Complacent in the miraculous

Don't worry--I'll be getting back to the series I started soon...I just wanted to offer this remark given the timeliness of the subject matter.

While I think the actual premise of Stephen Hawking's recent statement that the universe was in essence "fated" to create itself because of its own physical laws--laws whose presence is completely unexplained since if there is nothing, then there is also nothing for any laws to be grounded in--I will go into no further detail on the actual argument, as other sites are doing very well at addressing these more direct issues and exposing the fundamental flaws in Hawking's argument. (Though I might make the comment that if laws somehow pre-existed all somethings in this universe, then you open the possibility of a multiverse, and if there's a multiverse, then how did IT get there? You're right back to the question of a first cause and hence a Creator...)

Rather, I wanted to offer a meditation on the nature of...well, nature itself, and the miraculous.

I should state that I have great respect for Professor Hawking's intellect, and perseverance in his profession in the face of serious adversity. However, that doesn't stop me from disagreeing completely with his conclusion, and suspecting that perhaps he's not exactly a disinterested party in this argument. I don't mean that to suggest anything malicious, of course--rather, I think it's quite notable that Hawking doesn't acknowledge the miraculous when many people, from an outside perspective, would suggest that he himself is quite possibly the beneficiary of a major one. His survival with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) is quite simply unprecedented. Especially to those who have known people who have this disease and have not shown Hawking's longevity, the miraculousness of this is quite obvious.

I wondered how it was that one who is constantly experiencing such an unusual and miraculous happening as this would not acknowledge that indeed it is a miracle, would find no reason to suspect that there is something beyond the deterministic forces of physics. Even to conclude that the human will was capable of making a difference, without even acknowledging deity, would seem more sensible from an outside perspective.

Yet as I thought about it, I realized that there's something about the kinds of miracles that get our attention in life, and which ones don't. When you read the Bible, there are many examples of sudden, "bolt-out-of-the-blue" miracles: voices speaking from the sky, vivid visions, and even life and death themselves dealt out at the spoken word of God. These jolt us out of our routines--we are very ready to acknowledge that these are far from everyday experiences.

But not all Biblical figures that we are familiar with seem to recognize the miraculousness of the circumstances in which they are involved. It's interesting to consider that Abraham and Sarah had fixated upon having children, only recognizing that sudden event as a miracle. Yet it is made quite clear that their lifespan is not one commonly lived by people in their time. That in and of itself was a miracle right there, yet they were so fixed upon the one they wanted that they never saw this other miracle that they lived every day. There's another reason they didn't see it as well, I think: the fact that it was every day. It wasn't a dramatic bang...rather, a set of circumstances that crept up quietly, slowly, and in a drawn-out manner.

That's what I think may have happened in Hawking's case--being in the thick of it, so to speak, and understandably being concerned with the hope of a better future outcome, may have made what seems obvious from the outside very difficult to see indeed. It's a matter of perspective, and I think that we should all take the time, as Christians, to step back and look at some of the "quiet" and "slow" circumstances in our lives that are also miracles from God, not just the quick, bold bolts out of the blue.

A Miracle I Can Understand

One thing I will never understand is the mindset that a phenomenon, once explained by science, somehow becomes stripped of its beauty and miraculous nature, a view famously summed up by William Wordsworth when he said, "We murder to dissect." Yet the more I have read about the natural sciences, the more I have observed nature, the more its wonder increases in my eyes. And the more I come to appreciate the depth and degree of God's artistry. The fact that I learn about the scientific principles behind those acts of creation takes nothing away from that...indeed, I am even more amazed.

This is an area where I feel both many Christians and non-believers have a misconception. The suggestion here is that to explain a natural phenomenon is to somehow divorce it from God. This mentality leads to the idea of a "God of the gaps"--that is, that God is only responsible for and active in those areas where we have no explanations...yet. And as we keep discovering more, under such a theory the role of God is rolled further and further back. For an atheist, the implication is that God will eventually be squeezed out (or boxed into a near-infinitesimally small corner grossly unbefitting of His description as an omnipotent deity). For Christians, the risk we run is that we will only recognize as a "miracle" that which seems to contravene ordinary experience and even common sense. We may even risk susceptibility to fakes because of a desire to see something that seems to flagrantly violate the laws of nature.

That is not to say that there cannot be miracles that do circumvent, accelerate, or reverse natural processes, that it can never happen. They do. But how is it that we can't recognize things according to their natural, designed working order as miracles too?

I am one of those who believes that what science describes is indeed accurate. And I see God's hand in it all of the billions of years and the indescribable multitudes of subatomic particles. And to think that all of that, over such unimaginable spans of time, had to go into designing each and every one of us individually, and everything around us...it is awe-inspiring, and faith-inspiring!

The one who was in the incredibly difficult position, thousands of years ago, of having to render the vision I believe they truly had of the Creation in terms that were available in the world at that time, so that they could convey it to those around them, could not be expected to do so as though they were writing a 21st-century science book. Why should we expect that? I do not say this to diminish the skill, intelligence, or the divine inspiration of the individual who received this vision to transcribe into what we now know as Genesis. I think the fact that we got the beautiful and poetic glimpse that we did is remarkable enough, and I haven't seen anything like it in any other creation story outside of the Bible.

But we dare not dismiss Genesis and specifically the Creation, because of the time in which it was written. For there is something science can't tell us. It cannot tell us who created us, or why, it cannot assign a purpose to our lives, and it cannot determine whether the possibilities it illuminates should or should not be pursued and under what circumstances, beyond simple things such as, "If you throw magnesium in water, it's going to explode." So we've established that said reaction is explosive. That's great, but being explosive in and of itself is a neutral. The appropriateness of actually doing it is an entirely different matter. Now, whether or not to blow up magnesium may seem like a simple thing ("don't do it where people can get hurt" would be a pretty sensible guideline), but if you apply this same principle to more complex matters, it becomes clear that science in and of itself can't tell us whether we should do a thing that we have discovered we could do.

In Genesis (and the rest of the Bible), the identity of our Creator and His reasons for creating, and how we should relate to that Creation are laid bare for us to see and to take into our very beings. We, like Adam, continue to name the phenomena around us, living and nonliving, with greater and greater specificity. But the naming and the understanding, even the direct observation--just as it was when Adam was the first to speak names for the animals around him--does nothing to diminish the fact that these things are miracles. We have eyes to see nature as never before...if only we would observe it in all of its facets, with our minds, our hearts, our bodies, and our souls--and recognize the signature and the reflection of God imbued in every inch of it.

This is, and will always be, a miracle.