I had three conversations about miracles in the last 18 hours, and concluded that it still needed some clarification. So here is my third installment in what may become a soap. (Installment 1 here, and 2 here.)

3) This morning, a request came into the library for an interlibrary loan, but for periodicals, they only Xerox the article and mail off a copy. The librarian asked me if I was interested in the topic, and I quickly scanned them. They were all from journals in the past year.

  i) The first one was a theologian defending against Hume's critique of miracles. Seems that there are still people who find Hume convincing.
  ii) The second was a philosopher defending miracles against the claims of methodological naturalism, which defined miracles as impossible events, so of course there can't be any scientific proof for their existence.
  iii) The third was a Frenchman defending the miracle of extraterrestrial life as a prediction of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the evolution of religion.

So the first two articles were stuck firmly in the 20th Modernist Century with its faith in progress and the rejection of God. And the last is the characteristic of the 21st PoMo Century with its faith in process and the emergence of God. Either God doesn't exist or He's still arriving. Why do we swing from one extreme to the other? Why do we go from Atheism to Pantheism, from the absence of God to the ubiquity of gods? Can't we camp out in Theism for a while, after all, isn't that where Science lives? That's the question this blog is addressing.

The librarian started talking to me about a book he was reading that had the NYT writing effusive reviews and Al Mohler not-so-effusive, The Shack.   Guess what the answer to the problem of evil is? Nope, not atheism, try again. Nope, evil isn't just in your head, one more try. Yup, God is emerging. Seems we are on a roll here with Hegel.

Hegel?

Yes, the study of 200 year-old GWF Hegel explained a lot of things I didn't understand about PoMo. Such as why PoMo wants God to be always changing, when frankly, I thought it was one of God's better points, that He never changed. But it seems that this either makes God unapproachable or outdated, take your pick. Recall how we arrived at this impasse: first we made the world a watch, then we made God the watchmaker, then we complained that good watches don't need repairmen, and finally we said that watches have always been around without watchmakers. But since this conclusion led directly to the Holocaust, everyone is now looking for an exit.

Hegel provided exactly the wide sort of exit everyone wanted. He said that the world isn't a watch, but filled with God. In fact, God needs the world to explain Himself, since without the world He'd be that unapproachable heavenly watchmaker that caused so much trouble before. Now Hegel prided himself on being a civilized German, and didn't want to be confused with Hindu pantheists, so he preferred Greek terminology. God was the Absolute, and represents the Ideal.  In this century Heidegger likens God to "Being", and Tillich is famous for calling God "the ground of Being". Whitehead, about 100 years after Hegel, was a no-nonsense Brit who called his his philosophy "panentheism", meaning God is of the world but the world is bigger than God. (You will notice that the more vague the term, the more popular it is with philosophers.)

What all these philosophers are trying to do is make God accessible. Or as they say in seminary, to make him immanent. They all feel that the danger of Kant and Christianity is that God is so transcendent he has no interest in us or in our time frame. And a God who isn't there expires, in Nietzsche's words "God is dead."

But there are real consequences with having a God who is only of the world. It means that God really is stuck in time like you and I.  Long before The Shack, Conservative Rabbi Harold Kuschner wrote a bestseller "When Bad Things Happen to Good People" on the problem of evil, concluding that God is entirely good and knows our pain, but just can't do anything about it either. A bit of a letdown, if you ask me. Which is worse, a God who is powerful but never around, or a God who is always around but can't fix anything?

"Oh, but he can," say the Bergsons and Tiplers and the de Chardins, "in the last day, at the Omega point, when everything reaches perfection, then it will all come out alright.  You'll see, we are all getting better and better until that unity with the Absolute Mind will remove all imperfection."

I think you are getting the drift. There isn't a dime's worth of difference between all these versions of Hegelian dogma and Hindu pantheism or even Buddhist nihilism. You might even start drawing parallels: since the world is all deception and all these varieties of truth a part of the One Big Truth, we can celebrate our diversity, our local gods, our Gaias and Earth Days, our Easters and Ramadans, for they are all part of the web of being, the dance of life, the destiny of time. We are just motes in the eye of God, molecules in the ocean of love, etc etc.

With a half hour of practice and a few websites for material, you could probably spin this sort of thing for a lifetime. Hegel, with more German circumspection, called this process "dialectic", and  convinced everyone that with the destination fixed in the final dissolution in the Absolute, the only thing we needed to worry about was the journey. And in fact, debate was to be encouraged, for thesis would lead to antithesis and thence to synthesis in a never ending argument of history inexorably drawing us higher and higher to that final ecstatic union with the borg.  History resolved all problems. History lead inevitably to Hegel's own philosophy (why am I not surprised?). The History of man is the history of God.

So to recap, we were appalled by atheism and its excesses, so we rejected the Newtonian view of the world as a machine. At first we found refuge in a separationist dualism along with the Romantics, hiding behind the Kantian wall, but physics and history has not been kind to the wall; it is cracking and the barbarians are at the gates. Making the best of a rather desperate situation, we are ready to sally forth, reclaiming the burnt-over lands of time and space for the God who needs circumstances and people to realize Himself.  Rather than languishing in an artsy ghetto, we are now emboldened to recognize that God is revealing Himself through us. Everybody's special now.

Just one little problem. To quote the Incredibles, if everyone is special, then nobody's special.

Unless, to quote Napoleon, "some are more equal than others."

Karl Marx took Hegel seriously and said if history is our destiny, then let us change it! Let us accelerate the progress of mankind by forcing everyone to improve. We'll all arrive at the endpoint so much faster that way. And those who are hindering history will just have to be removed as efficiently and speedily as possible.  All for Progress and Progress for All!

So strangely enough, both atheistic monism and pantheistic monism, despite claiming to be complete opposites, end up in exactly the same place and with the same slogans: WWII, with atheist Hegelian communism and pantheist Hegelian racism in the battle of Berlin.  Rather like today where the diversity slogans that were meant to encourage tolerance are now punishing speech for being intolerant, even when it consists of revelation or miracles.

What then do we do with revelation, with miracles, with God's messages to us today?

"Well, honey, if you want to believe in miracles, that's just fine with us, so long as you get with the program. Just don't go saying embarrassing things about anyone else. No criticism, just positive energy. We're all in this together. Understand?"

We have gone from an Atheist "miracles don't exist", to a Kantian "miracles are myths," to a Hegelian "all miracles are equal", or, "miracles all say the same thing".  Either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle, since either nothing is God or everything is God. So the one thing a miracle can't be is the one thing it must be: something special. It may be true, as GK Chesterton pointed out, that the sun rising every day is a miracle, but for most of us, the regularity has erased its unique message. On the other hand, when the EMT pulled 6 unbelted but undamaged children out of my wrecked Suburban, there was little doubt they had witnessed a miracle.

The Atheist says miracles are dumb, the Kantian that they are lies, and the Hegelian that they are garrulous. None of them let miracles say what they are shouting for all to hear.

In the next and last installment, we'll look at what miracles say.   To be continued...