Miracles attributed to Mary McKillop may just be good luck. Photo: Steven Siewert
Every time you check the news lately it seems that God has performed another miracle. Last month, a four-year-old boy survived a seven-storey fall from the balcony of a high-rise building in Miami, landing on a palm tree with little more than a scratch. Within hours the press had dubbed him the "miracle boy" with witnesses declaring that they "saw the hand of God" helping the child.
We have also supposedly seen God's handiwork in a spate of recent airline disasters. First there was the Libyan plane crash and then, just 10 days later, a similar horror in India. In both cases, the survival of one or more passengers was deemed miraculous. In the case of the Mangalore accident, even those who missed the flight cited divine intervention. One of the passengers meant to board the plane said, "I was supposed to go at 1.15am, but by mistake I thought it was 1.15pm . . . it is actually a miracle from God".
All this talk of miracles tends to lead religion into dangerous territory. For me, "miracles" are just a reminder of a problem inherent in religious logic. If we are to believe that God really did intervene to save these people from an early death, what does this say about those who die? Presumably God does not care enough to save them from the terror and pain of an accidental death or to spare their families a lifetime of grief. We can also reasonably ask why, if God is all-powerful and all-loving, he doesn't prevent plane crashes and balcony falls in the first place?
The response offered up by religion is the baffling claim that God works in mysterious ways, or has a "higher plan", which we are not qualified – or even permitted – to inquire after. I prefer American biology professor and renowned internet blogger P.Z. Myers' recent response that such events can only be interpreted as proof that "God is a capricious bastard".
In Australia, most of our recent miracle work has come by way of helpful go-between Mary MacKillop. More astonishing than "miraculous" recoveries from terminal cancer, has been the media coverage of this story.
Since the canonisation campaign really started to take off, some Australian media outlets have simply and unabashedly reported Mary's miracles as if they were irrefutable fact, with the words "allegedly" and "according to" glaringly absent from many stories. Take, for example, this headline: "Woman miraculously cured from inoperable lung cancer by praying to Mary MacKillop". Perhaps even worse though, are uncritical reports that Mary's miracles have been subjected to "exhaustive inquiry" involving "rigorous scientific analysis".
According to the official Mary MacKillop website, the miracle rubber-stamping process involves demonstrating that a person really had an illness, that they are now cured, and the cure was not brought about by medical means. What is missing from all this "stringent" scrutiny by "medical specialists" though is one of the most fundamental tenets of scientific methodology: correlation does not prove causation. To claim that any miracle either recent or historical has been medically or scientifically proven is patently false.
While spontaneous regression from cancer is certainly uncommon, it is also not unknown or undocumented. Just because so-called miracle recipient Kathleen Evans recovered from lung and brain cancer, and she also prayed to Mary MacKillop, does not mean that one thing led to another. By the same logic, I could claim that wearing blue socks brings prosperity since I found $2 behind the couch this morning.
What's, of course, interesting about miracles is that they are always within the realm of the possible. If God really wanted to silence the doubters, why wouldn't he do something truly impressive and unambiguous? Or, as the now-infamous line goes, why doesn't God ever answer the prayers of amputees?
If the church wants to claim that an infrequent, yet still entirely possible, event is a miracle then that's up to them. For me, and I'm sure a lot of others, such statements just serve to remind us about one of the more difficult problems with religious belief – unless we are prepared to hold God directly accountable for all the unfair, undeserved and particularly unspeakable things that happen on his watch, we can't give him credit for the occasional stroke of good fortune. If this seems like a simplistic argument, that's because the hole in the logic just looks so impossibly big from this side.
Likewise, should people want to devote their lives to securing an Aussie sainthood, then that is their business. Personally, I can't help but think that two "confirmed" miracles in the 100-plus years since her death just suggests a kind of stinginess on Mary MacKillop's part.
Instead my objections arise when the church and the media start uncritically reporting "miracles" as news and as fact.
With Mary MacKillop's big day looming in October, let's hope that the coverage of her canonisation shows due respect for reason, science and good sense. In the meantime, can we please banish all this talk of miracles and call survival stories what they really are – cases of good luck.
Sarah McKenzie is a freelance writer.
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