During this Easter Season, when the greatest miracle of Christian belief is celebrated, I thought I'd muse a bit here on the miraculous, always a bone in the throat of secular naturalists. I'd like to point out first that not every act of God is a miracle. We often speak that way, though, and loosely use the word "miracle" for happy outcomes, unexpected events (e.g., the Cubs winning the World Series), and so on. We can certainly understand happy exuberance that leads to using that term imprecisely, but we should really keep it to designate true, supernatural acts which abridge the natural order (e.g., raising the dead, instant healings).

Second, as I've noted in several sermons, there is clearly a normal, natural, predictable order to God's universe. We'd be in a mess if we couldn't predict rates, forces, and patterns in nature, just as we'd be in a pickle if our watch ran at different speeds during the day. (I've had a few like that.) But some want to assert that this natural order of things is absolutely invariable, that it can never be abridged by a god of any kind. Why not? Even in the natural order there are sudden, even catastrophic, abridgements of the natural order, such as Mt. St. Helen's blowing its stack. How often do we see THAT happen in nature? Scientists even tell us of catastrophic meteor impacts in the past, which they've detected on the earth's surface through the craters (I like that word.) they've left on this globe. If nature itself throws us a curveball now and then how can we rule out other kinds of abridgements? I remember the excitement of watching the Shoemaker-Levy meteor impacts on the surface of Jupiter, a very rare event indeed.

If there's a God, and that's the BIG question to settle right at the start, then His capacity to enter into His ordered creation is self-evident. A watchmaker, who creates a timepiece to run at an orderly pace and work in a predictable fashion, can intervene whenever he wishes to make the hands which normally run forward go backward, and at a rapid pace if he wishes. Even those of us who aren't watchmakers intervene in our clock/watch world this way, twice a year--Daylight Savings adjustments. The watchmaker--and fellow humans like him--is outside of and superior to his creation and has the right to make it do unusual, abnormal things. So it is if there is a Creator, and His hand-spinning interventions we call "miracles." Once you admit there's a Creator God, you've ipso facto allowed for miracles. God Himself is the greatest supernatural entity spoken of in the Bible. To admit His existence and yet gag at the possibility of miracles is to strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.

Finally, those who deny the possibility of miracles have usually decided they do not want to recognize that this orderly, designed universe has a Designer; they make "natural law" their final authority because it's more congenial to their unspoken biases. Even Einstein (not a traditional theist at all) admired the great engineering mind behind the universe. People who deny a Creator and miracles do so out of a prior ideological commitment, a philosophical viewpoint they've smuggled into their lab coat. Science has not disproved miracles. If so, which branch has done it and where's the data? It was scientists who once scoffed at Pasteur's assertion that spontaneous generation was impossible, that life only arises from other life and not spontaneously from putrefying meat. When Carl Sagan said, "The Cosmos is all there ever was and all there ever will be" he was not speaking as a scientist but as a philosopher. There is no way he could ever know such a thing; he only chose to believe it. That he was a scientist does not make that statement anything other than a mere assertion of faith. He'd smuggled his philosophy into his lab coat, and was bootlegging a naturalistic faith into his science. Let's not be intimidated by such tactics. Our faith is eminently reasonable. --Tim Crater