by Eric Metaxas
Therefore not just those things we would clearly recognize as miracles but every single thing in creation ultimately points beyond itself to the creator, who is by definition outside temporal and material existence and outside his own creation. Everything has meaning! It’s in the nature of things. De Rerum Natura.* This is the absolute opposite of the nihilistic view of the universe that there is no such thing as actual meaning, because meaning is just something that humans artificially impose on other things. According to this nihilistic and materialistic worldview, nothing means anything. Everything just is.
The essential meaning of miracles, then, is to point us to the God behind the miracles. In the New Testament we see that Jesus performed miracles precisely to prove that he was who he said he was. And in the Old Testament, God performed signs and wonders to attest to who he was. People have their faith strengthened and deepened by miracles, and many people actually come to faith through miracles. My own conversion to faith is an example of this, as I relate later in this book, and my faith has been dramatically strengthened by miracles that I have experienced personally, as well as by miracles that have happened to people I’ve known and whose judgment I’ve trusted.
DO MIRACLES STILL HAPPEN?
There is a popular idea in our culture that even if miracles might have happened at some point in the past, in our modern, scientific world, they are simply no longer possible. But if miracles cannot happen now, how exactly is it that they could have happened in some distant past? Has the fundamental reality of the universe somehow changed, and when did that happen? If we believe miracles cannot happen today but happened to our distant ancestors, what we really seem to be saying is not that miracles happened back then but, rather, that all those people back then were naive enough to believe they happened. It is to say that miracles never happened, but gullible people thought they did. Perhaps we find the idea charming and think ourselves generous for having it. But that is a tremendously patronizing view of other human beings. Shouldn’t we give the people in the past the same respect and dignity we would like people to give us? Can we not admit that if miracles ever really did happen in the past, they can still happen today? And if they cannot happen today, can’t we be honest and admit that they never happened in the past either? We cannot logically have it both ways.
But this leads to another important question: Why do we sometimes have such a patronizing attitude toward people of previous eras? Do we really think they didn’t have the sense to know the difference between what normally happens and what normally does not happen? Do we think that just because they didn’t have telescopes and microscopes that they wouldn’t have the human sense to know whether something really happened or didn’t? Shouldn’t wise people of any era want to know the difference between an unhinged hallucination and an actual vision, strange and inexplicable as the latter might be? We are wrong to have the idea that we from our superior position can pat these distant naifs on the head and allow them to cling to their fantasies, just as we allow our five-year-old to believe in the Easter Bunny.
We should be clear that whenever we talk about actual miracles occurring—whether today or in the biblical past—we are talking about things that are very, very far out of the ordinary in any era of history and are therefore attention-getting in any era. That’s because it seems to be precisely God’s intention to get our attention when he does something miraculous. He doesn’t want to manipulate us in our ignorance into believing something that actually did not happen. If he is the God of reality, he wants to do just the opposite, to startle us.
Certainly one of the most dramatic examples of this is in the resurrection of Jesus, which we shall treat at length in a subsequent chapter. But for our purposes here, let’s simply state that two thousand years ago, Jesus’s rising from the dead was considered as impossible and staggering as such a thing would be considered today. People in the first century did not rise from the grave any more than they do now, in the twenty-first century. If someone is restored to warm, breathing life from literal, stone-cold death, it is equally outrageous and unbelievable in any century. On the other hand, if someone rises from the dead in a fairy-tale world where unicorns fly and horses talk, it has no meaning and no impact and is no “miracle” at all. But what happened when Jesus rose from the dead in Jerusalem twenty centuries ago was about as meaningful and impactful as anything could be. It was so shocking and incomprehensible that no one would have believed it unless there had been literally hundreds of eyewitnesses, not to his actual resurrection, of course, but to his having been resurrected. But even with hundreds of eyewitnesses, there were many who simply could not believe it and refused to believe it, which is perfectly understandable. But the point of it, as we see when we read the New Testament Gospel accounts was precisely to end discussion of who Jesus was, to be a thing so extremely and frighteningly out of the ordinary that many who were skeptics would at last believe.
The parting of the Red Sea is another example of how atypical and staggering such things were at the time they occurred. God very much meant it to be so. If the Red Sea parted every few years it would have meant nothing when it parted 3,500 years ago so that the Israelites could escape the approaching Egyptian soldiers. We could then regard its parting just in time for the Israelites to escape Pharaoh’s army as a happy coincidence of timing. But since the Red Sea never parts of its own accord—it is many hundreds of feet deep where the Israelites would have crossed—we may conclude that God was intentionally doing something inexplicably and toweringly attention-getting. That was plainly the point of it. It is not in any way presented in the pages of Exodus as something that might be taken for granted. It was meant to be taken—and was taken—as epochal, as a hinge in the history of the world.
The point of this, and most other miracles, is that no one would ever forget it. So how can something have not been dramatically out of the ordinary when we see that it was meant to forever change the way the Israelites perceived God and themselves? In fact, it was the ultimate mnemonic device. Whenever the Israelites would doubt God after that event, whenever they doubted that he had chosen them and made them his own people in an unprecedented way, whenever they doubted that he had a plan for them and a path for them and a future for them, they only needed to remember what he had done back there when the army of Pharaoh was bearing down upon them to annihilate them forever. They would remember that it had really happened, that God is not just real but that he is that real, so real that he sometimes intervenes in dramatic ways.
Though it’s less remembered by Gentiles, God similarly parted the waters of the Jordan River just before the Israelites went into the Promised Land. Immediately after it happened, they built a memorial of stones precisely so that they would not forget that this outrageous event actually happened. It hasn’t happened since and isn’t expected to happen again. To mark them forever, the Jewish people have put these events into their calendars, and, of course, they mark the parting of the Red Sea and the Exodus with annual celebrations of Passover.
But since logic dictates that God could have saved the Israelites from Pharaoh’s army in an infinity of ways, and in ways infinitely subtler than parting the Red Sea, it is obvious that he didn’t part the Red Sea to save the Israelites as much as he parted the Red Sea to communicate himself to the Israelites. This itself tells us much about the God behind miracles. If he could do what needs doing in other ways, why does he do what he does the way he does it? It is to speak to us about himself.
It’s therefore appropriate to conclude that a miracle is something that really only happens in context. The parting of the Red Sea is a miracle precisely because the Israelites perceived it as a miracle—as an outrageous and otherwise inexplicable event that God made happen, which was precisely God’s intention. If it was merely a freak of nature, something that happened to happen, it would not be a miracle. If it happened forty thousand years before the Israelites existed, it wouldn’t be a miracle. What makes it a
miracle is that God performed it specifically to make himself known, to communicate with human beings. When God pokes into our world through the miraculous, he is communicating with us, otherwise we cannot appropriately use the term “miraculous” to describe an event.
3
MIRACLES AND SCIENCE
To force a naturalistic paradigm on everything has the effect of closing down science, rather than opening it up.
—JOHN LENNOX
Before we delve into the personal evidence for miracles and miracle stories themselves, I thought we should first address the big picture—and the big questions that surround this subject. So in the next three chapters we will be talking about the compatibility of science and the miraculous, and about how science is more and more giving us evidence for the very miraculousness of our own existence. These are heady but supremely fascinating subjects.
The idea that science is somehow at odds with faith and miracles is false. It’s actually not only false but also demonstrably illogical. Still, it’s a resilient old canard, one that peskily refuses to crawl off and expire. So let’s do our part in trying to dispatch it from this world as we are able.*
There are many leading scientists who unapologetically believe in God and miracles, who see no conflict between a life simultaneously dedicated both to faith and scientific inquiry. This alone should be dispositive. For example, Francis Collins, who appeared on the cover of Time for his work heading the Human Genome Project, and who is now the director of the National Institutes of Health—and who for his fame as a scientist was on President Obama’s 2008 transition team—is a Christian who has been quite public about his faith. Indeed, in his book The Science of God, he explains how it was science itself that led him to embrace his Christian faith. Another top scientist, Cambridge’s Sir John Polkinghorne, after being recognized as one of the top quantum physicists of the twentieth century—and being elected to the Royal Society—was ordained as an Anglican priest and now regularly writes and speaks on the compatibility of science and faith.* And, finally, Dr. William D. Phillips, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1997, has spoken widely about how his dedication to science and God are not merely compatible but conjoined and logically inextricable from one another. The list of contemporary men and women of science who believe in the God of the Bible and in miracles is virtually endless.
We are only surprised by this—if we are—because our culture has so forcefully promoted the idea that faith and science are at odds, but the ironic and virtually unknown reality is that modern science itself was essentially invented by people of Christian faith.* That’s because they believed in a God who had created a universe of staggeringly magnificent order, one that could be understood rationally, and one that it was therefore worth trying to understand. Many of them believed their scientific work was a way of glorifying God, because it revealed the spectacular order and manifold genius of God’s creation. Isaac Newton himself was a serious Christian, and Galileo, who because of his battles with the Catholic Church is often thought of as a scientist at odds with Christian faith, was in fact a committed Christian. To add just two from the many others we might name, John Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday were both men of deep Christian faith, whose breadth of scientific genius can hardly be overstated, and whose faith explicitly underpinned their zeal to understand the laws governing the universe.
Today we take the idea that the universe can be understood rationally for granted, as though it were a given. But the idea ought to startle us. Though we hardly consider it, the comprehensibility of the universe through scientific inquiry is a radical notion, one that points directly to God as the creator. No less than Albert Einstein acknowledged it and declared it for the ages:
Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration towards truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot imagine a scientist without that profound faith.
He also said the following: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
Though Einstein did not believe in the personal God of the Bible, this greatest of modern scientists clearly beheld with awe the towering surprise at the heart of all scientific inquiry—that it is at all possible. That somehow the universe can be rationally understood. The glorious gift of this was not lost on him. In another place, Einstein said this:
Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE
Another reason science is not at odds with faith—or with the miraculous—is that the realm of the miraculous is by definition beyond the scope of science. Science is limited to describing the universe of matter and energy that came into being via the Big Bang. To speculate beyond that is to go beyond the realm of science, strictly speaking. But many atheistic scientists insist there is never any reason to speculate beyond the universe of matter and energy, because there is nothing beyond that. They insist that the universe is all that is. The problem is that they cannot by any means prove this scientifically, so for them to make this claim at all is itself “unscientific.” Ironically, in doing so, such scientists are themselves reaching beyond the world of science.
As John Lennox has said, “Rationality is bigger than science.” The world of scientific inquiry does not encompass all rational inquiry. This is a tremendously important point. So yes, science has limits. It can describe the universe of matter and energy, but it cannot account for that universe. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of science explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe . . . but they explain nothing.”*
So on the larger issue of how the universe came to explode into being in the Big Bang, and on the issue of where all of that matter and energy suddenly came from, science must remain silent. It can go all the way back, fourteen billion years, to the Big Bang, but there it must stop. It can tell us what is, but it cannot tell us why it is or where “what is” came from. Science cannot speak to these “bigger” questions. Einstein himself said, “You can speak of the ethical foundations of science, but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics.” For example, science can tell us what is possible for us to do in terms of scientific research on stem cells or on cloning, but it cannot tell us if that research would be ethical or unethical. For such questions we must venture beyond the borders of science.
The name for that border, actually, is what is called a “singularity.” As we will explain in chapter 5, the fundamental laws governing all the matter in the universe were set in place a fraction of a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Science simply cannot look into a realm “before” such laws existed. It cannot tell us why those laws were put in place at that precise time, nor whether those laws were predetermined in some way or by someone. But here is what science can tell us: that fourteen billion years ago all matter and energy in our universe came into existence. But there is a problem with this. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy and matter cannot be created or destroyed. If this is true, how is it possible that all the energy and matter in our universe were created in the Big Bang? According to all that we know from science, that is impossible. Yet science knows that it happened.
There is no disagreement that energy and matter from outside a “closed system” can be put into that closed system. But isn’t that precisely what a miracle is—the injection of something from outside this world of time and space into this world of time and space
? Why can that not happen again? And again and again and again? If it happened once, in the Big Bang, how can we possibly insist that it can never happen again? On what basis can science make such a claim?
Of course, once the energy and matter have come into the closed system of this universe, that energy and matter are subject to the laws of this universe. C. S. Lewis grappled with this in his typically brilliant way:
If God annihilates or deflects or creates a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born.
So just as in the creation of the universe, here too in the miracle of the virgin birth, something came from “outside the system.” Once that matter and/or energy entered, it was bound by the rules within the system—it had to follow the laws of our universe. But how did it come in? And why did it come in? And where is the world “outside” this world of matter and time? Science cannot tell us. But surely we can ask and can use reason to try and answer these questions. Surely rational human beings should ask such questions and do their rational best to find what answers they can.
