Nehaveigur

When I say that I have experienced miracles, I mean that I witnessed things that are unlikely to have happened by chance. My “miracles” are interesting coincidences, nothing more. I assumed that it was obvious that I didn’t mean the word literally. I don’t believe that those events had supernatural causes or contained a message sent by God.

I’m aware that there are people who believe in actual miracles. I was brought up Catholic and it’s the religion I’m most familiar with, and still have a fondness for, even though I’ve been an atheist for my entire adult life. I’m not even spiritual in any meaningful way. Yet I sometimes still feel what Catholics describe as grace, and I’m grateful that this is possible without having to believe in a literal God or anything else that’s supernatural. The existence of grace does not imply the validity of belief and neither does the apparent fine-tuning of the universe.

Catholics are supposed to believe in miracles, but I think most of them are privately ambivalent about whether the Church’s official miracles are actually acts of God. I didn’t appreciate that there are serious thinkers who believe in miracles. But apparently there are. Ross Douthat has recently written a book in which he seriously claims that literal miracles exist, and that believing so is reasonable. Here is a good review and here is one that contains an unusual amount of misdirection. I briefly considered writing a rebuttal but then realized I just don’t have enough time. Even if I did, all the old arguments for the existence of God (there are no new ones) have been rebutted many times over, and doing so yet again isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.