Following on from our Deconstructing God preaching series, we are publishing a series of articles addressing some of the big questions raised by our secular culture against the Christian faith. In this post, Jeff Jones tackles the question of miracles.
One time, I was teaching a group of kids at Sunday school. I wanted to get them thinking. So, I asked them this question: “Who do you think made you?”
One of the responses was classic. “God done it,” said the kid. He was stoked with his answer. I was unsatisfied.
I could’ve started talking about the birds and the bees, albeit uncomfortably. A material explanation of one’s existence seems more intellectually satisfying to me than just crediting God with it. But, I also truly think that God did make this kid—and all of us. What should I have said?
I just nodded and moved on to my next question.
The whole thing got me thinking about miracles. What can God “do”? Are miracles possible? If they are, what even is a miracle?
Whether we believe in miracles or not, few of us would deny that there are things in life for which the term ‘miracle’ seems the most appropriate. The beauty of a sunset, the birth of a child, the sight of one’s spouse on their wedding day—all of these things seem so remarkable that we want to make reference to some kind of divine activity. All other descriptions fall short.
The thing is: Christians just don’t just believe in things that feel like a miracle. They contend that some things genuinely are a miracle. Miracles like God becoming man, and this man rising literally from the dead, are at the centre of Christian faith.
I think this raises three questions.
1. How are miracles possible?
How does the idea of miracles mesh with science, when science seems to give us stable and predictable laws of nature that never seem to change?
Answering this question requires defining our terms. It really matters how you define nature and miracles. And the field is set between the Christian and the naturalist.
A naturalist is someone who believes that there is nothing outside of nature; that everything in this universe can be explained by reference to causes inside this world. As such, nature operates as a closed system, with laws and forces like gravitational laws or electromagnetic laws. Miracles, therefore, are hard to factor in.
Two of the most influential naturalist philosophers in history—David Hume and Benedict Spinoza—defined miracles as something like a violation of the laws of nature. For them miracles were completely nonsensical. After all, when Jesus walked on water, how could gravitational laws be suspended (so that Jesus could attempt such a feat) and at the same time also be working to keep the rest of the world running!? There seems to be an internal contradiction here, at least at face value.
Of course, Hume and Spinoza are right, if that’s what miracles actually are. However, both the Bible and the best of Christian philosophy does not define miracles as a violation of the laws of nature. Christians, through the centuries, have made sense of reality not as a closed system of cause-and-effect, but as something perpetually upheld by God’s power.
Unlike a naturalistic worldview, which seems to assume that laws such as gravitational laws cause things to happen, Christians believe that such laws only describe God’s universe in human terms. God is the agent who is involved and working at every moment. In the Christian worldview, God is not sitting back on his armchair passively, having created the universe letting ‘laws’ run the universe. God is the ultimate cause for everything.
Whether it is the formation of a human in the womb, or the incarnation of the Divine Human Himself (Jesus!), God is intimately present and working. While we can map the mechanistic workings of the universe with ever-neater equations and models (which is both incredible and necessary), miracles should cause us to look through this world to the God who made it, upholds it, and is present in it.
The idea of miracles is anything but contradictory. Our best scientific theories map patterns, and these patterns are crucial to develop things like medicine and technology. However, these patterns are finite human descriptions observed over a finite period of time. The actual pattern of the universe, for the entirety of the space-time continuum, is fashioned by God. This pattern includes not just what we typically observe, but also disruptions to this pattern, which is what we should call a miracle.
A miracle is not a violation of natural law; it’s simply an interaction of God with the world which is constantly under His care.
If this is true, then it is just as true to say “God done it” while at the same time laying out a scientific explanation about human conception when faced with the question that was posed to me by the Sunday school child. These explanations are not in competition; they are complementary, allowing the thinker to reflect on the mechanism and the miracles all at the same time.
2. Why are miracles necessary?
What might be bothering you is much less a philosophical question. Maybe your question is more practical. Why are miracles even necessary in the first place? After all, wouldn’t Christianity be more reasonable and rational to the average secular person if they got rid of all the “woo-woo”?
Paul, an early follower of Jesus (and a major contributor to the New Testament), argued the opposite. In fact, he argues that the Christian faith is in vain if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead (1 Corinthians 15:14).
One of the reasons Paul makes this claim is because he recognises that the natural end of things, as they stand, is death and destruction—both for the human and the cosmos. He didn’t think this because he agreed with modern scientists who posit a big-freeze or the heat death of the universe in some distant time (Paul was an ancient Jew, not a modern scientist!). Paul thought this because, as the Christian story holds, death and decay are the consequences of our sin, separating us and our world from God and his life-giving source.
In order to disrupt this catastrophic end of humans and the world, God breaks this pattern. He enters history as a human, dies, and rises again in the person of Jesus. This disruption to the general pattern gives the Christian hope that there will be another disruption to the natural order of things at the end of history, when all of humanity will be resurrected to face Jesus. Those who have sided with Jesus will be reconnected to God’s life-giving source, never to die again.
What’s the point? The point is that miracles are not only philosophically compatible with a modern appreciation of science. Miracles are necessarily part of the Christian message. Without their central place in the Christian message, the message should be at best taken as some ancient philosophy with little practical relevance today. That’s Paul’s argument!
More than that, this is the substance of Christian hope. If miracles are possible, and these particular miracles have happened, they reshape every facet of our existence and outlook. If Christianity is true, we can trust and know that the current patterns of war, poverty, pandemics, and violence will be disrupted at the end of history, since the Christian God is a miraculous God.
3. Do miracles happen today?
Many people would rightfully be curious on the question of whether miracles actually happen today. And, if I’m honest, even Christians debate the issue.
What’s not debated among Christians is whether God worked miraculously in history—in the time around the writing of the Bible. It is uncontroversial to say that the person of Jesus, his miraculous life, and his miraculous death, resurrection and ascension, are of a different kind or order of miracle to anything that has happened or will happen. This was the first and only time when God literally clothed himself in humanity. There is something that is breath-taking and awe-inspiring about the fact that the Christian God became like us: human. There is something special about the quality of this miracle that no other miracle has. This cannot be debated.
Some, however, contend that the time of God’s miraculous activity has ceased. And it’s good to be honest about this. This is something on which Christians disagree.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s entirely logical to expect that miracles are possible today. See, if all of reality is caused and sustained by the power of God, miracles would just be part of God’s intentional work. If God was capable of miracles in the distant past, there is no reason why he wouldn’t be capable of miracles today.
More than that, even today there is a serious amount of scholarship being done on the testimony of claims to miracles all around the world. If God can do miracles (philosophically speaking), has done miracles (historically speaking), and there are reports of miracles all around the world (experientially speaking), then why not take the possibility of miracles more seriously yourself?
For the Christian, even the very concept of faith in God is in-and-of itself a miracle.
The Bible, in Romans 3, claims that the natural human state is one of disbelief and disobedience. Just as humans and the world are on a course of death and decay, even the human heart is affected by death and decay. Left to our own devices, we would not worship God or even seek God.
God had to work a miracle (i.e. break this pattern) and resurrect us spiritually through the Holy Spirit so that we can believe and so that we can obey. Every Christian ought to know that they are a Christian because of the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, and not through their own efforts of trying to be good people.
Here’s what this means: it means that the ultimate cause behind both our physical birth and spiritual rebirth is the same: “God done it”.
Conclusion
The question of whether miracles are possible can be answered with an emphatic “yes,” if the Christian worldview is true. This is because God is the ultimate cause of all things, not just miracles.
More than that, miracles are obviously necessary to an honest, Christian faith. The central beliefs of Christianity hold that God became human, died, and was resurrected. These are not inconsequential.
Finally, the question of whether miracles happen today can also be answered in the affirmative, if we have answered in the affirmative to the first two questions. In other words, if miracles are possible and if miracles are necessary, then there is no good reason why miracles can’t happen today.
Got Questions?
If this article has sparked interest for you, Anchor Church regularly runs a course called Alpha for people who are interested in exploring the big questions of life, faith, and meaning.