Miracles and incredulity

I have a problem with how people use the word miracle.

The dictionary definition is "a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency."  So this would undoubtedly qualify:

The Miracle of St. Mark, by Jacopo Tintoretto (ca. 1548) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But other than claims of honest-to-goodness angels appearing and stopping someone from getting murdered, the occurrences people usually call miracles seem to fall into two categories:

1. Events that have a positive outcome where one can imagine all sorts of ways they could have gone very wrong.  An example is when I was driving down my road in the middle of winter, hit a patch of black ice, and spun out -- coming to rest in a five-meter-by-five-meter gravel patch without hitting anything, where other trajectories would have taken me into a creek, an embankment, or oncoming traffic.
2. Events that are big and impressive, and about which we don't understand the exact cause.

It's the second category that attracted the attention of one Michael Grosso, who writes over at the site Consciousness Unbound, in a post this week called "A Trio of Obvious Miracles."  I was intrigued to find out what Grosso thought qualified not only as miracles but as obvious ones, and I was a little let down to find out that they were (1) the Big Bang, (2) the appearance of life, and (3) the evolution of consciousness.

The problem with all three of these is a lack of information.  In the first case, we have a pretty good idea what happened shortly after the Big Bang -- and by "shortly after" I mean "more than 10^-35 seconds after" -- but no real idea what triggered the expansion itself, or what came before it.  (If "before the Big Bang" even has any meaning.  Stephen Hawking said the question was like asking "what is north of the North Pole?"  Roger Penrose, on the other hand, thinks that a cyclic universe is a real possibility, and there may be a way to detect the traces of iterations of previous universes left behind in our current one.  The question is, at present, still being hotly debated by cosmologists.)

As far as Grosso's second example -- the origins of life -- that's more in my wheelhouse.  The difficulty here is that even the biologists can't agree about what makes something "alive."  Freshman biology texts usually have a list of characteristics of life, which include:

• made of one or more cells
• shows high levels of organization
• capable of reproduction
• capable of growth
• has a limited life span
• responds to stimuli
• adapts through natural selection
• has some form of a genetic code
• has a metabolism/use of energy

Not only are there organisms that are clearly alive but break one or more rules (sterile hybrids are incapable of reproducing, bristlecone pines appear to have no upper bound on their life spans), there are others, such as viruses, that have a few of the characteristics (organization, reproduction, limited life span, adaptation, and genetic code) while lacking others (cells, growth, response, and independent metabolism).  We talk about something "killing viruses," but the jury's still out as to whether they were alive in the first place.  (Perhaps "inactivating" them would be more accurate.)  In any case, the search for some ineffable something that differentiates life from non-life, like Henri Bergson's élan vital, have been unsuccessful.

With the final example, consciousness, we're on even shakier ground.  Once again starting with the dictionary definition -- "an awareness of one's internal and/or external environment, allowing for introspection, imagination, and volition" -- it remains to be seen whether we're unique in having consciousness, or if it (like intelligence) exists on a spectrum.  I'd argue that my dogs are conscious, but are insects?  How about earthworms?  How about amoebas?  All of them have some awareness of their external world, as evidenced by their moving toward pleasant stimuli and away from unpleasant ones; but I doubt very much if amoebas think about it.  So is our much more complex experience of consciousness simply due to our large and highly-interconnected brains, which would suggest that consciousness arises from a purely physical substratum?  If so, would it be possible to emulate it in a machine?  Some people are arguing, from a Turing-esque "if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference" stance, that large language models such as ChatGPT are already showing signs of consciousness.  While I find that a little doubtful -- although admittedly, I'm no expert on the topic -- it seems like we're in the same boat with consciousness as we are with life; it's hard to argue about something when we can't even agree on what the definition is, especially when the characteristic in question seems not to exist on a binary, you've-got-it-or-you-don't basis.

In any case, the whole thing seems to boil down to an argument from incredulity -- "I can't explain this, so it must be a miracle."  Grosso writes:

I grant the astonishing character of the miraculous, and the rarity.  But in the parapsychological definition, the term refers to phenomena that are extraphysical; cannot be physically explained. But what is causing these deviations from physical reality?...  Of course, we generally don’t kneel in awe at the miraculous sunrise or shudder with wonder as we wolf a burger down our gullet.  We are in fact swamped by what in fact are obvious miracles, the whole of nature and life in its wild multiplicity.  But thanks to habit and routine our imagination of the marvelous is deadened.

Honestly, I'm not even all that convinced about the rarity of miracles.  He's picked three things that -- so far as we know -- only happened once, and from that deduced that they're miraculous.  I did a post here a couple of years ago about Littlewood's Law of Miracles (named after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood), which uses some admittedly rather silly mathematical logic to demonstrate that we should, on average, expect a miracle to occur every other month or so.  So I'm not sure that our perception of something as unlikely (and therefore miraculous) means much. 

The thing is, we can't really deduce anything from a lack of information.  Myself, I'm more comfortable relying on science to elucidate what's going on; like the astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace famously said to Napoleon when the latter asked why Laplace's book on celestial mechanics made no mention of God, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" ("I have no need of that hypothesis.").  If you're claiming something is a miracle, you're saying it's outside the capacity of science to explain, and that seems to me to be very premature.

My stance is that in all three cases he cited, science hasn't explained them yet.  And that little word at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

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Not magic

I got in a friendly argument online a few days ago with someone who finds my reliance on the scientific method "limited."  (His word.)

He accepts science, he said, but added that if that's your only way of understanding, there's stuff you'll miss.  "There are features of reality that science can't, or won't, study," he said.  "Science deals with what is tangible and quantifiable; there are other ways of knowing that allow you to access what is intangible and unquantifiable.  Without those, you're ignoring half of the universe."

The whole thing put me in mind of biologist Stephen Jay Gould's idea of non-overlapping magisteria -- that there are different domains of inquiry, and science only addresses one of them.  (Gould considered religion to be one of those other magisteria -- and that science and religion could coexist just fine unless one chose to tread on the other's toes.)

The problem with this is that science has been progressively chewing away at the other magisteria, as more and more of the universe is explained scientifically.  Phenomena that were thought to be utterly mysterious are now accounted for by rational scientific models -- heredity and tectonic activity are just two of many examples.  (In some realms -- such as legal documents -- we still have vestiges of this older way of thinking, in calling certain natural occurrences "acts of God.")

Even some religious people are uncomfortable with this approach.  Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer referred to it as "the God of the gaps," and pointed out the most obvious problem with it:

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge.  If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat.  We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know.

So accounting for a phenomenon using some not necessarily religious, but non-scientific, explanation is basically nothing more than the argument from ignorance; "we don't yet know how this works, so it must be beyond science to explain."

Emphasis on the word "yet."

Take, for example, the bleeding polenta of Padua.

[Image credit: Exploring the Invisible]

In 1819, there were reports of what some were calling a miracle and others a work of Satan -- the appearance of what seemed to be drops of blood in polenta, bread, and other starchy food.  Whatever it was did look convincingly like blood, as you can see from the above photograph.  Italy in the nineteenth century was a devoutly Roman Catholic country, and the phenomenon was considered a "sign" (of what, depended upon whom you asked; some thought it was a harbinger of the end of the world, unsurprising considering how often this claim still comes up).

But a chemist at the University of Padua, Bartolomeo Bizio, firmly believed that there had to be a natural, rational cause for the spots.  He obtained samples of the red-stained food, and very quickly discovered two things: (1) if he put a drop of the red material on a sterile dish of starch, it rapidly developed red streaks as well; and (2) when he looked at some of it under a microscope, he saw cells -- but not blood cells.  Whatever it was might have the same color as blood, but it wasn't blood.

It was, in fact, a bacteria, which Bizio named Serratia marcescens -- the genus name after Florentine biologist Serafino Serrati, and the species name from a Latin word meaning "decay."  The red color comes from an organic compound called prodiogiosin.  Serratia marcescens has been found to be a more-or-less ubiquitous bacteria in soils and on moist surfaces -- it's responsible for the pinkish color that sometimes shows up in spoiled food and around the edges of unscrubbed sinks and drains.

It's a simple example, but it does show how "it happened because of something supernatural" is not really an explanation at all.  It is, in fact, a way to stop thinking.  Bizio started from the standpoint of "let's assume this has a rational cause," and it was only because that was his baseline assumption that he was able to take the step forward into understanding it.

Now, don't misunderstand me; it's not that I'm sure that science can explain everything, and it's certainly not because I think science has explained everything.  It's more that before we jump to a paranormal answer, we'd better make sure we've ruled out all the scientific ones first.  Because in the past two hundred years, the other magisteria have gradually shrunk as science has explained more and more of the universe.

As the inimitable Tim Minchin put it: "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be -- not magic."

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Rules for miracles

In today's News of the Surreal, we have: the Vatican is tightening the rules on what it's willing to call divine supernatural phenomena.

It's tricky business, isn't it?  In science, there's a well-established protocol for evaluating the strength of a claim, involving stuff like evidence and logic (and, if possible, a statistical analysis of the data).  But how do you do that in religion, where the only real rule is God does whatever the hell he wants?  Most of the claims of miracles are, by definition, one-offs; after all, if the same sort of thing kept happening over and over, it wouldn't be a miracle.  It's not like when Moses saw the Burning Bush, he was able to say, "Okay, let's compare this to other times we've had booming voices speak out of a flaming shrubbery, and see if this is a real phenomenon or if maybe I shouldn't have eaten those suspicious-looking mushrooms at dinner." 

So now, according to the new rules, bishops are being given the unenviable task of deciding whether a given apparition or miraculous healing or whatnot is real.  The first hurdle, apparently, is to determine if it is an outright lie to make money -- and the problem is these sorts of claims are ridiculously lucrative, so such scams abound.  The apparition of the Virgin Mary in the little village of Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina, wherein six adults were supposedly blessed for their faith and told such surprising revelations as "don't have an abortion" and "same-sex marriage is naughty in God's sight," led to it becoming the third most popular pilgrimage site in Europe (after Fátima in Portugal and Lourdes in France).  Over a million people visit the shrine every year, bringing in huge amounts of revenue; in 2019, sixty thousand young Catholics from all over the world descended on the village, accompanied by fourteen archbishops and bishops and over seven hundred priests -- despite the Vatican making the rather equivocal statement that such pilgrimages were okay "as long as there is no assumption the [apparitions of Mary] are confirmed to have a supernatural origin."

One of the many gift shops in Medjugorje [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sean MacEntee, Virgin Mary Statues (5778409684), CC BY 2.0]

Don't try to tell me that religion isn't big business.

Once the bishops determine that any given claim isn't simply fraudulent, they issue a nihil obstat ("there is no obstacle") decree, which is the religious version of "Whatever floats your boat, dude."  Nihil obstat effectively says, "Okay, fine, we can't stop you from worshiping this thing, but we're not saying it's real, either."  In the new guidelines, bishops are warned against going from there to stating outright that the phenomenon is divine in origin; issued prematurely, the Vatican says, jumping from nihil obstat to "this is a message from God" can lead to "damage to the unity of the Church" and could "cause scandals and undermine the credibility of the Church."

Well, yeah, that's the problem, isn't it?  There is no good evidence-based litmus test for differentiating between a "real" supernatural event (whatever that means) and a mere delusion; if there was, the event wouldn't be supernatural, it would simply be natural.  So we're still down to the sketchy grounds of having a bishop say, "I prayed to God and God said it was so," which then hinges on whether the bishop himself is telling the truth.

Because I can't think of any times bishops have been involved in hinky stuff, can you?

So the new rules don't really solve anything, just kick the can down the road to give the impression that there are now hard-and-fast rules for determining the veracity of something that by definition doesn't obey the laws of nature.  The BBC article where I learned about this story (linked above) ends with what has to be my favorite line I've read in a news source in months, to wit: "And so the Vatican, an institution peppered with mysticism, and which still communicates via smoke signals when electing a new pope, will be hoping its new rules can regulate claims of the supernatural."

Heh.  Yeah.  The Catholic Church, of course, is kind of in an awkward position, because they do more or less accept science most of the time, as long as the science doesn't fly in the face of the status quo.  The Big Bang Model was actually the brainchild of an astronomer who was also an ordained priest (Monseigneur Georges Lemaître) and the Vatican stated outright that the Big Bang was completely compatible with Catholic theology in 1951.  They officially pardoned Galileo in 1992 (better late than never), and have at least refused to condemn biological evolution.  But the fact remains that -- as the writer for the BBC News stated -- the entire institution is rooted in mysticism, which is a deeply unscientific approach to understanding the world.  I suppose I'd prefer this sort of waffling to (say) the views of the fundamentalists, who pretty well reject science in toto, but it still strikes me that trying to play it both ways is not gonna turn out to be a winning strategy.  Once you accept any kind of evidence-based criteria for establishing the truth, you're solidly in science's wheelhouse, and -- despite the "non-overlapping magisteria" stance of people like evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould -- the result for religious claims has almost always been a solid thumbs-down.

In any case, there you have it.  New rules for miracles.  I guess it's a step up from the bumper sticker I saw a while back that said, "The Bible said it, I believe it, and that settles it," but given the other options, I'm still going with the laws of scientific induction any day of the week.

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Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

• Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
• We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
• An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
• The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000, or about 0.632.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen. In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or a seemingly unusual pattern.  Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other ordered pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first one looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't. 

The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

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Miraculous mathematics

I've blogged before about "miraculous thinking" -- the idea that an unlikely occurrence somehow has to be a miracle simply based on its improbability.  But yesterday I ran into a post on the wonderful site RationalWiki that showed, mathematically, why this is a silly stance.

Called "Littlewood's Law of Miracles," after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood, the man who first codified it in this way, it goes something like this:

• Let's say that a "miracle" is defined as something that has a likelihood of occurring of one in a million.
• We are awake, aware, and engaged on the average about eight hours a day.
• An event of some kind occurs about once a second.  During the eight hours we are awake, aware, and engaged, this works out to 28,800 events per day, or just shy of a million events in an average month.  (864,000, to be precise.)
• The likelihood of observing a one-in-a-million event in a given month is therefore 1-(999,999/1,000,000)^1,000,000 , or about 0.63.  In other words, we have better than 50/50 odds of observing a miracle next month!

Of course, this is some fairly goofy math, and makes some silly assumptions (one discrete event every second, for example, seems like a lot).  But Littlewood does make a wonderful point; given that we're only defining post hoc the unlikeliness of an event that has already occurred, we can declare anything we want to be a miracle just based on how surprised we are that it happened.  And, after all, if you want to throw statistics around, the likelihood of any event happening that has already happened is 100%.

So, like the Hallmark cards say, Miracles Do Happen.  In fact, they're pretty much unavoidable.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Miracle of St. Ignatius (1617) [Image is in the Public Domain]

You hear this sort of thing all the time, though, don't you?  A quick perusal of sites like Miracle Stories will give you dozens of examples of people who survived automobile accidents without a scratch, made recoveries from life-threatening conditions, were just "in the right place at the right time," and so on.  And it's natural to sit up and take notice when these things happen; this is a built-in perceptual error called dart-thrower's bias.  This fallacy is named after a thought experiment of being in a pub while there's a darts game going on across the room, and simply asking the question: when do you notice the game?  When there's a bullseye, of course.  The rest is just background noise.  And when you think about it, it's very reasonable that we have this bias.  After all, what has the greater evolutionary cost -- noticing the outliers when they're irrelevant, or not noticing the outliers when they are relevant?  It's relatively obvious that if the unusual occurrence is a rustle in the grass, it's far better to pay attention to it when it's the wind than not to pay attention to it when it's a lion.

And of course, on the Miracle Stories webpage, no mention is made of all of the thousands of people who didn't seem to merit a miracle, and who died in the car crash, didn't recover from the illness, or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That sort of thing just forms the unfortunate and tragic background noise to our existence -- and it is inevitable that it doesn't register with us in the same way.

So, we should expect miracles, and we are hardwired to pay more attention to them than we do to the 999,999 other run-of-the-mill occurrences that happen in a month.  How do we escape from this perceptual error, then?

Well, the simple answer is that in some senses, we can't.  It's understandable to be surprised by an anomalous event or an unusual pattern.  (Think, for example, how astonished you'd be if you flipped a coin and got ten heads in a row.  You'd probably think, "Wow, what's the likelihood?" -- but any other pattern of heads and tails, say, H-T-T-H-H-H-T-H-T-T -- has exactly the same probability of occurring.  It's just that the first looks like a meaningful pattern, and the second one doesn't.)  The solution, of course, is the same as the solution for just about everything; don't turn off your brain.  It's okay to think, at first, "That was absolutely amazing!  How can that be?", as long as afterwards we think, "Well, there are thousands of events going on around me right now that are of equally low probability, so honestly, it's not so weird after all."

All of this, by the way, is not meant to diminish your wonder at the complexity of the universe, just to direct that wonder at the right thing.  The universe is beautiful, mysterious, and awe-inspiring.  It is also, fortunately, understandable when viewed through the lens of science.  And I think that's pretty cool -- even if no miracles occur today.

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In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Woo-woo world update

Yesterday's political post resulted in five people calling me a "libtard snowflake" (or the equivalent), a recommendation to "shut the fuck up until I get past my brainwashing," a person who said he was going to laugh after November 6 when "the leftist assholes like [me] are going down in flames," and one email that I was a "partisan hack working for the disinformation specialists."  The result is that today, we'll consider a different set of issues, to wit:

• Do ghosts hug each other in the afterlife?
• If you were strapped for cash, could you count on an angel to give you a hundred bucks?
• What would you do if you saw a UFO that made "sci-fi noises" and made your dog "go mental?"

Apparently the answers are, respectively:

• Yes.
• Yes, and your two pals would also get a hundred bucks each.
• Report it to the local newspaper, who would treat it as fact.  Of course.

You're probably wondering about the details by now, so allow me to elaborate.  The first story comes out of Lincolnshire, England, specifically Revesby Abbey, a Cistercian monastery that dates back to 1143.  Ron Bowers was conducting a "paranormal investigation" of the Abbey because of its reputation for being haunted, and he snapped a photograph that should be encouraging to any of us who are not looking forward to the idea of an afterlife with no cuddling.  Here's the photo:

Which looks, at a stretch, like a couple hugging.  So Bowers turned the image into its negative, because there's nothing like noodling with the image if it doesn't show you what you want:

And I have to admit it's a little spooky, although as I've pointed out before, pareidolia works even on people who know what it is and realize that their sensory/perceptive systems are being fooled.

Bowers, on the other hand, is all in.  "I thought I could hear a rustling in bushes behind me before the capture of what looks like an embracing couple which led me to think it could be someone in the physical [sic]," Bowers said.  "At first, I thought it was one figure, but within a few seconds I realized it could be two – one with an arm around the other.  The arm is very prominent, and it looks like two people embracing, it looks like they are in love...  It’s nice to believe that love continues.  It’s a lovely picture and who knows maybe there is a love story there.  For me it’s a little more of a confirmation that our lives continue or that our energies can return to our favorite places.  If it is possible that we are energy, it could return to our favorite places, like homes, pubs, maybe schools and other locations.  I don’t believe I have ever had something so intimate as that picture."

The second story comes from Dreamy Draw Mountain in Arizona, where three college students from Phoenix were on a hike a few weeks ago, and had a big surprise.  The students, Allisa Miller, Jen Vickman, and Kassi Sanchez, had started out the day poorly, sleeping through their alarms, and getting up to find that it was hot out.

Which makes me wonder what they expected, in Phoenix.

"Like we didn’t want to hike," said Sanchez, whom I dearly hope isn't majoring in communication.  "Like something we had to do almost forced fun."

Despite this devastatingly tragic start, they persevered where weaker individuals would have given up, and made it up the mountain trail.  And when they got near the top, they saw...

... Jesus.

Or an angel, or something.  They don't seem all that sure, themselves.  "We just see a silhouette of this man, it looks like he has long hair and he’s in a robe," said Miller.  "He was like right there on the top of the mountain.  We were all just kinda shocked, we just kinda sat there."

So they went up toward him, but he vanished.  Near where he was, they found an envelope stuck between two rocks.  They opened it, and found a long, rambling note quoting the bible and various Christian rock singers, signed, I shit you not, "J."  And with the note were three one-hundred-dollar bills, one for each of them.

It's a miracle!  A visitation from Jesus, who evidently stopped by the Pearly Gates National Bank on his way to Arizona!

Or maybe it's a poorly-thought-out publicity stunt.  I'll let you decide.

The last story comes from Stonehouse, Gloucestershire, England, where an "unnamed eyewitness" reports seeing a UFO close-up while out walking his dog.

"The UFO was hovering about 50 foot [sic] away from me, but we could not smell fuel or anything, I was shocked that it did not hit our house," he told a reporter for the Stroud News & Journal.  "It seemed like it was trying to fly below the radar, so it could avoid being scanned - at the time my dog was going mental at it... it looked like a huge tube with intricate ship-style rivets...  When I came across it coming through the forest I thought it must be a plane or hot air balloon, but it was clearly not and it was making sci-fi-like sounds.  Before it shot off into the clouds at immense speed the engines turned bright white, I've never seen anything like it."

Although he had his cellphone with him, he was "too shocked to take a photograph" of it.  Because of course he was.

This is apparently the second UFO sighting near Stonehouse in the past two weeks, which makes me wonder why they have all the luck.  I would love to see a UFO, or a ghost or Bigfoot or whatnot, and here I sit.  And I guarantee that I wouldn't miss an opportunity to take a photograph if I did.  I'd even remember to take my cellphone camera off the "auto-blur" setting.

So that's the news from the Wide World of Woo-Woo this week.  Affectionate ghosts, cash-dispensing messiahs, and UFOs that make "sci-fi-like" sounds and are held together with rivets.  I think we can all agree that this is preferable to a lot of silly stories about politics and neuroscience and genetics and so on.  Stories about ghosts and angels and UFOs don't result in my getting death threats or being called a "fucking ultra-left-wing looser [sic]."  Which is a little off-putting.  If you know any ghosts, you might want to mention that I could use a hug.

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The Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a must-read for anyone interested in languages -- The Last Speakers by linguist K. David Harrison.  Harrison set himself a task to visit places where they speak endangered languages, such as small communities in Siberia, the Outback of Australia, and Central America (where he met a pair of elderly gentlemen who are the last two speakers of an indigenous language -- but they have hated each other for years and neither will say a word to the other).

It's a fascinating, and often elegiac, tribute to the world's linguistic diversity, and tells us a lot about how our mental representation of the world is connected to the language we speak.  Brilliant reading from start to finish.

Governmental facepalms

Because we evidently needed another reason to facepalm over a Trump appointee, today we consider: John Fleming, assistant secretary for health technology at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Fleming has some decidedly peculiar ideas.  In his book Preventing Addiction: What Parents Must Know to Immunize Their Kids Against Drug and Alcohol Addiction, Fleming states that opiates are proof of the existence of god:

Were it not for these drugs, many common and miraculous surgeries would be impossible to either undergo or perform.  In my opinion this is no coincidence at all.  Only a higher power and intellect could have created a world in which substances like opiates grow naturally.

Which brings up a couple of troubling questions:

1. Why do these miracle substances intelligently created by a deity so often lead to addiction and the potential for overdose?
2. If opiates are a blessed gift from god because they "grow naturally," why are people of Fleming's stripe virtually all against the legalization of marijuana?  Seems like an intelligent deity's creation of marijuana could be argued not only from the standpoint that it "grows naturally," but because its consumption is so beneficial to the tortilla chip industry.

 It's a bit like Dr. Pangloss said in Voltaire's masterpiece Candide:

It is clear, said he, that things cannot be otherwise than they are, for since everything is made to serve an end, everything necessarily serves the best end.  Observe: noses were made to support spectacles, hence we have spectacles.  Legs, as anyone can plainly see, were made to be breeched, and so we have breeches...  Consequently, those who say everything is well are uttering mere stupidities; they should say everything is for the best.

When, of course, rather than giving us noses to support spectacles, god could just have given us all perfect eyesight rather than noses built to support spectacles.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

This, however, is not the only bizarre thing in Fleming's book.  He says there's a correlation between tattoos and drug addiction:

Body art comes into play in drug addiction as well, although obviously, not all who have a tattoo are addicts.  A sailor who gets a single tattoo on his arm or an adult woman who has a small butterfly tattooed on her lower abdomen are not necessarily drug addicts or even rebellious — just dumb, at least temporarily!...  When you see that your child has become interested in body art or has a fascination with the Goth or other subculture, then be on alert, because your child is likely headed into rebellion and possible drug experimentation.

So this makes me wonder how my two rather large tattoos haven't resulted in my being addicted to cocaine or something.  Despite the size and elaborate nature of my own body art, maybe I'm still in the category of "temporarily dumb."

Last, it turns out that Fleming himself might not have much right to point fingers about temporary stupidity, because he is one of the people who fell for the story in The Onion that Planned Parenthood was building an "$8 billion abortionplex."  Then, not having learned the lesson "if you're not smart enough to recognize satire and fake news, at least be smart enough to check your sources," he delivered a speech on the floor of Congress in 2013 to communicate the alarming news that the Department of Defense was starting to round up and court martial Christians so as to "create an atheist military."

Where, you might ask, did Fleming get this "information" from?

From Breitbart, of course.

So come on, folks.  Is it too much to ask to have a few government appointees who are competent, intelligent, and sane?  Because the ones we have now, in my dad's trenchant phrase, couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.

Myself, I'm beginning to wonder if this is an elaborate experiment being run by alien scientists to see how long it takes us to figure out that the whole American government is some kind of huge put-on.  The question they're trying to answer is whether we'll just go along with it unquestioningly.  At some point, maybe they're expecting us to say, "Okay, ha-ha, very funny.  Game's up.  Come out of hiding, alien overlords, and give us back some semblance of normalcy."  I don't know how else you'd explain people like Fleming, not to mention Steve Bannon, who looks like he's spent the last ten years pouring Jack Daniels on his breakfast cereal.

Thicker than water

People on the left side of the political aisle are currently engaging in a good bit of gloom-and-doom prognostication.  I try not to make predictions -- I've found that almost always, such attempts to look ahead don't work.  The universe always seems to have surprises in store for us -- some of them far better than we'd hoped, others far worse than we'd feared.  In any case, foretelling the future is generally a losing game.

This time, though.  I dunno, folks.  2017 is looking pretty dire.  I say that not as some kind of political pundit, which heaven knows I'm not.  I'm saying this because...

... the blood of St. Januarius didn't liquefy a couple of days ago.

St. Januarius is an interesting figure, largely because there's a huge and complex story about him even though modern historians are uncertain whether he ever existed.  The short version is that he was a third-century holy man who helped out Christians during the reign of the virulently anti-Christian Roman Emperor Diocletian, and for his trouble got shoved into a fiery furnace (that didn't work), thrown into a pit filled with wild bears (that didn't work either), and finally beheaded (that worked).  The earliest historical sources that mention him date to the sixth century, so right there it casts a little doubt on his life history, even if you don't count the miracles.

The Martyrdom of Saint Januarius (1631), by Artemisia Gentileschi [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Fast forward to 1389, when a relic of St. Januarius showed up in Naples, Italy (where he is known as St. Gennaro).  It was a vial of the saint's blood, obtained when he was beheaded in 305 C. E. or thereabouts.  Where it had been for a thousand-odd years is anyone's guess, but it was immediately revered as a holy relic, especially when it was found that the blood spontaneously liquefied three times a year.

Skeptics have speculated for some time about how the whole liquefaction thing happens.  Robert Todd Carroll, in The Skeptic's Dictionary, said that the "miracle" can be duplicated using a mixture of chalk, hydrated iron chloride, and salt water, and was due to a property of certain liquids called thixotropy -- they become less viscous the more they're shaken, stirred, or agitated.  (A common example is ketchup.)  So predictably, my thought is that it's a non-miracle that relies on purely natural physical properties of whatever it is that's in the vial.

But of course, the true believers don't like that idea.  Especially now that (gasp) the blood didn't liquefy on schedule.  They say that this only happens when a disaster is about to strike -- such as in 1631 (before an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius), 1939 (right before World War II), 1943 (when Italy was occupied by the Nazis) and 1980 (right before an earthquake struck).  Of course, those are hardly the only bad things that have ever happened, so one has to wonder how many times the blood liquefied and something awful followed, or didn't liquefy and there was a disaster.

This hasn't stopped people in Naples from panicking, of course.  The Catholic powers-that-be have tried to calm everyone, to little effect. Monsignor Vincenzo De Gregorio, Abbot of the Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro, said, "We must not think of disasters and calamities.  We are men of faith and we must pray."

Or, possibly, stop believing in medieval superstitions and look for rational explanations for stuff.  That could work, too.

Of course, apparently the saint has been giving us hints of disaster all year.  When Pope Francis visited the Chapel earlier this year and said the Lord's Prayer over the vial, the blood only "half liquefied."  Whatever that means.  Archbishop Crescenzio Sepe said of the event, "The blood has half liquefied, which shows that Saint Januarius loves our pope and Naples."

The pope wasn't quite so sanguine.  "The bishop just announced that the blood half liquefied.  We can see the saint only half loves us.  We must all spread the Word, so that he loves us more."

Righty-o.  And now the blood didn't liquefy at all, which means St. Januarius doesn't love us at all, or (according to the legend) that something really dreadful is about to happen.

I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, however.  Given the world's current state, something really dreadful is pretty likely to happen anyhow, regardless whether some obscure saint decided to warn us ahead of time.  And besides, since the saints are supposed to be pretty powerful and able to work miracles and all, don't you think that there'd be a more direct way of warning us than having his blood liquefy?  How about the saint putting big letters in the sky spelling out "WATCH OUT THERE'S GOING TO BE AN EARTHQUAKE?"  Or having celestial trumpets blare, and the saint's deep, booming voice shout out, "There's going to be a volcanic eruption in the middle of downtown Omaha, you probably should evacuate?"  Or simply having the saint tell Donald Trump to tweet about it?

In any case, I'm willing to wait and see what 2017 has in store.  My guess is it'll be a mixed bag as always, although considering the fact that the incoming Cabinet appointments have all been selected from the Daddy Warbucks Fan Club, it could be a rough ride.  So we'll have to wait until the next scheduled liquefaction, which is in May, if the Earth isn't hit with a giant asteroid or something before then.

Mary's tears

A report is in from Fresno, California that there is a statue of the Virgin Mary in someone's house that is "weeping real tears."

The predictable result is that the devout are now flocking to the home of Maria Cardenas, and church officials are declaring that it's a miracle.  Devotees have spent hours kneeling and praying before the statue.  People are collecting the "tears" in vials, and claiming that they have magical powers of healing.  Cardenas states that the tears are "oily" and "smell like roses."

Such stories are not uncommon. There have been enough claims of this type that "Weeping Statues" has its own Wikipedia page.  Weeping statues, usually of Jesus or Mary, have been reported in hundreds of locations.  Sometimes these statues are weeping what appear to be tears.  Others weep scented oil, which is apparently what's happening in this case.  More rarely, the statues weep blood.

The problem is, of course, that when the church has allowed skeptics to investigate the phenomenon, all of them have turned out to be frauds.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

One of the easiest ways to fake a crying statue was explained, and later demonstrated, by Italian skeptic Luigi Garlaschelli.  If the statue is glazed hollow ceramic or plaster (which many of them are), all you have to do is to fill the internal cavity of the statue with water or oil, usually through a small hole drilled through the back of the head.  Then, you take a sharp knife and you nick the glaze at the corner of each eye.  The porous ceramic or plaster will absorb the liquid, which will then leak out at the only point it can -- the unglazed bit near the eyes.  When Garlaschelli demonstrated this, it created absolutely convincing tears.

What about the blood?  Well, in the cases where the statues have wept blood, most of them have been kept from the prying eyes of skeptics.  The church, however, is becoming a little more careful, ever since the case in 2008 in which a statue of Mary in Italy seemed to weep blood, and a bit of the blood was taken and DNA tested, and was found to match the blood of the church's custodian.  Public prosecutor Alessandro Mancini said the man was going to be tried for "high sacrilege" -- an interesting charge, and one which the custodian heatedly denies.  (I was unable to find out what the outcome of the trial was, if there was one.)

Besides the likelihood of fakery, there remains the simple question of why a deity (or saint) who is presumably capable of doing anything (s)he wants to do would choose this method to communicate with us.  It's the same objection I have to the people who claim that crop circles are Mother Earth attempting to talk to us; it's a mighty obscure communiqué.  Even if you buy that it's a message from heaven, what does the message mean?  If a statue of Mary cries, is she crying because we're sinful?  Because attendance at church is down?  Because we're destroying the environment?  (Pope Francis might actually subscribe to this view.)   Because the Saints didn't make it to the Superbowl this year?  Oh, for the days when god spoke to you, out loud, directly, and unequivocally, from a burning bush...

In any case, I'm skeptical, which I'm sure doesn't surprise anyone.  I suppose as religious experiences go, it's pretty harmless, and if it makes you happy to believe that Mary's tears will bring you good luck, then that's okay with me.  If you go to Fresno, however, take a close look and see if there's a tiny hole drilled in the back of the statue's head -- which still seems to me to be the likeliest explanation.

Fireproof

New from the "You Really Think The World Works That Way?" department, we have the edifying story of the guy who was in a fiery car crash, in which both he and his bible survived more or less unscathed.

The unnamed driver had his Jeep sideswiped while driving down the highway in Tennessee, veered off the road, and ran into a telephone pole.  The car burst into flames.

According to witness Anita Irby:

I just saw GOD on 385.  I'm always in awh [sic] of his wonders but today just blew my mind.  This car ran off the road and hit a metal post and burst into flames not to mention the passenger was trapped inside as the car was filled with smoke the flames began to fill the inside.  THE ENTIRE EXPRESSWAY STOPPED and people ran from their cars trying to break the windows and open the doors of this mans [sic] car to free him, as they were the others went up in prayer for God to deliver this man from the paws of the devil....  Now it appeared our prayers was in vain because he couldn't move and the flames had reach the inside of the truck.  But God!!!!!! .....the flames were on the inside but the way my God is set up The Way It Look Like and what it is, None of the flames touched him and even after the car exploded once All these God blessed people ran back up ... Now the passenger even begged them to just let him die .  End of Story he's Alive and well. ......  Jesus thats my Goddd

When the scene was investigated, they found something else -- that a bible on the front seat of the car had also escaped damage.  Another witness, Eugene McNeil, said, "That is God.  If you don’t believe it, I don’t know what to say."

Here's a photograph of the car, mid-explosion:

So that's pretty terrible, and I'm really glad the guy made it out alive.  What I'm going to say in addition should not be construed as minimizing the fact that there was a catastrophic accident in which no one was hurt.

But really -- attributing the whole thing to god?  How about the people who pulled him from the car?  How about the paramedics who helped him and made sure he wasn't badly injured?

And the whole bible thing... the cynic in me thinks that it was a deliberate plant by one of the witnesses or rescue crew.  I mean, bibles are made of paper, which last I checked was highly flammable.  Take a look at the photograph; the entire passenger compartment of the car was engulfed in flames.  The likelihood of a bible surviving unburned is awfully slim.

But even if it did -- you really think an all-powerful, all-compassionate deity would work that way?  If god really did want to protect the guy, how about keeping him from getting in the accident in the first place?  And the dude's car burned up.  Cars, you may have observed, are a hell of a lot more expensive to replace than bibles.

Yes, yes, I know, money's not the point, the love of money is the root of all evil, and so on.  But seriously.  People are absolutely convinced that god intervenes in football game outcomes, helps people find their lost car keys, and makes sure they find exactly the pair of shoes they were looking for in Walmart.  Don't you think that on the whole, there are more pressing things he should be attending to?

Evidently, the answer is "no."  Here are a few of the responses to the article about god making sure the bible didn't get burned:

"Behold, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt, and the form of the fourth is like unto the Son of God...."   If Nebuchadnezzar could say such things, then I think we can safely assume that they have happened, and continue to happen...  Only believe. 

Sometimes God make [sic] it as a lesson for the people who have a faith in him to make their faith even stronger.  And those who don't believe in God.  If you warn them or you don't do in either way they won't believe.  As they have locks on their hearts. 

Adonai, the Living God.  Glory is yours Father. 

God saved a man and proved that his word fireproof! 

Liberals must really hate it when God does things like this.  Oh make no mistake about it God is real.  The fact that the bible wasn't touched and the man got out on time like that is proof.  There is no scientific explanation.

Well, maybe this is because of my locked heart, but even if you start from the assumption that god exists, it doesn't make sense that he'd run the universe this way.  On the one hand, he answers prayers to eliminate minor inconveniences, and allows major suffering of innocent people without doing a thing?

Oh, but "God Works In Mysterious Ways."  I suppose that explains everything.

I'm not setting out to be obnoxious, here.  I just don't get this worldview.  It seems to be telling us that there's a deity who is super-concerned about trivial stuff -- not to mention disapproving heartily every time people masturbate -- but stands back and does nothing during famines, wars, and even the Holocaust.

Which is a way of thinking I simply don't get.  Probably explaining why for me, it seems far more probable that there's no deity up there in the first place.

Miraculous backfire

I walk a pretty fine line, here at Skeptophilia, between criticizing ideas and ridiculing the people who hold them.  And I'm sure that I've stepped across that line more than once, given my fondness for the word "wingnut."  But I do try to focus on people's words, actions, and ideologies rather than launching broad-brush ad hominems.  That way lies Ann Coulter, and heaven knows we wouldn't want to go there.

Wait, was that a personal ad hominem?

Dammit.

Anyhow, any time you write something and post it or publish it, you take the chance that you're going to cause some negative responses.  And the problem is that there's a range of negative responses people could have to what a blogger writes, from "disagreement" to "offense" to "so offended I'm going to sue your ass off for libel."  And this is the predicament that Stephanie Guttormson has found herself in.

Guttormson is the Operations Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, and is the kind of person who has slim tolerance for bullshit.  She has a YouTube channel called "Think Stephtically," and she has taken on all manner of psychics, faith healers, and their ilk.  And now, she has gotten herself into (in my opinion, entirely undeserved) hot water over her criticisms of Adam Miller, who claims to be a faith healer and miracle worker.

In two YouTube pieces -- "Adam Miller, Con Artist" and "Adam Miller, Charlatan Antics, Childish Tactics" -- she took Miller's claims apart piece by piece.  Devotees tried to strike back, with commentary such as the following:

I have had work done by Adam Miller for the last 2 years 12 years of nagging pain in my back, INDEED he is a healer this woman is a hacker and knows nothing about spirituality.  Adam and Eve Miller are the real deal back off and allow those their gifts to heal on.

Well, I might point out first that there's a difference between a "hack" and a "hacker," but the more trenchant response is the one that appeared immediately after the above post:

I brushed my teeth yesterday then crossed the street.  Today I forgot to brush my teeth, and was hit by a car crossing the street - IF only I had brushed my teeth, I wouldnt have been hit by a car.  Right?

(Y)our example demonstrates (amongst others) the logical fallacies of cherry picking, and correlation is not causality.  THAT is why we have scientific methodologies - to weed out those claims by people such as Adam when not supported by the evidence.

Spot on, of course.  But the problem with people like Miller is that they never just retreat in disarray when they're shown up -- they lash out.  And that's what Miller has done.  He has sued Guttormson for copyright infringement (she used some clips of Miller's schtick in her own videos) and for "actual harm caused to Mr. Miller as a result of Guttormson’s infringement and statutory damages."

The lawsuit probably doesn't stand a chance of being found in Miller's favor; but the problem is, Miller is wealthy (another indication of how many gullible people there are in the world) and can afford the cost far better than Guttormson can.  So Guttormson has started a GoFundMe drive to pay for her legal costs from this frivolous lawsuit -- to which I hope you will be able to donate.

But what Miller may not have realized, given his apparent unfamiliarity with critical thinking, is that there is a phenomenon called the Streisand effect.  It involves someone objecting to negative publicity, and their objection bringing far more attention to that publicity than it otherwise would have had.  It got its name, of course, from singer Barbra Streisand, who became furious over an aerial photograph of her house that had been taken by an obscure California photographer, and sued him to have it destroyed -- resulting in the photograph being circulated worldwide, appearing in countless articles and blog posts, including on the Wikipedia page about the Streisand effect.

Gives new meaning to the phrase "pick your battles."

Barbra Streisand's house, posted here just because I can.  [image copyright © 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org, and courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So let's see if we can invoke the Streisand effect here.  Miller wants his day in court?  Fine.  How about we skeptics pull together, and not only support Guttormson's GoFundMe drive, but circulate and repost her two videos in which she criticized Miller?  When I looked at them this morning so I could link them to this post, they had only 11,000 and 2,400 views each.

That is far too few.

So take a look at Guttormson's YouTube videos (links posted above).  Post them on Twitter and Facebook and wherever else you can think of. They're well worth watching on their own merits, of course; she's hilarious, and her biting commentary on Miller's content and delivery style got some belly laughs from me.  Besides the pleasure of watching Miller's lawsuit completely backfire, it'd be nice to see more people exposed to this kind of skeptical approach of woo-woo claims.

Funny to think, then, that the efforts of a guy who claims to "work miracles" might be to bring much wider attention to a woman who works to demolish such claims.  Now wouldn't that be a miracle?