By Douglas Anele

In otherwords, when people claim they have received a miracle in one form or another, a sufficient number of critical and well-educated people of trustworthy character and good sense to occlude the possibility of deliberate deception invariably dispute such claims – and for good reasons too, because appearances do not always reflect reality. Human beings, especially in underdeveloped communities where majority of the population are poor and undereducated cling dogmatically to the teachings of Holy Scriptures concerning miracles, even when the phenomena in question are amenable to scientific explanation.

Hume argues further that reputable individuals who have a great deal to lose in case their claims turn out to be false hardly make testimonies of miracles, and the setting for the so-called divine interventions is hardly such that makes detection of false claims unavoidable.

Naturally, people are attracted to the unusual, the marvellous, and the extraordinary. As Hume maintains, the emotion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles and being an agreeable emotion, generates a strong tendency to believe the events from which it originated. This tendency is more pronounced in religion, where the question of systematic empirical corroboration is considered irrelevant and unnecessary. Thus, if the love of wonder combines with religious devotion, the believer enthusiastically imagines that she experiences something whenever her beloved and highly respected pastor prays animatedly under Holy Ghost anointing, or “speaks in tongues.”

Moreover, the prestige factor, the acknowledged dignity of authority possessed by popular religious leaders and their overconfident repeated affirmations of divine healing through faith increases suggestibility of the devout, thereby making it extremely difficult for them to doubt promises of miraculous interventions in their lives.

On a general note, Hume acutely observes that, “The many instances of forged miracles and prophesies of supernatural events, which in all ages have been detected by contrary evidence, or which detect themselves by their absurdity, prove sufficiently the strong propensity of mankind to the extraordinary and the marvellous, and ought reasonably to beget a suspicion against all relations of this kind.”

Human beings interpret their experiences based on the contents of their epistemic repertoire built on intelligence, memory, imagination, knowledge, experience and other mental powers. Thus, because these factors differ from person to person, what A interprets as miraculous to B may be just an instantiation of previously ill-understood manifestation of a natural propensity. That said, air travel, space exploration, the wonders of modern electronic communication and medicine would seem utterly miraculous to someone who lived before the nineteenth century. To such a person, the very sight of an aeroplane landing and passengers disembarking from it, or organ replacement in an excellent hospital, would be extraordinary, because such events are not part of the normal experiences of life for him and his contemporaries.

Most claims of miracles in Nigeria pertain to health issues, both physical and mental, although a sizeable number of the faithful eagerly expect supernatural intervention in their businesses, family and employment problems. Sometimes, during special miracle sessions, people blind or crippled from birth claim to have been healed completely and instantaneously. Now, the pertinent question arises: How is it possible for someone who has never seen or walked to identify colours or move about in an instant? These deceptively simple activities require prolonged learning experience to accomplish, during which the relevant organs of the body, including the brain, develop capacities for efficient sight and locomotion respectively. Hence it is virtually impossible for someone with congenital blindness or severe deformity of the legs to identify colours or walk instantaneously.

Of course, a believer can always maintain that instantaneous healing was the miracle, which is beyond the reach of scientific comprehension. However, he cannot have it both ways: if God suspends the laws of nature whenever he chooses in order to effect a miracle, then he is capricious; if he allows phenomena to occur according to divine plan he established before creation, then either every occurrence is miraculous or nothing is. Anyway, the miracles advertised on television seem to be stage-managed. I believe that religious leaders desperate for converts sometimes pay unemployed and poor people to pretend to be blind, crippled, and deaf etc., so that during religious gathering or special healing programmes they can claim miraculous cures. Ironically, the miracle workers seem unable to heal family members, friends and loved ones with genuine health challenges, which strongly suggests, as already indicated, that public display of miracles are stage-managed to hoodwink the unwary.

Let us now beam our searchlight on the mechanics of miraculous healing involving large crowds of enthusiastic believers. According to M.B.O. Danmole, in God, Religion & the Scientific Environment, after a pastor or religious healer had, through whatever means, determined that a patient has the appropriate level of faith, what happens subsequently is neither magic nor miracle. The great irruption of anticipatory excitement and confusion characteristic of such gatherings generates a huge amount of emotional energy, which activates volleys of self-sustaining stimuli to the sensory organs. Once the emotional state of the expectant crowd, including that of the sick person, is brought to this level of excitement and its physiological reinforcement in heart action and adrenal response, together with other physiological mechanisms in the sympathetic nervous system, the stimulus becomes self-consolidating. This affects the peripheral muscles, which contracts and provides additional stimulus to the impaired organs, adding to the aggregate volleys of impulses delivered to the nervous system along well-determined pathways.

Under the emotional effusion required for physical reinforcement, the lame and people with paralysis originating from cerebral lesions walk and move briefly during the healing session. Incidentally, most times when the excitement subsides, the paralysis relapses. For the dogmatic faithful, such temporary healing, which is explainable scientifically, constitutes a miracle. Now, if the disability in question stems from habit or from contrived behaviour such as hysteria, the temporary stimulation achieved during a healing session may effect a permanent cure. Of course, faith healing can also cure severe disabilities but only on the level of subjective behaviour integration, that is to say, the sick person may accept or ignore the disability.

Many instances of purported miracle or faith healing are instances of spontaneous remission, autosuggestivity, and placebo effect. Our bodies and minds repair themselves naturally through these mechanisms studied by experts in psychology and related medical sciences. extraordinary justification of unusual occurrences.

In conclusion, charlatans masquerading as miracle workers would continue to exploit the gullibility and intellectual laziness of Nigerians by reinforcing belief in miracles through legerdemain. As Bertrand Russell wryly remarked, folly is perennial; but the consolation is that not everyone can be fooled with exaggerated and irrational claims of miracles. Concluded.