Creative Discontinuity
Measuring Miracles and other events
John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God.
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
Given the number of times I have mentioned the idea of a creative discontinuity I thought it would be good to devote an entire comment to the idea. What is a ‘creative discontinuity’, as I use the term? It is a ‘discontinuity’ that exists because of some creative act. It is an historical phenomenon at which any backwards historical analysis needs to stop; because something has happened at that point which makes any kind of analysis fruitless.
Let me give a mundane example. Take the following number series:
0,0,0,0,0,50,49,48,47,46,45,44,43,93,92,91,90,89…
This number series represents a boy filling up a leaky bathtub. Do you see it? The bathtub is originally empty, and stays empty (0,0,0). Then the boy comes along and dumps a bucket with fifty cups of water into it (0,0,50). While the boy is off to the well for another bucket the tub slowly leaks out water (50,49,48) and the number series continues down until another bucket is dumped in (45,44,43,93) at which point the leaking continues apace (93,92,91).
Presumably this will continue until the tub contains enough water and the boy gets in to try to have his bath before the tub empties.
The interesting part of this example for our purposes is the break between 0 and 50, or 43 and 93. Each of those breaks cannot be predicted either by the numbers before them (0,0,0…) or the numbers after them (49,48,47…). If a naturalistic (i.e. Doesn’t believe in the existence of boys) observer were to observe the tub during the (49,48,47…) stage they would hypothesize the following series (…55,54,53,52,51)which, as it turns out, never happened. They would even start to wonder about the edges of the tub, and what happened before, say, (2000,1999,1998…) which represents the maximum the tub could hold. (See ‘the Big Bang theory’).
Now let us apply this to the miracle of Jesus and the water turning into wine. A good vintner will understand that a certain amount of sugar turns into alcohol at each period of time the wine is aging. Let us invent a very simple and, I’m sure, inaccurate, number series to represent this. Let us take a sugar to alcohol ratio, use percentages, and represent it like this S:A. Thus grape juice with no alcohol at all would have a number such as 100:0. Over time those number would shift in the following manner: (100:0, 99:1, 98:2, 98:3…).
This means that if a vintner tastes a wine and estimates its ratio at 75:25 they will, by backwards progression, assume a series (100:0, 99:1, 98:2, 98:3… 77:23, 76:24, 75:25). The series that they will NOT predict is (0:0, 0:0,0:0, 75:25). That break between the last 0:0 and the 75:25 is what I am calling a ‘creative discontinuity’. It was the point where Jesus turns water into wine [John 2:1-11]. It is something that cannot be predicted by naturalistic and uniformitarian assumptions.
It can be predicted, but only by stepping outside of these assumptions. The boy’s sister, hearing his mother command him to fill the tub and take a bath, can predict (if not with perfect certainty) the likelihood of the (0,0,0) becoming (0,0,50,49…). Similarly Jesus’s mother ‘predicted’ (in a vague sort of way [John 2:5]) the 0:0 becoming transformed into 75:25.
That transformation is a creative discontinuity or, as we say in theological discussions, a ‘miracle’. It is the uniform action of nature being acted on by an outside, supernatural, actor. In the case of the fiat, ex nihlo, creation of the world it was not only acted upon, but created. Created, ordered, filled… all in six days [Exodus 20:11]. And nothing in the current created order, looked at through the backwards telescope of naturalistic uniformitarianism, should attempt to say otherwise.