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On Miracles (PoAC)
Jun. 10th, 2007 06:47 amA couple of days ago, I was browsing my bookshelf for reading material and discovered there a copy of "God in the Dock," a collection of essays by the greatest of the Christian apologists and thinkers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis. The first essay in it is about miracles, and it has clarified my thinking somewhat. I find Lewis often does that for me, though on rare occasions I find I disagree with him - usually not his conclusions so much as the applications of them. But I digress.
I have railed before against the popular use of the word "miracle" in our society. A twelve-car pileup kills nine people and injures five more, but leaves the infant in his seat totally unharmed - it's a miracle. A patient comes through a difficult surgery and survives - it's a miracle. Someone gets hit by lightning, but his friend standing right next to him is fine - it's a miracle. These examples and similar ones make me cringe, but I was never able to coherently explain why.
Now I can.
A miracle, in order to be a miracle, must go against the natural laws as we know them, or in the case of Christ, must speed up those natural laws, doing in a moment what usually takes much longer, or doing now what will be possible when our natural laws have come to an end. (More on these in a different post.) The examples above don't fit those definitions. They are examples of probability. The infant's survival is dependent on the technology of the car and his seat, and the interaction of those with the physics involved in the crash. It's possible that a little more spin on the car, or a little less, might have had a very different outcome for him. He beat the odds, but the odds themselves are a function of natural laws and are therefore, if not predictable, at least comprehensible. The patient who comes through a difficult surgery, again, was given long odds - perhaps forty percent survival, perhaps less. But the outcome fell within the range of probability. If it didn't, the surgeon wouldn't have operated to begin with, because there would have been no point.
To call such events "miracles" is first of all to misunderstand the nature of miracles. Second, it's to misunderstand the nature of probability and mathematics, and the science of the events in question. Third, and this is the one I rant about, it's to trivialize the events that resulted from not beating the odds. That miracle baby who survived the car crash is now an orphan because his parents died in it. The boy whose friend was hit by lightning may have survived - but the friend didn't. How many patients died during a similar operation to the one the patient survived? And why, exactly, would God have made an exception to the rules of nature and protected those particular people and not the others affected by the same event? The answer is, he didn't - it wasn't a miracle. He let nature take its course, and the results, though not predicted, still resulted from that.
I have railed before against the popular use of the word "miracle" in our society. A twelve-car pileup kills nine people and injures five more, but leaves the infant in his seat totally unharmed - it's a miracle. A patient comes through a difficult surgery and survives - it's a miracle. Someone gets hit by lightning, but his friend standing right next to him is fine - it's a miracle. These examples and similar ones make me cringe, but I was never able to coherently explain why.
Now I can.
A miracle, in order to be a miracle, must go against the natural laws as we know them, or in the case of Christ, must speed up those natural laws, doing in a moment what usually takes much longer, or doing now what will be possible when our natural laws have come to an end. (More on these in a different post.) The examples above don't fit those definitions. They are examples of probability. The infant's survival is dependent on the technology of the car and his seat, and the interaction of those with the physics involved in the crash. It's possible that a little more spin on the car, or a little less, might have had a very different outcome for him. He beat the odds, but the odds themselves are a function of natural laws and are therefore, if not predictable, at least comprehensible. The patient who comes through a difficult surgery, again, was given long odds - perhaps forty percent survival, perhaps less. But the outcome fell within the range of probability. If it didn't, the surgeon wouldn't have operated to begin with, because there would have been no point.
To call such events "miracles" is first of all to misunderstand the nature of miracles. Second, it's to misunderstand the nature of probability and mathematics, and the science of the events in question. Third, and this is the one I rant about, it's to trivialize the events that resulted from not beating the odds. That miracle baby who survived the car crash is now an orphan because his parents died in it. The boy whose friend was hit by lightning may have survived - but the friend didn't. How many patients died during a similar operation to the one the patient survived? And why, exactly, would God have made an exception to the rules of nature and protected those particular people and not the others affected by the same event? The answer is, he didn't - it wasn't a miracle. He let nature take its course, and the results, though not predicted, still resulted from that.
