To get back to the subject of Lourdes, here is a nice article by Mark Shea on the rhetorical strategies of the New atheist writers.
catholicexchange.com/2009/09/23/114751/EXTRACT FOLLOWS
This curious pattern of trying to have things both ways is on remarkable display among the New Atheists. On the one hand, we run into contradictory explanations that do not explain, such as diabolically clever evangelists who are too stupid to read their own books. On the other hand, we run into a curious role reversal when it comes to dealing with claims of the miraculous, not 2,000 years ago, but right here and now.
Theists, you will recall, are dogmatists utterly closed to empirical evidence that challenges their tidy little universe. The New Atheists, in contrast, are realists who just follow the evidence where it leads, and luckily it leads to what they “simply knew” since they were nine years old. Yet curiously, we so often meet New Atheists like London Times columnist Matthew Parris.
Recently, Parris wrote his coolly intellectual reaction to the story of Sr. Marie Simon-Pierre, who, as doctors confirm, was suddenly healed of a well-documented case of Parkinson’s Disease on the night of June 2, 2005, after praying for the intercession of the recently deceased Pope John Paul II. By way of careful scientific examination of these facts, Parris deployed the following analytical algorithms:
1. Link the story with crazy dispensationalist notions about the Second Coming;
2. Call for “intelligent Christians” to voice their “righteous anger” and “contempt” for this “nonsense” (apparently meaning “any belief in the supernatural”);
3. Ridicule the “excesses of Lourdes”;
4. Lament “the woeful confusion of faith with superstition”; and
5. Categorically condemn anyone stupid enough to “honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.”
Parris concludes this dispassionate pursuit of the evidence with the following de fide definition:
“But how can you be sure?” Oh boy, am I sure. Oh great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a Pope’s name down. He didn’t.
Simple-minded folk might think that the truly rational first step is to find out if the nun had Parkinson’s and then find out if she was cured. Why not research the strange and well-documented deeds of St. Pio of Pietrelcina? Or the miracles at Lourdes?
Instead, the tactics of Parris are defended with a sort of mantra: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This slogan is designed to persuade us that the debate is over what the facts are — not over whether the New Atheist materialist dogma permits him to so much as look at them.
The reality is that extraordinary claims are established on the basis of human evidence every day. No man can prove in a lab that his wife loves him, yet for millions of men it is an extraordinary fact more certain than the age of the universe, accepted entirely on human testimony. For centuries, extraordinary claims were brought back from Africa of a mysterious manlike creature that dwelt deep in the jungles. The way the reality of this creature was determined was not by sitting in a lab parroting “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but by going and seeing whether or not gorillas were there.
And that’s the thing: The believers go and see. Credo ut intelligam. New Atheists stay at home and rail at what Hitchens calls the “ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage.”
Seventy-thousand eyewitnesses (including atheists and skeptics) to the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima are told by the stay-at-home dogmatist that it was spontaneous mass hallucination unprecedented in history.
People who have experienced scientifically documented and inexplicable healings at Lourdes are commanded by New Atheists to believe they are victims or perpetrators of some sort of unnamed “excess.”
A Host begins bleeding human blood at a Mass in Betania, Venezuela, and the whole thing is caught on video by an ordinary tourist? Conspiracy and trick photography, despite the fact that the Host (still preserved in a monstrance after being subjected rigorous tests) continues to bleed now and then to this day.
And when the resolve to Just Not Look begins to crumble under the suspicion there might be something to the supernatural after all, the solution is “Pop in a DVD of the Amazing Randi or Penn and Teller debunking something and repeat to yourself ‘Some claims of the supernatural are bunk, therefore all are.’”
God’s obstinate tendency to conform to the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior (”God, under carefully controlled, laboratory conditions, will do whatever he likes”) has prompted some particularly desperate New Atheists to propose one final objection in a last ditch attempt to show who is boss. This is known as the Argument from Chronological Snobbery. It may be seen in chemical purity in the words a devotee of the New Atheism who recently wrote me:
Because science is evidence-based and ever-evolving it is actually better suited to unravel the mysteries of life and the universe than ancient “divine” texts. (Is it unreasonable to ask, for instance, that the Lord offer us at least a cursory sketch of DNA in his “authoritative” text on the workings of the world? Or perhaps it’s time for the old man to reveal a revised edition that at least pays lip service to the Enlightenment and the wonderful discoveries of science, none of which were implied or indicated in the slightest in his original “bible.”)
St. Thomas would put it thus:
Objection 5. It seems God does not exist, because if he did exist he would meet my demand for proof by giving a biblical author knowledge — such as the soil composition of Mars or the design of a microchip — impossibly ahead of the Bronze Age. He has not done this, therefore God does not exist.
Now there are only two sorts of people who think Scripture is supposed to be The Big Book of Everything: New Atheists and Fundamentalists (who are more alike than either realizes). Catholics, in contrast, believe Scripture to be about God’s progressive revelation of salvation in Jesus Christ and reject the notion that its mission is to give us the atomic weight of the hydrogen atom or a schematic for a transistor. That’s because our present is not, in the words of Lewis, “the final and permanent platform” from which all is to be judged and the ultimate summit to which all has been leading.
Think about it. Suppose some earlier skeptic made similar demands. If he is God, says the medieval skeptic, then why doesn’t Exodus discuss the four humors of the body? Where is the blueprint for the astrolabe in Genesis or the science of leechcraft in Numbers? The 17th-century skeptic demands to know why God nowhere reveals ultimate truth — Newtonian physics — in Scripture. The 19th-century skeptic demands to know why God never deigned to reveal the hard scientific fact of aether to Moses. In the 1940s, the Stalinist skeptic laughs at the Bible’s ignorance of Lamarckian evolution.
In short, it is the glory of science to progress. Meanwhile, the purpose of revelation is not to tell us everything about everything, but to tell us about the important things. And the irony is, the revelation of creation ex nihilo is precisely the sort of thing that transcends both Bronze and Digital Age mythologies. Paganism tended toward a cyclical, not a linear, vision of time. It universally imagined the gods making the universe from some sort of “stuff.” Only one people held the fixed belief in creation ex nihilo: the Jews, who insisted that “God created the heavens and the earth” out of nothing. Scientifically, the question of whether the universe even had a beginning remained open until about 40 years ago. How that beginning came about is still — and always will be — a question that transcends science and can only be known by revelation.
At this point, the sane metaphysician must sooner or later say, “Very well then, science is limited and I must grow beyond its narrow confines. I must embrace a larger metaphysic that encompasses science, yet allows for supernatural revelation that transcends, not contradicts, the truths revealed by science.” The insane metaphysic says, “No! Everything must fit my narrow empiricist worldview!”
That is what the Catholic Tradition calls “pride.” And that, ultimately, is the real issue here, not “sufficient evidence.” The solution to this blunder is what the tradition calls “humility.”
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that the only response a believer can give to the one who will not understand is “You don’t understand.” It should be noted that the operative term here is “will not,” not “cannot.” There are two sorts of questioners, roughly speaking: those who ask to find things out and those who ask to keep from finding things out. This is the explanation for Jesus’ mysterious refusal to give a sign, coupled with his curious willingness to give all sorts of signs. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. But those who ask in order to keep from finding also get what they seek. For all find what they truly seek.