Thinking About Miracles

Science tells us there are natural laws that govern both physical and human nature.  Man cannot break these laws and God does not break them (at least not very often).  This scientific idea is the basis of everything we think and do these days, and it has led to a popular “dogmatic” notion that if miracle means breaking or suspending natural laws, then miracles just can’t happen.  This attitude really goes against the grain of true scientific inquiry.  Science is not a closed system.  It believes that the impossible may turn out to be true and the incredible may become fact. It has happened many times in the realm of science. If a cure for cancer is impossible then why bother to continue research for a cure?  Indeed, a cure for cancer would be an incredible thing and considered a miracle, a true breakthrough.  

Now if science is able to use the processes of natural law to do the marvelous and the amazing, the unpredictable and the unexpected, to unveil the mysteries and to transform life, how silly of us to make the assertion that God cannot do the same with the laws God has ordained to hold the universe together.  It is a wholly unscientific idea!  Science, when true to itself, is not a set of dogmas, but an open-ended method always willing to reach new conclusions in the light of new evidence.  Science knows that whatever present knowledge we have now is at best fragmentary.

Now if knowledge is fragmentary (as true science admits—and religions ought to do the same) then it may be a mistake for us to think that we live in a closed system of impersonal natural laws.  It is thinkable (and reasonable) that there could be invasions into this world of natural law.  To believe that God cannot affect events in the world or that God is not superior to what we call natural law is worse than no belief at all!  To even consider that God may exist means we are entering a world beyond natural law—the world of the supernatural.

To reject the idea that the impossible may be possible and the incredible could be, to reject revelation and the unpredictable will leave us prisoners in a closed system.  Just as without a vision a people will perish, so without a sense of the miraculous, we will lose hope.  Scripture reports that Jesus could do no mighty works in a certain town because of their unbelief.  Is that why we are missing the miraculous?