Taking A Look At The ‘Miracle’ At Wattala
“ David Hume proposed that a claim of a miracle has one sure test of veracity: the possibility of the miracle not happening should be even more crazy than the possibility that it did.” ~ Wattala Claim
I have no desire to run down any religion and I am sans any religion. On the other hand, I am impelled to examine claims that are tantamount to a war on science -claims that can only serve to deceive a gullible public. The latest sensational story is a tale about an alleged miracle at St Anne’s Church in Wattala, Sri Lanka – a dominantly Catholic suburb.
The claim is made by the Parish priest himself-Revd Father Sanjeev Mendis – listening to the story told by a young woman who reportedly said that she saw drops of sweat pouring down the visage of a picture of Jesus given to her by some priests who brought the picture from Chalakkuddi in India. “We had family problems for some time and these subsided since the miracle began,” said this woman. “I have experienced some strange feelings which are hard to explain ever since this miracle began.”
Religion Depends on Miracles
Religious institutions world over and through the ages have depended on miracle stories to boost their faithful numbers. I say this is yet another one like the old ones. Persons in authority like the priest in this case should be doubly careful before they spread a narrative of this sort; they have a responsibility to tell the truth.
The Bible relates many such miracles during the time of Christ. The very resurrection from a state of death of Jesus Christ has been the centrepiece. Turning water into wine and feeding thousands of people with just one loaf of bread are just a few of the biblical stories.
Among the modern ones include the miracle at Lourdes and the miracle at Fatima, Portugal. Australian national pride was heightened when the Pope recently canonised one of her citizens, Mary Mckillop, as “saint” for having “successfully interceded to cure a cancer patient.” The Buddhists-although adherents of an atheist religion – have their own stories about “Iddi balaya, ” which is a kind of ability to levitate and fly through air without any mechanical device like an aeroplane. The latter power is alleged to have happened not by divine intervention, however, but by effective deep meditation.
Violate Natural Laws
These tales do one thing: they claim certain happenings that violate natural laws, which form the very heart of scientific and technological investigation. The God -believers’ stories are that it is divine or supernatural intervention. The ‘supernatural influence,’ contradicts natural laws and naturalistic explanation for phenomena. The simple reason is that we never experience such interruptions in natural laws in any general sense save for a few and far-between isolated personal stories or anecdotes.
David Hume on Miracles
David Hume, the 18th century Scottish philosopher and an intellectual giant in the history of the philosophical enterprise, gave the best logical repudiation of miracle tales-to date. Hume wrote his account in his, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” Even Professor Richard Dawkins does little more than develop on what Hume did say. David Hume first posits through the evidence of our experience that there is a defining regularity in the universe that is reflected in what are deemed laws of nature. The sun rises every morning. A ball thrown up, falls to the ground by the operation of the natural law of gravity; tides come in and out in regularity due to the gravity of the moon; liquids behave the same way, day in and day out. The illustrations of regular happenings of natural events are endless and the evidence for such regularity is vast. This observed regularity creates a kind of habit in our minds to predict that they would occur again and again in the future. Science and technology has advanced so much today on the central assumption of such predictability.Therefore, the “laws,” are factual or are firmed in every pragmatic sense. Since they work, we accept them. Admittedly, it isn’t logical to believe that just because a serial of events and consequences occurred in the past they would occur in the future, too. Hume admitted this illogicality but accepted the scientific truth on a pragmatic basis.
