Miracles

It was Alistair Campbell, redoubtable press secretary in Downing Street, who interrupted a question to Tony Blair with, “We don’t do God”. Of course we know that did not mean that no-one in Downing Street believed in God! Subsequently Tony Blair himself was received into the Catholic Church! To invoke God in politics would be a cop out –it would be to admit defeat in the face of an electorate that expects politicians to take responsibility for what is happening, to organise the affairs of the nation in such a way as to secure peace, security, welfare and prosperity as far as is humanly possible.  In a similar way science does not do God – or specifically miracles – because it is the job of science to find out the answers. If there is no apparent answer the scientist must go on searching! To invoke God is a cop out. Again that does not mean that a scientist cannot believe in God or miracles. Of course many do!

 

As a matter of principle, miracles are not testable by science because they are by definition unrepeatable. Given the same physical circumstances, repeatable in controlled laboratory conditions, science expects and requires the same outcome. A miracle would be a different outcome to the norm, unpredictable and unrepeatable. Not the stuff of science or the material of scientific laws! There are many scientists and others who believe that all truth can be reduced to scientific cause and effect. There is nothing else to the cosmos except that which is accessible to the scientific method. And in the end that includes you and me.

Unfortunately that means that many key aspects of our experience are destroyed, including our very dignity as human beings. Our fundamental experiences of freewill, conscience, consciousness, and rationality are set aside as illusory. You have no choices in your life because all is determined by your genes and your past experiences. Any feelings you may have that this or that are right or wrong, or that you are a person with an I-story to tell (a narrative identity of your own), and a responsibility for your life and actions, are illusions. As one atheistic scientist has put it, "I think the idea we exist is an illusion.... The idea there is a self in there that decides things, acts and is responsible is a whopping great illusion. The self we construct is just an illusion because actually there's only brain

and chemicals and this 'self' doesn't exist - it never did and there's nobody to die". This kind of attitude implodes, as was pointed out by Haldane many years ago, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true ...., and therefore I have no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms."

The commonly held idea that there is nothing to the cosmos except what we might call scientific truth, no activity or oversight of God in creation, or in sustaining that creation, nothing which cannot be explained in terms of mathematical equations, no miracles – this kind of nihilistic philosophy implodes on itself. There is no truth, and no valid science either! And there are many angry people in our world right now, reacting to the failure of world views associated with atheism such as humanism, secularism, materialism, which simply do not work!

What is a miracle? There is a lot of confusion! Deists believe that God set up the world at the beginning of time, like Pugin built this church, and then disappeared off the scene, rarely if ever to be seen here again. In that case a miracle would be an intervention from outside to heal a dying person, or rehang a fallen candelabra. But as Christians we are not deists, we are theists. The apostle Paul put our position very clearly, “(Jesus Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶for in^* him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷He himself is before all things, and in^* him all things hold together.” In other words, God in Christ is not like an absent architect, he is as it were a cosmic artist who upholds and sustains this world moment by moment, in such an intimate way that should he cease activity the whole cosmos would not merely become chaotic or run down like a clockwork toy, it would disappear “like some imploding light bulb”, as I once heard the present Bishop of Liverpool remark. “Your God is too small” was the title of a book written in the 1960’s!¹⁸
 

 What then is a miracle? The laws of nature, as drawn up and developed down the ages by scientists, be they physicists, chemists or biologists, describe what God normally does. A miracle is an activity of God which is something different from what he normally does? It is not occasional intervention from a remote deistic god. Rather it is an unusual action by a God who is here present all the time upholding and sustaining the universe. Of course such an action appears to break the laws of nature. But since these laws are descriptions of God’s normal activity we need not be surprised that from time to time he choses to act differently!

 How does he do this, rather than whether he does it, is probably the more important question. The Bibles’ answers from the beginning of the OT to the end of the NT is “by his word”. In Genesis we read, “And God said … and it was so. The epistle to the Hebrews puts it this way, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” The apostle John in the passage we all know writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ²He was in the beginning with God. ³All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. John Lennox equates this “divine logos” to what we would call information. Richard Dawkins has unwittingly concurred, without linking his thoughts to the Bible, you’ll be surprised to know, “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not fire, warm breath, nor a ‘spark of life’. It is information, words, instructions …. “

It may be helpful in the limited time available to address miracles in a bit more detail under 3 headings:

                                                                       Creational

                                                                       Structural

                                                                       Personal

By creational miracles I mean those unusual and exceptional activities of God, carried out during the course of the creation of the universe and of life, and ultimately the creation of human life itself, the culmination and ultimate purpose of the universe! Now we have to be careful here. There was a time when there was no scientific explanation for the rainbow, no natural explanation for an eclipse of the sun, of earthquakes, of evolution, let alone of the nature of matter and fundamental particles. Particularly since the so called “Enlightenment”, science has made the most enormous advances. We now know much more. To many people mankind is well on the way to what Stephen Hawking called the “theory of everything”.

 

 

In the 1960’s SH expected a theory of everything to be available by the end of the century. As that time approached he revised his assessment to the end of the next century, now he has recently said, “I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. I’m now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and we will always have the challenge of new discovery”. Even SH does not believe that such a solution to the secrets of the cosmos will ever become fully known or understood by man.

As time goes on the gaps in pure scientific understanding of the universe, including how it came to be, as well as how it works, have obviously been closed down by modern science. However, the continuing, accelerating, advance of knowledge appears, in the 21^st. century, to be opening up new and arguably more challenging gaps, gaps which as John Lennox has put it, are not revealed by ignorance, but by knowledge. Hitherto this has been most apparent in the realm of particle physics, which in many ways is the most fundamental area of research, since everything is made of matter and energy, which are interchangeable.

It is not difficult to find particle physicists and cosmologists who understand these new kinds of gaps. Arno Penzias, “Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe that was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan ”. Perhaps most significantly of all, Sir Fred Hoyle, “All that we see in the universe of observation and fact ……. remains unexplained. And even in its supposedly first second the universe itself is acausal. That is to say, the universe has to know in advance what it is going to be before it knows how to start itself.”

More recently this kind of scepticism has spread into the biological field, and we have people like Francis Collins of human genome fame, for example saying, “No current hypothesis comes close to explaining how in the space of a mere 150 million years the prebiotic environment that existed on planet earth gave rise to life”. American philosopher, Professor Anthony Flew, converted to theism after 50 years of atheism because, “Biologists’ investigation of DNA has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved”

Even these great and marvellous creational miracles should not be seen as physical intervention by force or energy, but rather the input of information by the creator during the course of the creation of the cosmos, and of life. The ultimate example is creation of what John Stott dubbed in the 1960’s, “Homo Divinus”, men and women who are capable of fellowship with God, that is you and me! The divine logos of John’s Gospel, the creational instructions of Genesis (and God said), the Word of God - impacting on creation and directing perhaps in something of the same way as a Board of Directors directs a company. In the words of cell biologist Graeme Finlay, “The image of God refers to our spiritual capacity to relate to God, and receipt of a commission to serve him.” and “God conferred his likeness upon a member of the ape family, and brought into being Homo Divinus, the ape-in-the-image-of-God, with the unique capacity to know, love and serve its creator.”

Structural miracles are miracles, beyond the process of creation, which are seen as once off unusual activities by God within the created world as it continues its everyday existence. The most obvious examples are the miracles of Jesus, and the supreme miracle of the resurrection. There can be no scientific explanation of the resurrection! But if we think back to the concept of the divine word or logos, we may begin to think of modern discoveries like DNA, and the information contained in seeds and embryos. The apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthians about the resurrection of Christians says, “When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. ³⁸ But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.”

And finally personal miracles would perhaps be better called “personal encounters” – encounters with the living God, the greatest and most significant of which is when someone comes to Christ in faith, seeks forgiveness and as we would say, “becomes a Christian.” There are many weird and inexplicable events and coincidences in the Bible and in everyday Christian life which fall into this category. The star of Bethlehem was probably a most spectacular example. It was one amazing coincidence that it came upon the scene at the birth of Christ. God used it as a sign. The answers to our prayers may involve structural miracles, but they are far more likely to take the form of personal encounters, incidents of guidance which give rise to “coincidence”, transforming circumstances in our personal lives, averting disasters, forwarding the purposes of God in world which would have things otherwise, providing for the Word of God to do its transforming work in the lives of individuals. William Temple once wrote, “When I pray coincidences happen, when I don’t they don’t”.

Looking back I became a Christian through a number of coincidences which brought me face to face with the right people at the right time. Similarly with our marriage! Moving to Fyfield and standing here today, talking about miracles is a miracle in itself! I look back to the first WATSAN “Walk for Water” launched to pay for a new project vehicle. We talked of £10000, but our Treasurer thought we’d be lucky to raise £3000 and we prayed. We raised £13500 – why so much, Lord? Because that’s actually what the vehicle cost! That I would submit is the result of a whole series of personal encounters. “When I pray coincidences happen, when I don’t they don’t”.

It is miraculous that our world and we are here at all, that there is something rather than nothing! The supreme miracle – CS Lewis called it “the grand miracle” is the coming of Jesus Christ, his life characterised by amazing structural miracles culminating in the resurrection. These wonders together with the personal encounters experienced by Christians in day to day life all testify to the reality of the power of God in our world. To summarise, Austin Farrer (Warden of Keble College, philosopher and theologian), once said, “The atheist’s ultimate fact is the universe; the theist’s ultimate fact is God”.