Promised you a miracle (Simple Minds)

It's miraculous! ... Is it? Literally? 

At my Oxford college in 1985 there was a young man who was almost convinced about Christianity, but he said he'd only become a Christian if we could convince him that the stuff that Jesus did in the Bible, the healings and miracles, were still happening. We really believed that they were, at least we'd read stories about them happening in California, and we fully expected them to start happening around us too. It was just a matter of time, praying enough, maybe fasting too. It felt like an exciting time to be a Christian, in the 80s, with prophecies of revival and a buzz of anticipation around 'signs and wonders', supernatural interventions that we believed and fully expected to see. 

A weirdly blonde Jewish girl being healed by an Aryan Jesus

Hope starts to fade and the energy dissipates when promises aren't fulfilled. But every few years there was a fresh wave of excitement about some new teaching or stories of outbreaks of miracles in different parts of the world: South Korea, Toronto, Pensacola, and even Geordieland. I went on courses to learn to pray prophetically, to pray for healing, to fight against the devil in prayer. 

Sometimes people were 'healed' as a result of prayer, apparently, or so the stories went. I didn't meet people who had these experiences, just 'friends of friends' stories. The only direct result I saw was a friend's daughter who had a verruca, which got better after I'd prayed. And this felt totally pointless. And not really good evidence, either. After all, verrucas tend to go away spontaneously after a few months or years. And why would God put effort into healing that, when he hadn't bothered to heal the lovely woman who I watched dying slowly of cancer when her children were only teenagers? Or the young mother who had a serious psychiatric illness?

I saw people throwing away crutches and getting out of wheelchairs at a charismatic Christian festival, in tents full of thousands of people. What was happening? Were they actually healed from physical disabilities, or were they suffering from more psychosomatic disorders? I was really concerned for the 13-year-old girl with chronic fatigue syndrome, who got out of her wheelchair and declared that she was healed. Was she really? How was she the next day, or week? What pressure was she getting from her parents, and her youth leaders? CFS is often characterised by periods of feeling better followed by reversals and extreme exhaustion. Or was the prayer context the prompt she needed psychologically to be able to overcome a pattern of behaviour? 

One problem with being in the evangelical Christian bubble is that of confirmation bias. We would see answers to prayer and joyfully thank God, but if the prayers were not answered, we had some excuses about God's higher purpose. So either way, God wins. Or maybe we didn't pray with enough faith. Or our sin was getting in the way. I am very good at self-criticism and generally assumed that it was my fault rather than God's if the prayer didn't work. 

This is also an attribution bias: good things come from God, bad things are from the devil or our sin or lack of faith. For example, if we pray and depend on God, things go well, we have good encounters, we feel peaceful. If things don't go well, we feel grumpy or anxious, or people are unpleasant, this must mean we weren't depending on God enough, we were trying to do things 'in our own strength'. Again, God wins every time. 

Johnny P gave me five reasons he believes in God, the first of which is:

'the weight of testimonies of the miraculous of people I know personally (I’ve got a book of about 40 testimonies which feels like a relatively empirically weighty subset)'

I'd be curious to know what these testimonies consist of, and what supporting evidence they have. Are they in the category of gold fillings and sparkle dust, common stories of 'miracles' that came out of the 'Toronto Blessing' in the 1990s? Or are they more like surprising or serendipitous events? Humans are notoriously bad at assessing the probability of things happening. For example, how many people need to be in a room for 50% chance that two of them share a birthday? The answer is a surprisingly small ... 

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I used to have a testimony, a series of coincidences which seemed like more than chance, and seemed clear evidence of God's care for me. I turned down a good job offer because I felt God said I could (plus I didn't fancy the commute), and took a temporary job, which then enabled me to jump ship at short notice to take the wonderful dream job when it came up. But it does have a more simple explanation, to do with my privilege, education, luck, courage, doing some neat networking and having the financial resources to risk turning a job down. 

In science we apply Occam's razor, which says that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one. Hypothesising an invisible deity and a whole set of supernatural events is less likely than a simple set of coincidences.

We also have to avoid positive evidence bias, where we notice the evidence that fits our hypothesis, and ignore anything that doesn't. Johnny's collection of stories is not evidence, as it is not balanced by data on prayers that have not been answered, or coincidences that did not occur (that doesn't even make sense!). This is a typical approach to evidence in religions that demand 'faith' in their followers.

Proper scientific examination of a hypothesis actually demands that we should be looking for evidence to falsify it, not cherry-picking evidence that supports it. This is equivalent to anti-vax videos listing cases of people who have died after vaccination, without mentioning the millions times greater numbers of people who have been fine. His forty stories from different people do not represent a weight of evidence, but a set of anecdotes from people who are already convinced, and are looking for stories to support their views.

When I was a young, totally convinced fundamentalist Christian working in a church in Nottingham for a gap year, I had an extraordinary and disturbing encounter at the Night Shelter. On my very first visit, a resident came up to me and told me my birthday. I believed there was no way he could know that information, and so my immediate conclusion was that he had obtained the knowledge through supernatural (Satanic) means. He must have been a witch or medium, or at least demonised. This seriously spooked me, and reaffirmed my magical worldview. By the time I had come to doubt this explanation, decades later, it was too late to go back and look for evidence of other explanations. I don't remember writing my date of birth on a form, but maybe I did. Memory is highly selective. Or maybe he would say random dates to everyone he met, and occasionally score. 

Similarly, anecdotes from believers are based on selective attention and biased recall. They notice things they want to see, and remember the parts that bolster their beliefs. They probably don't realise they are changing the story each time they recall and report it, but this is what happens, so the drama is exaggerated.

Mostly, life is very mundane even when you're trying to live in the awareness of a supernatural dimension. Over the years we learnt to explain away the lack of result, and hope that people didn't feel too let down. And then, to pray for things that were unfalsifiable, like 'peace while she goes through treatment' or 'skill to the surgeon's hand' rather than actual healing. 

When my son had serious depression, my church friends prayed fervently. But when they asked how he was the following week, I had to report that he was worse. This was the Wrong Answer. They lost the impetus to keep praying after a few weeks because I wasn't giving them the correct feedback. I'm glad to say he is doing really well now, 9 years later, and I suppose some people would credit that to God, but I think he's actually coped better with life now he's an ex-Christian. As many of us have. 

And when it came to my turn to have breast cancer, I felt embarrassed by people praying for me the night before my surgery, that God would heal me. I mean, was I meant to trust God to heal me, and cancel the surgery? Or was I meant to attribute the healing via two surgeries and 3 weeks of radiotherapy (the 'slash and burn' treatment) to God? If so, it was horrible. And would have been kinder of him to stop the cancer developing in the first place. 

I suppose good things came out of it though, such as an awareness that life is finite, a challenge to think what I wanted from the rest of my life. And within a year I had left my marriage, my church, my home, my city, my friends and made a new life, first in Southampton, then here in France. Maybe God put cancer in my life to trigger a set of changes that would benefit me. And to provoke me to reconsider my faith and embrace atheism. And to give my life to permaculture.

I've always loved growing things