The daughters of the high priest Anius changed whatever they chose into wheat, wine or

oil. Athalida, daughter of Mercury, was resuscitated several times. Aesculapius

resuscitated Hippolytus. Hercules dragged Alcestis back from death. Heres returned to

the world after passing a fortnight in hell. The parents of Romulus and Remus were a god

and a vestal virgin. The Palladium fell from heaven in the city of Troy. The hair of

Berenice became a constellation.... Give me the name of one people among whom

incredible prodigies were not performed, especially when few knew how to read and

write. 
—VOLTAIRE, MIRACLES AND IDOLATRY

A n old fable concerns the comeuppance of a braggart who was forever retelling the story of a

truly stupendous leap that he had once made on the island of Rhodes. Never, it seemed, had

there ever been witnessed such a heroic long-jump. Though the teller never grew tired of the

tale, the same could not be said of his audience. Finally, as he again drew breath to relate the

story of the great feat, one of those present silenced him by saying gruffly, “Hic Rhodus, hic

salta!” (Here is Rhodes, jump here!)

In much the same way as prophets and seers and great theologians seem to have died out,

so the age of miracles seems to lie somewhere in our past. If the religious were wise, or had the

confidence of their convictions, they ought to welcome the eclipse of this age of fraud and

conjuring. But faith, yet again, discredits itself by proving to be insufficient to satisfy the faithful.

Actual events are still required to impress the credulous. We have no difficulty in seeing this

when we study the witch doctors and magicians and soothsayers of earlier or more remote

cultures: obviously it was a clever person who first learned to predict an eclipse and then to use

this planetary event to impress and cow his audience. Ancient kings in Cambodia worked out the

day on which the Mekong and the Bassac rivers would annually suddenly start to flood and

conjoin and, under terrific water pressure, appear to actually reverse their flow back into the

great lake at Tonle Sap. Relatively soon, there was a ceremony at which the divinely appointed

leader would duly appear and seem to order the waters to flow backward. Moses on the shore

of the Red Sea could only have gaped at such a thing. (In more modern times, the showman

King Sihanouk of Cambodia exploited this natural miracle to considerable effect.)

Given all that, it is surprising how petty some of the “supernatural” miracles now seem. As

with spiritualist séances, which cynically offer burblings from the beyond to relatives of the late

deceased, nothing truly interesting is ever said or done. To the story of Muhammad’s “night

flight” to Jerusalem (the hoofprint of his horse Borak is still allegedly to be seen on the site of

the Al-Aqsa Mosque) it would be unkind to make the obvious riposte that horses cannot and do

not fly. It is more pertinent to notice that people, ever since the beginning of their long andexhausting journeys across the earth’s surface, gazing for days at the rear end of a mule, have

fantasized about speeding up the tedious process. Folkloric seven-league boots can give the

wearer a spring in his step, but this is only tinkering with the problem. The real dream, for

thousands of years, involved envy of the birds (feathered descendants of the dinosaurs, as we

now know) and the yearning to fly. Chariots in the sky, angels that could glide freely on the

thermals...it is only too easy to see the root of the wish. Thus the Prophet speaks to the longing

of every peasant who wishes that his beast could take wing and get on with it. But given infinite

power, one might have thought that a more striking or less simpleminded miracle could have

been confected. Levitation plays a vast role in Christian fantasy as well, as the stories of the

Ascension and the Assumption confirm. At that epoch, the sky was thought to be a bowl, and its

ordinary weather a source of portent or intervention. Given this pathetically limited view of the

cosmos, the most trivial event could appear miraculous while an event that would truly astonish

us—such as the sun ceasing to move—could yet appear as a local phenomenon.

Assuming that a miracle is a favorable change in the natural order, the last word on the

subject was written by the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who granted us free will in the

matter. A miracle is a disturbance or interruption in the expected and established course of

things. This could involve anything from the sun rising in the west to an animal suddenly bursting

into the recitation of verse. Very well, then, free will also involves decision. If you seem to witness

such a thing, there are two possibilities. The first is that the laws of nature have been suspended

(in your favor). The second is that you are under a misapprehension, or suffering from a

delusion. Thus the likelihood of the second must be weighed against the likelihood of the first.

If you only hear a report of the miracle from a second or third party, the odds must be

adjusted accordingly before you can decide to credit a witness who claims to have seen

something that you did not see. And if you are separated from the “sighting” by many

generations, and have no independent corroboration, the odds must be adjusted still more

drastically. Again we might call upon the trusty Ockham, who warned us not to multiply

unnecessary contingencies. Thus, let me give one ancient and one modern example: the first

being bodily resurrection and the second being UFOs.

Miracles have declined, in their wondrous impact, since ancient times. Moreover, the more

recent ones that have been offered us have been slightly tawdry. The notorious annual

liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro in Naples, for example, is a phenomenon that can

easily be (and has been) repeated by any competent conjuror. Great secular “magicians” like

Harry Houdini and James Randi have demonstrated with ease that levitation, fire-walking,

water-divining, and spoon-bending can all be performed, under laboratory conditions, in order

to expose the fraud and to safeguard the unwary customer from a fleecing. Miracles in any case

do not vindicate the truth of the religion that practices them: Aaron supposedly vanquished

Pharoah’s magicians in an open competition but did not deny that they could perform wonders

as well. However, there has not been a claimed resurrection for some time and no shaman who

purports to do it has ever agreed to reproduce his trick in such a way as to stand a challenge.

Thus we must ask ourselves: Has the art of resurrection died out? Or are we relying on dubious

sources?

The New Testament is itself a highly dubious source. (One of Professor Bart Ehrman’s more

astonishing findings is that the account of Jesus’s resurrection in the Gospel of Mark was only

added many years later.) But according to the New Testament, the thing could be done in an

almost commonplace way. Jesus managed it twice in other people’s cases, by raising both

Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus, and nobody seems to have thought it worthwhile to

interview either survivor to ask about their extraordinary experiences. Nor does anyone seem to

have kept a record of whether or not, or how, these two individuals “died” again. If they stayed

immortal, then they joined the ancient company of the “Wandering Jew,” who was condemnedby early Christianity to keep walking forever after he met Jesus on the Via Dolorosa, this misery

being inflicted upon a mere bystander in order to fulfill the otherwise unfulfilled prophecy that

Jesus would come again in the lifetime of at least one person who had seen him the first time

around. On the same day that Jesus met that luckless vagrant, he was himself put to death with

revolting cruelty, at which time, according to the Gospel of Matthew 27:52–53, “the graves were

opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his

resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” This seems incoherent,

since the corpses apparently rose both at the time of the death on the cross and of the

Resurrection, but it is narrated in the same matter-of-fact way as the earthquake, the rending

of the veil of the temple (two other events that did not attract the attention of any historian),

and the reverent comments of the Roman centurion.

This supposed frequency of resurrection can only undermine the uniqueness of the one by

which mankind purchased forgiveness of sins. And there is no cult or religion before or since,

from Osiris to vampirism to voodoo, that does not rely on some innate belief in the “undead.” To

this day, Christians disagree as to whether the day of judgment will give you back the old wreck

of a body that has already died on you, or will reequip you in some other form. For now, and on

a review even of the claims made by the faithful, one can say that resurrection would not prove

the truth of the dead man’s doctrine, nor his paternity, nor the probability of still another return

in fleshly or recognizable form. Yet again, also, too much is being “proved.” The action of a man

who volunteers to die for his fellow creatures is universally regarded as noble. The extra claim

not to have “really” died makes the whole sacrifice tricky and meretricious. (Thus, those who say

“Christ died for my sins,” when he did not really “die” at all, are making a statement that is false

in its own terms.) Having no reliable or consistent witnesses, in anything like the time period

needed to certify such an extraordinary claim, we are finally entitled to say that we have a

right, if not an obligation, to respect ourselves enough to disbelieve the whole thing. That is,

unless or until superior evidence is presented, which it has not been. And exceptional claims

demand exceptional evidence.

I have spent much of my life as a correspondent and long ago became used to reading

firsthand accounts of the very same events I had witnessed, written by people I otherwise

trusted, which did not accord with my own. (In my days as a Fleet Street correspondent, I even

read stories in print under my own name which were not recognizable to me once the sub

editors had finished with them.) And I have interviewed some of the hundreds of thousands of

people who claim to have had direct encounters with spacecraft, or the crew of spacecraft, from

another galaxy. Some of these are so vivid and detailed (and so comparable with other

depositions from other people who cannot have compared notes) that a few impressionable

academics have proposed that we grant them the presumption of truth. But here is the obvious

Ockhamist reason why it would be utterly wrong to do so. If the huge number of “contacts” and

abductees are telling even a particle of truth, then it follows that their alien friends are not

attempting to keep their own existence a secret. Well, in that case, why do they never stay still

for anything more than a single-shot photo? There has never been an uncut roll of film offered,

let alone a small piece of a metal unavailable on earth, or a tiny sample of tissue. And sketches

of the beings have a consistent anthropomorphic resemblance to those offered in science

fiction comics. Since travel from Alpha Centauri (the preferred origin) would involve some

bending of the laws of physics, even the smallest particle of matter would be of enormous use,

and would have a literally earth-shattering effect. Instead of which—nothing. Nothing, that is,

except the growth of a huge new superstition, based upon a belief in occult texts and shards

that are available only to a favored few. Well, I have seen that happen before. The only

responsible decision is to suspend or withhold judgment until the votaries have come up with

something that is not merely childish.Extend this to the present day, where the statues of virgins or saints are sometimes said to

weep or bleed. Even if I could not easily introduce you to people who can produce this identical

effect in their spare time, using pig fat or other materials, I would still ask myself why a deity

should be content to produce such a paltry effect. As it happens, I am one of the very few

people who has ever taken part in the examination of a sainthood “cause,” as the Roman

Catholic Church calls it. In June of 2001 I was invited by the Vatican to testify at a hearing on the

beatification of Agnes Bojaxhiu, an ambitious Albanian nun who had become well-known under

the nom de guerre of “Mother Teresa.” Although the then pope had abolished the famous office

of “Devil’s Advocate,” the better to confirm and canonize an enormous number of new “saints,”

the church was still obliged to seek testimony from critics, and thus I found myself representing

the devil, as it were, pro bono.

I had already helped expose one of the “miracles” connected with the work of this woman.

The man who originally made her famous was a distinguished if rather silly British evangelist

(later a Catholic) named Malcolm Muggeridge. It was his BBC documentary, Something Beautiful

for God, which launched the “Mother Teresa” brand on the world in 1969. The cameraman for

this film was a man named Ken Macmillan, who had won high praise for his work on Lord Clark’s

great art history series, Civilisation. His understanding of color and lighting was of a high order.

Here is the story as Muggeridge told it, in the book that accompanied the film:

[Mother Teresa’s] Home for the Dying is dimly lit by small windows high up in the walls, and

Ken [Macmillan] was adamant that filming was quite impossible there. We only had one

small light with us, and to get the place adequately lighted in the time at our disposal was

quite impossible. It was decided that, nonetheless, Ken should have a go, but by way of

insurance he took, as well, some film in an outside courtyard where some of the inmates

were sitting in the sun. In the processed film, the part taken inside was bathed in a

particularly beautiful soft light, whereas the part taken outside was rather dim and

confused.... I myself am absolutely convinced that the technically unaccountable light is, in

fact, the Kindly Light that Cardinal Newman refers to in his well-known exquisite hymn.

He concluded that

This is precisely what miracles are for—to reveal the inner reality of God’s outward

creation. I am personally persuaded that Ken recorded the first authentic photographic

miracle.... I fear I talked and wrote about it to the point of tedium.

He was certainly correct in that last sentence: by the time he had finished he had made

Mother Teresa into a world-famous figure. My contribution was to check out and put into print

the direct verbal testimony of Ken Macmillan, the cameraman himself. Here it is:

During Something Beautiful for God, there was an episode where we were taken to a

building that Mother Teresa called the House of the Dying. Peter Chafer, the director, said,

“Ah well, it’s very dark in here. Do you think we can get something?” And we had just taken

delivery at the BBC of some new film made by Kodak, which we hadn’t had time to test

before we left, so I said to Peter, “Well, we may as well have a go.” So we shot it. And when

we got back several weeks later, a month or two later, we are sitting in the rushes theater

at Ealing Studios and eventually up come the shots of the House of the Dying. And it was

surprising. You could see every detail. And I said, “That’s amazing. That’s extraordinary.”

And I was going to go on to say, you know, three cheers for Kodak. I didn’t get a chance to

say that though, because Malcolm, sitting in the front row, spun around and said: “It’s

divine light! It’s Mother Teresa. You’ll find that it’s divine light, old boy.” And three or four

days later I found that I was being phoned by journalists from London newspapers who

were saying things like: “We hear you’ve just come back from India with Malcolm

Muggeridge and you were the witness of a miracle.”

So a star was born...For these and for my other criticisms I was invited by the Vatican into aclosed room containing a Bible, a tape recorder, a monsignor, a deacon, and a priest, and asked

if I could throw any light of my own on the matter of “the Servant of God, Mother Teresa.” But,

even as they appeared to be asking me this in good faith, their colleagues on the other side of

the world were certifying the necessary “miracle” that would allow the beatification (prelude to

full canonization) to go forward. Mother Teresa died in 1997. On the first anniversary of her

death, two nuns in the Bengali village of Raigunj claim to have strapped an aluminum medal of

the departed (a medal that had supposedly been in contact with her dead body) to the

abdomen of a woman named Monica Besra. This woman, who was said to be suffering from a

large uterine tumor, was thereupon quite cured of it. It will be noticed that Monica is a Catholic

girl’s name not very common in Bengal, and thus that probably the patient and certainly the

nuns were already Mother Teresa fans. This definition would not cover Dr. Manju Murshed, the

superintendent of the local hospital, nor Dr. T. K. Biswas and his gynecologist colleague Dr.

Ranjan Mustafi. All three came forward to say that Mrs. Besra had been suffering from

tuberculosis and an ovarian growth, and had been successfully treated for both afflictions. Dr.

Murshed was particularly annoyed at the numerous calls he had received from Mother Teresa’s

order, the “Missionaries of Charity,” pressing him to say that the cure had been miraculous. The

patient herself did not make a very impressive interview subject, talking at high speed because,

as she put it, she “might otherwise forget” and begging to be excused questions because she

might have to “remember.” Her own husband, a man named Selku Murmu, broke silence after a

while to say that his wife had been cured by ordinary, regular medical treatment.

Any hospital supervisor in any country will tell you that patients sometimes make

astonishing recoveries (just as apparently healthy people often fall inexplicably and gravely ill).

Those who desire to certify miracles may wish to say that such recoveries have no “natural”

explanation. But this does not at all mean that there is therefore a “supernatural” one. In this

case, however, there was nothing even remotely surprising in Mrs. Besra’s return to health.

Some familiar disorders had been treated with well-known methods. Extraordinary claims were

being made without even ordinary evidence. Yet there will soon come a day in Rome when a

vast and solemn ceremony will proclaim the sainthood of Mother Teresa, as one whose

intercession can improve upon medicine, to the entire world. Not only is this a scandal in itself,

but it will further postpone the day when Indian villagers cease to trust quacks and fakirs. In

other words, many people will die needlessly as a result of this phony and contemptible

“miracle.” If this is the best the church can do in a time when its claims can be checked by

physicians and reporters, it isn’t difficult to imagine what was rigged in past times of ignorance

and fear, when the priests faced less doubt or opposition.

Once again the razor of Ockham is clean and decisive. When two explanations are offered,

one must discard the one that explains the least, or explains nothing at all, or raises more

questions than it answers.

The same goes for those occasions when the laws of nature are apparently suspended in a

way that does not offer joy or apparent consolation. Natural disasters are actually not

violations of the laws of nature, but rather are part of the inevitable fluctuations within them,

but they have always been used to overawe the gullible with the mightiness of god’s

disapproval. Early Christians, operating in zones of Asia Minor where earthquakes were and are

frequent, would rally crowds when a pagan temple fell down, and urge them to convert while

there was still time. The colossal volcanic explosion at Krakatoa in the late nineteenth century

provoked an enormous swing toward Islam among the terrified population of Indonesia. All the

holy books talk excitedly of floods, hurricanes, lightning, and other portents. After the terrible

Asian tsunami of 2004, and after the inundation of New Orleans in 2005, quite serious and

learned men such as the archbishop of Canterbury were reduced to the level of stupefied

peasants when they publicly agonized over how to interpret god’s will in the matter. But if onemakes the simple assumption, based on absolutely certain knowledge, that we live on a planet

that is still cooling, has a molten core, faults and cracks in its crust, and a turbulent weather

system, then there is simply no need for any such anxiety. Everything is already explained. I fail

to see why the religious are so reluctant to admit this: it would free them from all the futile

questions about why god permits so much suffering. But apparently this annoyance is a small

price to pay in order to keep alive the myth of divine intervention.

The suspicion that a calamity might also be a punishment is further useful in that it allows an

infinity of speculation. After New Orleans, which suffered from a lethal combination of being

built below sea level and neglected by the Bush administration, I learned from a senior rabbi in

Israel that it was revenge for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, and from

the mayor of New Orleans (who had not performed his own job with exceptional prowess) that it

was god’s verdict on the invasion of Iraq. You can nominate your own favorite sin here, as did

the “reverends” Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell after the immolation of the World Trade

Center. In that instance, the proximate cause was to be sought and found in America’s surrender

to homosexuality and abortion. (Some ancient Egyptians believed that sodomy was the cause

of earthquakes: I expect this interpretation to revive with especial force when the San Andreas

Fault next gives a shudder under the Gomorrah of San Francisco.) When the debris had

eventually settled on Ground Zero, it was found that two pieces of mangled girder still stood in

the shape of a cross, and much wondering comment resulted. Since all architecture has always

involved crossbeams, it would be surprising only if such a feature did not emerge. I admit that I

would have been impressed if the wreckage had formed itself into a Star of David or a star and

crescent, but there is no record of this ever having occurred anywhere, even in places where

local people might be impressed by it. And remember, miracles are supposed to occur at the

behest of a being who is omnipotent as well as omniscient and omnipresent. One might hope for

more magnificent performances than ever seem to occur.

The “evidence” for faith, then, seems to leave faith looking even weaker than it would if it

stood, alone and unsupported, all by itself. What can be asserted without evidence can also be

dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the “evidence” eventually offered is so

shoddy and self-interested.

THE “ARGUMENT FROM AUTHORITY” is the weakest of all arguments. It is weak when it is asserted at

second or third hand (“the Good Book says”), and it is even weaker when asserted at first hand,

as every child knows who has heard a parent say “because I say so” (and as every parent knows

who has heard himself reduced to uttering words he once found so unconvincing). Nonetheless,

it takes a certain “leap” of another kind to find oneself asserting that all religion is made up by

ordinary mammals and has no secret or mystery to it. Behind the veil of Oz, there is nothing but

bluff. Can this really be true? As one who has always been impressed by the weight of history

and culture, I do keep asking myself this question. Was it all in vain, then: the great struggle of

the theologians and scholars, and the stupendous efforts of painters and architects and

musicians to create something lasting and marvelous that would testify to the glory of god?

Not at all. It does not matter to me whether Homer was one person or many, or whether

Shakespeare was a secret Catholic or a closet agnostic. I should not feel my own world

destroyed if the greatest writer about love and tragedy and comedy and morals was finally

revealed to have been the Earl of Oxford all along, though I must add that sole authorship is

important to me and I would be saddened and diminished to learn that Bacon had been the

man. Shakespeare has much more moral salience than the Talmud or the Koran or any account

of the fearful squabbles of Iron Age tribes. But there is a great deal to be learned and

appreciated from the scrutiny of religion, and one often finds oneself standing atop the

shoulders of distinguished writers and thinkers who were certainly one’s intellectual and

sometimes even one’s moral superiors. Many of them, in their own time, had ripped away thedisguise of idolatry and paganism, and even risked martyrdom for the sake of disputes with

their own coreligionists. However, a moment in history has now arrived when even a pygmy

such as myself can claim to know more—through no merit of his own—and to see that the final

ripping of the whole disguise is overdue. Between them, the sciences of textual criticism,

archaeology, physics, and molecular biology have shown religious myths to be false and man

made and have also succeeded in evolving better and more enlightened explanations. The loss

of faith can be compensated by the newer and finer wonders that we have before us, as well as

by immersion in the near-miraculous work of Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Tolstoy

and Proust, all of which was also “man-made” (though one sometimes wonders, as in the case

of Mozart). I can say this as one whose own secular faith has been shaken and discarded, not

without pain.

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the

conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of

historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural

element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive,

and it most certainly had its martyrs and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually

excommunicating rival papacies. It also had its schisms and inquisitions and heresy hunts. I was

a member of a dissident sect that admired Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, and I can say

definitely that we also had our prophets. Rosa Luxemburg seemed almost like a combination of

Cassandra and Jeremiah when she thundered about the consequences of the First World War,

and the great three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher was actually entitled

The Prophet (in his three stages of being armed, unarmed, and outcast). As a young man

Deutscher had been trained for the rabbinate, and would have made a brilliant Talmudist—as

would Trotsky. Here is what Trotsky says—anticipating the gnostic Gospel of Judas—about the

way that Stalin took over the Bolshevik Party:

Of Christ’s twelve Apostles Judas alone proved to be traitor. But if he had acquired power,

he would have represented the other eleven Apostles as traitors, and also all the lesser

Apostles whom Luke numbers as seventy.

And here, in Deutscher’s chilling words, is what happened when the pro-Nazi forces in

Norway forced the government to deny Trotsky asylum and deport him once again, to wander

the world until he met death. The old man met with the Norwegian foreign minister Trygve Lie

and others, and then:

Trotsky raised his voice so that it resounded through the halls and corridors of the Ministry:

“This is your first act of surrender to Nazism in your own country. You will pay for this. You

think yourselves free and secure to deal with a political exile as you please. But the day is

near—remember this!—the day is near when the Nazis will drive you from your country, all

of you...” Trygve Lie shrugged at this odd piece of sooth-saying. Yet after less than four

years the same government had indeed to flee from Norway before the Nazi invasion; and

as the Ministers and their aged King Haakon stood on the coast, huddled together and

waiting anxiously for a boat that was to take them to England, they recalled with awe

Trotsky’s words as a prophet’s curse come true.

Trotsky had a sound materialist critique that enabled him to be prescient, not all of the time

by any means, but impressively so on some occasions. And he certainly had a sense—expressed

in his emotional essay Literature and Revolution—of the unquenchable yearning of the poor and

oppressed to rise above the strictly material world and to achieve something transcendent. For

a good part of my life, I had a share in this idea that I have not yet quite abandoned. But there

came a time when I could not protect myself, and indeed did not wish to protect myself, from

the onslaught of reality. Marxism, I conceded, had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical

glories, but they were in the past. Something of the heroic period might perhaps be retained, butthe fact had to be faced: there was no longer any guide to the future. In addition, the very

concept of a total solution had led to the most appalling human sacrifices, and to the invention

of excuses for them. Those of us who had sought a rational alternative to religion had reached a

terminus that was comparably dogmatic. What else was to be expected of something that was

produced by the close cousins of chimpanzees? Infallibility? Thus, dear reader, if you have come

this far and found your own faith undermined—as I hope—I am willing to say that to some

extent I know what you are going through. There are days when I miss my old convictions as if

they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel

better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to

do its own thinking.