Miracles & The Benevolent Dolphin

What's a miracle? The word seems to be thrown around a lot and the above video shows a curious way in which we tend to read miracles into just about anything we want. In cases like this, it's an obvious logical error that allows people to pick out the tiny good snippets and blow them out of proportion. What about benevolent dolphins?

We've all heard stories of stranded swimmers who were about to drown in the ocean when a miracle happened. A dolphin came to the surface and nudged the swimmer up and toward the shore. He continued to do this until the swimmer was close enough to walk out on his own strength.

A miracle, right? No tragedy being ignored here, is there?

While it's incredibly easy to read intention into the dolphin's motives, let's stop and consider another possible explanation. What about sadistic dolphins? Why don't we ever hear of the swimmer who had almost made it to shore when an evil dolphin was sent by the devil to consistently nudge him further out to sea until he drowned? If this ever happened, how would we know about it? The swimmer would have died and nobody would have known of the true circumstances.

We hear of the benevolent miracle dolphins because they are the ones whose survivors live to tell about it. Perhaps there actually is some sort of altruistic sense that dolphins use to help people. Perhaps they have some sense that people belong on land, and land is over there, and I should help out here. Perhaps. We really can't be sure. We CAN be sure that accepting the story of the benevolent dolphin as an unassailable miracle is not logically feasible. If I ever get stranded out at sea though, I do hope I'm wrong on this.

-Chris