freeinfidel

It seems as though another miracle worker may turn out to be nothing but a fraud. We all long for the fantastic in our lives, but attributing events to miracles is self-deluding and often dangerous. The rational mind is a better defence against life’s dangers, and when it’s applied, miracles appear to dissolve away.

If you are a couple desperate for a child, it’s understandable that you might turn to unorthodox methods. You might even pray for a miracle. However, I’d like to think that most people would think twice about putting themselves, and their money, in the hands of a self-styled ‘archbishop’ who claims to be able to produce those miracles to order.

Gilbert Deya is currently facing extradition from the UK to his homeland of Kenya to answer five charges of child stealing. His wife has already been convicted of similar offences. Yet over 34,000 people have joined Deya’s church, the Gilbert Deya Ministries, many of them seeking the miracle babies that are the Kenyan’s speciality.

Women who weren’t even pregnant suddenly have babies that they claim were provided by divine intervention. When the police raided the Deya’s own home, they found a number of children that the couple claimed were produced by Mrs Deya in a kind of serial miracle. The problem is, DNA tests show no links between the putative parents and their claimed ‘miracle’ children. Forged birth registrations have also been uncovered.

On the face of it, this seems like a clear case of fraud, of a skilled confidence trickster preying on the fears, desperation and - yes, let’s be honest - gullibility of those who suppress their critical faculties in the face of their desires.

This isn’t the first time. Throughout history, snake-oil salesmen of all kinds, many in religious robes, have exploited people’s willingness to believe, their desire for the fantastic and their craving for instant solutions to their problems. That same willingness manifests itself in the readiness of some to accept, even look for, miracles.

Those of us who prefer rational analysis to joyous credulity find ourselves speechless with amazement at what some people will attribute to the miraculous powers of a unseen deity who seems willing to meddle in our lives, but only in a sporadic, partial and seemingly random manner.

In the case of Alcides Moreno, the young man who recently fell 500ft from the top of a building and survived, the doctor at the (Presbyterian) hospital to which he was taken said: “If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one.” Of course, Morneo’s brother, Edgar, was killed in the same fall, so I guess that wouldn’t be a miracle. Maybe the answer is, if you want to see Alcides’ survival as a miracle, be careful not to look at Edgar.

The ‘miracles’ that the Roman Catholic church is prepared to accept as proof of saintliness can strike we rationalists as either bizarrely trivial or highly improbable. The Vatican does, of course, make a show of investigating claims of miraculous achievements as part of the beatification process. But it starts from a position of stunning credulousness anyway. And most applications for saintdom are in the church’s interest.

Your average believer is even less rigorous when attributing phenomena to divine meddling.

Take the story of the Dominguez family who survived three days in blizzard conditions in California. The reason they survived is that they did the right things - huddling together, not eating snow (because the father remembered that it leads to hypothermia) and so on. Knowledge, intelligence and commonsense - those are what kept the family alive. So what does the doctor who treated them say? “There’s a miracle from God in there somewhere.” If I were the Dominguez family, I’d be pissed off with that comment, with having one’s own intelligence, perseverance and courage ignored in favour of giving the credit to the doctor’s imaginary friend.

And note the doctor’s words. “Somewhere.” In fact, these survival stories are not so uncommon. And there are perfectly rational explanations for why these particular people survived. No supernatural explanation is necessary. Yet the doctor felt the need to look for one. There is nothing he could point to and say, “This just can’t happen without god’s help”, and yet he still felt the need to give credit to an unseen force when the people who deserved it were his patients.

We hear this all the time. The willingness to attribute survival, wishes granted and hopes fulfilled, or great achievements to a ‘miracle’, when a more credible explanation can be found in the skills, dedication and sheer effort of those involved, tells us a great deal the need of some members of society - those who actually believe in miracles in the first place - to have their faith confirmed by events in the material world.

Which is strange, because isn’t that contrary to the whole idea of faith?

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