Post Hoc Miracles

Christians today are fond of proclaiming that, even in
a world filled with “sinful” people who “fully deserve to suffer
in hell for all eternity,” Jesus, because he loves us all so much,
still performs miracles for us, but the reason nonbelievers “fail to
see” is because we are blinded by arrogance or deluded by the devil!
Isn’t it interesting, though, that all of these so-called
“miracles” seem to come in the form of naturally occurring phenomena,
or events that have perfectly natural explanations? For example, if a skyscraper
collapses from an earthquake (or terrorist attack), killing thousands under
millions of tons of concrete and steel, but a few people are rescued from
isolated pockets within the rubble (through human effort, mind you), it’s
labeled “a miracle from Jesus” even though it’s a statistical probability
that a few people will be alive. While the odds of any particular person
surviving such a catastrophe are exceedingly small, the odds that some
will be alive is virtually 100 percent; as such there is nothing “miraculous”
about it!
From a post hoc perspective, anything can be made to seem
“miraculous.” Because these miracle claims are devised after the
fact, and based on a need to believe that Jesus is real and that he performs
miracles, Christians will latch onto any improbable event that fits a preformed
expectation they have in their minds, but they ignore the thousands of
other “improbable events” they see every day but never notice because
they carry no religious weight for them.
This past summer, during a major league baseball game,
the famed Arizona Diamondbacks’ pitcher, Randy Johnson, threw a blazing
fastball toward home plate, and at that moment a bird flew in the path
of the pitch and was struck by the ball, which killed it in mid-air. Now,
the probability of such an event happening is remote in the extreme, and
yet we don’t see Christians running around proclaiming what a “miracle”
it was! They don’t call it a miracle because they have no religious motivation
to do so. Besides, they realize that there was nothing outside the natural
world required for this improbable event to have occurred.
So why is it, then, with so many billions of prayers being
said year-in and year-out by millions of Christians all over the world,
we have never seen a “miracle” come in the form of even one resurrection
from the dead? In my profession I have seen many children die tragically,
and do you know what? They are all still dead!
Evidently, Jesus’ best miracle work comes through death
and destruction (e.g., WTC, Oklahoma City, etc.), but why can’t he provide
just one resurrection today as objective evidence to “His” reality?
Why not just one Lazarus (John 11); just one Jairus’ daughter (Luke 8);
just one “Only son of a widowed mother” (Luke 7)? Indeed, in the
Lazarus fable we are told that Jesus waited for him to be dead and buried
for four days because he thought it would be a good opportunity to perform
a resurrection for his disciples (and the people standing round) in order
“that they may believe…” (John 11:42). Well, why should we expect
anything less, so that WE may see it “and believe”? Why should they
get the supposed physical evidence but we, two millennia removed, “just
have to have faith”?