Dear End of the Rainbow,
We keep looking for you.
Not angrily. Not mockingly. Just… hopefully. Like someone squinting after a storm, convinced that if they tilt their head just right, something will appear.
Gold. Proof. A sign.
People tell stories, of course. Stories of healing. Of timing. Of things working out just when they were about to fall apart. And for the people telling them, those moments feel real. Personal. Charged with meaning.
Miracles.
But here’s the quiet problem.
Every miracle comes with an alternative explanation already attached.
Medical remission.
Statistical coincidence.
Human intervention.
Administrative error.
Luck.
Sometimes the explanation is mundane enough to feel disappointing. Like an IRS check arriving at just the right moment. One person says, “Thank God.” Another says, “Thank the IRS.” Same event. Different interpretation.
Which tells us something important.
What we call a miracle often depends less on what happened, and more on what we already believe.
Believers see intention.
Nonbelievers see causation.
Both see the same facts.
And that raises an awkward question:
If God is acting in the world, why does God leave such ambiguous fingerprints?
Why no clear, repeatable, unmistakable evidence?
Why signs that only make sense after belief?
Why events that always require interpretation instead of observation?
In every other domain of life, evidence doesn’t work this way.
If gravity exists, it doesn’t show up selectively.
If germs cause disease, they don’t heal some people while ignoring others for mysterious reasons.
If a cure works, it works regardless of who believes in it.
But miracles are strangely uneven.
Personal.
Unverifiable.
Unequally distributed.
Which leads to an even harder question than skepticism itself:
If God performs miracles, why these ones?
Why for some people and not others?
Why save one child and not another?
Why intervene here, but remain silent there?
Selective revelation doesn’t strengthen belief.
It complicates it.
Because a God who could make things clear, but doesn’t, starts to look indistinguishable from a God who isn’t there at all.
Atheism doesn’t always come from hostility.
Sometimes it comes from exhaustion.
From waiting.
From listening.
From asking sincerely and hearing nothing back.
From realizing that belief seems to require filling in the gaps ourselves.
So we’re left with a plain, almost unfair question:
If God exists and wants to be known, why is the evidence so hard to find?
And if God doesn’t exist, why are humans so good at finding meaning anyway?
Still searching the horizon,
~ The Radical Left