Miracles: Proofs for the Eyewitness Only

In Chapter 22 of Some Answered Questions, 'Abdu'l-Bahá takes up a question that had divided every religious tradition of the Western world: how should miracles be understood? Are the miracle stories told about Christ, about Muḥammad, about the Báb, the very proofs of their stations? Or are they something else — accidental, secondary, beside the real point?

The Master's answer is direct and characteristic.

Miracles are proofs for the eyewitness only — and even he may regard them not as a miracle but as an enchantment.

The teaching has two halves. The first is realist. Even extraordinary events, the Master grants, may have occurred — and in some cases certainly have. The second is sceptical, and the scepticism is from a perhaps unexpected source: the Master Himself doubts the evidential value of such events.

He observes, plainly, that the only person who can be sure that a miracle was a miracle is the person who saw it with his own eyes. Anyone else is depending on testimony — and testimony, on a matter as remarkable as the breaking of natural law, is by its nature open to question.

But, He continues, the case is even harder than that. Even the eyewitness may, on reflection, fail to be persuaded. The extraordinary feat he saw may, with a little distance, look to him like a clever trick. The Master mentions, in passing, that extraordinary feats have also been related of some conjurors — the stage magicians of the bazaar, in the Persian setting, who could produce illusions of remarkable convincingness. The line between the marvel that has come from God and the marvel that has come from a clever performer is not, the Master suggests, a line that the unaided eye can always draw.

What follows is the larger argument that runs through the whole chapter. The proofs of a Manifestation of God are not, finally, the supernatural feats attributed to Him. The proofs are the moral and historical effects: the transformation of the disciples, the spread of the teaching across whole civilizations, the moral elevation of the souls who receive it, the unity it produces in scattered peoples. These are evidences any later generation can examine and weigh.

The implication for the Bahá'í believer is simple. The Faith does not stand or fall by the production of wonders. It stands on the quality of the life it produces in the people who receive it — and on the spread of the message across continents that no army was sent to conquer. The miracle, in 'Abdu'l-Bahá's account, is not the parlour trick. The miracle is the Bahá'í community of Lagos, of Tirana, of Honolulu, of Cuzco, that did not exist a century ago and now does.

The teaching frees the believer from a certain temptation. We are not asked to believe in spite of what we know about how the physical world works. We are asked to look, soberly and at length, at what the message has done in the lives of those who have received it — and to weigh the matter on that ground.

Source: 'Abdu'l-Bahá, Some Answered Questions (recorded by Laura Clifford Barney, 1904-06), Chapter 22 on Miracles. Public domain text from the Bahá'í Reference Library.

'Abdu'l-Bahá. (1908). *Some Answered Questions*. Bahá'í Publishing Trust. https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/some-answered-questions/