Carl Sagan - The Varieties of Scientific Experience - A Personal View of the Search for God

We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course. But we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time. It is therefore at least millions to one that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.

Strong stuff.

Without a doubt it is more interesting if miracles occur than if they do not. It makes a better story. And I can recall a case that happened to me. I was at a restaurant nearby Harvard University. Suddenly the proprietor and most of the diners rushed outside, napkins still tucked under their belts. My attention was attracted. I rushed outside also and saw a very strange light in the sky. I lived not far away, walked home (without paying the bill, but I told the proprietor I would return), got a pair of binoculars, came back, and with the binoculars was able to see that the one light was actually divided into two lights, that exterior to the two lights were a red light and a green light. The red light and the green light were blinking, and it was, it later turned out, a massive weather airplane with two powerful searchlights to determine the turbidity of the atmosphere. I told the people at the restaurant what I had seen. Everyone was uniformly disappointed. I asked why. And everyone had the same answer. It is a memorable story to go home and say, "I just saw a spaceship from another planet hovering over Harvard Square." It is a highly nonmemorable story to go home and say, "I saw an airplane with a bright light."

But beyond that, miracles speak to us of all sorts of things religious that we have powerful wishes to believe. This is true to such an extent that people become very angry when miracles are debunked. One of the most interesting cases of this sort- and there are thousands of them-is within the Roman Catholic Church, where there is an established procedure for verifying alleged miracles. It's in fact where the phrase "devil's advocate" comes from. The devil's advocate is the person who proposes alternative explanations of the alleged miracle, to see how good the evidence is. I have in front of me a newspaper clipping from June a year ago, titled "Priests Denounced After Rejecting Miracle Claim." And let me just read a few sentences:

Stockton, California. Angry believers denounced a panel of priests as "a bunch of devils" after the clergymen ruled that a weeping Madonna in a rural Roman Catholic church is probably a hoax, not a miracle. One woman, Lavergne Pita, burst into tears when the findings were announced Wednesday by the Diocese of Stockton. Manuel Pita protested that "these investigators are not investigators. They're a bunch of devils. How can they do this?" Reports that the sixty-pound statue sheds real tears and can move as far as thirty feet from its niche in Mater Ecclesiae Mission Church in Thornton began circulating two years ago. Church attendance has tripled since then… Last year the diocese named a commission to study the reports. In announcing the panel's finding, Bishop Roger M. Mahoney said the events connected with the statue "do not meet the criteria for an authenticated appearance of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ." The statue may have been moved, the tears may have been applied… Actually, the tears were never reported to flow, they were just seen, and they were gluey. One of the proponents said, "When the virgin appeared to the kids in Portugal, they didn't believe them either. These things usually happen to the humble and low incomes. The poor," he added. "These things are not for everyone."

Well, I would like now to tell you about one of the most extraordinary studies on this subject that I know of, which is one of the few cases where not just supposed miraculous events occurred but where they were studied in great detail by a team of observers, who infiltrated the religious group in order to do sociological research. They convinced the group that they were there because they were also believers. This is an extremely interesting case, because the prophecies, every one of them, failed utterly. And those are not the cases we tend to hear.

The story comes from a book called When Prophecy Fails, by [Leon] Festinger et al. It was published in the middle 1960s and refers to events that occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the early 1950s. A woman in Minneapolis believed that she was receiving a message by automatic writing. Do you know what automatic writing is? It happens to people all over the world. It's where the hand with the pen or pencil in it seemingly takes on a life of its own and writes things when, as far as anyone else can see, the person who belongs to the hand is asleep or doing something else. There seems little doubt that the person who is attached to the hand is responsible for what is happening on the paper. But it has an eerie sense of happening not just unconsciously but from some external source. In this case the automatic writing was from Jesus-or at least a modern incarnation of him-who was resident on an otherwise undiscovered planet called Clarion. The message was urgent. It said that a flood would inundate the Earth (despite the biblical promise made to Noah), on the twenty-first of December, would cover most of the United States and the Soviet Union, among other nations, and would raise the lost continents of Atlantis and Mu. Spacemen from the planet Clarion would arrive before the flood to rescue the faithful, take them up on the flying saucers, and bring them to Clarion.

The group that formed around the woman who did the automatic writing were ordinary people, in no sense obviously deranged. One of the leaders of the group was a physician who was examined by psychiatrists, I guess on the grounds that for a physician to believe this was extraordinary but for anyone else it was expected. He was adjudged to be entirely sane although "holding unusual ideas." The group received numerous messages-six or eight-advising them to be present at a certain time in a certain place to be picked up by flying saucers before the event, and, as will be no surprise to you, the Clarionites never appeared. If they had appeared, you would have heard of it before now. The flood itself also never appeared, although earthquakes in several parts of the world occurred within a day of the predicted inundation, and that was taken by the enthusiasts in the group to be a partial confirmation of the flood.

As you can imagine, the failure of the flood on December 21 produced some consternation in the group but by no means led to the group falling apart. They responded wholeheartedly to a subsequent automatic-writing message that they were to sing Christmas carols in the cold outside the house of one of their leaders, preparatory to still another UFO pickup, which they did, surrounded by a crowd of some two hundred taunting onlookers and police to separate them from the onlookers. They showed great dedication, great courage. But a skeptical approach to the world, they cannot be said to have exhibited.

Now, as to their understanding of how it is that they were not picked up, there were several sets of explanations, and I'll just list them: They had misunderstood the message (although it said in plain English what they were to do and it was signed "Jesus" or "God Almighty"). Another explanation was that they had been insufficiently dedicated, that their faith had not been strong enough. Or that all this was merely a test by the extraterrestrials to see how committed they were and that the extraterrestrials never intended to flood the Earth, just to test their faith. Or that the predictions were entirely valid but they got the date wrong. It would happen ten thousand years later… a small mistake. Or that the inundation would have happened but the coterie of the faithful sufficiently impressed God with their faith that God intervened on behalf of mankind, and we're all alive because these people had believed strongly enough.