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Miracles and Proof of God’s Existence
According to pop-Christianity, believing in God is the key to salvation and God wants all to be saved. You might ask, why doesn’t He show up and prove his existence? A couple of minor miracles captured on CNN would be all it takes and the whole televised world could be saved!
Essentially we have:
- If we could see, we’d believe
- If we believed, we’d be saved
This logic is fascinating because it’s basic and, in a sense, true but terribly misleading. Why?
- Because the kind of belief which saves does not come by seeing
- Because seeing is not always believing
Seeing is not Believing
In any experience which permits doubt, people will believe what they want to believe and not what they see. Any minor miracles would always be doubted and put down to trickery especially if they were only seen on TV. Each of us would personally need to see something amazing, like a dead relative rising up from the grave in order to be truly convinced that something supernatural has happened. However, even then, some of us would later consider the experience a kind of delusion and question our sanity or assumptions (was uncle Fred really dead?).
When Jesus healed a blind man (John 9) the man and his parents were interrogated by the religious authorities and various conspiracy theories were put forward. “The man was not truly blind”, they said. “It’s not the same man!”, “He’s a liar”. The consensus was that Jesus was a sinner and a charlatan and the authorities expelled the man and ultimately lynched Jesus. Seeing is not believing but even if one believes (in this sense) it’s simply not the key to salvation.
Pop-Gospel and Blind Belief
The pop-Gospel is “believe and you are saved” and is interpreted as: blindly believe these (crazy) things and you go to heaven instead of hell. Sounds ludicrous, as if God somehow prizes intellectual dishonesty above all other virtues. Surely God prizes people who question things (skeptics) and try to live a good life (moralists) above this cheap nonsense?
True Gospel and Personal Trust
True Gospel Christianity is radically different from other religions and worldviews. Christians are neither naive nor moralists and don’t only have belief in a set of propositions but uniquely and critically trust in a person. The oft quoted John 3:16 says “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”. The preposition “in” (Greek eis) is not accidental and the word “belief” (Greek pisteuo) goes way beyond a mere nod of a head.
To believe in someone is to be convinced that they are something good and true and worthy of our faith. When a daughter says to her father “I believe in you” she is saying “I trust you, I know you are capable, faithful and reliable”. When we are called to believe in Jesus we are called to place our trust in Him – believing his words is part of that trust but this kind of personal trust goes beyond intellectual assent of his teachings. Thus Ghandi, who thought the Sermon on the Mount beautiful and true even if Jesus never lives, was emotionally and intellectually engaged by Jesus’ teaching and nature but not personally receptive to Jesus as a person.
Jesus makes it particularly clear in Matthew 7 when he speaks of judgement day and people being separated into heaven and hell based not on their belief but on whether He, Jesus, knew them personally (“I never knew you. Depart from me,”). He radically explains that,
Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven
What has this all got to do with God’s hiding? We’ve said that God wants all people saved and that trust in His Son is the key. We’ve seen that miracles are not necessarily the best way to gain this trust. At best God could win our intellectual assent “Yes, you are powerful”, He could win our minds forcefully by proving his power and existence once and for all but is that the key to our salvation?
Salvation and do we want it?
Salvation is the point in a person’s life where they are rescued from the natural fate of death and brought into a new life which is from, in and for God with the promise of an eternity with Him. Imagine the person who has just seen proof of God’s existence: he’s seen the power but he’s also thought about the consequences of Christianity being true. God exists, He created me, He’s personal and just. Now, “How does God see me? I’m not such a bad person. Wait, God knows all I’ve done? He expects better of me? He demands my obedience? I must hand over my freedom to this sort of tyrant? Give me liberty or give me death!” It has been said that those who reject God would find heaven hell and not enter willingly.
Winning our Hearts
The point is that God may win our minds with miracles, perhaps even our approval with blessings but our hearts are trickier and require special treatment. His true aim is to win our hearts and as any lover knows, you can’t buy or force love because it is not love unless it’s given freely. No show of power will win our hearts as much as God patiently, progressively and lovingly revealing Himself to those who seek him whilst hiding his glory and power from those who do not seek him. God knows his face is terror to the proud and that people must first be humbled before they can look at Him. He knows that pride cannot break pride and that true humility humbles. He also knows that no love is greater than that which will die for a loved one.
The First Fruits
Thus the stage is set for God to descend to earth as a baby, to a poor family, in a backwards part of the world. A Nazarene man teaches, heals, serves, suffers and dies and the world goes on. The grave is empty and, for 40 days he is sighted. Many see, some believe. For the believers the world changes and life is never the same again. Their hearts are won. They are the first fruits. How can we moderns hear this and fail to be captivated and be left cold? Surely we are blinded! This picture of boundless love and self-sacrifice has the power to transform yet we pass on by.
Conclusion
God hides from those who are unwilling and unable to see him. He wants to woo us and win our affection. If we respond to the light we have, he progressively reveals Himself in a process only limited by our desire to know Him more. Our loving but shy God hides from those who do not wish to see Him. One day every eye will see and every knee will bow but not every heart will rejoice.
Miracles are generally held by naturalists to be impossible on the following grounds:
- Miracles break physical laws
- Physical laws cannot be broken
- Therefore, miracles cannot occur
While many have argued against 1) i.e. that miracles do not break physical laws (e.g. C.S. Lewis) I would consider 2) even less likely to be true. What we call physical “laws” are not prescriptive laws at all but descriptions of how nature seems to work. We did not discover the handbook of the universe explaining how it works but rather assume that it’s apparent regular operation is governed by laws.
However, the laws are manifestly not immutable because the very processes we call “laws” are tentative and change as science progresses. If a new phenomena (such as the photoelectric effect) is observed, we change the laws to better explain that (energy is now quantized, particle-like).
A believer in miracles might hope that one day, science would discover physical laws being broken and indeed allow for the miraculous. If they were more sceptical they might suspect that the laws would simply be changed so that the observed miracle fits into natural behaviour.
Surprisingly such “miracles” have already been observed. With the advent of Quantum Mechanics scientists began to observe phenomena which defied classic physical laws. For example, when electrons move from one energy state (orbit) to another they do not occupy any position in between – they jump which is a kind of magical disappearance and reappearance act. It turns out truth is stranger than fiction but this did nothing to convince hard-nosed naturalists that miracles are possible; they simply re-defined physical laws.
Prior to QM one might have declared such behaviour “impossible” because it violated laws. Nowadays the problem of the disappearing electron is simply how electrons work – we’ve seen it happen so it must be natural. One could even conceive humans observing God creating the world and calling it nature. Indeed that is, I think, what we do when we study evolution.
When we study the operation of the universe we must constantly remind ourselves that our “laws” are just describing behaviour and not prescribing how things must be. Unfortunately, time goes by and we soon forget this and start saying that certain things (miracles) cannot happen. We look back in history and convince ourselves that reported miracles are legends or frauds because we cannot witness them forgetting that our ability to observe a phenomena says nothing about it’s possibility.
Consider the turning of water into wine reported in John Chapter 2. Until about 1900 this would have been considered physically impossible – turning one element or substance into another was the impossible dream of alchemy. Nowadays we routinely turn uranium into lead in nuclear power plants – indeed the process occurs naturally as well albeit slower. We also know that the sun fuses hydrogen atoms into helium and that super-novas and other violent cosmic process produce other elements. So now we know even elements can turn into other elements. We know that turning water into wine is not physically impossible, just very difficult – you need a lot of energy. But Jesus’ followers already knew that: they saw the water turn into wine so they knew it was possible and they also knew that not just anybody could do that – that it was difficult. Funny how they knew more than modern man did until about 1900!
Because QM has allowed us to see just how strange our world really is we really have a justifiable basis for considering miracles to be physically possible yet infrequent events which require divine intervention. We have discovered that reality does not have to make sense. Unfortunately this has opened the door to a naturalistic explanation of divine intervention: if weird things happen naturally then we might say all weird things (like the emergence of life) are natural chance happenings. In common with most scientific progress the results can be interpreted by both atheists and theists as supportive evidence for their world view. As it turns out the evidence always points to what we want to see.
