Signs or Misunderstandings? Miracles, Science, and Religion
Thomas Jefferson famously constructed an edition of the New Testament that excluded most of the supernatural. He cut out the Virgin Birth, the turning-water-into-wine, the making-the-blind-man-see, and the Resurrection, along with all the other miracles, to paste together a more respectable, reasonable version of the gospel.
You can see he literally cut out the parts he didn't like.
Many Christians will immediately realize that the Jefferson Bible takes away acts of God that are at the heart of the Christian faith. Responding to attitudes like Jefferson’s, Christians who profess belief in miracles may move to an antagonistic stance, promoting faith free of obligation to reason. But that antagonism, the separation of reason from miracles (or miracles from reason), may be unnecessary at best and undermining to Christianity at worst.
Miracles: Unreasonable and Immoral
In our everyday use of the word, a “miracle” is a religious interpretation of what one might otherwise call “coincidence” or “luck.” You found the perfect parking spot without trouble after a long day at work. You walk away from a particularly nasty car accident unharmed. You received an unexpected ‘A’ on a test (miracle of miracles). And so on.
But in some situations, the meaning of “miracle” reaches deeper. It requires God (or whatever being is in charge of the universe) to act in a powerful, unprecedented, perhaps inexplicable way for the achievement of divine purposes. With this meaning of miracle in mind, the recession of cancer, when the doctors told you that you had only months to live, becomes a testimony to God’s continuing call on your life. The protection of a small nation from the onslaught of five surrounding countries becomes a sign of divine favor. The parting of the Red Sea, walking on water, and the resurrection of the dead are all, under this understanding of miracle, God’s acts as a part of the divine plan for salvation.
There are at least two challenges to believing in miracles today: science and morality. From the perspective of science, it may not seem consistent to accept the laws of nature that make our entire modern society possible while simultaneously saying that there is a whole spiritual world that can mess with these laws at any time, even all the time. Many people would identify with Rudolf Bultmann, influential theologian and scholar, when he says, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles. We may think we can manage it in our own lives, but to expect others to do so is to make the Christian faith unintelligible and unacceptable to the modern world.”
The notion of the unacceptable leads to the second problem: morality. Many people question the goodness of a God who “blesses” some people but blatantly disregards the safety and wellbeing of others. If God is able to act sometimes, that makes God accountable for all the times God does not act. Such a God is either fickle, cruel, or weak, and many don’t want or need a God like that messing with their lives. And so, believing in miracles becomes a righteous rejection of science for some, and an incredibly insensitive insistence of false hope for others.
The History of The Issue
One hundred years or so before Jefferson, Sir Isaac Newton described some fairly universal physical patterns of how objects move. An object will remain at rest where it is unless it is moved and keep moving unless it is stopped. And so on. He called these patterns “laws of nature” in reference to God’s moral laws, attributing to God the establishment of how the world works both physically and morally.
Newton’s physics opened the door for a mechanistic understanding of the universe, meaning that we can think of the universe as God’s creation of a giant clock, each atom a part of an intricate cog in a well-oiled system that runs perfectly and without error. This mechanistic view leads to the ideas of causal closure--all causes and effects are the result of measurable, natural, physical phenomena.
But while mechanism was meant to praise the foresight and genius of the Creator God, historian Peter Harrison explains the problem it created, saying, “Ironically, the very constancy of divine action served to make God increasingly irrelevant as an explanatory mechanism. In the nineteenth century, laws of nature came to be regarded not as laws imposed on nature by God, but literally as laws of nature itself." This understanding of law doesn't mean behavioral guidelines, but rather predictable, dependable ways nature behaves. We have reached this understanding because of science’s success—we rely on the laws of nature in order for our technology to work. We rely on predictability and stability daily; divine breakage of the laws would throw the whole system and our society would crumble. What’s more, we’ve come so far scientifically exactly by leaving out the possibility of supernatural activity; in the words of Enlightenment mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace about the movements of God in the world, “I have no need for that hypothesis.”
Miracles present problems that some Christians resolve easily by referring to God's sovereignty—God does as God wants in God's universe and holds it all together. But for the Christian dedicated to a God who makes and maintains order out of chaos or the scientist who works on the premise that the laws never change (though our precise understanding of them might) and that the activity of the world can be explained mechanistically, the possibility of miracles is not easy to accept by any means. After all, God is not physical, so how does he interact in our measurable, physical systems cause and effect?
Different Perspectives
Before we dismiss miracles as either no problem at all or every problem there is, let’s go back to the definition of miracle and consider the different ways that one might approach the issue. Defining “miracles” is crucial to any discussion of the topic and beginning with a baseline definition can help clarify perspectives. For the Christian, the Bible doesn't offer a clear definition of the word, but considering the variety of miraculous acts in the Bible, one could view miracles in the following ways:
Sign: Miracles are typically called “signs and wonders” in the Bible. We can think of them as noticeable events that point to God’s presence and power and of a reality that is to come.
Inherent Wonder: An extension or correction of the idea of miracles as signs is to say that all events are wondrous miracles in themselves, whether we acknowledge them as such or not. Rather than speaking in specific acts, God is generally speaking to all with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Violation of Law: When a miracle is something that simply couldn’t happen naturally, such as a statue of the Virgin Mary crying genuine human tears, it’s a violation of a natural law. This is philosopher David Hume’s view, that a true miracle is not something that may be achieved by natural processes, it is “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”
Inexplicable: The medieval theologian St.Thomas Aquinas suggests that for a miracle to be a wonder to all, its cause has to be hidden from all. This idea, taken narrowly and alongside Hume’s concept of miracles, fits within the conflict model of Science and Religion, undermining the value of scientific exploration and allowing science to “replace” God once we discover a physical explanation for a particular event.
Interpretation: Like the idea of miracles as “inherent wonder” above, this conception of miracles suggests that an event can be a miracle if we choose to see it that way.
Timing: Perhaps a particular miracle is not in the extraordinariness of the event itself, but in its timing, in the unlikeliness that you would be at that exact place at that exact time in order to, say, receive help just when you need it, run into a friend you were just thinking about, or, more dramatically, narrowly miss being in a car accident. Miracles of timing allow the believer to see a miracle as God’s action in the events of our lives without breaking any laws of nature.
This list of perspectives, of course, is not exhaustive, and not necessarily mutually exclusive. It does help you realize, however, that many different ideas are involved when speaking about miracles, including divine action, natural law, and the character of faith.
What Helps
Some people want to prove the Bible by proving how miracles could happen through natural law, to describe a God who set up an orderly universe that can be explored by science. Some people want to prove the Bible by proving how miracles couldn’t happen through natural law, to describe an all-powerful God who is willing to reach into the world out of love for Creation. Some people want to dismiss the idea altogether and focus on more immediately applicable doctrines of faith. Attitudes toward miracles vary.
Ultimately, however, the difficulty of miracles means that we have to seek God with intentionality and use discernment to decide what it means for a miracle, or any event, to be caused by God or be used by God. Science doesn’t replace the God of miracles, but advances in science do suggest that we need to look again at our understanding of the word "miraculous". For the faithful, uncertainty here doesn’t mean weak devotion—it means that we have opportunities to form much more active and honest relationships with God through seeking.
1. Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth, Vol.1, p.5.
2. David Hume, On Miracles, X.12, endnote.
3. Peter Harrison, Creation: Law and Probability, p.28.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, III.101.1.
