Greg and Amy discuss examples of God using natural events in supernatural ways. What makes an event miraculous isn’t the absence of a scientific explanation but the presence of God’s purposeful timing and clear intervention.
Transcript
Question: Should something still be considered a miracle from God if it can be explained scientifically?
Greg: In questions like this, I always am thinking for a little bit about refinements or distinctions that need to be made. It says in the book of Exodus that God parted the Red Sea using the wind. So, here you have a natural element that is being employed by God to accomplish something unusual. Would somebody be able to describe that event as being able to be explained scientifically?
Now, I think the proper way to understand the word “scientifically” here is that you can specify the natural forces that account for the effect. What makes the parting of the Red Sea unusual or miraculous is not that there weren’t any natural forces involved that account for the effect, but they were involved at a very specific time, in a very specific way, to accomplish a very specific end. Now, that makes it a miracle. God intervened to use a natural phenomenon to create an unnatural escape route for the Hebrew people when they were about to be devoured. And, when they passed over on the other side, that wind stopped, and the sea closed in and destroyed the armies of Pharaoh. These are all the marks of divine intention to accomplish this act, even though there’s a natural element that’s involved.
So, the way the question was asked, those two areas are not exclusive. A lot of people will call a birth of a child a “miracle.” I think that’s actually a misuse of the word. I’m not trying to take away anything from the magnificence and the transcendence—the amazing thing that two living cells can join to make a separate being—but that’s all secondary causation. That’s, as I was talking about before, it’s indirect, or you have primary and secondary causes. God established a biological sequence of events that would lead to this. So, God’s responsible for it, but I wouldn’t say that was God’s immediate intervention to cause that baby to be born, and I think a miracle is going to be more like that—God’s immediate intervention.
Sometimes, a miracle is a result of something that can’t be explained in any other way. It is a total intrusion. A person has cancer, people are praying over that person, and the tumor disappears. All right? So, that’s a miracle because, presumably, God is the one who has answered the prayer and done this work. There was no natural process that was involved. It was a supernatural process. But sometimes miracles are done using a supernatural process, and the miracle has to do with the timing and the nature of the event—that no natural process would have done that, had that effect, at that time, for that purpose.
Amy: Yeah, that’s exactly what I wrote down—timing. Answers to prayer, where God is glorified and he does something unusual and steps in. But, to me, this is so tricky because God is always working. So, I don’t think there’s as hard a line as maybe people think, because maybe they think either it’s the case that God does something supernaturally, or it’s the case that things just would happen on their own. But I think there’s a sense in which God is always working in everything, and this is why we were saying you should be thankful and know that everything has a purpose. So, I guess some of this just comes down to the definition of what a miracle is.
Greg: Yeah, it does. I thought of two other illustrations that are actually close to each other. They’re in the Gospels. And one I just read about in John 6, I think it is. And there is Jesus walking on water. All right? And when he’s walking on water, there’s no natural explanation for that. That isn’t the kind of thing that happens on a semi-regular basis or occasionally, and then it just happened that he was walking on water right by the boat that he could get into. All right? Now, when he did that, the boat was immediately at Capernaum because they had gotten into the Sea of Tiberias—Galilee—and they kind of headed across a quarter section of north to get to Capernaum, and that’s where they were rowing and heading towards, and there’s Jesus, you know, strolling on by, and then he gets in the boat, and they’re automatically there. Now, boats arrive at their destination. That’s not an unusual thing—that a boat would arrive at its destination. But that it had happened instantaneously is evidence of a miracle. Or, storms on the Sea of Galilee start up, and then they stop. So, the stopping of a storm is not itself miraculous, but it becomes a miracle when this otherwise natural event happens as a result of a command of Jesus: “Be still.” And all of a sudden—boom—it stops. So, there’s another example where you have two cases—one case where it’s clearly an act of God to cause that event; secondly, you have normal events that happen in an unusual way that lets us know that this is also a miraculous intervention.
Amy: And not just unusual, but meaningful. So, it was serving the purpose of revealing Jesus and showing his authority. So, it’s not even just that it hardly ever happens. It’s that you can see a meaning in it, like when somebody prays for someone, and then their disease is gone.
Greg: That’s certainly the case with the calming of the storm—“Who is this man that controls the forces of nature?” idea. I’m not sure if that fits the same, like, “Oh, they just arrive at the shore. What’s that all about? Oh, we don’t have to row anymore.” But I get your point. It’s a good point.