I don’t believe in miracles, but my disbelief comes from a position of authority: I’ve experienced a few. As I don’t believe in any kind of divinity, I can’t believe in the kind of miracle agonised over by Vatican conclaves, whereby some divine power suspends the workaday rules of nature to make a point to his or her followers. I do however believe in the less ostentatious, secular variety of miracle, which is really nothing more than a remarkable happenstance. The two meanings are poles apart; yet one denies wonder while the other affirms it.
We live in a complicated universe which is only intelligible at a subjective level. We understand events in the ways that serve us best. If I were to walk away unscathed from a spectacular plane crash leaving every one of my fellow passengers dead, newspapers would call my survival miraculous. Various strands of supernatural belief might colour this response: Perhaps God had reached out to shield me from the impact; my guardian angel might have persuaded me to sit in Row Z behind the bulkhead; good karma could have paid me a dividend.
But would it then follow that my fellow passengers somehow deserved their fate, having all been less obedient to their deity, less respectful to their ancestors or less willing to hold doors open for strangers? Would it not have been simpler for the divinity to just prevent the mid-air collision, rather than orchestrating a complex sequence of flukes to save my very average self? If I were so favoured, what on earth did the divinity have against the others? The lazy, deus-ex-machina plot device makes us groan in the cinema but is less critically received in reality.
I had a real and nasty cycling accident last year: I was hit by a car at speed and I broke my back. I was improbably lucky in many ways. I wasn’t wearing a helmet but nothing hit my head. I was hit by a small car and I’m a big guy. I bounced onto the verge and not into oncoming traffic. Unusually for the road, the verge was wide, grassy and free of concrete, barbed wire and thorny plant-life. One of my vertebrae disintegrated but I retained full use of all my limbs. I feel enormously lucky, but that luck is dumb and non-judgemental. For every accident like mine, many more end in death or paralysis. Conversely, others result in nothing more than bruised pride and road rage. I feel I should be grateful, but grateful to what? I don’t believe in any supernatural force capable of being thanked.
When I let my eyes drink in the night sky, I find the appalling immensity of creation miraculous. The fact that my eyes are here to see it at this precise point in an incomprehensible span of space and time is miraculous. When my sister gleams with joy at the sight of her firstborn, a ruddy, kicking and bright-eyed affirmation of life, she's looking at a miraculous end to a long struggle, both personal and evolutionary. When I read about the torments that have defined human life for most of recorded history, I find it miraculous that I live in centrally-heated comfort without fear of hunger, disease or war. The miracle is that all of these wonders are within the scope of nature, not in the gift of something outside it.
We need thank no supernatural entity, but if we have known any joy or wonder, and have been spared the worst that human history has to offer, we should acknowledge our debt to pure dumb luck and human endeavour. After all, if you flip a coin enough times, you’ll eventually get heads ten times in a row.
