Who runs things here? Miracles

There is no “miracle within nature”

The picture so far: God created the laws and our ability to choose, and since then the world runs according to them. But the Bible is full of miracles: the ten plagues, the splitting of the Red Sea, the giving of the Torah. How do they fit into the picture?

Some distinguish between two kinds of intervention: a miracle, which is a departure from nature, and “natural intervention,” in which God causes nature to “choose” one of several possibilities without departing from its laws. And many have claimed that whoever sets the laws of nature against divine involvement ignores the second kind. But this is a mistake. The laws of nature, as far as we know, never allow several possibilities. Given a certain state, they determine one single result. “The weather is random”? No. It is chaotic, that is, very hard to calculate, but it is completely determined. (Perhaps in the quantum world there is genuine randomness, but even that is disputed, and even there it is not clear there is “room” for intervention.) So every divine intervention is necessarily a departure from the laws of nature, that is, a miracle. There is no such thing as a “hidden miracle” that is not a departure: it too is a departure, only no one noticed.

A miracle is not a logical contradiction. It is only physically impossible, and whoever created the laws can suspend them. The question is only how often it happens.

The frequency is declining

And the answer is a historical fact: in the Bible there are many miracles. In the Talmudic period, fewer. In our day, almost none. The Sages believed there is divine involvement within nature, and in this sense what is said here disagrees with them. But we have already seen that on questions of fact there is no authority, and that the Sages lived in the scientific world of their time.

And what about testimonies of people today? Many tell of miracles they experienced. They should not be rejected in advance, but each should be examined. Yet most do not withstand examination. First, what we hear is not a representative sample: we hear of whoever was saved, not of whoever was not. “Babas” and wonder-workers built careers on this. And second, precisely because these are possible events, there is no way to know whether there was intervention. Only reports of miracles that directly contradict the laws of nature, or miracles that came after advance notice, can count.

What is the meaning of a miracle?

Nachmanides thought that miracles strengthen faith, and that “from the great, famous miracles a person acknowledges the hidden miracles.” But there is also another view, and it is precisely the one that suits modern eyes. A midrash, which Maimonides also brings, describes that Abraham reached the conclusion that there is “a master of the palace” from the question of who turns the sphere, that is, from the daily order of the stars and the sun. It is precisely routine that proves there is a master, not departure from it. A world that ran chaotically would actually be a sign that there is no master. And that is exactly the argument from the laws of nature that we saw in the previous article.

And from this point of view, a miracle is actually a kind of “correction”: when God’s will cannot be realized within the ordinary laws, he is forced to depart from them. There is no perfect system of laws. And so some have said that the need for a miracle actually “diminishes” God. And yet a miracle whose purpose is clear, like the splitting of the Red Sea, and especially when it was announced in advance, has meaning: it shows that God desires this people. But that is true when it is clear to us that a miracle really happened, and that is very rare.