The Logic of Miracles
What Science can't say about Miracles
Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind.
If this man were not of God, he could do nothing.
I saw a meme the other day, with a mother showing her daughter an empty bookcase entitled ‘All of the evidence for God’. Now, it was a silly meme. You can read whole books entitled ‘The Evidence for God’ or some variant thereof. What is actually meant is ‘all the evidence for God that I accept’, and that is a common logical error.
However the error I wish to talk about today is different. It is a facet of the ‘argument against miracles’ that goes something like this:
-A miracle (supernatural explanation) is an event with infinitely small probability
ergo
- For any observed event a natural explanation is always to be preferred.
Now, there are already problems, but watch what happens as time goes on:
Suppose you go over to a friends house for dinner. And you have heard that the wife does most of the cooking. So when you go over the first time, and the meal comes out, and you don’t know who cooked it, you say, “Well, she cooks most of the time, so she probably cooked this meal.”
Now suppose you go over time and time again, and each time you go, you never see who cooks the meal, so each time you assume that she cooked. So each time you go home you, in your head, chalk that meal up to her.
So you go from ‘I have heard that she usually cooks’ to ‘she cooked the last nine times we went (or so I assumed)’ to ‘she cooked the last forty times we went over to their house for dinner’ to ‘She always cooks the meals when we go over.”
Now suppose that one evening your wife (you being too polite) asks who cooked. And, to your utter shock, the wife says, “I usually cook the meals, but my husband always cooks for company.”
You almost fall out of your chair. All this time you had been assuming that she was cooking!
There are two parts of this analogy that bare looking at. The first is that you came to the situation with an assumption. You had been told that ‘she usually cooks’, so when you couldn’t see what was going on in the kitchen, you assumed she had made the meal.
There are at least two possibilities for the way the universe is organised. The first is that the entire universe consists of impersonal forces, making up the energy and matter that science deals with. These forces act upon each other in impersonal ways, ways that, with our limited knowledge, are random but, if fully understood, would lead us to be able to completely predict everything that happens.
The opposite possibility is that the entire universe is managed by personal forces, or a personal force. That everything that happens has a reason for happening, not merely a cause.
The analogy of the kitchen is that is not possible, on the level of experiment, to tell these two things apart. Or, rather, it is not possible to disprove either one.
Suppose that you watched a creature walk into a room, look at two items, and then choose to take one and leave the other. It would obviously be possible to make the assumption that there was a ‘personal’ choice involved. That the universe had changed (one thing had been taken) due to the personal action of an intelligent actor.
But it is perfectly possible to reason out that action in the realm of purely impersonal factors. That certain chemicals caused certain neurones to fire, etc, all of which ended up with the cake being taken and the carrots left. Or, perhaps (see how I set this up in the example) to speak of the pre-programmed chemical attraction of simple sugars over… whatever’s in carrots.
Or, the exact opposite. No matter what physical event you see happen, it is perfectly reasonable to say, “Some overarching power caused that to happen.”
When I was a kid, there was a pizza parlour in our town that had this absolutely wonderful contraption which covered a whole wall. It was all made of thick wires and steel balls. It had a little elevator which would take the balls up to the top of the contraption, and they would then roll down these tracks made of wire. From time to time there would be this gate, which would send alternate balls down alternate pathways, which included various shoots, or striking up against bells or chimes or something.
When I first saw it, I marvelled at the way the balls randomly went down and formed such amazing patterns as they fell. But then, as I kept watching (we liked pizza and the adults’ conversation was boring), I started to notice something and then (yes, I was that kind of kid) I started calculating it out and… all of those wonderful ‘random’ patterns weren’t random at all! The guy who had designed it had calculated it out and put in the gates so that, every fifteen minutes, one ball would ‘miraculously’ get through all of the gates in just the right way and ring the big chime! Arghhh!!
People are fond of saying things like ‘Science has disproven the virgin birth’. Now, lets think about what that means. What it means is that scientists have done a bunch of experiments and have found out that when a sperm hits an egg they, sometimes continue the development of the newly formed human being into something that will, if put in a proper environment, come out of the birth canal and keep you up all night.
They have probably done hundreds or even thousands of experiments with human sperm and eggs, with other sperm and eggs, and each time, if they did it right, that is what happened.
That’s it. What they haven’t done, cause how exactly would you do this, is to fly up to heaven and measure the creative potentiality of the infinite personal God and determined that He is not up to creating a human being without a sperm and egg… oh, wait, that wouldn’t even do it, would it? He is not up to creating sperm and… well, no, that wouldn’t do it either, would it? He is not capable of stealing some sperm from some guy and injecting it into some girl who hasn’t yet had sex… You see the problem?
Let’s go with the most extreme view of the virgin birth. Let’s go with ‘God created, ex nihlo, an embryonic human being and implanted it in the womb of a woman who had not ever had sex.’ Given an infinitely powerful God who literally created the entire universe by just speaking.. how is that even hard?
No, what the statement actually comes down to is, “We know that the way that human beings are normally produced is that some human male has sex with some human female and, nine months or so later, a baby is born.” Cool, Captain Obvious. Guess what? Joseph knew that. Mary knew that. All of Mary and Joseph’s friends and neighbours knew that. Scripture literally says that they all knew that.
The point of the idea of a miracle is ’this isn’t the way we see this normally happening’. The point of science is ‘this is the way we see things normally happening’. You literally cannot have miracles without science.
There is a trope called something like ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’. There needs to be a parallel trope which says, “Any sufficiently powerful creator can create an internally consistent ‘natural’ system’ or some-such.
Or, to put it another way, you can’t build a machine that will detect teleos. You cannot discover the purpose behind ‘natural’ actions, thus you can never actually determine between a miracle and a natural event. Similarly, although on the opposite side, you can never have a good enough grasp of natural events to rule out an event from being natural. That is kind of the whole point of magic shows, no?
Whether you are a Christian, and believe in miracles, or a naturalist, and don’t believe in them, it is important to realise that science, properly done, can say nothing at all about them. Miracles can neither be proven nor disproven by science, since the very basis of science is to demonstrate what normally happens, not to put a bound on what can happen.