One Poor Approach to Private Revelation: Dogmatic Atheistic Faith

As we saw last time, a relatively small but significant number of modern people answer the question "Do miracles ever really happen?" with Emile Zola’s firm and utterly irrational negative. This is due, not to “the facts,” but to their faith—come hell or high water—in a rigid and unthinking naturalism. The atheistic materialist like Zola rejects the possibility of Marian apparitions, divine healing, and such things because he rejects the possibility of all supernatural occurrences, no matter what evidence is presented to his senses. The hilarious thing about this is that the atheistic materialist with the invincible immunity to facts in front of his very eyes usually pats himself on the back for his scientific open-mindedness while condemning the supernaturalist as the rigid dogmatist. But as Chesterton pointed out long ago, this is to get things exactly backward:

The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism—the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

But, of course, atheists aren't the only people who are skeptical of the possibility of miracles in the present day.  Some Christians are too.  Of which more, next time.