Episode 42 - Miracles Revisited: The Intertwining of God and Nature

Have you ever pondered the divine brushstrokes that painted the universe into being? This episode takes you on a profound journey through creation theology, contrasting the serene Christian narrative with the tumultuous tales of ancient mythologies and the Islamic view of earthly existence. 

We navigate the waters of divine love and will, weaving through the rich tapestry of a cosmos crafted with intentionality and governed by the intricate dance of the Trinity. 

As we dissect these narratives, we uncover the profound impact they have on our perception of the universe's inherent value, casting ripples through the realms of science, art, and the essence of what it means to be human.

Prepare to challenge your understanding of the laws of nature as we question the very fabric of miracles and divine intervention. 

With a nod to David Hume's historical skepticism, we scrutinize the modern myth of a self-sustaining cosmos and redefine the boundaries that separate the natural from the supernatural. 

Miracles are reimagined not as violations of natural laws, but as the hand of God momentarily revealed in exceptional clarity—a concept that reshapes our relationship with the everyday. 

Join us for a thought-provoking session that promises to stir the soul and invite a deeper appreciation of the miraculous interplay between the celestial and the terrestrial.

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:30

Well, welcome to the next episode of the Christ-Centered Cosmic Civilization. And we're continuing to think through these basic theological foundations of the doctrine of creation that enables civilization, science, to flourish. We've been thinking about the second principle that we're meditating on is that the universe was freely made from the Father through the Son, by the Spirit, and is ruled over by the great High Priest, who is God, the Son, the Lord, jesus Christ. And we saw that ancient myths and modern myths focus on explaining the origin of the universe through myths of sex and violence, basically, and this kind of generations of the gods or eons of the ages or whatever, and that the out of that emerges from, through sex and violence, the world as we now have it. But Islam also has a doctrine of creation that does not give rise to an environment that is conducive to scientific study in this way. So in Islam, the earth people often assume that people who don't know Islam usually think it has the same doctrine of creation as the Bible does, but it really doesn't. In Islam, the earth was created as a place of exile when Adam was thrown out of paradise. So Adam was in heavenly realm and then, because of sin, is thrown out and earth is then created as a place of exile. So it's again. It's created as a result of something going wrong. So in a way it's echoing those ancient myths where the explanation for the universe is out of problems, is out of problems. So the earth is not a good place in itself. It isn't intrinsically made. It's not good, but it is created in Islam a temporary place of testing because of Adam's fault. So again, that creates enormous problems for understanding humanity in the physical universe and understanding the universe itself as an intrinsically good thing. And it rolls into art, how art is perceived in Islam, and it has a lot to do actually with the understanding of paradise and how things that are forbidden on earth are permitted in paradise. For example, alcohol is an example of that. But it has a lot of consequences for sexuality and all kinds of things If Earth and our physical embodied life on Earth is seen as a response to a sinful exile and that Earth is merely a temporary holding space but it has no eternal destiny, earth itself. We're going to explore that in a lot more detail in a future episode.

Speaker 1: 5:15

Well, so what is the correct explanation? Well, this is our second principle. The Bible tells us how the universe really began and it came from the will, the mind and heart of our gloriously good, eternal Father and brought into being and sustained by the word of his Son through the power of the Spirit. So the origin point is the will of the Father and that it is created not in response to sex and violence or sinful rebellion or anything like that. It is created freely, as an expression of the very life of God. It's an artistic endeavor that's done out of love and something that is a celebration of expression structure, and it has an intrinsic well, think about this more, perhaps in the third principle, but it has.

Speaker 1: 6:35

Well, let's just say what we said. The heavens and the earth, then, were made without any sex, violence, explosions, ripping apart, no conflicts, no multi-generational soap opera of the gods, nothing like that at all. And chaos and darkness far from being the source of the universe, chaos and darkness are shown to be powerless on the very first day of the universe. And that hugely important that because there is that within us, that feel that in our messed up state, there's something within us that calls to chaos and darkness as if there was something good in it, as if there was the darkness which gives us anonymity and hiddenness and chaos, which speaks of endless possibilities. And all of that the evil that is in us calls to that, the sense of things being hidden and endless possibilities of creating ourselves and the world in a completely different way, according to our own will. And yet when the universe was created, we are told in the very act of creation that the chaos and darkness are powerless and barren. So the creation is not a battleground fought over by evenly matched powers of good and evil, as in the sort of maniche philosophy that was big in the sort of ancient world. There's not a balance between the forces of light and darkness in that kind of yin yang way. There are no mysterious dark energies, dark forces, nor do things suddenly emerge from nothingness without cause or explanation.

Speaker 1: 9:02

There isn't any irrationality that's at the core of explanation of the origin of the universe In the ancient and modern myths. There's an irrationalism that's built into the whole thing, particularly in the modern ones, in the real explanation from the father through the son, by the power of the spirit. Life doesn't just pop up and design itself with no logic or meaning or reason. Everything in the universe has meaning, design, reason, structure, purpose, rationality, and it can be understood, we can study it. We have minds, we are cells, created in the image of the God who made us and in order for us to enjoy the reality, the rationality, the structure, the meaning of everything. So the creation was brought into being by the mere word of the father, meaning the son, by the son of the father, because the fathers willed this, and the universe is not from the remains of some earlier conflict or catastrophe. And then, connected to this, then, is this deep truth that the universe is ruled over by the one who the Father has enthroned in the highest heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ. So the Father.

Speaker 1: 10:45

There's this, what we call the monarchy of the Trinity, that the Trinity rules as one and that rule. So it's not that there are three, like the Father's one ruler, the Son is another ruler and the Spirit is a third ruler, as if there are three rulers. No, that is to totally misunderstand the Trinity. No, it's the monarchy of the Trinity, and the Father rules by the Son and the Spirit rules by anointing the Son. It's from the Father. The Father's rule is through the Son, in the power of the Spirit. They rule as one and the Father has appointed His King. Or really, if we say the Father anoints His King. We see all the three are joined together in that phrase the Lord.

Speaker 1: 11:42

Psalm 2 says the Lord has enthroned His Christ, christ the anointed one. The Lord has enthroned His Christ in the highest heaven and rules over everything. So the universe is ruled over by the one who the Father has enthroned in the highest heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ, filled with the Spirit without measure. And that means and so think of that that he is the one. The Father created it all through Him and rules it all through Him. So he does not need to break into history or break the laws of nature in order to act in His good creation. He rules all things and everything that happens is an example of His rule. In this deep sense it's not, or he's all under His rule.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Now let me just explain that he does not need to break into history. That is a phrase that I quite often hear in certain kinds of church settings, where there's this feeling that they'll say, maybe at Christmas. At Christmas, god breaks into history. Or sometimes it's said in the case of a particular kind of miracle. Isn't it great that God has broken into our situation or broken into the world in order to do a miracle or some conspicuous example of His presence. Or they'll say at Pentecost, in Acts 2, that's when the Holy Spirit breaks into history.

Speaker 1: 13:31

But why that is not good enough at all at all is it has the idea that the universe is a sealed system, like a mechanical clockwork system that is completely self-sustaining, self-explaining, and the God who made this is external to it, completely external to it, but can, if forced, break into the system in order to do something. But that is a monumentally unsuccessful way of thinking. It's not at all the way the Bible sees it. Remember, in the Bible, there are the heavens and the earth, and the Father has established His throne in the highest heaven, and that there is the Son sat at His right hand, through whom this monarchy of God is projected by the power of the Spirit to the whole creation, and that from that throne, within the universe, within the highest heaven, part of the universe, the highest heaven, the biggest, vastest part of the universe, is already ruled. Everything is done. So, in the Lord's prayer remember, we pray may your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.

Speaker 1: 15:12

That idea, then, is that there's already this throne room filled with hundreds of millions of angels and there's the Father's throne and the Son. The Lord Jesus is anointed to sit by Him and be the divine emperor over the whole of creation and all these creatures that serve Him perfectly in the highest heaven. All of that already exists. He does not need to break into the universe. This living God reigns from within the universe. He's established His throne within the universe and rules it and governs it in that way, so that the life of the creation, though it has an independence to Him, isn't. He is not the same as the universe. Like we don't identify, we don't say, ah, the universe itself is divine or anything like that, but nevertheless the entire creation is filled with this divine glory, always, always. He doesn't break into this closed system. Rather, he inhabits this system, the Father through the Son, in the power of the Spirit.

Speaker 1: 16:35

So, thinking about this business, about breaking laws of nature in order to act, let's just take a little bit of time on that. The idea that there are laws that govern creation, laws imply a law giver and what we call. We call them laws of nature, but they're not really called anything like that. In the Bible you don't get that sort of impersonal language as if the universe has these kind of laws or principles or mechanics that just operate like the clockwork image. But you see, what we call the laws of nature are simply descriptions of the way the Lord, jesus Christ, nearly always governs his creation and miracles. What we call miracles are when he does things differently.

Speaker 1: 17:34

The World English Dictionary offers this definition of a miracle it's an event that is contrary to the established laws of nature and attributed to a supernatural cause. So again there, the World English Dictionary is operating a kind of anti-Christian, anti-biblical view, so that a miracle is supernatural idea that it's something it operates like outside of nature, above nature. I'm not totally happy with that at all, the idea like that nature is a closed system and something needs to come in from above or beyond. Another dictionary offers two more definitions. Here's one Miracle, an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause. Or another definition it's an effect or event manifesting or considered as a work of God. Maybe that one, the idea that something that manifests as the work of God, right, well, we might come back to that, because we might say, like I think it's Augustine who said, isn't it that, if we think rightly, we would think of everything's miraculous. Well, I'll come back to that later. Look, so these definitions might seem to be perfectly all right at first glance, but again, they do see God as an intruder breaking into the normal running of the universe.

Speaker 1: 19:40

So this idea of laws of nature, that way of thinking, grew up in 17th century Europe as people began to think of the universe as a kind of machine, a clockwork machine really, because that was the kind of ultimate machine that they had at that time, and they could see this idea of these cogs moving very intricately and complexly to produce this ordered, harmonious working, and so they would go. Ah, the universe is essentially like that and therefore it led to certain consequences in the way of thinking about God. Is God even necessary once the machine is set up? Well, in 1750, a skeptical thinker called David Hume said that a miracle was quote a transgression of a law of nature by a particular will of God or some invisible agent. That's how we that was his working definition of miracle a transgression of a law of nature by a particular will of God or some invisible agent. Now, hume believed we should never believe in a miracle. Well, certainly we should never believe in a miracle based on human testimony, because we know all too well that humans often deceive or are deceived. So, faced with the most likely explanation of a report, if somebody says I've witnessed a miracle, the most likely explanation for it is always more likely that a human is either deceived or deceiving rather than that a law of nature has been broken. That was David Hume's conclusion Because, remember, in his mind he thinks of the universe.

Speaker 1: 22:07

Think of, like if you've got one of those watches where you can see the cogs and the mechanisms working inside, and he's looking at that and saying, well, you just can't, you can't just mess with that mechanism. If you open it up and start prodding the cogs or moving things manually, the entire mechanism falls apart. It just isn't possible to muck about with the cogs and the workings, because the whole thing depends on it not being interfered with, for it to be a sealed system. And David Hume quite is right to think well, look, human beings make stuff up, or you know the tired they see something they're like oh, I've seen a ghost and it's just some washing in the garden or it's some shadows and things like that, and their overactive, the overactive imagination turns it into an incredible story and so on. That's yeah, human beings are like that.

Speaker 1: 23:12

So he's like he couldn't think of any circumstances were a human testimony would would be credible. So he did say David Hume recognized that if lots of credible people all claimed to have seen an miraculous event, it might just be reasonable to believe that a miracle had happened. But David Hume thought this could never happen if religion was involved, because religious people are too prone to excitement and bias, judgment and deception. They kind of they kind of want to believe in weird miraculous things, and so they could get themselves as a crowd kind of worked up into a mass hysteria and genuinely or maybe believe they've witnessed something. But it's really because of society, it's a psychological explanation. So David Hume did not seem to imagine that a crowd of credible people might witness something that he classed as religious, so as a religious miracle he would say could not be witnessed by a crowd of credible people. And obviously that has an impact on how he would read the Bible, because he would automatically regard any biblical writer. Any biblical testimony is, by his definition, not credible because it's religious. So he's kind of already decided what he's going to take from the eyewitnesses of the Bible because he knows they're not credible to him intrinsically.

Speaker 1: 25:21

Well, a further problem is with the whole idea of the laws of nature. Since the 17th century there's been a growing assumption that the universe manages itself, that the universe has its own laws and its own energy, and we saw something of that in our last episode. But it's just very commonly assumed that the universe just has laws, order, structure, energy. It just has that in and of itself. It is self governing and self created. This machine, this clockwork machine, assembled itself and that is considered now to be an obvious sort of thing and anyone, if anyone, who questions that is considered irrational. Almost that's the power of that myth, that it is so strong that, even though it's an absurd idea to believe that the clockwork assembly assembles itself, nevertheless that is. But it's not come suddenly that view, it's built since the 17th century. So in fact many people today believe the universe created itself and the Big Bang formulated its own laws. And I can, I've found dozens of examples of that in very credible or very mainstream literature and websites and things that just say that. So the idea of a self generated, ordered and structured cosmic machine has become so deep in the assumptions of the modern world that people speak about laws of nature as if these laws really existed and that it's the most natural and obvious thing to say.

Speaker 1: 27:40

Now, in earlier ages it was more common to say that miracles were when something happened different to the way it normally happened. So there was like a Latin phrase to encapsulate that. That just meant contrary to the normal course of nature. That was the normal way of speaking of a miracle. It was simply something that was contrary to the normal course of nature.

Speaker 1: 28:12

Not getting into this idea of a system that needs to be broken into or laws that have to be broken Because you don't want to like, if you believe that the living God, the Father, through the Son, by the power of the Spirit, is the law giver that gives the universe laws to operate with, it raises kind of difficult questions. If you start thinking of the law giver as a law breaker, it could even raise moral and ethical questions. So in the past people, because they didn't have this very systematised idea of laws of nature, they would get into those sort of tangles because they just said, no, a miracle is when something happens in the universe in a way that it doesn't normally do, and that is a very simple way of defining it, but it's better. It was generally assumed that the living God made everything happen in the way it normally did, so that a miracle was simply when the living God did things in a different way than he normally did. Now we'll leave it there, because I want to dig into that in our next episode.