In my first post on miracles, I came up with (and gave my justification for) a definition of the term ‘miracle’. A miracle is an intervention by the supernatural. Any other reasonably probable explanation must be more likely.
In the second post, I discussed the justification for using an even wider definition of the term – in effect, anything that is seen by someone as a sign that God is intervening in nature. And, as I acknowledged, by this definition everything is a miracle.
In this post and the one after, I’d like to narrow things down again, and look just at those miracles that appear to be outside of the natural law. My speculation is that there are two different types of event outside of the natural law as we know it. I’ll be arguing that a lot of what we class as miracles are, in fact, just the natural law operating as it should (though affected in ways we don’t yet understand by the non-physical world). They qualify as miracles by the definition given above only if you regard the spiritual realm as non-natural or supernatural.
Then, in my next post, I’ll finally get down to the real deal – direct interventions by God – ‘real’ miracles, in the strictest definition of the word.
I was going to do one post on each – natural law ‘miracles’ and direct interventions – but I wrote too much! J
DISCLAIMER: If wild speculation annoys you, read no further. Many of the ideas in this post are highly speculative; I offer them as a brain-stretching exercise rather than a serious statement of beliefs. Some bits may be true. I have no idea which bits, and I have no suggestions to offer as to how some of my ideas might be tested. But I also have no intention of assuming that, just because I can’t test something, it isn’t true – or even that, just because I haven’t imagined something, it isn’t true.
Natural laws we don’t know about yet
The physical world contains things that are more than merely physical. One end of the spectrum of things non-physical but real is not contentious at all – take the brain and the mind, for example. The brain – with its neurons, its chemicals, and its electrical activity – is the physical substrate that allows the mind to exist. Over the years, I’ve written about and read up on studies of animal intelligence, and the search for artificial intelligence, both of which highlight the amazing mystery which is human sentience.
The other end of the spectrum is where the charlatans and the crackpots cluster, selling a lot of pure nonsense to the gullible and the desperate. I know people who reject the existence of the whole spiritual realm on the basis that their Auntie Mary spent the family silver on a crock of fools gold from a local cult. To my mind, this is a foolish overreaction. The proof that the container is full of bathwater is not proof that there is no baby.
Irish witches
My mother-in-law was an Irish witch – one of those unsettling people whose strike rate for knowing things they couldn’t know was way higher than average. Of course pure coincidence might explain why she made her sons bed on the morning of the day he arrived without warning almost a week earlier than expected. Coincidence might also explain all the other instances of seeming prescience on her part and on the part of many others I have known. And it might be coincidence that such events cluster in the lives of some and not others.
I think rejecting the alternate theory – that such people somehow (sometimes, without much control over whether or not it happens) tap into the minds of others – simply because it could have been coincidence is a good example of the rationalist fallacy which I’ve discussed before on this blog. Knowing you have an explanation that fits your idea of the universe is not proof that you have the explanation. (Yes, I realise that knife cuts in both theist and non-theist directions.)
As hinted above, I’m not proposing this as true miracle – rather, I’m suggesting the possibility of the kind of interconnectedness proposed by Jung and others; an interconnectedness that some are more sensitive to.
Another example of the same sort of thing is the atmosphere – even personality – that some buildings seem to contain. Again, some people seem to be more sensitive to this than others. I have a child who picks these things up – who complained bitterly about one room in a house we lived in until we had it blessed (we were unsurprised to find someone had died there in a fire); who wept when we took her to the Auckland casino and couldn’t be consoled till we left the building. And many people comment on the sense of prayer that appears to permeate places that have been hallowed for a long time.
Any teacher can tell you that a class has a personality, made up from – but also influencing – the personalities of the individual members.
These are natural things. They are hard to pin down and tricky to study. They seem to me to point to the existence of something that is not physical, or at least not primarily physical.
Coming soon: the second half of this post – works of faith, and natural law and the saints.
Joyful Papist 