Where’s the Magic?
A Critical Look at Miracles
Is any one of you sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick, the Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail.…(James 14–16)
I was in the eighth grade in rural Virginia. New to the South and with only a glancing acquaintance with religion, I listened enrapt at our cafeteria table as my friend recounted the revival her family had attended over the weekend. A man in a wheelchair had been able to stand up and walk! A lady had her migraine disappear when the pastor touched her head! She kept describing miracle after miracle as people came forward and were cured by the laying on of hands.
I went back to class with my head spinning. This was a bombshell! If I ever got sick or hurt, all I would have to do would be go to her church, and her pastor would cure me. Soon, everybody would be going there. Everyone would be healthy again! This was going to be big!
A Child’s Logic
It didn’t happen though. People kept getting sick, hurt, and dying. I didn’t understand why the news hadn’t covered that revival. Certainly this was big enough to follow up with those cured and put it on the front page of the paper? Why weren’t sick people going to that church?
Soon the whole episode was swallowed into the time-warp of childhood. But I never forgot it. For it had informed me, from the experience of adults, that magic was possible on Earth. If a pastor asked god to perform miracles, he would do them.
Later, in college, I remembered my friend’s story. I had been born again during my freshman year and become involved with a Christian club on campus. We attended a “spirit-filled” church in a converted barn in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, where everyone spoke in tongues and the elders would prophecy and sometimes cure people with the laying on of hands.
Everyone except me, that is. I had been “baptized in the spirit” in the dorm room of one of the campus club’s leaders. His name was Kevin and he had performed a whole little ceremony and laid his hands on me, but somehow it didn’t take. I kept waiting to feel the Spirit fill me and pour the tongues out of my mouth. It felt like god was displeased with me, like I didn’t have enough faith. Finally, I decided to try putting some real effort into it instead of waiting for god to do all the work. So I prayed for the gift of tongues, then started vibrating my vocal cords and moving my lips.
Voila!
I can still do it. Anybody can, actually.
I now realize, and freely admit, that I was faking the tongues. At the time however, I dodged it in my mind. Everyone else seemed to have just as much control over their “gift” as I did. The pastor would even schedule periods within the services for the congregation to pray in a cacophony of tongues, then call out “Amen” for us all to cease.
So I must have been doing it right. And when I got a nasty cold and went back to Kevin’s room for “healing,” I convinced myself that the holy spirit had entered me through his hands and had cured it. Even though I really didn’t feel any better. Because if god could raise up someone from a wheelchair in my friend’s church, my cold was child’s play for him. And when I woke up the next morning refreshed and much improved, I attributed it to god’s promised magic, not my immune system.
Inverted Logic
God promises us miracles, we pray for miracles, and once in a blue moon, we actually experience miracles. The dog gets out of the fence, we miss our flight because we were out looking for the dog, then that plane crashes. Was it random? Or was it because grandma was praying for our safety? It’s easy credit the prayer, because after all, what were the odds?
The odds always seem to argue in favor of divine intervention. But to see the whole picture, we need to figure in all the odds. How many people on that plane also had someone of faith praying for their safety but nevertheless died in the crash? How many people who survived the crash or also missed their flight, were not Christians and had no one praying for them at all?
All evidence of miracles is anecdotal. This doesn’t make them untrue, it just distorts their prevalence and the affiliation of their beneficiaries. We hear about the prayerful Christian cancer victim whose tumors miraculously go into remission, baffling doctors. Stories are never told, however, about the millions of the faithful whose prayers for a cure fail to prevent their death from cancer, even after a faith-healer lays his hands on them. Nobody writes these stories because they are unremarkable. They happen all the time. Likewise we don’t hear about the Hindu, the atheist, or the imprisoned pedophile, whose cancers also went into a mysterious remission, baffling doctors. Because god is not involved.
On balance, it can be concluded that miracles seem to be just as prevalent among non-believers and adherents of other religions as they are among Christians. In both populations they are rare, but seem to be publicized mainly among evangelicals. Because in their case, god is involved.
The rarity of answered prayer and other miracles does not detract from evangelical theology. God’s refusal to grant prayerful requests is rationalized as his hearing the request but saying no, his teaching us some kind of lesson, his testing our faithfulness, his purifying us through fire, or his notoriously inscrutable will.
I would add to that list the fact that god could not perform every miracle requested of him even if he wanted to. When two baseball teams are both praying for a win, only one team’s outfielder can be stung by a bee at the precise moment he’s trying to catch a fly ball, allowing the third baseman to slide into home for the decisive run. When believers in every town on Florida’s Atlantic coast are praying that theirs won’t be the town hit by the hurricane, one of them is going to hear god’s “no” with a vengeance.
Invisible Logic
None of this means that miracles don’t happen, that they cannot be caused by the hand of the god of the Bible, or that magic cannot exist on Earth. It does mean that we can’t know whether any miraculous event is caused by that god, other supernatural forces, or just that one-in-a-million chance actually happening, because lotteries eventually have to be won by somebody.
My only objection is to the verse in James, and all the others that promise magic from heaven to faithful believers. Why does god make promises he doesn’t plan to deliver? Why does the verse not say “…the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick if this is within god’s inscrutable will, and if god is not using that person’s illness and death to teach someone else a lesson, and if god is not using that person’s death to test someone else’s faith, and if god is not using that person’s illness to purify them or another believer through fire”?
We can’t know what causes the events that appear to us to be miraculous. We also can’t know why they occur, and why they occur to the specific people who experience them. What we can know is that if our Bible as written and translated for us truly is the word of god, then god is lying to us. He is promising magic and not delivering on that promise. He is causing countless Christian believers to doubt themselves, wondering if god is punishing them for their insufficient faith.
And the kids, let’s not forget the head trip it puts on the kids. Word has it that there was even a 13-year-old girl in Virginia once who was lying awake at 11:30 pm on Christmas eve, in heavy debate with herself. She was deciding whether to go outside to the stable to see whether her horses would talk to her. Because that’s what a friend at school said could happen at the stroke of midnight on that magical date. And she had got it from her pastor.
It’s not publicly known whether that girl made that little trip in the cold. But I have it on good authority that she ended up becoming an agnostic.
