Roger Ebert: “I’m not a miracle.

And neither are the Chilean miners.” Thus Ebert opens a recent entry to his journal. Ebert continues:

We are all alive today for perfectly rational reasons. Yet there is a common compulsion to describe unlikely outcomes as miraculous -- if they are happy, of course. If sad, they are simply reported on, or among the believing described as "the will of God." Some disasters are so horrible they don't qualify as the will of God, but as the work of Satan playing for the other team.

After a bit of this and that he returns to the miners:

How much better to describe the rescue as the result of the fortitude of the miners and the skill of the good-willed people on the surface who reached them in what was, after all, a very short time. How much better to say the outcome in Chile was the result of intelligence and good will. But there seems to be a narrative in these matters that requires the citing of divinity.

From there Ebert brings it home by discussing his medical emergency when his carotid artery burst just as he was leaving the hospital after successful surgery. Since he was still in the hospital, surrounded by his medical team wishing him well, that team switched into rescue mode and saved his life. Improbable? Yes. But not a miracle.

Then: a discussion of the status of miracles in Roman Catholic theology. On Ebert’s word that theology is quite subtle about the miraculous. Most things casually asserted to be miracles are not so in the conspectus of Roman Catholicism, certainly not the rescue of the Chilean miners nor the saving of Ebert’s life. And, nearing the end – where he declares that he doesn’t himself believe in miracles (he’s a lapsed Catholic) – he mentions evolution and then darts away from it:

That puts me in mind of all the arguments against evolution that depend on a complete ignorance of the definition of a scientific theory. But let's not go there today. Returning to the subject, what has all this to do with my carotid artery, or the Chilean miners? I argue that few people have a good idea of what a miracle actually is. It's not like entering the lottery. God doesn't perform miracles for a few lucky winners. They take place for one purpose only, and that is not to spare lives, cure disease, heal limbs or prevent a bus from falling off a mountain. Their only purpose is to demonstrate the glory of God.

But let’s return to evolution. One implication of Ebert’s argument, it seems to me, is that the habit of mind that treats the rescue of the Chilean miners, and so many other things, as being miraculous, belongs to the same discourse that dismisses evolution and that dismisses evidence for anthropogenic climate change. It’s one thing to dismiss science in cases where the causal mechanisms are obscure and incompletely understood and where the data is difficult to gather and interpret. That’s not the case with the Chilean miners. But if routine habits of mind deny rational explanations in cases where such explanations are ready at hand, then obscure and difficult phenomena, like evolution and climate change, they haven’t got a chance.

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That’s one thing, then, Ebert’s article itself. But it’s posted to the blog and, as such, garners comments. Ebert’s posts routinely attracted many comments, many of them long and thoughtful. Since his blog is monitored, and Ebert himself does the monitoring, he reads all the comments. People know this.

This post attracted an extraordinary comment, from one Eric Schmidt. He identifies himself as a grad student, gay, and in long-term conflict about Catholicism. At the time he read Ebert’s post he was in an atheist phase:

And yet, reading your post at 7:25 a.m., I felt the overwhelming, almost out-of-body urge to go to Catholic mass and confession. My parents, who were staying with me over the weekend, must have seemed rather startled when I jumped out of bed and drove hastily to a church I knew would have a mass this early with opportunities for confession. ...

And in the confessional I poured out -- admittedly with some stuttering and prodding -- all my hurt, my agony, my anger at God, my anger at my fragmented adolescence, my anger for those years of my life when it seemed God was looking down and laughing. I didn't cry or beat my breast. That's the Hollywood version of catharsis. Mine wasn't a majestic confession, just a true one. And I feel back on a path toward God now.

There is, of course, a bit more, but you’ll have to read it at Ebert’s joint. Here’s part of Ebert’s response: “. . . you take seriously what I take seriously, but it draws us in opposite directions.”

There’s an old term for it: Concordia discors.