Michael Shermer on The argument from miracles
Shermer argues that miracle claims are explained by cognitive biases, pattern recognition, and the law of large numbers — not supernatural intervention.
Michael Shermer has made the debunking of extraordinary claims a central focus of his career as founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Why People Believe Weird Things. His treatment of miracle claims draws on his expertise in the psychology of belief: human beings are wired to detect patterns and attribute agency, even where none exists. Miracle reports, in Shermer's analysis, are predictable products of these cognitive tendencies rather than evidence of supernatural intervention.
Shermer invokes the law of large numbers to explain why apparently miraculous coincidences occur with regularity. In a world of billions of people experiencing millions of events daily, some extraordinarily improbable things will happen to someone, somewhere, every day. The recipients of these improbable events interpret them as miracles; the vastly larger number of people to whom nothing remarkable happened are never counted. This is a textbook case of selection bias, not evidence of divine intervention.
In his books and lectures, Shermer has catalogued the cognitive biases that make miracle claims compelling: confirmation bias (remembering the hits and forgetting the misses), the availability heuristic (giving extra weight to vivid, memorable events), and the tendency to find meaning in randomness. These biases, he argues, are more than sufficient to explain the entire history of miracle reports without any supernatural component.
“Humans are pattern-seeking animals. We find patterns even where none exist. It's what we do — and it's why we believe in miracles.”