In 2007, at Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island, a premature baby was born by C-section after being severely deprived of oxygen in the womb. A couple hours later, his heartbeat slowed until it was nearly undetectable. The attending doctor prayed over the baby, directing his plea to Salvador Valera Parra, a priest who died in Spain in 1889. Moments later, the baby’s heart started beating. Despite the lack of oxygen, the boy grew up to be a healthy young man. Eighteen years later, in July of this year, Pope Leo XIV announced that the recovery was, officially, a miracle.
The Vatican has a miracle investigation office, the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, established in the 16th Century. The Dicastery’s role is to determine whether a person can rightfully be canonized. As part of that process, the saint-in-question must be responsible for at least two miracles that are scientifically unexplainable. By the Vatican’s own definition then, miracles are inherently unscientific; they defy the laws of nature, and are not repeatable testable events with discernible causes.
This definition has left the evaluation of miracles to religious bodies. But Jordan Grafman, a neuropsychologist at Northwestern University, has recently embarked on an inquiry into miracles of his very own, using tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and brain lesion mapping.
Grafman’s characterization of a miracle is not so different from the Vatican’s: it’s an event or outcome that a person believes was influenced by supernatural agents. A miracle is not simply rare or coincidental. For example, as a good Chicagoan, Grafman is a Cubs fan. When the team won the World Series in 2016, if you’d run into him at Wrigley field that day, he might have euphemistically declared it a miracle. But actually, the win was simply a rare event, not a miraculous one, he told me, since he didn’t believe a supernatural agent had anything to do with it.
Grafman’s work radically diverges from the church soon after their shared definition. “If I have to prove that there’s a God in the universe somewhere, forget it,” he said. He’s not interested in verifying if miracles, like sudden healings or communion host wafers bleeding, are really the work of a supernatural force. Rather, he wants to reveal a different unknown: what brain regions are used to support the belief in miracles, and, then, how miracles influence how we see ourselves and other people.
Grafman’s career is about understanding belief: political, social, and now, religious. “We’ve studied fundamentalism, mysticism, all sorts of things related to religion,” he said. He and others have found that certain brain networks are associated with more general religious belief, and that brain damage can increase or decrease religiosity. As Grafman got deeper into religion, he began to feel that miracles were the key to understanding faith.
A miraculous interaction with a supernatural being is at the center of the history of religion, said Patrick McNamara, a neuroscientist at Boston University School of Medicine, and author of The Neuroscience of Religious Experience. “People evolved in relationship to these invisible minds,” he said. Miracles provide evidence for the existence of God, as well as act as a driving force for people, especially Christians, to join and stay in religious groups.
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But even though scientists have turned their focus on mystical experiences or extreme religious belief, the study of miracles is unique. “We know very little today about the neural underpinning of miracles,” said Irene Cristofori, a cognitive neuroscientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and former lab member of Grafman’s.It’s odd, Grafman said, that neuroscientists don’t know much about how people believe in miracles, given how commonly people report experiencing them.
In southern France, five million pilgrimage to the city of Lourdes each year as a site of miraculous healing. It’s commonly said about Lourdes that for those who believe, no explanation is necessary and for those who do not—no explanation is possible. Grafman rejects this sentiment. He has long wondered why and how humans believe in supernatural entities, and how those beliefs impact our social behavior. Miracles could be the key to unlocking some of those answers, if he can find an explanation for the unexplainable.
Miracles are likely as old as religion itself
In ancient Sumer, the oldest civilization, gods had powerful abilities, like healing the sick or creating catastrophic floods. The ancient Greeks believed that some gods were capable of miraculous healing, like Asclepios, who Zeus eventually killed because he kept raising people from the dead.
Miracles are found in every religious group and culture, McNamara says. As he explains it, miracles and religion go hand-in-hand because if you believe in beings like gods or angels, you expect to see them perform actions that mere mortals cannot. The word for miracle in Islam is “sign.” “It’s a sign that God exists and that God intervenes, God’s aware, and that God knows what’s going on and can change things,” said the anthropologist Scott Atran, author of In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.
“How else do we assert the reality of God?” Grafman said. “One way is to highlight events that are not easily explained by probability or scientific knowledge.”
In early medieval society, Christian miracles were determined by popular consensus, and as a result, miracles occurred everywhere, all the time. Any event that induced awe could be a miracle. In texts between 740 and 1078, a monk called Winnoc was credited with miracles like blinding another monk, then restoring his sight. But some of his other miracles were downright bland: he fixed a cup with a crack in it used for Mass, and in another instance, stopped a lamp that fell from breaking. Saint William is credited with what historian Christopher Norton called “one of the least remarkable miracles.” In 1153, when he travelled to York, large crowds met him as he crossed a bridge. The bridge collapsed, and no one was hurt. That was miracle enough to confirm his sainthood.
When any miracle goes, it creates an “unregulated saints market.” By the 12th Century, theologians started to more strictly discriminate between wonder-inducing natural events, and events that seemed to violate the rules of the natural world. Only the latter became considered an official miracle—thus beginning the oppositional relationship between miracles and science.
The growing understanding of medicine and physics encouraged this rift. In the 17th Century, the philosopher Baruch de Spinoza pushed back against the very concept of miracles. If God invented the laws of nature, why would he break them? In 1748, David Hume wrote that the laws of nature should be trusted over any first-person account of witnessing a miracle. The French philosopher Voltaire also insisted that “miracles cannot be believed,” adding on a warning, that “anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Modern day people still believe in miracles
For a first step to study miracles in the modern mind, Grafman first needed to ask: Do religious people still believe in miracles today, and if so, how many, and what kind?
To answer that—and eventually, other questions—every Wednesday, Grafman has a Zoom call with Mickey Sanchez, a minister at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical Christian group based at universities. “Miracles are a key part of our faith,” Sanchez told me. “If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then our faith is not valid.” Sanchez currently attends the Vineyard Church, a charismatic church which emphasizes the actions of God in everyday life. “We believe miracles happen, we should expect it—healings, prophecy, this sort of thing,” he said.
Grafman’s conversations with Sanchez initially helped to address some basic queries. Sanchez helped Grafman create a religious registry of around 400 people who are willing to participate in scientific research. The registry is limited to Christians for now, pulling from the Chicago area, and charismatic churches where miracles feature heavily. From the registry, Grafman ran a pilot study, still unpublished (though shared at scientific conferences), with 70 respondents. More than half, 42 people, said they had experienced a miracle, either themselves or through someone they knew.
Other survey work finds belief in miracles is common, and even increasing. The General Social Survey from The University of Chicago, which has been monitoring social change since the 1970s, asked if respondents “believe in religious miracles” in 1991, 1998, 2008, and in 2018. In people who align with religious traditions, belief in miracles increased to 62 percent in 2018, a jump of fourteen points from 1991.
Most of the miracles from the Grafman’s pilot study were health related, like, one person who said, “I saw my cousin getting healed from cancer completely.” (Health-related miracles dominate in the modern era; since 1950, every miracle that’s been announced by the Vatican has been a miraculous healing.) Others reported financial miracles, where they successfully prayed for a job or money. Some said they experienced the apparition of a loved one or supernatural being.
People who experienced miracles were predominantly educated with college or higher degrees, and people of all genders, ages, and races. With a small number of respondents, it’s hard to draw conclusions from these demographics for now, except that it suggests all kinds of people can believe in miracles, and having a higher level of education doesn’t preclude a person from this belief.
What do miracles look like in the brain?
After basic miracle survey data is gathered, Grafman can drill down deeper—into the brain. In 2024, Grafman used brain imaging from a group of Vietnam War veterans to identify brain regions associated with religious fundamentalism. He found that when certain brain networks, mostly in the right side of the brain, were damaged, people were more likely to have extreme religious beliefs. (Right-brain damage has been linked to, in other cases, delusional beliefs, confabulations, and a weakened ability to detect errors. Damage in these areas might lead a person to ignore their religious doubts, or see less conflict between religious beliefs and their other beliefs.)
As part of his miracle pilot study, Grafman and his colleagues returned to that older dataset to look at one specific question the veterans were asked: “How much do you support the statement, ‘There are really miracles?’”
When people had lesions in deeper regions of the brain, and farther to the back of the head, they said they believed in miracles less. Those who had frontal lesions believed in miracles more.
The results, while preliminary, held some clues Grafman wants to follow up on. The brain areas connected to belief miracles were different from regions related to magical thinking—suggesting that a belief in miracles is not quite the same as when people think their thoughts and desires change the external world. Instead, the brain regions were more closely associated to areas linked to the placebo response, when expectation or belief can lead to biological changes.
More research on miracle believers could confirm if these areas play a clear role in miracle making. Every experience or belief that you have, from a belief in God to thinking about tying your shoe, is reflected somewhere in the brain. It won’t be surprising that an fMRI machine can detect activity when a person is pondering miracles, when Grafman puts miracle-believers in brain scanners later this year.
What the brains of miracle believers can reveal is how these beliefs are similar to other brain networks. If brain areas that are associated with miracles overlap—or stay clear of—other regions, it can suggest what kind of belief miracles are, and how they might influence people to act based on those beliefs. Is a belief in miracles more like the placebo effect, or is more like having a strong political opinion, or even a delusion?
Past research has shown the merits of visualizing the neural basis of religious belief. In 2019 Atran used neuroimaging to show that people who said they were willing to fight and die for their sacred values (i.e. ideals people don’t compromise on, like valuing human life) were activating different brain regions than those associated with deliberative or analytic thinking. That finding suggested scared values were being evaluated differently than say, choosing your child’s preschool or playing the stock market. Other neuroimaging work has revealed that when people pray, areas of the brain socializing with friends are used. This could mean that some people regard supernatural entities as “real” and akin to having social interactions. If God is not abstract, but a dear friend, it likely changes how people respond to affronts on their beliefs, or people with differing faiths.
Later this year, Grafman will repeat his survey on miracles in a larger sample, with at least a thousand participants. Based on the answers, he will devise prompts for a neuroimaging study to probe his hunches about the overlap between political and miracle beliefs. Grafman hypothesizes based on his past work that brain imaging in healthy people will show that a belief in miracles is supported by brain networks similar to partisan political belief, where we’re motivated to connect causal dots when the evidence isn’t totally there, and align closely with others who feel the same way.
This will be a very different kind of miracle investigation than what’s taken place for the last several centuries. Yet, though science and miracles have been at odds, they have never been more closely intertwined than they are today. When the Dicastery investigates miracles, it uses medical records, bloodwork, and imaging, to demonstrate a miracle cannot be scientifically explained—which is harder to do as scientific knowledge expands. In 2024, the rules were updated by Pope Francis: an investigation of a miracle no longer needed to decide at the outset if an event was supernatural or not, to avoid an event being declared supernatural, and then later having to reverse the decision.