Are the Laws of Nature Miraculous?

Science has once again become theology

Does God answer prayer? Are there any scientific or logical limits to the extent to which God can respond? Is there anything that God cannot do? Is there anything that God will not do? Are miracles possible? In the modern age, both believers and unbelievers alike think there is an essential tension between miracles and the laws of nature. Miracles are perceived as breaking the laws of nature, while the laws of nature are upheld as unbreakable. However, it is scientifically not at all clear precisely what a law of nature is. Many physicists have found the existence of laws of nature to be profoundly mysterious. And some scientists have even described the laws of nature themselves as miraculous.

Are Miracles in the Eye of the Beholder?

A “miracle”, from the Latin mirari, ‘to wonder at’ or ‘to be surprised at’, is something we don’t see as normal. It is typically a strange, uncommon, or fortuitous event. Rapid recoveries from illness, escapes from near brushes with death, and even a stroke of good luck, are often referred to as miracles. Such events excite wonder because they appear to require, at their origin, something beyond human action or natural causes.

Yet, a miracle is over and above a random happening, and an event must be more than a mere anomaly to be considered miraculous. A true miracle must have meaning. In this way, miracles are preceded by faith and are discerned in the context of longing and hope. As answers to subjective questions and longings that are objectively directed towards the heavens, miracles point to the objective reality of a transcendent manifestation of a deeper subjective reality that is both beyond and within the cosmos—a reality otherwise known as God.

For the last two hundred years the majority of skeptics have rejected the possibility of miracles because they have held that human experience and scientific experimentation testifies that the laws of nature are never broken. Because “firm and unalterable experience has established these laws,” they say, a miracle—by the very definition of the term—is not physically possible.¹ Defining “miracle” as a breaking of the unbreakable laws of nature creates an inherent logical contradiction within the very notion of a miracle.

As philosopher Steven Horst explains, “The problem is not so much that miracles have empirical evidence against them, but rather that there is a contradiction inherent in the very notion of an event that is an exception to an exceptionless law.” ² The modern skeptic’s definition of miracles assumes that the laws of nature are “an exceptionless regularity of some sort [that] obtains throughout the universe, without restriction of time or place.”³

The Supernatural Laws of Nature

While the concept of laws of nature would appear to be comfortably at home in the world of secular scientific materialism, the origin of this idea is in actuality the Biblical understanding of creation. The idea that laws govern nature was originally a theological concept developed within Ancient and Early Judaism that was passed down to the Early Christians and ultimately to the first true scientists (known as philosophers of nature) of the late Middle Ages. One finds this idea already fully expressed in the Early Jewish Book of Enoch and in the Wisdom of Sirach. ⁴

“When the Lord created his works from the beginning, and, in making them determined their boundaries, he arranged his works in an eternal order, and their dominion for all generations. They neither hunger nor grow weary, and they do not abandon their tasks. They do not crowd one another, and they never disobey his law.” (Wisdom of Sirach 16:26-28)

“Contemplate all the events in the sky; how the lights in the sky do not change their courses, how each rises and sets in order, each at its proper time, and they do not transgress their law.” (1 Enoch 2:1)

“Contemplate all these works, and understand that he who lives for all the ages made all these works. And his works take place from year to year, and they all carry out their works for him, and their works do not alter, but they all carry out his word.” (1 Enoch 5:2)

In contrast to the Greek philosophical mindset, Jews and Christians believed that the ways of nature, as the product of the Divine Mind, were reflections of reason and that “even those aspects of nature that threatened human safety were not lawless in themselves. They served God’s purposes and had laws of their own, even if unknown to humans (Job 28:25-27).”⁵ In the Bible’s understanding, “whatever takes place in creation as the result of God-given laws is the work of God.”⁶ It is not surprising then, that the Bible perceives no fundamental dichotomy between miracles and the God-ordained natural laws. Since God is the sovereign author of both, there could be no contradiction between the two.

For early modern scientists such as Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibnitz, Isaac Newton, and Robert Boyle, belief in God as the Creator of the Laws of nature was “an inextricable part of their theorizing.” For instance, Boyle believed the orderliness of the cosmos was imposed by a rational Creator God as “a system of rules” and Newton saw such regularities as principia (principles), which could then be discovered and described by rational human minds as “laws”. All of these early modern scientists understood God as being continuously active in the universe in and through his laws of nature.

God was seen as literally creating through such laws and these laws were perceived as a deep expression of the will of God for the cosmos. For these pioneering scientists, “the sustained operation of natural law itself is termed a miracle and illustrates God’s providential dominion.”⁷ The most common natural event is itself a miracle because nature’s obedience to the laws of God is an instance of special providence. For them, the understanding of a miracle as a supernatural intervention was not an option. The Early Modern scientist’s biblical view of the relation of God to the world has no place for miracle as a violation of natural law. To them, it would make no sense for certain acts of God (miracles) to contravene other acts of God (the laws of nature).

The Physical Impossibility of Miracles?

Image: Erwin Schrödinger, enlightenedcrowd.org

After the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, many philosophes of the so-called “Enlightenment” began to view miracles as violations of the laws of nature. Holding a view of natural law as deterministic and immutable, these thinkers came to question both the possibility of miracles and the credibility of any accounts claiming miraculous events had occurred. More recently, however, physics has demonstrated that the Enlightenment concept of physical law is no longer scientifically valid.

Recent discoveries in quantum physics have shown the role of indeterminism in nature and have raised new possibilities for how God’s interaction with the world of nature can be understood. With the development of quantum theory in the twentieth century, physicists have come to understand the fundamental natural laws as statistical. Instead of stating what must happen, the laws of nature are now seen as stating what will probably happen. As quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger observes, “Physical laws rest on atomic statistics and are therefore only approximate.”⁸ Consequently, arguments based on Enlightenment assumptions about natural law that reject the possibility of miracles are no longer considered sound.

The Miraculous Laws of Nature

While the concept of “laws of nature” has become essentially synonymous with the objective natural sciences, many recent scientists, upon deeper reflection, have found the laws of nature to be a mystifying concept that invites philosophical and even spiritual reflection. For instance, physicist and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner concludes that the existence of mathematically describable laws of nature “is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.” ⁹ Physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman observes that the fact that there are laws of nature at all is itself “a kind of miracle.” ¹⁰  

For Albert Einstein, the mysterious aspect of the laws of nature evoked a spiritual interpretation: “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the Laws of the Universe—a Spirit vastly superior to that of man.” ¹¹ In the same way, physicist Steven Hawking remarks, “One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature.” ¹² Beginning with the Bible’s idea of the laws of nature as an embodiment of God’s will and ending with Hawking’s reflection that God is the embodiment of the laws of nature, the relation between miracles and the laws of nature has come full circle. As theology became science, so science has once again become theology.

1. David Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,” in Classics of Philosophy, ed. Louis P. Pojman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 714.

2. Steven Horst, “Miracles and Two Accounts of Scientific Laws,” Zygon 49, no. 2 (June 2014): 323–47, at 325.

3. E. J. Lowe, “Miracles and the Laws of Nature,” Religious Studies 23, no. 2 (1987): 263–78, at 269.

4. The earliest written copies of The Book of Enoch come from the Dead Sea Scrolls - and date from 200 BCE- 300 BCE.

5. Joshua M. Moritz, “Christian Theology of Creation and the Metaphysical Foundations of Science,” Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies 2:2 (2017); Christopher B. Kaiser, “Early Christian Belief in Creation and the Beliefs Sustaining the Modern Scientific Endeavor,” in The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, ed. J. B. Stump and Alan G. Padgett (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012), 6.

6. Christopher Kaiser, “The Laws of Nature and the Nature of God,” in Facets of Faith and Science, vol. 4, Interpreting God’s Action in the World (Lanham: University Press of America, 1996), 191.

7. James E. Force and Sarah Hutton, eds., Newton and Newtonianism: New Studies (Springer, 2004), 75.

8. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 10.

9. Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” in Mathematics, ed. Douglas Campbell and John Higgins (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1984), 3:117.

10. Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 43.

11. Albert Einstein, quoted in Albert Einstein, The Human Side: New Glimpses from his Archives, ed. Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 32.

12.  Stephen Hawking, interview by Ki Mae Heussner, “Stephen Hawking on Religion: ‘Science Will Win,’” ABC News, June 7, 2010, accessible at http://abcnews.go.com/WN/Technology /stephen-hawking-religion-science-win/story?id=10830164.