Inexplicable. Seriously?

Lordy, the stupid things that come out of mouths attached to religion-addled brains.

Too hash? Consider. The Trump-supporting Dallas pastor, Robert Jeffress, preached this to his congregation the day after the failed assassination attempt: "What happened yesterday is also a demonstration of the power of almighty God. I mean, what happened was inexplicable apart from God. God spared him for the purpose of calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation."

Seriously, inexplicable? As in, can't be explained?

That's just dumb. The kid missed the shot. It happens. Perhaps he wasn't a good marksman. Or maybe he felt rushed. He'd just chased a police officer off the roof, so he knew he'd been discovered, and had to work fast. Or the steeply pitched roof affected his aim.

Or this. Trump turned his head at an opportune moment. Trump himself acknowledged that he was turning to look at a chart that he was using in his speech.

Did God make him turn? Don't be absurd. Do you think that, but for God, he'd not have turned to look at that chart?

Trump's movement is completely explicable in terms not just of what he was doing in that moment, but, in a broader existential sense, of the stochastic happenings that carom off each other continually as reality plays out at each point of space and time. Existence is a dice roll. A shooter's intention and a speaker's movement line up, or they don't, without apparent reason. Because of how our brains are wired, we typically only notice when some seemingly momentous coincidence occurs. But make no mistake: coincidences occur constantly.

Which presents a golden opportunity for mush-minded thinking. Because coincidences are happening continually, there are always some available to take the believer wherever he wants to go. Constructing meaning from randomness is utterly commonplace in the belief buffet. It's a trademark feature of religious practice by denizens of pews and pulpits to align notable coincidence with divine providence—at least when when events conform to some desired narrative that the believer wants to advance. With religion, the stupidity (sorry, that word again) never ends.

Sometimes it gushes forth. "If you didn't believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now!" bellowed Republican Senator Tim Scott at the Republican National Convention. "Thank God Almighty that we live in a country that still believes in the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Alpha and the Omega. Our God still saves."

Tim Scott's standard for what qualifies as miraculous is clearly quite low, but it's entirely consistent with what I've observed in a lifetime of watching persons captive to religion. Heck, I used to be one myself. But I must admit I always had a hard time with miracles and other bizarre claims. I made the best of it, but was often secretly embarrassed by the stuff I heard in church. Even as a kid I knew deep down that a lot of it was crazy. What's fascinating to me is that the Tim Scotts and Robert Jeffresses are never embarrassed as they spew nonsense. Nor are many other grownups I observe with dismay.

Genuine miracles don't happen, because the only things that ever do happen are things that can possibly happen. Occurrences that are rare but possible and thus explicable don't count as miracles. Sorry, they don't.

Rare outcomes happen in nature. Rarity means uncommon, not impossible. Everything unfolds on a probability curve. Such rarities include the vast majority of miracles recognized by the Catholic Church, which overwhelmingly tend to be unexplained recoveries from dire disease processes that ought (probabilistically speaking) to be fatal. But we know that in principle such recoveries can occur as a result of entirely natural processes, such as the body's sudden spectacular marshaling of its immune system, for reasons that aren't presently understood.

Just because the doctors you consult don't know why someone got better doesn't make it a miracle that they did. There are monumental examples of this, and utterly banal ones. I got better. Did the antibiotic help or hurt? Don't know. Doctors don't understand the placebo effect, either, but it's undeniably real, and has to be accounted for in medical studies of drugs and procedures. And so on.

For many decades, certain authors and medical practitioners have been exploring the body's own innate capacity for self-healing. Bernie Siegel, for example. Or Andrew Weil.

Interestingly, none of the Catholic miracles involve outcomes that we know in principle can't happen in nature, such as the spontaneous regeneration of an amputated limb. Because humans absolutely can't regrow missing limbs, such regeneration would qualify as a genuine miracle if it ever happened. It never has, and never will. Maybe that should tell you something.

Long ago, some Catholic friends were having a hard time understanding why I claim their "miracles" don't count. What would? they asked. I pointed out the window at the municipal water tower across the field. Having that tower suddenly move several hundred feet would be a miracle, I said. At least once we ruled out David Copperfield-type illusions operating from our perspective in the living room where we were sitting. We could walk over to the tower's new location and kick at its base. Yup, a miracle.

A lot of miracle claims are mush-minded motivated reasoning, as with the Jeffress and Scott quotes above. It's a game religious types seemingly don't realize they're playing, but they do it all the time. The failed assassination attempt lets them tell themselves that Trump has been chosen by God, which is exactly what they wanted to believe anyway. Indeed, there's even been a messianic aspect to this among some Christians, which is bizarre and disturbing.

Thus religious practice often involves exercises in motivated tea leaf reading. Maybe God is trying to tell us this. Or that. Maybe. God never speaks clearly, so the possibilities are endless. The maybes slot effortlessly into worldviews. We get to play out scenarios in our head and choose the ones we like, and then incorporate them into our personal realities. God communicates through "signs," suggested Marjorie Taylor Green, with her really dumb mention of earthquakes and eclipses. Christians thus find themselves in the business of interpreting what earthquakes and eclipses mean. (Apparently they don't mean fault slippage or orbital mechanics.) Robert Jeffress said the failed assassination attempt was God's way of  "calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation." Sure it was.

But as I wrote elsewhere, there is only one reality, and it's our job to discern it. Not only will religion not help, but it will rot the thinking brains we need to discover and act upon what's real. It will train us how to not think. It will cause us to eschew empirical processes in favor of deeply irrational ones. We can do better than that. And if we're to survive as a civilization, we must.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

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