6.4 THE APPEAL OF MIRACLE STORIESIn addition to conditioned superstitious behavior and different cognitive
mechanisms supporting magic, there is a dynamic interaction between the
practice of magic and miracle stories. Miracle is probably the most widespread
genre in early Christian literature. Miracles give the bulk of the gospels, two of
them starting with Jesus’miraculous birth and all four of them (in their
present form, at least) ending with his resurrection. The apostles perform
numerous miracles in the Book of Acts. Miraclesfill the pages of the Apoc-
ryphal Acts of the Apostles, apocryphal gospels, and the Acts of the Martyrs.
The tradition goes on unbroken in hagiography and continues in present day
(evangelical) preaching and the Roman Catholic cult of the saints. Miracle
stories have always been popular, independently of whether magical practices
are widespread or not in a given culture. For example, the adventures of Harry
Potter attract broad audiences, notwithstanding the fact that most of the
readers and viewers do not practice any form of magic in everyday life. Why
are miracles so consistently powerful across space and time?
From the perspective of modern Western readers, miracle stories (often) go
against modern scientific knowledge. According to modern common sense,
illness can be healed by killing off pathogens with the help of antibiotics,
removing damaged tissue and mending broken bones, not by prayer and the
laying on of hands, let alone by words uttered from a distance. This is,
however, hardly the full story. Without knowing bacteria, Newtonian mech-
anics, and Copernican cosmology, ancient intellectuals expressed skepticism
about miracles. The most famous among them is probably Lucian of Samo-
sata, who especially reprimanded the use of miracle stories in historical
narratives (Lover of Lies,True History 1 – 4). Long before Lucian, arguing
probably against Herodotus, Thucydides required that no fables, however
entertaining, should be included in a work of history (On the Peloponnesian
War1.22). Both Josephus and Philo, while zealously dedicated to Jewish
religion, were reserved when it came to miracles (Delling, 1958; Moehring,
1973; Duling, 1985; Eve, 2002, pp. 3–85). It is obvious that some ancient elite
thinkers had a sense of skepticism or at least reservation about miracle stories,
in spite of holding a world-view in which the supernatural played an import-
ant role. Attitudes toward miracle seem to depend on more than just modern
or pre-modern world-views.
In order to understand what attracts us to miracle intuitively, we have to
take a step back and think about learning and culture from a psychological
perspective. Human culture is made possible by the accumulation of know-
ledge across generations. But our cumulative tradition comes at a price: we
cannot test every piece of wisdom we learn from our parents and teachers.
Even modern Western education, assumedly nurturing critical thinking, is
based on believing things on authority in thefirst instance. Although we do
132 Cognitive Science and the New Testament