DOCUMENTED MIRACLES

Author: Micael Grenholm
Year: 2018
Publisher: Sjöbergs förlag
Language: Swedish

When I was but a tender sapling of a lad, my parents bought two books for me which I read over and over again. One told of phantoms and haunted castles, the other of marvellous beasts and monsters. Though a dim candle of reason flickered within my youthful mind and deep down I knew that the stories were not true, I willingly surrendered to the tingling sensation of marvel and awe. Each chapter, each sighting, each ostensibly irrefutable testimony filled me with joy. I chose to believe so that each time I opened the books I could once more relive the sensation of wonder and amazement.

My sentiments were rather similar when I recently laid hands on Micael Grenholm’s “Dokumenterade mirakler” (not available in English but the title means “Documented Miracles”). I expected nothing more than a charming parade of more or less loosely connected coincidences, imaginative interpretations, far-fetched explanations, misunderstandings, and fabrications, all passed off as indisputable evidence of God’s existence. I was looking forward to an entertaining albeit inconsequential read.

Yet, once I began to peruse the pages, I discovered that the author’s aspirations were of a different order. The author sets forth to not only list miracles as he perceives them, but moreover to prove that they are a thing of the world of senses, and not stopping there, to establish a link to a specified miracle-worker.

Grenholm pays significant attention to defining the boundaries of his field, circumscribing the term ‘miracle’, and introducing concepts such as the Swedish acronyms VOTEB and VOTUB (Scientifically Inexplicable Health Recoveries After Prayer and Without Prayer respectively). With these terms planted into the reader’s mind, he proceeds to parading a succession of anecdotal yet curiously persuasive evidence in which the terminally ill rise from their beds, seemingly without any plausible medical explanation. Grenholm goes through remarkable pains to validate his material and cite his sources, and he manages to demonstrate that full restoration of health contrary to medical expectations indeed occurs and is perhaps less rare than one might think. Thus far, there is no controversy. Neither ancient nor modern medicine ever proclaimed itself infallible. Sometimes patients that are expected to get worse and even die, recover. Other times, patients who were expected to make a full recovery, perish. Medicine, like all sciences, is imperfect. That is why we continue to do research.

Grenholm’s enterprise becomes decidedly more obscure when he departs from the terra firma of facts and ventures forth into the mist-shrouded realm of philosophy. His chapters, to be sure, are nothing if not thorough, even admirably so, yet several of his arguments, upon closer scrutiny, warrant considerable doubt.

As but one example, Grenholm takes up arms against David Hume’s assertion that the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary must be the evidence that sustains it. Grenholm seems to disagree. To illustrate his criticism, he recounts the story of a famous actor who enrols at a high school to immerse himself into the role of a high school-student. When he tries to tell a classmate that he is indeed a Hollywood celebrity, she refuses to believe him. Nothing the actor says, can persuade her. Grenholm argues, that if the student had later wandered into a cinema and seen on the silver screen the very same actor play the part he claimed he would, it should suffice as proof of his claim. And as simple a thing as a movie, he says, can hardly be dignified with the title of “extraordinary evidence”.

In this argument, Grenholm unfortunately makes the mistake of conflating his aggregation levels. Despite having earlier exercised a scrupulous precision in defining his terms, here he treats the word “extraordinary” with a carelessness quite unworthy of his former diligence. “Extraordinary” in the philosophical sense, denotes that which lies outside the boundaries of a given system. In his example, all participants inhabit a world whose fundamental premise they share. They all agree on the existence of actors, movies, high school, and cinemas. They all operate within the same system. Thus, the actor’s confession, while unusual, cannot be called extraordinary in any rigorous sense and consequently requires no extraordinary evidence. Both claim and evidence are of the system.

If we would narrow the system down to the high school only, and create a closed universe of students, classmates, and liars, then both actor and cinema would be outside the system and thus considered an extraordinary piece of evidence in favour of an extraordinary claim.

Translated to miracles, we are transported to a system governed by the laws of nature and the claim of divine intervention is nothing less than a declaration of the supranatural trespassing on the natural I am sure Grenholm would agree with this proposition. If miracles are indeed extraordinary and unnatural, it stands to reason that the evidence to support their existence need also be extraordinary.  

My reasoning above certainly does not disprove the existence of miracles. I maintain that Grenholm’s case for the existence of miracles is strong. But statistically and scientifically unlikely as they are, there is little evidence that they are external to our system, and the connection between miracles and the Christian God still remains to be demonstrated.

In a way, it is quite impossible to leaf through the pages of “Dokumenterade mirakler” without one’s thoughts irresistibly straying to Dr Bonamy from Emile Zola’s novel “Lourdes” (see review from July 2019). Here we encounter the good doctor, a man of education so confident in his image of the incorruptible scientist, perched loftily upon a pedestal of unimpeachable rationality, meticulously chronicling the supposed miracles unfolding before him, all in the noble name of knowledge. And yet, on closer examination we see how deeply involved he is in the belief system, functioning, with a naïveté bordering on the tragic, as an unwitting instrument for the advancement of superstition.

In my personal view, proving the divine armed with the frail minds and limited equipment of humans, calibrated merely to navigate the dull harmonies of the natural world, is a task fit for fools. The Mount Everest of apologetic history is littered with the remains of those who have tried and succumbed before Micael Grenholm. Anshelm of Canterbury, Averroës, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Kurt Gödel… all had their go, and failed.

And so, it appears to me that using human faculties to understand God is like stacking bricks to build a tower to heaven. In truth, I suspect these grand endeavours reveal far less about the nature of God than they do about the fathomless depths of our own conceit.