Over on X, @aishpilled asked, “non-theists – what would make you believe in God?” It was a good question, and the atheists answering offered both trollish and thoughtful answers.
Many of the responses were variations of wanting something so obvious (either to the individual or to the world) that it would be literally impossible to deny. For instance, one person wrote:
Have your god instantaneously appear in front of me, right now, with a bottle of my favorite wine. I’ll presume god knows both where I reside and my wine preferences. Or, under any and all necessary scientific observation, have god instantaneously appear and instantaneously reinstitute an amputated limb to a degree it can’t be determined to have ever been amputated in the first place.
Another:
Pretty much anything unequivocally attributable to a god and nothing but a god.
Eg. All amputees spontaneously regenerating limbs.
There are plenty of apparently-supernatural events in this world in which there’s no obvious scientific, materialist explanation. But that’s not enough: these atheists want evidence where there’s not just no explanation, but no possible explanation. On one level, this is a perfectly understandable desire: who wouldn’t want God to make himself more manifest? And that longing is even a good thing. But on another level, these desires are not going to be met in this life, because they’re unholy, and contrary to whole raison d’etre of miracles.
To see why, it’s important to first recognize that our core problem is that we want to be godlike apart from God: that is, we want to be God, instead of God. This is where all evil comes from. Milton’s Paradise Lost gets this just right, by having Satan declare it “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” And the first humans broke off communion with God by falling for the lie that if they would just disobey God, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Gen. 3:5). St. Augustine argues that this is at the heart of every sin: that we are enticed by “that false and shadowy beauty which pertains to deceptive vices,” declaring to God that the sinning soul “turns away from You, and seeks without You what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to You.”
It’s for this reason that faith is the key to our salvation. As Hebrews 11:1 puts it, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” It is, in other words, a recognition of your own limitations and an act of trust: recognizing that God is God and I’m not.
This is where miracles come in. Miracles aren’t the point of Christianity: as St. Paul says, “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:22-23). But miracles can be an aid to that act of faith, as the Catechism explains:
The signs worked by Jesus attest that the Father has sent him. They invite belief in him. To those who turn to him in faith, he grants what they ask. So miracles strengthen faith in the One who does his Father’s works; they bear witness that he is the Son of God. But his miracles can also be occasions for “offence”; they are not intended to satisfy people’s curiosity or desire for magic. Despite his evident miracles some people reject Jesus; he is even accused of acting by the power of demons (548).
Contrast this with the kinds of miracles that the above atheists were demanding, in which God (a) makes everything clear, to our satisfaction, so we don’t have to trust him; and (b) comes to us on our terms (even catering our favorite bottle of wine!). This a decision to trust God only once there’s no longer any need to trust, and only once God has treated us as the real gods.
Whether we’re looking at the logical case for why the universe needs a creator, or the historical case for Jesus’ Messianic claims and Resurrection, or any of the miracles that God still performs in the modern world, God gives us more than enough reason to trust him. But what he won’t give us—what he can’t give us without feeding into our sinful self-delusions—is so much evidence that we needn’t trust him, and can go on pretending like we’re Him.