Miracles in the Mind's Eye by Kenneth E. Nahigian When defending miracles, apologists point with relish to the authority of eyewitnesses. The notion is that eyewitness reports are always good evidence, even when the events reported are extraordinary. Not so, alas. Shabbetai Tsvi, the 17th century rabbinical "messiah", was case in point. The Tsvi (or Servi) was an ordinary devout Jew until he met a rabbi in Gaza. Upon meeting him, the rabbi fell into an ecstatic trance, then awoke to announce that God had said: "This is my son. This is the redeemer." Surprised, but convinced he had a mission, Shabbetai gathered a handful of followers and marched on Constantinople, the seat of the Ottoman Empire, demanding that the sultan return Israel to the Jews. Within months the Jewish world was in a messianic frenzy. Hundreds of followers attributed fantastic miracles and wonders to Shabbetai, including visions, healings and angelic voices; multiple eyewitness accounts of outrageous miracles circulated via dated letters within days or weeks of non-events, though Shabbetai's own disciples, who thought things were getting out of hand, tried to squelch the rumors. Even many Englishmen were convinced, and began betting at the London Stock Exchange as to when the new messiah would return the Jews to Israel. The outcome? The sultan captured Shabbetai and "converted" him to Islam under threat of torture. The Tsvi publicly disavowed his own movement. (Even so, it persisted for three centuries before dying out. And the Jews did not return to Israel until 1948.) One researcher, Gershom Scholem, noted with awe how "the transition from history to legend took place with extraordinary rapidity in what are practically eyewitness accounts." (See: Scholem, Sabbatai Servi, the Mystical Messiah, Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 215.) In fact, history is fairly well peppered with such stories. The 13th-century rabbi Jehudah the Hasid was a personal skeptic and opponent of religious magic, yet within his lifetime rapt followers testified to his miracles and represented him as a great magician. The historian Josephus, not well known for gullibility, reported with some conviction how Alexander the Great once parted a river, Moses-like, so his army could cross. Great miracles were also "witnessed" for Mohammed, the Bab and Baha'ullah (founders of the Baha'i faith), Joseph Smith, and "godmen" such as Meher Baba and Sai Baba. More recently, African prophet Simon Kimbangu gained a reputation as a miracle worker contrary to his own wishes; followers represented him as the "Christ of the Blacks", though Kimbangu repudiated such a role. My favorite is from the 2nd—century writings of the Greek satirist Lucian. After watching the immolation of the charlatan—prophet Peregrinus, Lucian told a couple of the local yokels, as a joke, that he had seen a vulture ascending from the pyre crying that Peregrinus had been exalted to heaven. Next day, Lucian was startled to hear an old man solemnly testifying that he himself had seen this miracle. Within days, the village was full of witnesses claiming they had seen Peregrinus dressed in white, risen from the dead, and walking about the arcade! Like modern reports of UFO abductions, Sasquatch encounters, Elvis sightings, etc., these stories say much about the plasticity of our perceptions, show how passionate belief can filter what we see, even rewrite our memories. Catholic scholar Hippolyte Delehay wrote that many of the fantastic miracle stories associated with the saints are obviously the stuff of such religious mania, despite settings involving the claimed eyewitness of sensible people. Even so, some tales seem convincing. One such is the reputed levitations of St. Joseph of Copertino (early 17th century); another is the famous Fatima vision (1917). The Fatima incident, in particular, has a unique quality. It was spectacular; it was recent; and it involved not just a few witnesses, but thousands. What happened? In Portugal, on May 13, 1917, a ten—year old child and her two cousins ran home crying that a lady "brighter than the sun" had appeared to them standing on a cloud in a tree. They said the lady had asked them to return a month later. They did, along with about fifty curious and excited members of the local peasantry. Again, the children claimed to see the lady, though the witnesses saw nothing—only the movement of a cloud, some said later, in the treetops. Even so, many believed the children—and some doubted. A month later the children returned to the site and supposedly received three "secrets" from the lady, with a vision of Hell. (They described Hell as a vast sea of fire within the earth, full of lost souls like black animals, tumbling in pain, burning within and without, shrieking horribly.) Next month the children missed their appointment because a local official, alarmed at the unrest of the townsfolk, seized the children and questioned them for two days. About 18,000 spectators went to the site, but saw nothing. (The children claimed the lady appeared privately to them a week later.) Next month, on Sept. 13, the children kept their rendezvous, along with a crowd of 30,000. Passions were high. Things happened. Some claimed to see the sky change color as a luminous globe moved across it, but no one (other than the children) saw the lady. Then, on a rainy Oct. 13, a crowd of 70,000 showed up, including newspaper reporters. The children received more visions of the lady, who at this time supposedly identified herself as the Virgin Mary. The crowd—some of them, at least—saw, or claimed to see, something else. The rainclouds parted; the sun shone through; a prismatic light surrounded it, bathing the crowd; then the sun wrenched itself from the sky and came down to earth in a zigzag fashion. It stopped, very close to earth, warming the crowd. And "danced." After a while, it returned to its natural place. Contrary to rumor, the lady did not deliver any "letters" to the children. Church authorities composed these later, based on the reports of the children. The first two letters contained warnings about Hell and rather generic predictions about World War I (which was already raging). Church authorities sealed the third. Supposedly, Pope John XXIII opened it in 1960, read it, fainted, and had it resealed, permanently. Compelling. Why doubt? Besides the possibility of mass hysteria and rumor mongering, elements of the story are inherently incredible. No one else on earth saw the sun wrench itself from the sky; nor did a few million soldiers, sailors and airmen, engaged in war activity in the general vicinity at the time, notice anything odd. The number of supposed eyewitnesses is impressive, but these are reported numbers—remember, this was still the heyday of yellow journalism, and I for one have no way of knowing how many of the witnesses actually claimed personally to see the vision. The numbers also seem excessive. Could 70,000 excited Catholic peasants gather in a meadow without crowd control, gather close enough all to observe the same tree, and not trample it flat? Nor injure each other? (Only last August, in Brazzaville, Congo, 142 Roman Catholics died in stampedes when a much smaller crowd showed up to meet a priest who supposedly performed miracles.) UCLA neuropsychologist Ronald Siegal, author of Fire in the Brain (Dutton, 1992), wrote extensively about the prevalence of "waking dreams," especially under conditions of stress. In one survey, 79% of respondents admitted to hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations; a third of them said they were fooled into thinking the illusion was real. Dr. Siegal himself replicated many bizarre cases. Such illusions are surely the seed of at least some miracle-vision stories. The power of conformity, the magnifying effects of rumor, wishful thinking, might well explain the rest. But we should be suspicious of miracle-visions for a more general reason: their banality. Significantly, visionaries rarely receive anything basically new from their visions—only an affirmation of prior convictions. When the Virgin Mary appears to pious worshippers in strongly Catholic countries, for instance, she almost always wears "her color" (blue) as if she could appear no other way. When the Virgin delivers messages through her interlocutor, the messages tend to be consistent, in thought and word, with what we'd expect the human medium to think and say. The recipient of the religious vision may act frightened or astonished, may actually be astonished, but the vision itself often suffers from a lack of imagination similar to what we see in laymen who try to predict the future. Like the story "Mellonta Tauta", where author Edgar Allen Poe saw future transportation in terms of windborne balloons and 300-mph steam trains of sixty-foot gage (he did not envision airplanes, jets or space shuttles). And like Edward Bellamy (author of Looking Backward), who from his cozy 19th-century perspective projected a 20th-century utopia that bore all the marks of the Victorian era, and none of ours. Most miracle-visions are like that, bounded by the precepts, cultural bias and education of the visionary. Exceptions, when they occur, are suspicious for other reasons. It seems plausible at least that the visions (most of them) are psychological artifacts. Or urban legends. Or lies. Fatima not excepted. It's a remarkable story. Perhaps it has an atom of truth. We can't know it doesn't. All human knowledge comes from experience, after all; and since experience is limited, we will never rid ourselves of a certain uncertainty, a graininess in our insight. Even an intelligent fellow like Thomas Jefferson, for example, "knew" that rocks simply do not fall from the sky. He wrote, "I could more easily believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven." Tom Jefferson was wrong. But, should we mock him? Hardly! In terms of the accepted knowledge of the day, Jefferson was quite justified in his skepticism. Given the context of his experience, he simply could not have thought in other terms, yet remained rational. He was doing the best he could. So it is with us. We are doing the best we can. We build our knowledge of history, and the present world, under a simple assumption, that miracles are, at least, unlikely. And the rational man will always seek out ordinary explanations before extraordinary. This is called parsimony. Without it, history itself is broken—and we can never know what is true, and what isn't. How do we know Portugal even existed in 1917? Parsimony lets us assume it did. Otherwise, perhaps it was created by a miracle a few years ago, or moments ago—a miracle that rewrote history books, changed human memory. Thus rational thinkers will simply not credit the Fatima vision, or any miracle story, until they have exhausted all other reasonable possibilities, until the evidence for miracles has piled up so high we simply cannot think in any other terms. When that happens, and if, we will have a revolution, a paradigm shift—as when meteorites became an accepted part of our worldview. But then miracles will no longer be miracles. Just part of life. Kenneth E. Nahigian is a writer and has been a student of freethought for 20 years. He lives in Sacramento, California. Table of Contents | 1995 Issues | Subscribe Truth Seeker | Feedback | Freethought.com Webmaster Credit card Orders call: 800-321-9054 or fax: (619)676-0433 Or send check or money order to: Truth Seeker / 16935 W. Bernardo Drive, Suite 103 / San Diego, CA 92127 $20.00 annual U.S. subscription ($35.00 international). Individual issues—$10.00 + $2.50 postage and handling Or be a committed freethinker and send $35.00 for a two year subscription. Truth Seeker is published by Truth Seeker Co., Inc. (ISSN 0041-3712) © 1996