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Miracles are signs and wonders that reveal God’s supernatural glory to our senses.
We have this ability to observe and draw conclusions about the way things are or the laws that govern the natural world and science is our crowning achievement for making and interpreting these observations.
When we define a natural law, by something like science, what we’re actually saying is, this is what always happens under certain circumstances. So when we define something like a law of gravity, we’re saying, this is how two objects with mass behave in proximity to each other.
A miracle is what happens when something occurs in a manner that doesn’t conform to those laws - that is, it doesn’t happen the way we always observe it… and since it doesn’t, it is, in the eyes of science, an anomaly and therefore, unexplained by science. If science could explain it, it wouldn’t be a miracle.
So asking for scientific evidence of a miracle is asking for a contradiction. Some people look at that and say, well then miracles are impossible because things always behave according to the laws of nature.
Well, the audacity of that statement is staggering, and it reveals, ironically, a very unscientific way of looking at the world. Scientific inquiry has always been motivated by a desire to reach for the unknown. But if you begin by defining what is or isn’t possible based on your existing, limited range of knowledge, then you’d never bother trying to discover anything.
You could say that a miracle is, by definition, something that we don’t understand. It’s evidence that the person who caused the miracle, like Jesus, has an ability or a knowledge that exceeds human understanding.
And this creates a problem for people who say that there needs to be proof before they will believe in a miraculous claim because a proof is, by definition, something that we do understand. If the evidence that you’re trying to provide as a proof to someone exceeds that someone’s ability to understand it, then you haven’t proven it to them, you’ve only told them something that is true and they can either choose to trust you or not… on faith.
Like, when my 3 year old daughter asked me why there were bubbles in her soda water, my explanation about how carbon dioxide can be dissolved in a liquid by adding pressure to it wasn’t an instance of me having proven it to her because it didn’t make any sense to her.
If a proof is, by definition, something that you are able to understand and a miracle, is by definition something that you are not able to understand, then to ask for proof of a miracle is to ask for someone to make you understand something that you can’t understand. In other words, it’s a logical contradiction.
To insist that proof of God conform to a self contradictory criteria is a pretty good way of staying stuck in your own feedback loop and it demonstrates an unwillingness to actually be open to the only kind of evidence that can be provided.
In other words, don’t ask for evidence under some pretense that you’d actually accept it when it’s presented and then retreat into a logical fallacy as a defense against the evidence.
If you can accept that miracles might be possible, that still doesn’t prove that they occur. If you’ve never seen one, just as you’ve never seen a flying orangutan, that could reinforce the belief that they don’t occur.
But what if there are thousands of documented cases of people having witnessed a miracle. That’s pretty powerful evidence and again, unless you're content with contradictions, you need to resist the temptation to retreat back into the insistence on proof. Eye witness accounts are the only possible kind of proof that can be offered.
I can provide a lot of examples of credible miracles, but I’ll stick with the process by which Catholic saints are declared. You may or may not know this, but in order to be declared a saint, in the Catholic Church, there needs to be evidence that miracles can be attributed to the person in question.
Now, it’s easy to dismiss this process, but if you look into how it’s scrutinized and investigated by the Church, you’ll discover that they take a very skeptical approach as in, they look for every possible natural explanation for the supposed miracle first, even consulting scientists and experts and if no natural explanation can be offered, then they start to favor a miraculous explanation.
With an understanding of this open and transparent process, we should begin to get a sense of the scope of how many well documented miracles there are out there and that’s a pretty commanding rebuke of the claim that there is no evidence for God or miracles.
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3 июл 2024
