I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my first installment in what may become a soap.

1) Last evening, we had a "Writers Group" meeting, where I brought my blog "The Physics of Miracles". They all liked the story-telling, but struggled with the philosophy. "What do you mean by miracles?" they asked me, "And why do you say there are no scientific laws?"

Then last night at Princeton University, I attended a panel discussion on "Faith and Science", where the question came up about miracles as violations of scientific laws. One of the panelists, my advisor Dr Vern Poythress, had written an entire book on the subject "Redeeming Science". (You can support this amazing man by buying his book, but if you have good reasons for being a skinflint, he also makes the PDF available for non-commercial use.) In his book, as well as at the panel, he makes the point that "scientific laws" reflect an outlook on Nature that sees it as an impersonal, mechanical machine, in contrast, say, to a stone-age animist who sees Nature as anthropomorphic spirits, or a Christian who sees Nature as the actions of a personal God.

But isn't Nature impersonal?

The impersonal machine metaphor for Nature (and yes, everything we know is analogous and metaphorical) only arose in the Enlightenment. Some historians of science argue that it was the public awe and admiration of the invention of the pocket watch, (exemplified in William Paley's famous 1801 book on ID and ridiculed by Richard Dawkins in "The Blind Watchmaker") that made everyone think of the universe as  God's pocket watch. Newton's calculus explained the orbits of the planets as precisely as a watch kept time, and thus he was credited with causing the paradigm shift in the view of the cosmos. Realize that for 1000 years before Newton, planetary motion was calculated with circles inside circles, epicycles that looked vaguely machine-like, but without a motive force, without gears or laws or design, so it was considered merely a description of God's actions, not a prescription of a mechanism. Also notice that a century earlier, Descartes had failed in an attempt to find a motive force for the orbits of the planets as vortices of liquid, but since machines aren't made out of liquids, the paradigm shift had to wait for Newton.

So it really has been for a little more than 2 centuries that science can talk about discovering "laws". And these have been very fruitful centuries of scientific progress. Make no mistake, treating Nature as a machine is tremendously productive.

Nevertheless, it comes at a price. We have separated God from His creation, making the machine independent of Him. The 19th century opened with Deists like William Paley, who proposed that God made the Universe as a really complicated watch, wound it up and stepped back. Then the 20th century opened with Atheists like Russell and Einstein who kept the watch, but did away with the Watchmaker, or at least, made Him so distant that He's out of calling range. Then followed the most devastating and global wars in human history, merging with the most deadly and genocidal purges in human history: WWI, WWII, Korea, Cold War-Gulag, VietNam-Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan. It was and remains a steep price to pay for banishing God.

But we need not become Atheists or even Deists; we can give God a job running Nature. We just have to shed the idea that the universe is a machine.

Does this mean adopting an animist or pantheist view that God = Nature?

No. That was the pagan view supplanted by Christianity. It is as much a deadly snare as the materialist machine. There is a reason, after all, that Science arose only in the West, and only after 1000 years of educating the pagan mind. Because paganism or pantheism prohibits science. We can't go back to that view no matter how attractive a Hindu or a Wiccan religion might appear without destroying the progress of three centuries.

But you will notice that science did not arise in a mechanistic Enlightenment world, it arose in a medieval Christian world, and was appropriated by people like Newton. That is, all those great minds of the Enlightenment were educated in a pre-scientific world at universities that taught Greek and Hebrew and the classics. It took two or three centuries before atheism finally expunged the last remnants of Christianity and attempted their grand experiment of the Atheist State. So contrary to what you may have read, it was not the Enlightenment that produced Science, but medieval Christianity that produced the science that brought the Enlightenment.

Therefore after the abject failure of the Modernist Century, perhaps we should reconsider the elixir that produced the Newtons and Boyles and Pasteurs and Maxwells of the Enlightenment.

That elixir is purpose.

The laws of Nature then, are not impersonal rules of an intricate machine. Nor are they the material embodiment of an emergent will. Rather they are the regularities of a personal God. It is God's transcendent faithfulness that makes them regular. It is God's imminent concern that makes them purposive. So a miracle is not a violation of an impersonal machine, but a loving response to a personal request.

But GK Chesterton, in his wide-ranging critique of materialism published in 1911, said it all so much better!

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

Chesterton then makes the point that Dr Poythress made on the panel. If regularities are personal, then even more so are the irregularities.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

Chesterton wrote that in 1911, at the pinnacle of Modernism, and on the brink of two devastating global wars of atheism. As the world reeled back from the nihilism of mustard gas and Zyklon B, it searched for an answer to the onslaught of atheism. In the next post, I'll relate the next two conversations on this search. 

To be continued...