Tag Archives: Miracles

On the Possibility of Miracles

Apologetics, , , , , , , ,

The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, better known as the Jeffersonian Bible, was compiled in 1820 by the founding father of the same name.  Using a literal cut and paste method, Jefferson extracted sections of the New Testament that he thought presented Jesus as a great moral exemplar.  Left behind are only mentions of the miracles He performed, including the Resurrection, and any passages that even have a whiff of his divinity.  The famous tinkerer could find no reasons to believe in the divinity of Christ and the operation of the supernatural so he imposed his naturalism upon the texts of the Bible.  Although he hid it away for fear of reprisal, there are many, even inside confines of the Church, who openly adopt and preach naturalism. 

Naturalism

Simply put, naturalism is the position that all that exists is nature.  It usually goes hand in hand with scientism, that is, the belief that the only field of knowledge is empirical science.  Within this philosophical framework the supernatural is a priori excluded such that there must be a natural explanation for everything.  This would include the divinity of Christ and miracles.  Rather than scientifically investigating the possibility of miracles, they simply conclude that miracles are impossible because they are impossible.  As we shall see, however, the miracles of Jesus are in fact quite possible.

CS Lewis makes a helpful distinction in categorizing the miracles of Jesus into two very broad categories: miracles of the Old Creation and miracles of the New Creation.  The former are those miracles in which, seemingly, the laws of nature are altered.  The latter are those that pertain to the laws of supernature.  As an example of the former we could have the changing of the water into wine and of the latter, the walking on water.  Both however respect nature and are no mere suspension of natural laws.  The super-natural always builds upon and assumes the natural. 

Using the Miracle of Cana as an example, let us examine whether or not such a miracle of the Old Creation is possible.  But before doing so, a disclaimer of sorts must be made.  The goal of this discussion is to show that miracles are possible and if possible then probable.  This is not a definitive proof that any particular miracle, including the changing of water into wine, actually happened.  That must be taken upon faith.  Instead the goal is more modest and that is to show that there is nothing irrational about believing in miracles, and, in fact, it is irrational not to believe in their possibility.

Returning to our example, let us examine what is happening.  A substance, namely water, is being changed into another substance, wine.  Change is a reality within the natural world and occurs everywhere we look so there is nothing per se out of the ordinary here.  All substantial change is governed by the enduring principle of matter.  In each substantial change, the matter takes on a new form; water gets into a grape seed and the matter becomes the grape vine which then bears grapes which undergo another substantial change through the process of fermentation and become wine.  So, we see, using the laws of substantial change, it is quite possible that water becomes wine. 

The Lord of Nature

This is not to explain away the miraculous, but to set it in its proper context.  Properly speaking the miracle is not in the change itself, but in the rapidity of the change.  Christ is revealing that He is the Lord of Nature and so it is fitting that He would respect the laws of nature and yet show His mastery over them.  He is the Sovereign King of Creation and thus He can do all things.  He came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it means not just the religious laws like the ritual washing that made the stone jars necessary, but also the laws of nature as well.  In fact, He uses the miracle as a sign that it is His power over nature that also gives Him the authority over the religious law. This mastery over nature is precisely what lends credibility to His claims of divinity and is the reason why He always uses some form of matter in His miracles rather than just creating it out of nothing.  The fact that He also produced a superabundance of 520 liters of wine shows how His absolute mastery.  A similar thing can be shown with the other miracles such as the multiplication of the loaves. 

What about the miracles of the New Creation, those like the walking on the water and the Resurrection?  How can we reconcile these?  Here again we must admit that we cannot prove them, but we can show how the follow from the possibility of the Miracles of the Old Creation and how they are not a repudiation of the laws of Nature.  If we view the miracles of the Old Creation as signs, motives of credibility if you will, then we can say that these miracles of the New Creation are the fulfillment of those signs.  They are meant to show that the laws of nature are not what is altered but man and his relationship to nature that is altered.  Water is still wet and still permeable, but man is given power over it.  Peter, a mere man in the process of becoming a new man, is able to walk on the water as long as he kept his eyes fixed on Christ.  Death, a natural consequence of man’s material being, no longer can hold him.  In both cases the laws are still in place, but man himself has changed.  Previously governed by the material laws because of his material body, he is governed by the laws of a spiritual body.  Spirit asserts its dominance against matter. 

We see now that we must admit at least of the possibility of miracles of Jesus and any philosophy that eliminates them by definition is necessarily false.  There is nothing contrary to the character of nature that would preclude them.  To eliminate them a priori means that you must in some way deny some of the attributes of nature itself.  To eliminate the possibility of the supernatural in this case means a denial of the natural as well.  The only way they could be excluded is if God did not allow them, a question that the Naturalist is not even willing to consider.

Not surprisingly most naturalists are also atheists (or at least deists).  In other words, they form their philosophy based on their belief, rather than as true scientists who would allow the data to take them wherever it goes.  In other words, they invent a philosophy to fit their belief rather than fitting their belief to a correct philosophy.  One may not know whether Christ was God or not, but to eliminate the possibility of the miraculous ultimately is unreasonable. 

Knowing when Your Time is Up

Anthropology, Bioethics, Heaven, Last Things, , , , ,

In a study that confirms what fans of The Princess Bride have long known, researcher Dr. Sam Parnia found that those whose hearts stopped and were clinically dead were only “mostly dead”.  He found that nearly 40% of patients who were revived after their hearts had stopped beating reported some level of awareness and consciousness.  The doctor even went so far as to say that “you know you are dead because your brain keeps working” for some short period of time.  Since the results of this study, which he dubbed AWARE, were published in 2015, there have been a slew of studies attempting to better understand death and so-called near death experiences.  Unfortunately, a number of these studies ignore what we already know through philosophical anthropology and so end up taking researchers down into bottomless rabbit holes.

With the advent of the age of the “specialist” these types of studies, that is, studies that apply empirical science to questions philosophy can, and usually already has, provide an answer are becoming more common.  Very often science, because it relies only upon empirical methods, comes up with incorrect conclusions.  We already know, and have known for a long time, that you know when you are dead.  This is because the soul is immortal.

Philosophy as the Handmaiden of Science

Some might think this is a theological claim and dismiss the question a priori has something that must be “believed” and not known.  While the question of the soul’s destiny might be a theological claim, the fact that it is immortal is a philosophical truth.  Human beings are capable of three types of actions.  There are those that depend solely upon the body like digestion.  There are those that depend upon the interaction of the body and the mind like choosing what to eat based upon both knowledge of nutrition and personal tastes.  Finally, there are those actions that do not depend upon the body like abstract thought in some intellectual field like mathematics or even reasoning about the immortality of the soul.  This latter group, because it does not depend upon the body as a completely immaterial operation, means that man has the capacity, at least in part, to act when the soul is separated from the body.  We may use the body (such as our memory and imagination) when we perform these abstract operations, but these operations do not depend upon the body. 

We may not be able to definitively say how we know after the soul has been separated from the body, but we can say with certainty that we continue to know things even after our brains cease operating.  This, because it goes outside of ordinary human experience, would have to be revealed in some way to us.  The point though is that it is not unreasonable to posit that one of those things that we know is that we are dead.

If philosophy already confirms this when it proves the immortality of the soul, then what value do studies like this have?  Death, properly defined, is the separation of body and soul.  Because the soul is an immaterial substance, its presence cannot be directly detected using scientific (materialistic) methods.  Instead medical personnel must look for signs that the soul has, in fact, left the body.  To see how this might be done, we again must turn to philosophy.

What do we mean when we say the soul is “in the body”?  To say that a spiritual substance is in a material substance is to say that it is acting upon it.  So, it is said that the soul is in the body, it does not mean that it is stored in some area of the body, but that it acts upon it.  The soul does not act on every part of the body directly, but instead acts through the brain which serves as the body’s integrative organ.  Once the brain is no longer able to perform this integrative task, then the soul leaves the body.  This is the reason that the Church suggests what is called the Neurological Criteria for determining death. 

Science as the Handmaiden of Philosophy

This study and studies like it seem to empirically verify what we have long known through reason—even if the heart stops beating, this does not mean a person is dead (i.e. the soul has left the body).  Studies like this should also make us pause on questions of organ donation since many people use clinical death as a criteria to determine whether to harvest a person’s organs.  The person, using the Neurological Criterion, may still actually be alive and even capable of higher brain activity associated with human thought.  In so far as these studies help to refine and better pinpoint the moment of death, they are very helpful.  But when they get off on tangents such as “you know you are dead” they undermine the task of true science.  They seem to adopt a materialistic conception of man, without the strings that are attached.  If you are “dead” and your body is all you are, then who is the I that is knowing he is dead?  To even make the statement implicitly assumes there is someone who survives death.

When framed in this way these studies also feed the universal fascination with near-death experiences.  As this particular study showed, these experiences are relatively common place.  There is no reason why we should be skeptical of these accounts in general, especially when as Christians we have examples, including Lazarus, of people who have definitely died and are resuscitated.  But there are reasons why we might be skeptical in particular instances.  Few, if any, of these people describe the presence of the demonic or mention the epic struggle with fallen angels that we know happens in the dying.  To say that all of these people have avoided the same epic struggle that Our Lord instructed us to pray against in the Our Father, stretches the Christian imagination.  In fact, it stretches it thin enough to say that it is probably not common place at all.  It is more likely that most of these are either illusory or demonically caused.