No, that title is not an oxymoron. To a lot of people, miracles are things that violate physics, but that is because they have been taught that definition. This is a common but gross misunderstanding, in a large part due to the anti-supernatural modernism of the past 200 years. In this post, I hope to explain both what a miracle is, how common they are, and how you can "look under the hood" to see just exactly how God managed it.

Ancient and Medieval Miracles

Let's begin with Biblical and Early Church miracles. As many modernist and liberal theologians have attempted to show, they can be explained without "violating laws of nature". For example, in their accounts, the walls of Jericho fell because of an earthquake, or the Red Sea parted because of an unusually strong and steady wind, or the 5000 were fed with 3 loaves and 2 fish because most of the audience had secretly stashed their lunch so they wouldn't have to share it and were inspired by the generous example of the little boy. But the Bible doesn't claim that these events were miraculous because they violated some law, rather, they were miraculous because they occurred immediately after God's people called to Him. They were miracles of timing, not miracles of unnatural physics.

This is not to say that God could not have violated a law of physics, or that multiplying the loaves might not have been an ex nihilo creative act like the formation of the cosmos, but rather that the element common to all miracles is temporal proximity to a need preceded by a request. To put it another way, the magician can only impress us with his skill if he predicts the future accurately, and the result comes immediately after the specific request. All answered prayers are miracles.

Now we don't call a magician's acts "miracles", because we are all convinced that he has some secret information, he reads "magic trick" books, and spends hours practising his sleight-of-hand. It is highly likely that God does miracles in this same "information" sense where the Earth is his stage, and we the audience. Only, unlike the magician's accomplices, our lives really are in danger, and the miracle truly is our salvation. The magic act then, is a poor imitation of the real thing, the deliverance that is ours through the power and wisdom and foreknowledge of our Lord and Master.

Therefore it shows no disrespect, but the highest form of honor to ask "how did God do it?" For in seeking to know the methods of His power, we come to know something of the God who chose us before the foundation of the world to bear His name, and to represent His kingdom. If anything, our appreciation is increased when we fully comprehend the amount and type of information that it necessitates. John's gospel records no parables, but only miracles that he calls "signs". For miracles are first and foremost miracles of information, wordless parables packed with meaning, and it is both foolish and disrespectful to treat them as arbitrary demonstrations of limitless power.

David Hume's Atheism

So where did we get the idea that miracles were simply arbitrary acts of power that violate laws of Nature? I would argue that it happened in the Enlightenment, and the biggest blasphemer was David Hume.  Like Darwin and Spinoza and other atheists of this time period, the principal attack on Medieval Christianity was not the frontal assault on the existence of God, but an undermining of the need for God. If God were transformed into an accessory or preference rather than a vital power delivering us from certain death, then one can become a drawing room skeptic, cynically pointing out the foibles of priests and church hierarchies. The main attack against theism going back to 500BC with Democritus and Epicurus, was the denial of purpose. As Lucretius put it in 50BC, we must not think that we have ears for the purpose of hearing, or eyes for the purpose of seeing, or that lightening is under the control of the gods; rather, all these other things followed "laws of Nature", which have nothing to do with the gods.

It might have been a compelling argument before Christianity swept the world, but St Augustine, among others, showed how every "law of Nature" is dependent on the will of God. Thus atheism was banished from Christendom for over 1000 years, and during this time, Science was born and flowered and set fruit. And Man saw it, and thought it beautiful for its own sake, and took, and ate of it, and found that it held knowledge of good as well as evil.

So David Hume took over this argument from Lucretius, arguing that the laws of Nature were not, in fact, the laws of God, but mere regularities of observation that man in his enlightened state could manipulate to his profit. Newton's law of gravity was not a inner character of matter, nor a direct command of God, but merely an observation of a frequent occurrence that dropped objects fall in a manner consistent with the inverse square of the distance from the two objects. Newton himself, contributed to this "agnostic" view of gravity by denying any understanding of what the law meant metaphysically, simply stating Hypotheses non fingo, "I frame no hypotheses." Consequently, the ancient and medieval view that the heavens declare the glory of God was replaced by a mute machine that might have been originally built by a now distant and unapproachable God. 

Well if Hume is right, that laws are merely statements of regularity, then a miracle is a statement of irregularity, a violation of a law, a "super-natural" event. But by definition, if irregular things happened before, they would already be a law, so violations of laws have never happened before. Accordingly, when someone claims to have seen a miracle, we have to weigh the likelihood that they are lying with the likelihood that a previously unknown event has occurred. To Hume, it seemed a no-brainer that human deceitfulness was more likely, proving instead that we always project ourselves onto the world, and only God can penetrate through our total suppression of the truth.

Well many people have pointed out that Hume's argumentation is actually circular, since according to his definition of "laws" we can only learn what we already know. Science is not done as Hume said, nor are "scientific laws" mere generalized inductions of frequent occurrences. Nevertheless, his definition of miracle as a super-natural event in violation of a law of nature has been firmly fixed in the modernist mind. It does seem to "explain" why the miracles of Moses were so impressive to the Egyptians, or why Jesus' miracles convinced his disciples. After all, would card tricks have made disciples of uneducated fisherman?

If not super-natural, then what is a miracle?

Miracles

I want to convince you that Hume's definition is a two-fer: it elevates mechanistic, materialist science to the status of a god, while denigrating the purposes of a personal God to the meaningless whims of fate; it simultaneously makes an idol out of nature while denying God's informational message. In order for us to find miracles again, we must destroy the idol of Science, and replace it with the holiness of God.

Let us begin with what is the real nature of Science. Science is not discovering the "laws of Nature". Laws are things that are decreed, written, designed, established of people, by people, and for people. Nature is none of those things. If there is a law, then there is a purpose. And if there is a purpose then there is a purposer.  And if the purposer shows skill, then there is an intelligent designer. In recent years, many books have been written on this subject by both Christians and non-Christians alike, all of them concluding that the mechanistic, atheist/deist, Enlightenment, clock-like world has crumbled and can never be recovered. It has been undermined by Einstein's relativity, Bohr's quantum mechanics, Bell's inequality, Lemaire's Big Bang, and numerous failed theories that vainly strove to find a random or necessary universe.

Of course one can put one's head in the sand, study one grain of sand and say things like "Science is what scientists do", preferring to ignore the big picture. But the shingled beach is still there, and the sound they refuse to hear is the roar of the returning tide, advancing on their sand castle walls.  Every new discovery in science, whether cosmology, biochemistry or quantum mechanics shouts purpose, and Newton's postponement of judgement becomes harder and harder to sustain. For the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament declares his handiwork.

If then all of Science shows design, can there be something extraordinary? If every rising of the Sun is a miracle, then how can there be any extraordinary information, any personal message sent?

Now we are getting someplace. If on most mornings the sky turns pink and then the yellow sun leaps into the sky, but this morning the sun appears sullen and red, we take it to mean something. "Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailor take warning." Jesus said, You who can interpret the sky, can you not interpret the times? The same is true of miracles. They are unusual events that carry meaning.  The significance of the event is directly correlated to its level of unusualness, but the message is correlated to the complexity. If normally the dead stay dead, but if we should find a cat walking about whom many witnesses saw fall from a 50ft tree, we might shake our head and talk about 9 lives; but if we should find a man walking about whom witnesses saw dead and buried, we would expect a longer explanation.

Then a miracle is a highly improbable event that carries a personal message from God.

Anatomy of a Miracle

When I was in college, the school had vehicles that were used to transport students for various intramural events. Every Sunday I would drive one into Chicago to hold a worship service in a "halfway" house for societies discards. On one occasion, several students were driving back from a sporting event late at night, when the driver fell asleep on the interstate. The van veered off the road and by chance struck a parked semi-trailer. Since the trailer is higher off the ground than the car, the collision sliced off the top and killed the students. After this tragic accident, the school established a Cinderella policy that prohibited students from driving late at night.

No such policy covered personal vehicles, of course, and when my college friend had the use of the family station wagon one semester, and six of us made plans to catch a free ride from him from Chicago to Boston. A brilliant and procrastinating student, he had to pull two consecutive "all-niters" to finish his papers that semester. Accordingly he gave the keys to us, crawled into the back of the station wagon among the duffel bags, and slept for 8 hours straight. He awoke with the dawn in western Massachusetts, after we had driven through the night in shifts, keeping each other awake. Offering to drive, we asked if he were truly awake, and he assured us he had slept well. Within a half hour, the day had broken, our night-time sleep anxiety passed, and all six of us dozed off. Then he began to get sleepy, which he fought valiantly, not wanting to disturb us, but it was a tripled strength he had never encountered before. Doing 70 miles per hour, he blacked out on the Massachusetts turnpike.

Here's where the physics comes in.

The kinetic energy of an object is proportional to its mass times the square of its velocity. A station wagon is a heavy car, this one was one of the last of its breed. It was loaded with 7 students and their luggage. It must have been close to 4000 lbs. At 70 mph that comes out to the kinetic energy of a half stick of dynamite. When we hit a stationary object, all that kinetic energy must be dissipated by the front of the car. Car designers know this, and purposely build in "crumpling" to the frame, though in the 70's it wasn't a very common. But then in those lax days, we had no seat belts on either, so as the car came to sudden stop, we would have been launched en masse toward the front window. The kinetic energy of a 150 lb body at this speed is "merely" 1/20 of a stick of dynamite, say, a M80 "black cat", but concentrated in the part of our body that does the stopping, e.g. our head. And that is just the energy, even more difficult to dissipate is the momentum. The head may weigh only 10lbs; the remaining 140 lbs of body are still coming after the head is stopped by the window, crumpling the body, with the weakest point being the neck.

Now you begin to understand why seat belt laws are so important.

What actually happened?

Well, this section of the Mass turnpike was built long before the Eisenhower interstate system codified the construction standards. So instead of steel guard rails, it had the I-beam posts connected by chains on an unpaved shoulder. When our tires hit the posts, the rubber shredded, and the wheel hubs dropped into the dirt shoulder. This caused the car to list to one side and steer toward the posts. The kinetic energy was dissipated gradually as the hubs dragged in the dirt and the posts drummed away at the body panels of the car. We came to rest as smoothly, though not as quietly, as if we had used our brakes. Not a duffel bag was disturbed. The Mass state police who arrived at the scene shook his head and kept saying "you were very lucky".

But we were young.  We didn't shake our heads.  We didn't believe in luck. We thought we were invincible. We didn't get the message.

Another Miracle

Thirty years later, it was another accident, and another miracle. This time it was a '94 Suburban, even bigger and heavier than the Chevy wagon. My wife was driving with my seven children, and once again, only the front passengers were belted in.  Interstate I-81 in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia was steep and curving downhill with mountains on one side, 30 foot drop-offs on the other. It was 9:00 pm, twilight had faded, and she was driving with the cruise control at 65mph, the speed limit. Once again, narcolepsy struck without warning. The vehicle fishtailed out-of-control because the cruise control kept revving the engine, until the back bumper struck the mountain, rolled the vehicle twice, scattering glass and duffel bags across the road, and finally came to rest precisely on its wheels, 100 feet down the shoulder.

The fire/rescue team cut the doors off the vehicle and extracted two unconscious and four conscious passengers, putting on neck braces and strapping them to rigid boards before transporting them with the two that had climbed out the now non-existent windows. At the hospital, the x-rays showed no broken bones, and in fact, not much evidence of concussions, for the unconsciousness might simply have been sleep. The hospital staff was amazed. "The lucky bunch" they kept calling them, discharging them all 3 hours later.

But we were old.  We shook our heads.  We didn't believe in luck. We knew we were fragile. We got the message.

For if we had struck the mountain with the front bumper, the 6 unbelted children would have been human projectiles. If we had slid into the guardrail with a top-heavy roof, we would have rolled down into the valley. All manner of other scenarios could be imagined except this one. Where did all the linear momentum go? No guardrails bent. No mountains gouged. No rubber skid marks. Where did 2 tons of 65mph Suburban lose its velocity? And how did it lose it without forever maiming the children inside?

We resolved to visit the wrecker's lot on the way home, and the traffic was backed up for 3 miles on I-81. When a half-hour later we crept by the reason, it was a car resting on its roof, with two silent ambulances parked nearby, their inactivity an ominous sign. It could have been us. I pondered this as I stood in the lot, staring at the "ball of metal" that had been a Suburban. In addition to the crushed roof, crumpled A-pillar, and missing doors, the back bumper was lifted up about 6 inches.

Slowly the scenario unfolded. While fishtailing, the back bumper had hit the mountain, which instead of launching the children, had pressed them into their seats. The mountain acted as a pivot, converting linear momentum into angular momentum. As the car continued to go forward, the entire car now began to rotate, rolling down the dirt shoulder. So complete was the conversion, that the car left no skid marks as it rolled. The roof-top carrier and then the A-pillar absorbed the momentum slowing the rotation, and when the wheels came around, the entire suspension absorbed more of the angular rotation. Some momentum remained, however, and it completed a second roll before the suspension absorbed the remaining angular momentum, and the car was at rest, on its wheels. The children were not a rigid part of the car, so their linear momentum had to be converted to angular differently. In their case, centripetal force and friction with the interior converted their linear motion; the child laying on the floor never moved during the accident. From 65 to 0 mph in 100 feet. And the cellos came out of the vehicle in their soft cases still in tune.

What did it take for this stunt to work? A very precise application of force at the back bumper, an energy absorbing roof and nearly perpendicular roll that transferred momentum into the suspension, with no guardrails or other disturbances that would have applied a dangerous linear momentum to the rolling vehicle. I would venture that a seasoned Hollywood stunt driver might be able to duplicate it on his fourth or fifth try, if he was precise enough and survived the first attempts.

Precision is another way of saying information. Planning. Design.

The message was sent and delivery acknowledged, but what did it mean?

That is where physics fails to be of much use. And this is where David Hume begins to rub his hands in glee. For miracles, like the parables of Jesus, are double-valued. They can be taken, and indeed, must be taken, in two completely opposite ways. For the Humes of this world, miracles must be seen as random unlikely events, or else they would become paranoid and unable to function as a happy atheists. But for the Christian, miracles are demonstrations of God's power and provision. At least a dozen people were praying for my family that night, my prayer group alone had 8 people in it, and grandparents too had felt anxiety. With so much prayer, it was a fulfilment of a request, though perhaps not in all aspects. What did it mean? St Paul said it best, I am not my own, I was bought with a price.