Those who deny the possibility of miracles usually come in two types: people who like Outer Space and undergraduates who remained sober long enough to read a paragraph of David Hume. The former type do not like miracles because they take things like “wonder and mystery” to be scarce resources which, if taken by Christians, will be denied to Scientists and astronauts. One cannot believe in the mystery of the Eucharist without denigrating the mystery of the Milky Way, and any claim of a miracle is met with a hopstep: “The real miracle is that we’re all floating through Space on a Rock.” To argue with such people is largely mean-spirited: they are children, for whom history is a war between Science and Religion, and whose fragile self-esteem relies on bunkering down with the enlightened side of this entirely imaginary fight.
As for the Humean, he takes, as the Thinking Man’s Position, the thesis “extraordinary things cannot happen, because, ordinarily, they do not happen,” the merits of which have never outweighed the Christian rejoinder, namely, that “extraordinary things can only happen on the condition that, ordinarily, they do not happen.”
But every now and then an explanation is given for a miracle which is rather more miraculous than the miracle itself—or at least a good deal stranger. I have heard it said that the Resurrection was a plot of the Apostles, solving the mystery of one man rising from his tomb by reference to twelve men walking willingly into their own, accepting martyrdom rather than admit that they made the whole thing up. I have heard Marian apparitions called collective hallucinations, which purports to explain one heavenly appearance with reference to a thousand, corresponding psychological ones—a wonder, if there ever was one. And recently, I have been puzzled by a claim against the purported healings of Jesus Christ, that they were performed through “the power of suggestion”—that is, through the placebo effect.
Science never rid the world of mystery, but scientific language has, especially when wielded by morons who imagine that because a thing has a Latin name, it is encapsulated, thought-through, and set firmly on a shelf labeled “Things We Understand.” I have been that moron, as when my child, dutifully imitating his father from the first, was born with a relatively large head. I took brief comfort in being told that this was a condition called “megacephaly.” Comforted, until I translated the term: it means big-headedness. “Science,” in the form of a doctor, had repeated my worried observation back to me in Greek, and I was endowed with a feeling of control over the problem, not because I was any more informed, but because I was pleasantly mystified by a big, authoritative word—used by megacephalus scientists.
“Placebo” is like this. It is a Latin word which delivers the sense that we have the thing tamed, when, in fact, the word delivers the frankly wild phenomenon that human beings can heal others, and be healed, in and through a relationship of authority and faith. It is a point of undisputed fact that a person can be given a sugar pill by a man he believes to be a healer, and actually be healed, without any particular mechanism of action beyond the authority of the doctor and the belief of the patient responsible for the healing. Because of this, we do not measure the efficacy of drugs against giving no drugs at all, but against the effects of this trust. Some have suggested that we simply use placebos as medicine—where the pills fail, one might try a dose of authority received in faith.
It is fitting that the actual origins of the word, bandied about like one more band-aid in the first-aid kit, comes not from the scientific journals, but a prayer book: it is the name given to Vespers in the Office of the Dead, from the first antiphon, "I will please the Lord in the land of the living" (Placebo Domino in regione vivorum) The argument that Jesus Christ healed through “the placebo effect” is a frustrating one, not because it is wrong, but because it takes as an answer and an explanation what should really be the beginning of a question. To the assertion that “Jesus healed,” it says “he healed only by entering into what appears to be the natural condition of the human animal, whose faith that he will be healed is a condition of the healing.” As far as I can tell, this would deny the presence of a wonder by pointing to the fact that human beings are already something rather wondrous.
A materialist might find it odd for a human being to be so wondrous—he would call the belief “I will be healed” one more rearrangement of cranial cells, whose squishy contortions may have a beneficial effect on, say, a failing liver. But the motions and reconfigurations of brain-cells require a cause, just as much as the healing of a liver, and it is no answer to say that “the brain makes the belief” when we might say, with as much confidence, that the belief changes the brain.
The most reasonable explanation is that the actual, immaterial belief is the cause of a material change in the brain cells, which are the proximate cause of the healed liver. The bizarre materialist a priori, which demands that beliefs be reduced to electromagnetic pulses or neural expansions, is merely strange, easily ignored. But if a materialist goes so far as to say that, as physical events, these beliefs are the physical products of other random, prior, physical events, thereby stripping the belief “I will be healed” of any status beyond the particular shape that a rock exposed to the weather happens to take—then his materialism can be disregarded as a similar, random disfigurement of an exposed and happenstance-produced brain. Rather, it seems obvious that the human person is a wedding of the spiritual and the physical; a body which holds and responds to immaterial meanings; flesh affected by the word; sick flesh therapeutically affected by the words “be healed,” when spoken with authority and received with trust.
Yes, Jesus appears to wait upon faith in order to administer healing, saying some iteration of “your faith has healed you,” or, famously, refusing to perform miracles in a certain town because of their lack of faith. But this does not make his healings any less astonishing. If anything they astonish more by being more instructive. They do not merely give man’s body back to himself, they also reveal his soul—he is a creature who receives health, life, and being as a mystery from above. Restoration of health, life, and being are quite possible, but they wait upon a conversion away from the adult pose of self-mastery and towards a reliving and a realization of this primordial reality—that we exist under authority.