Can You Believe in Miracles?

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A news article a while back noted that “in an effort to ensure transparency as well as historical and scientific accuracy,” Pope Francis approved revised norms on healings alleged to be miracles.

The norms have to do with the composition and procedures of panels of medical and other experts the Vatican uses to try to determine whether an alleged healing has a “natural or scientific explanation.”

I’m sure many cynics had a field day with this announcement. “Miracles?” they may ask! “No contemporary, informed person could believe in them.”

There’s reason for skepticism, if not cynicism. People easily see the face of Christ or the image of Mary on gnarled trees, sides of cliffs, in the clouds and on deformed carrots. They say that the survival of their cousin with cancer is “a miracle.” They declare that their remaining alive after that horrible auto accident is a miracle.

Sometimes, these phrases are simply figures of speech, meant to say that the incidents are highly unusual or extraordinary. Some people who use them mean to convey no sense of the spiritual or religious.

Continued Intervention

But many believers use the term in a literal sense, and as unlikely as alleged miracles may seem to non-believers, the attitude of many Christians and Jews toward miracles is understandable. The history of the relationship between God and creation as related in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles is one of continued intervention by God in the affairs of humans.

In the Hebrew Bible, God kills people, such as the events portrayed in the Passover; he parts the sea down to its floor; and he maintains a continual dialogue with prophets, kings and patriarchs. In the Christian Bible, Jesus walks on water, turns water into wine and raises a friend from the dead.

For many of us today – when scientific explanations are at least sought and expected for virtually everything – belief in miracles presents a problem that makes it hard for non-believers, and many believers, to embrace religious claims.

In my view, it’s difficult to believe in the God of Christians and Jews if you don’t accept the possibility of miracles, that God CAN intervene in the lives of humans and has done so. If God is all-powerful and the author of life, what would keep him/her from it?

Andrew Briggs

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But doesn’t God’s intervention in some cases and not others impugn the idea that God loves and cares for all of humanity? Why does he/she cure one person’s cancer but not another’s?

These kinds of questions are nothing new. They have been asked by believers and non-believers for thousands of years. The authors of the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible – written around 600 years before Christ – attempted an answer, placed in the mouth of God:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

Fact is, we can only speculate about the apparent dilemmas resulting from the traditional Christian and Jewish views on the nature of God. As God is unknowable, so are his/her “ways.” 

Personally, I’m a skeptic when it comes to miracles, believing that God wants us to make our own way in the world. Like a good parent, he/she accompanies us but rarely, if ever, intervenes.

Belief in miracles is related to belief in the efficacy of prayer, which is pivotal for believers in the God of Christians and Jews, and I believe that in this regard, we need some humility. I used to disparage people who prayed for rain, for the recovery of their loved ones, for a victory in a sports competition, but no longer. Who am I to say whose prayer makes sense and whose doesn’t?

Not Necessary

An article in LiveScience, a science news web site, quotes Andrew Briggs, a nanomaterials scientist at the University of Oxford who is Christian, as saying that “… it’s not necessary to understand every aspect of something to believe in its truth or importance.

“For instance, physicists don’t agree about what really happens when they take a measurement of tiny particles in quantum systems. But at the same time, quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of the very small, has shown itself to be a robust theory that works again and again, even if scientists don’t understand all of it.

“There are aspects of what happens when I pray to which I don’t really have a satisfactory account,” Briggs told LiveScience. But, he added, evidence for the value of prayer make it worth doing.