Miracles

Last week, my mom and I were talking on the phone and the subject of miracles came up. My mom was talking about how God is "in the miracle business" and I was talking about how he's the "author of the laws of nature", with all their regularity. It recalled to mind some things I read in a C.S. Lewis essay, about how laws of nature, far from precluding miracles, are necessary conditions for their possibility.

If there were no regular laws of nature, miracles could not be recognized as exceptions and would lose their function as divine signs. Miracles are possible provided that such laws exist and provided that God is not bound by those laws he has established. It wouldn't be reasonable for God to suspend the laws of nature in an arbitrary way (they would cease to be laws!). But it would make sense for him to suspend them sometimes for reasons such as getting people's attention regarding a new order of salvation!

If miracles were random and haphazard, I would have a hard time finding them credible. But if they seem to fit into a pattern and point in a certain direction, that is another thing. It would suggest purposeful activity on God's part. And the miracles described in the Bible, I think more or less fall into a meaningful pattern. In Lewis' words, they all point to the Incarnation, "the great miracle," Jesus' mastery over death and decay, laws with which we are all too familiar, and from which we all want deliverance (think of all the resources being poured into the bio-medical fields!).

Now God could of course, all things being possible to him, prevent any mishap from happening by performing constant miracles, a steady stream of violations of his own laws of nature. But I believe they must, as a rule, be relatively rare, or they lose their meaning (how rare? I don't know). Frequent interventions from on high would destroy the order of nature and make it impossible for us to act meaningfully, since the consequences of our actions would be unforeseeable. We could not cook food for our neighbor or give shelter to friends and relatives if the nature of chemistry or of structural mechanics were totally shifting and changing. As a more modern example, we could not build cars or airplanes unless we could predict how they would function.

God has built regularity into his world for his own purposes, which I do not claim to know fully. I am a natural philosopher, one who studies nature and her patterns, her regularity, her rules. But I do not go as far as my colleagues in claiming that the rules we discern are never violated. I think my colleagues are afraid of the scenario of haphazard miracles, but I don't believe those are the kinds of miracles that happen. There is a pattern, a pattern beyond nature, a way-out forever pattern, to the miracles. God's current emphasis seems to be salvation and it is entirely fine by me. He desires us to be healed and whole. The rule of captivity, death, and decay is one against which I wholeheartedly welcome his intervention. But miracles in themselves are not the point. They are the signs which point to the Great Miracle, the God who came and died and rose to life everlasting, a life he invites us to join, and purposes beyond this universe he invites us to be a part of.