Miracles are at the heart of the Christian faith. Miracles are also often at the heart of disputes
between science and religion. After all, how could someone who accepts, and in my case celebrates,
the scientific method as an effective and trustworthy path towards truth about the universe
possibly believe in miraculous healings or in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Well I do, and this
episode is about why I don’t think that miracles are in conflict with the scientific project.
Before delving into possible conflicts between belief in the miraculous and assent to the
teachings of science, it is useful to review what most people most of the time mean by a miracle.
A miracle is typically understood to be a singular, that is not regularly occurring,
event which cannot be explained by natural or scientific laws,
and is interpreted to be the direct work of divine agency. In the Summa Contra Gentiles,
St. Thomas Aquinas defines a miracle with more precision as "a sensible effect produced by God,
which transcends all the forces of nature." Importantly, both the common sense definition,
and Aquinas’s more precise one, presuppose the existence of natural forces, or laws of nature.
Because a miracle is not caused by natural means, it cannot be predicted by any laws of nature.
Indeed we use the word miracle colloquially to refer to an event we could not expect or
predict based on the typical patterns according to which the cosmos operates.
Miracles, in the more precise definition, where God produces an effect in the world
that transcends the forces or laws of nature, may appear to be in conflict
with the scientific project in multiple, rather different, almost orthogonal ways.
It has been claimed that the existence of miracles makes the scientific method unreliable. But it has
also been claimed that the scientific method disproves the possible existence of miracles.
The philosopher David Hume and others have claimed that almost by definition
one cannot rationally believe in miracles, and therefore they are intrinsically at odds with
the rational investigation of the cosmos that scientists are supposed to pursue.
Let’s talk about each of these in turn. First, the possibility of miracles may
seem to threaten the entire scientific project. How can we trust that data that
originates from observations and experiments, and hence ultimately from sense experiences,
reliably provide information about the normal, or law-bound operations of the universe
if God at any time can intervene and cause things to miraculously change, or appear or disappear.
Take the example of an astronomer who may study the stars and measure their brightnesses
to figure out how many stars of which sizes exist in the universe.
But how can this be done if we have a God who at will could change the brightnesses of stars at
any time, or maybe even exterminate some of them the very night the astronomer is at her telescope.
Now I suppose if the universe was governed by an anti-science demon, such a fear of the
supernatural interfering with the study of the natural order might be reasonable. This is not
the God that Christians acknowledge as the creator and ruler of the universe, however.
Rather in the Christian tradition, miracles serve as signs of God’s existence, presence,
governance, and love. Ruining a scientist's experiment in a way that was impossible for the
scientist to detect, as in our astronomer example, would not serve as a sign and therefore not fit
into the Christian understanding of miracles. But how about strange and mysterious patterns in
nature? There are many aspects of the observed physics, chemistry and biology of the cosmos
that are not well-explained by our current best scientific theories or expressed laws of nature.
Some examples are the presence of so-called dark matter in the universe,
the transition from chemistry to life here on Earth, and the evolutionary origin of
many features of living things. Could these be miraculous? Within some Christian lines of
thought, such unexplained features of the cosmos are indeed proposed to have supernatural origins,
and to present clear signs of God’s governance of the universe. The Catholic tradition,
however, emphasizes that God mainly expresses his governance by acting through secondary causes,
for example through the gravitational forces between the Sun and the planets that allow for a
stable, well-ordered Solar System. Therefore, when presented with something unexplained in the world
that could in principle be addressed by the scientific method, the Catholic scientist carries
out her work typically assuming that there is a natural, scientific explanation to be discovered,
rather than a supernatural explanation to be contemplated.
The second common objection to miracles is that they have been disproven by the advance
of science. The argument would be that in a pre-scientific cosmos it may have been
understandable that people pursued supernatural explanations of natural phenomena. With such a
view of the cosmos, claims of miraculous births, healings, and even resurrections would not seem so
strange and could therefore be readily accepted. But now when we understand physics, chemistry,
biology and medicine, it would be irrational to accept such explanations or claims. This line of
reasoning seems wrong to me in multiple ways. First, it seems to confuse pantheism,
superstitions and miracles. A pantheistic explanation of the regular occurrence of thunder
may for example be that each time it thunders, this is the willful action of a God of thunder
rather than an outcome of natural processes. This kind of explanation has indeed receded
as the scientific project has progressed, but has very little to do with miracles.
Similarly, superstitions are at odds with scientific explanations.
Superstition can be defined as an unjustified belief in a predictable supernatural causation.
For example, if you break a mirror you will have seven years of bad luck. This kind of claim
could be disproven using the scientific method. A miracle, while having a supernatural cause,
is not predictable. Rather it is its contrast with the way cosmos typically operates
that gives a miracle its theological significance. If people rather regularly arose from the dead,
then the Resurrection of Christ would not have had such a powerful impact on the disciples.
Miracles and laws of nature are therefore not in competition with one another.
Rather miracles rely on a well-established natural order, understood through the
scientific method as well as its ancient analogies, to function as theological signs.
It is also historically inaccurate to claim that in Biblical times, people did not understand the
ordering of the cosmos well enough to question the veracity of miraculous claims. It is true that we
have a much more detailed understanding of the laws of nature today than we did 2000 years ago.
It is also true, however, that some such laws or patterns had already been established by
Jesus’s time (and probably at the very dawn of humanity). These certainly included the fact
that humans can walk on land and not on water; that beasts can multiply, but that bread cannot;
and that people who have died stay dead. Somebody walking on water, multiplying bread,
and rising from the dead would have seemed as supernatural back then as he would have today. If
people more commonly accepted miracles a thousand years ago it was not because of their lack of
scientific understanding, but rather because of an openness to causes that go beyond it.
Perhaps the most common kind of miracles that you will hear of happening today are miraculous
healings. A person or group of people pray to God, or to a saint to intercede for them to God,
for themselves or someone they know to be healed from a sickness or injury that the practice of
medicine has failed to remedy. Following this prayer, sometimes sustained for a long time,
the person prayed for is healed in a way that is completely unexplainable by the medical
profession. With the traditional Christian understanding of the efficacy of prayer,
this kind of event could not be tested by the scientific method
since the healing is not something we can predict based on the intercessory prayer
but rather is a free gift of God in response to the prayer. By contrast, if we had a superstitious
belief that it takes 10 Hail Marys to heal someone’s broken arm, then we could obviously
test it. But again, that is not what Catholic Christians mean by a miraculous healing.
Finally there is the claim, going back at least to Hume, that miracles by definition
are so improbable that there can never be sufficient evidence to rationally accept them.
From this viewpoint, even if you saw a broken arm of a friend being miraculously healed in
front of you, it would be more rational to assume that you were hallucinating
than that you had just witnessed a miracle. This view may or may not be philosophically defensible,
but I would argue that it has nothing to do with science. The scientific method cannot be used
to estimate the probability of a certain miracle happening ‘naturally.’ Likewise,
the scientific method cannot be used to determine the amount of evidence that would be needed to
accept a miracle, since by their very nature miracles go beyond what natural causes can do.
In fact this extreme skepticism of sense perception when encountering something potentially
miraculous could be used as an argument against the scientific project itself, which fundamentally
relies on the scientist’s ability to trust that her senses accurately convey information
about the objective reality around her. To conclude, there are many claims against
miracles that seem to be based in science. But when we investigate these claims we invariably
find that they rely either on a non-Christian understanding of the nature of miracles,
or an inaccurate understanding of the purview of science. Miracles constitute "a sensible effect
produced by God, which transcends all the forces of nature," and this means miracles also transcend
the scientific method which concerns itself with the regular patterns of nature and its forces.
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