A priest in a local parish recently included in his homily a quote that appears to be a variant of something Thomas Aquinas said. The priest phrased it thusly: “For those who don’t believe, no miracle is enough; for those who believe, no miracle is necessary.” Aquinas’s quote is a little different: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The order is different, but the idea is the same.
The quote has a certain rhetorical symmetry to it, a certain parallel structure that makes it resonate in believers’ minds. That symmetry makes it more memorable, and that memorableness combined with its emotional resonance means it will stick.
The quote will seem clever as well. In believers’ view, it encapsulates both the weakness of the skeptic’s position and the strength of the believer’s. It creates a simple juxtaposition that both validates their own position and invalidates the position of opponents. In short, it’s the perfect rhetorical flourish believers can take home with them and use when talking to or about skeptics.
Like many rhetorical constructions, however, this one ultimately fails because of its oversimplification of both sides of the structure. From the skeptic’s point of view, it represents neither the skeptic’s position nor the believer’s position accurately. It is filled with generalizations and question-begging most believers would not notice.
The first part of this quote deals with skeptics. The assertion is that no miraculous event could convince the skeptic. There is some degree of truth to that. Were someone to rise from the dead, for example, the skeptic’s first response would not be, “Oh, this is possible proof of God’s existence.” Rather, she would begin looking for natural explanations. Even if no natural explanation were obvious, the skeptic would not default to a supernatural explanation. Rather, the skeptic would simply say, “We don’t know.” So in that sense, the assertion is correct: it’s doubtful that anything so puzzling could happen that a skeptic would move beyond a simple “I don’t know” into a theistic explanation based on the supernatural suspension of natural laws.
Believers, though, already primed for belief, eagerly accept as miraculous anything they can’t understand. It’s the argument from incredulity, which could be framed thusly: “I don’t understand how this could happen, therefore God must have done it.” Much creationist theorizing that attempts to refute the clear evidence of evolution lies along these lines.
This is no to say theists are not willing to admit ignorance. Indeed, when pressed on contradictions in their faith, the fall-back position is often simple: “God is a mystery.”
“Why would a loving god allow such suffering among children who can gain nothing from it and who simply suffer?” the skeptic asks.
“I don’t really know. I just know God has a plan, and that this is somehow part of that plan,” the believer responds.
The second element of the quote in question that we need to examine is the nature of miracles: A miracle is the suspension of natural laws. Yet because it is is it a suspension of natural laws, there’s no way to test a miracle to prove that it is a miracle. All of our knowledge is bound up in the natural laws that govern the universe. The suspension of those laws in order to create a miracle would be indistinguishable from a new law or principle we have yet to discover, and as miracles are one-time events, there’s no way we could test it to prove that it was not, in fact, some bizarre quantum event but instead a miracle. So in that sense, this assertion is correct: because skeptics generally deny the possibility of miracles, it would not even be an option.
Yet if the purpose of miracles was to convince skeptics, an omniscient god would know exactly what it would take to convince a skeptic. The Christian god’s very characteristics make this merely a question of will: if this god exists and it wants a skeptic to believe, it knows what it would take and would merely need to do this. The fact that it doesn’t suggests — again, if it exists — that it chooses not to, that it doesn’t want to.
The quote from the believer’s side is quite disingenuous, but it’s not immediately obvious. It states that “for those who believe, no miracle is necessary.” This suggests that miracles are secondary to some other method of conviction. But if we’re discussing Christianity (as the priest obviously was and as Aquinas was), the entire religion is based on faith in a central miracle: the resurrection of an executed first-century Jew. So in fact, the quote has it exactly backward: the central tenant of the Christian belief system is a miracle.
When discussing why they believe in this miracle, Christians point to accounts of the event in the New Testament and to personal experiences they claim to have had with “the risen Christ.” In order to accept the accounts in the New Testament, one has to have a certain degree of confidence in the accuracy of the New Testament’s accounts, and given the fact that there is not a single eye-witness account in the whole collection of books but instead multiple second- and third-hand accounts decades after the event, most skeptics find the Biblical evidence weak at best. On the other hand, to accept the authenticity of a believer’s accounts of personal inner experiences with Jesus, skeptics must necessarily accept that believer’s interpretation of that inner event. No one would doubt that the believer had that moment of clarity, that experience of warmth and love that they claim. However, just because a believer had that experience doesn’t mean that experience came from some god or other. Believers are often looking for reasons to believe: they’re looking for miracles large and small. They’re seeking these quasi-mystical experiences with their god. Since they’re looking for them, they often find them. As Augustine of Hippo said, “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”
Yet a believer Is likely to protest that such an analysis is going too far. “It’s about skeptics’ calls for miracles to aid in belief now. ‘God, give me a miracle so I believe!’ skeptics proclaim, but this quote is suggesting that’s not necessary for believers.” Skeptics are skeptical, though, not because there are no miracles today; we’re skeptical because we find the evidence for the source of any potential miracles lacking. To look at an event, proclaim it a miracle, then use that as evidence for a god is question-begging: it assumes the god exists in the first place. It works backward to an unwarranted assumption. Skeptics see things that believers proclaim to be miracles and say, “Now hold on — there’s probably another way to explain that phenomenon.” And if there’s not, skeptics will simply say, “We don’t know how to explain it.”
In the end, the quote is just as much an indictment of believers’ question-begging as it is of skeptics’ lack of faith.