DAY 94
CHALLENGE
“Miracles are part of a prescientific worldview. Today we understand that the universe operates by the laws of nature, not miracles.”
DEFENSE
The ancients knew as well as we do that nature obeys particular laws. The idea that there is no room for miracles today reflects a bias against miracles, not real science.
People in the ancient world were more in touch with nature than we are. They knew it behaved according to regular cycles and that things happened in predictable ways. They knew that the sun rises every day, that they could use the motions of the stars at night to predict the seasons and the correct times for planting crops, and they were aware that stones fall down rather than up, and so on.
They also were aware that virgins do not give birth, that water does not turn into wine, that loaves do not spontaneously multiply, and that people who have been dead for several days do not come back to life— much less ascend into heaven. It was precisely because they knew the regularities of nature that they were able to identify the latter events as miracles.
The difference between then and now is that we have a more de- tailed knowledge of the regularities of nature. We have precise measurements of many of them, and these allow us to describe them with mathematical formulas. Some are so well established we refer to them as scientific laws.
But these “laws” are merely descriptions based on observations of how nature usually works. Nothing says the world always acts that way. Science is based on observation, and the only way we could know that the world always behaves a certain way would be to observe the entire history of the universe and see what nature does at each moment, but we can’t do that.
Consequently, the idea that nature must always behave in the ways that it normally behaves goes beyond what science can establish. It’s a philosophical assumption, not a scientific fact. The open-minded way to approach this issue would not be to make that assumption but to look at the evidence, acknowledging that nature normally works in certain ways but leaving open the possibility that unusual, miraculous events might occur.
TIP
A good book on this subject is C.S. Lewis’s Miracles.