Miracles: An Antiquated View
Ryan, James H.
654 MIRACLES: AN ANTIQUATED VIEW By JAMES H. RYAN ONE of the strangest phenomena of contemporary American intellectual life, a phenomenon worthy of critical and psychological analysis,...
...He takes at fifth hand statements made by men who got their information at second and third hand...
...He has analyzed the historical evidence behind the miraculous happenings, has submitted the events themselves to a searching and scientific analysis, and has often frankly judged them to be spurious miracles...
...Miracles is written in the rationalistic manner which Ingersoll made famous, and with the same disregard for history and logic which was so marked a character* Miracles: A Modern View, by Floyd L. Darrow...
...Father Thurston, however, has approached these cases in a scientific spirit...
...Darrow that the historical value of the Gospels, even in the miracle narratives, is beyond critical questioning...
...They show that the judgment of the Church with reference to the historical value of the books it was called upon to include in the Canon was both sane and sound and that this judgment has its foundations in no less a fact than that the canonical Gospels are histories while the apocrypha are mere pious legends...
...In which connection it might have been well for the writer to have examined the medical report of the Bureau des Constatations Medicales of Lourdes rather than to settle the question by the a priori statement that all such cases are those of "typical neurotics, the hysterics, and those afflicted with the mental aberration oi physical disability...
...But nobody would question the value of the philosophy and science of Aristotle, of the mathematics of Euclid, of the medicine of Hippocrates, merely because of the highly imaginative character of Greek popular thought...
...Darrow does not appear to share this knowledge...
...All, except Catholics, concede that the miracles of the early Church and the middle-ages are utterly false...
...The Church makes no claims on our faith with regard to so-called ecclesiastical miracles...
...It is not necessary to cite other examples in order to establish how muddled is his thought as to the nature of a miracle...
...Because some so-called miracles are the products of popular imagination, because primitive peoples are given to animism and prone to regard certain natural events as miraculous, it is concluded that all miracles are purely psychological, and are explainable in such terms...
...Darrow settles the whole problem quite simply by declaring the Gospel history unauthentic, a view which he says is accepted today by "every scholar of standing...
...As a concrete example of Darrow's historical competency, I cite only two quotations picked at random from a mass of similar false statements...
...A book such as Miracles would operate to destroy this good opinion were we not quick to speak out and to brand it for what it is, a third-rate compilation, an unscholarly and tendential piece of propaganda writing...
...Those of the Bible are no less so...
...Such a mixture of half-truths, historical errors, discarded theories, and personal opinions parading under the trappings of scientific research cannot be paralleled in any other book which this reviewer has ever encountered...
...The question, then, and recent thinkers have seen the point, must be approached not so much from the angle of philosophy as of historical evidence, and to this evidence the Christian thinker turns for a definitive settlement of the problem...
...The chapter on miracles From the Apostolic Age to the Reformation, repeats the historical errors and half-truths of Middleton, Brewer, Warfield, and A. D. White, and assumes that since the Reformation, everyone outside the Catholic Church has ceased to believe that miracles are any longer of actual occurrence...
...In the Church, on the other hand, the benighted opinion endures that miracles are taking place today, as for example, at Saint Anne de Beaupre, at Lourdes, and at other shrines...
...In conclusion, may I cite some Darrovian gems of thought to justify my severe and harsh criticism of this "production of modern scholarship in popular form" ? After reading these quotations it may be left to the reader to judge whether the criticism has been either too severe or too unkind: "The so-called lives of this man of mystery [Christ] are nine-tenths fiction...
...Darrow on the evolution of thought, in order to make palatable the conclusion that the ancients were fools and, as such, ready to accept even normal happenings as miraculous events...
...This is not the place to come to the defense of the miracle, either from an historical or from a philosophical point of view...
...Instead of proving that the miracles of the New Testament are not genuine, the apocrypha demonstrate the direct opposite...
...Until the time of the Reformation the Catholic Church as a separate institution did not exist...
...He analyzes them, convinced that the Bible narratives are not historically exact, and that even if they were, a miracle is impossible anyway and cannot be accepted—a position very reminiscent of no less a modern than Hume...
...We may now turn to a consideration of what the author has written concerning the miracles of the Old and New Testaments...
...When he comes to the miracles of the New Testament, Mr...
...That many occurrences of the past have been recorded as miracles which were not in truth miracles, that popular superstition has often played fast and loose with fact in its interpretations of purely natural events, is a matter of elementary history...
...Criticism since Astruc has attacked the Gospels from every conceivable angle, only to conclude with Harnack, writing forty-seven years ago, that "as regards the criticism of the sources of Christianity, we stand unquestionably in a movement of return to tradition...
...Although I am quite conscious of the fact that the only claim to scholarship which it can make is that which the publishers make for it, nevertheless it heats one's blood almost to the boiling point to have such a book go forth as a sample of American scholarship...
...654 MIRACLES: AN ANTIQUATED VIEW By JAMES H. RYAN ONE of the strangest phenomena of contemporary American intellectual life, a phenomenon worthy of critical and psychological analysis, is the wide-spread favor with which books whose aim is to popularize scientific and literary knowledge have been received...
...But of the life and teachings of Jesus he seems to have known very little...
...Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company...
...and, "December 25, the date of Christmas, was also the birthday of many pagan deities," It would be difficult to castigate this unscholarly compilation in too severe terms...
...The Gospels are wholly unhistorical...
...He [Saint Paul] wrote probably within fifteen or twenty years after His death...
...Here again the myth theory of the origin of Jewish and Christian religious beliefs is worked overtime, and takes the place in the writer's argumentation of a painstaking historical analysis of the facts narrated by the Bible...
...The root problem is not so much whether miracles are possible—granting that the universe is governed by laws and that we, as scientists, are fully acquainted with all these laws and their workings (a large assumption)—as whether God Himself exists...
...istic of his controversial method...
...The book by Floyd L. Darrow entitled Miracles* is a typical example of this new kind of scholarship at its worst...
...Whether miracles have occurred and do now occur is a question which can only be settled on historical grounds...
...Suffice it to say that all references to continuity in nature or to the universe viewed mechanistically and as a closed system beg the question at issue...
...The conclusion of the whole matter, so far as history is concerned, is this —not a particle of evidence in support of a single miracle relating to Jesus has ever been found...
...American scientists and historians are doing high-class productive research in many fields today, work which is gaining for them the admiration and applause of the world...
...Nor does he seem to appreciate that it was due principally to their overemphasis on the miraculous that the early Church rejected the apocryphal gospels and refused them a place in the Canon of the New Testament...
...Yet Mr...
...It is difficult to review this work and to maintain during the effort one's mental equanimity...
...Such "scholars" as Brewer, Doane, and Middleton (an eighteenth-century controversialist) furnish the bulk of his material, chapter after chapter...
...There is no evidence, as far as I was able to ascertain, that the author has discovered a single new fact of history or has opened the way to a new conception of miracles...
...Darrow cites the Crucifixion, the 655 doctrines of the Trinity and of the Atonement as miracles and then proceeds to demolish them by pointing out parallels in certain pagan religions...
...The recent flood of compendia, histories, stories, and outlines would seem to justify this low opinion of our scholarly achievements, if such books could rightly be taken as a criterion of the level and integrity of American scholarship...
...He discusses seriously, and with seeming approval, the Rosicrucian philosophy, and applies its principles to the fact of the Resurrection and to the teachings of Christ, as a possible rational explanation of the dogmas of the Christian religion...
...If He does exist, He cannot but be regarded as an adequate and rational cause of all such happenings as fall without the realm of uniform natural action...
...On the contrary, a study of modern biblical criticism might show Mr...
...Darrow keeps repeating the discredited arguments of the older rationalists like Paulus, apparently oblivious of how unmodern these really are, and how far we have traveled from the theories of Strauss, Renan and company...
...The history of medicine, of the positive sciences and of philosophy shows that a progressive and upward growth in knowledge has taken place in these fields even during the last century...
...He rehashes the arguments of Comte and Huxley, and serves them up as the latest results of modern scholarship...
...The argument is a perfect example of what has been called "the fallacy of thought parallels...
...Frazer and Tylor are called upon to tell us about primitive culture, ghosts, religious myths, and totemism, to prove that all miracles are but the result of that "irrepressible proneness to wonder which in every childhood cradle of the race built up the marvelous background of prehistoric myth and legend into which the thought, the religion, the philosophy, and the literature of every civilization have so deeply struck their roots...
...He writes: "The Easter of the Christian Church was originally solemnized on March 25, the same day upon which the pagan saviours were believed to have risen from the dead...
...Yet Mr...
...That there has been evolution in human thinking, the history of which is, in its main outlines, perfectly well known, no one questions...
...American scholarship has been vigorously attacked in certain circles overseas and not altogether without reason...
...2.50...
...Draper and A. D. White are called on again and again to supply him with arguments, while several chapters are but badly done resumes of Stanley Hall's bizarre views as developed in his Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology...
...A great amount of insistence is laid by Mr...
...Nobody has more severely criticized some of the alleged miracles with which the lives of the saints are replete than Father Thurston...
...The contrast between this method of approaching the problem and that of the author of Miracles is so startling that it need scarcely be pointed out...
...If anything further were needed to demonstrate the utterly unscientific character of this book, one would be at a loss to know where to go in order to discover it...
...How far philosophy has traveled from the opinions as well as the spirit which dominated nineteenth-century agnosticism is well known to everyone in touch with contemporary viewpoints...
Vol. 5 • April 1927 • No. 24
