair.
Upon the slightest critical reflection, the "miracle" quickly disappears. In any tragedy, there will be victims and lucky survivors. If all survived, it would not count as a tragedy and if all died, well, we’d all be dead. This is neither miraculous nor unusual, it is everyday life. Every cloud may have a silver lining, but there is nothing miraculous about the silver.
The usual answer given by adherents of the Great Pretend to the observation that, if the relevant god really was bent on performing a miracle, why did he allow the tragedy to occur at all, is that the “bad facts” that gave stage for the climactic miraculous intervention were all humans’ doing and that God/Allah/Yahweh/Brahma etc. swooped in at the last minute to save the day. The classic case is the recovered drug addict or cancer patient who confidently declares it a miracle that they are still alive. Their wasted years living in a drug induced haze or years of struggling against the disease are conveniently assigned to human imperfections or, in extreme cases, to the “devil” or some other malevolent being, but the recovery or cure is unquestioningly assigned to their chosen deity.
This methodology of retrospectively assigning good facts to the good deity and bad facts to imperfect humans or the evil deity also has the convenient fringe benefit of making the putative god immune to disproof. Evidence against its miraculous intents, such as “well, if God was intent on protecting you, why did he still allow you to spend five years as a cocaine addict,” is countered with (the ironically true) “well, that was all my doing.”
Let me make a prediction. The next time there is a tragedy anywhere in the World, be it in India, China, the USA, Egypt, South America, or anywhere else, the local population will proclaim that the miraculous intervention of their god(s) saved the day. Over the course of the next year (whenever you happen to be reading this letter) there will be miracles from God, Yahweh, Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, and hundreds of other contemporary deities. The next time a mine or church collapses anywhere in poor South America, it will be a miracle from the Christian god that nobody was killed. If only a few people die, it will be a miracle that more weren't killed. If all die, it will be a miracle that a statue (or painting) survived. Quite possibly, the surviving art work will attain a local fame equal to Guatemala's Black Jesus. People will pray to it. Watch this space.
Who knows, perhaps competing gods are all sitting up in the sky, watching the Earth and selectively intervening with miracles in the geographical areas of the planet where their believers live and ignoring all other parts of the World. Perhaps the many Hindu gods are drumming up miracles in India, Allah is intervening to kill Americans in Iraq, while God protects Americans over the Hudson. Gods carving up the worldwide believers market in flagrant breach of the Antitrust laws.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, all this is just silly. Isn't it more likely that the millions of daily “miracles” and the gods who perform them exist solely in our minds. That we see miracles in tragedies because we so want to see them. We as a species are distraught by tragedy and cannot stand the thought that there is no divine justice. Nobody there to punish the bad and reward the good. No "ying" to balance the "yang." It makes us feel good to think of gods and miracles. It evens things up, relieves pain and provides security. How often do you hear the victims of crime or other injustice mention that they are comforted by the fact that their perpetrator will “go to hell” or otherwise face divine retribution. As an atheist, I would love a dollar for every Christian I have debated who has smugly taken comfort in telling me that I will burn in the Christian hell for eschewing the Christian god. It was George Bernard Shaw who remarked, “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented hell.”
On the flip side, if we ourselves survive a disaster, we feel a need to thank our god, lest it consider us ungrateful and the next time we might not be so lucky. Human psychology 101.
If all these "miracles" really were the acts of god, why can we predict with complete and absolute certainty when and how they will occur, and why do they occur all over the world with blind indifference to the faith or worth of their beneficiaries? More fundamentally, why are all "miracles," without exception, perfectly explicable by natural events. The author is reminded of Lourdes, where thousands of gullible Christians visit each year in vain search of a miracle cure to their (often terminal) illnesses. It never really happens, but the crowds keep coming.
If a god really wanted to reveal itself through a miracle, what would be easier than making a big public display of it so as to remove doubt - descending over an earthquake and stopping the rumbling, having a guardian angel appear and stop the Fort Hood shooter in his tracks, actually showing at Lourdes for once - you get the picture. Well, of course, this never happens, and it is so far-fetched that it even seems silly to suggest it. The skeptic’s poignant observation that miracles are always perfectly explicable by natural events is met with the shallow rebuke “god moves in mysterious ways” or the equally vacuous “god does not want to reveal himself, so that we have real faith.” Sounds a lot like exactly what they would have to say if there is no god.
Maybe it's time to grow up as a species. Maybe, as a child eventually, if reluctantly, sheds its Santa Clause and pretend friends, we adults should intellectually outgrow our invisible, wish-granting sky-fairies. Imagine for a moment, as John Lennon implored us to do, a World without religion. Imagine if all the billions of dollars in time, effort and hard cash that we spend worldwide on religion each year were instead funneled into something real and worthwhile, like reducing poverty, improving education or protecting the environment. We could probably make huge strides toward curing the chosen ill.
Now that would be a miracle.
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