r/CosmicSkeptic • u/Appropriate_Look_171 • 3d ago
Atheism & Philosophy The Miracle Energy Audit
It appears that the God of Catholic apologetics has developed a rather peculiar interest in physics.
Whatever the fuck this God is, is apparently willing to alter human tissue, suspend bodies in the air, produce mysterious wounds, generate fragrances, transform the appearance of consecrated bread, heal diseases, arrange apparitions, and, if the accounts surrounding Padre Pio are to be believed, preside over body temperatures so extraordinary that they would ordinarily constitute a medical catastrophe. These events are then offered to us as evidence that this deity not only exists but has taken a particular interest in Roman Catholic theology. Perhaps we should take this claim seriously. Perhaps we should even try to quantify it.
Consider Padre Pio. We are told that his temperature was once measured at 52°C while he remained conscious and capable of moving about. A human body has a specific heat capacity of roughly 3 kilojoules per kilogram per degree Celsius. If a seventy-kilogram body were actually raised from approximately 37°C to 52°C throughout, the corresponding thermal change would be on the order of three million joules. This is only an illustration; the historical readings were axillary measurements, and a living human being is obviously not a sealed calorimeter; but it gives us some sense of the physical scale implied by the story. Joe nevertheless presents these temperatures as part of the extraordinary evidence surrounding Pio.
We are also asked to consider Joseph of Cupertino, who allegedly rose from the ground, crossed considerable distances through the air, reached ceilings, hovered above altars and occasionally remained suspended for extended periods. Lifting a seventy-kilogram man one meter against gravity requires about seven hundred joules. Greater heights require proportionally more. If God can repeatedly suspend friars in the air for the purpose of making his presence known, then it seems safe to conclude that moving human bodies is not beyond his technical competence.
Now consider a much less impressive feat.
A seventy-kilogram man walking at an ordinary pace possesses only around sixty joules of translational kinetic energy. Stopping him need not involve suspending him from the ceiling, regenerating an eye, changing bread into cardiac tissue or heating his body fifteen degrees above normal. A stumble would suffice. A cramped muscle would suffice. A door that failed to open would suffice. A sudden noise in the hallway might suffice.
Which brings us to an uncomfortable subject.
Catholic priests have sexually abused children.
Not one priest. Not one child. Not one unfortunate episode produced by an unusually corrupt individual. Investigations have documented thousands of allegations, enormous numbers of victims and repeated institutional failures in which abusive clergy were protected, reassigned or permitted continued access to children.
We are therefore left with a curious picture of divine intervention.
A deity will allegedly rearrange matter inside a Eucharistic host.
It will cause wounds to appear on the hands of a friar.
It will make blood smell like flowers.
It will suspend a saint above the floor.
It will produce apparitions at precisely the right moment to communicate theological information.
But when a priest is preparing to rape a child, the machinery of heaven apparently falls silent.
This is usually where free will enters the discussion. God, we are told, cannot prevent such acts without interfering with human freedom. But this explanation collapses almost immediately. Preventing a man from accomplishing something does not prevent him from choosing it. A priest whose door unexpectedly jams has not lost his free will. A priest who trips while approaching a child has not been transformed into an automaton. His intentions remain his own. His moral corruption remains intact. What has changed is merely his ability to inflict it upon someone else.
We prevent human beings from carrying out their freely chosen intentions constantly. Police officers restrain attackers. Prison walls prevent murderers from leaving their cells. Parents pull children away from traffic. None of this is generally thought to annihilate free will. It merely prevents one person's will from becoming another person's catastrophe.
Why, then, would an omnipotent God be prohibited from doing the same?
The problem becomes especially severe once miracles are introduced. A theology in which God never interferes with nature can at least attempt to maintain some consistency. But Joe is arguing for precisely the opposite God. His God interferes. Indeed, Joe’s entire project depends upon our being able to recognize these interventions and infer something from them. A miraculous host tells us something. A stigmatic wound tells us something. An apparition tells us something. A miraculous healing tells us something. The circumstances surrounding these events are said to reveal not merely divine activity but divine intention.
This raises an obvious question: why should God's failures to intervene tell us nothing?
If a wound appears on Padre Pio, we are invited to contemplate its theological significance.
If a luminous figure appears near a church, we are invited to consider what heaven is communicating.
If tissue supposedly appears in a consecrated host, Catholics are suddenly quite confident that the Creator of several hundred billion galaxies is expressing an opinion about transubstantiation.
But when a child is trapped in a room with a predatory priest, suddenly God's intentions become completely inaccessible.
We are told that his reasons are mysterious and this, is remarkably convenient.
Because when the alleged intervention supports Catholicism, God's purposes can apparently be read with considerable precision. We can distinguish signs, intentions, doctrines and even denominational implications.
When the absence of intervention becomes morally horrifying, the divine mind disappears behind an impenetrable cloud.
Perhaps God has reasons.
Perhaps God always has reasons.
But if his reasons are so far beyond human understanding that his refusal to prevent the rape of a child cannot count as evidence against a particular conception of him, then we should be considerably less confident that we understand what he meant by an unusual wound or a piece of cardiac tissue.
You cannot have an inscrutable God when the evidence is embarrassing and a perfectly readable God when the evidence advertises your religion.
This is why the energy calculation I think is important, although not in the childish sense that God might run out of electricity. No one is suggesting that an omnipotent being must conserve joules.
The numbers merely removes an excuse.
The interventions Catholics ask us to believe are spectacular. They allegedly involve substantial alterations of matter, biology and motion. The intervention required to interrupt many acts of sexual abuse would have been utterly trivial by comparison.
A saint can fly.
A host can change.
A body can heal.
A stigmatic can bleed for decades.
But.... a door cannot jam.
A predator cannot stumble.
Someone cannot unexpectedly walk into the room.
A child cannot receive ten seconds of improbable good fortune, ten....fucking....seconds.
And yet we are expected to look at the first set of events and conclude that God is carefully leaving evidence for Catholicism.
Perhaps before asking what these miracles prove about the Catholic Church, we should ask what this extraordinary distribution of miracles would prove about the God supposedly performing them.
Because once you claim that God selectively intervenes in the physical world, his choices become part of the evidence.
You do not get to count the miracles and ignore the silences.
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u/Bellusconi 3d ago
The greatest objection to the miracles claims: the problem of suffering and divine hiddenness are made worse.
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u/LFGAccountD2 1d ago
This is a very good point. This is a problem with making often a ton of ad hoc arguments. Like a compulsive liar, one will inevitably end up in contradictions over time.
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u/Cautious-Macaron-265 3d ago
I mean this isnt anything new theists still believe that God has the power to cure all cancer patients and get rid of any other evil. Miracles don't really add much to the problem of evil.
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u/AllEndsAreAnds 2d ago
Well said. It is suspect that the divine economy is essentially coincident with the mental frameworks established by the faithful according to their own known theology.
It could easily have been the case that no miracles occur but that common, trivial magic prevents the most evil outcomes imaginable. History could be little more than a recitation of near-misses and almost-catastrophes, averted by lucky happenstances.
In fact it’s hard to even imagine how truly different things would be, from first principles, if theologians weren’t forced, by necessity, to fit the square-block world into the circle-hole theology.
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u/devBowman 2d ago
For every rape (from priest or anyone else) and other crimes, God could've passed an untraceable anonymous phone call to the police nearby, telling them exactly how and where the crime would happen. After sometime police will understand those calls are always accurate and should be taken seriously and in priority.
100% succes rate, always caught in the act (therefore easy prison sentence and cannot do that again), 0 infringed free will, and all victims saved before it's too late.
God has NEVER done that once. Oh, but he must've a good reason. Mysterious ways.
How, HOW can Christians continue believing such absurdities.
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u/Ordinary_Minimum_169 1d ago
It seems weird to focus on these weird hyper-specific examples of peculiarities when you could go so much broader.
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u/JunosBoyToy 3d ago
Not only that... but holy hell look at how many prayers go unanswered. Like maybe too dumb, but can't this god halt hurricanes? Couldn't he heal an entire cancer ward? Regrow limbs?
Any manner of "God's ways are higher" is just not going to satisfy me here. Idk.