Q&A: Miracles and Divine Intervention
Miracles and Divine Intervention.
Question
Hello and blessings,
I’m fairly new here. From skimming between the lines, I understood that your view is along the lines of “the Lord has forsaken the land,” meaning: in the past, the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself and intervened more, whereas today, based on what appears before our eyes, we have no choice but to conclude that He no longer intervenes. (And if I misunderstood in a way that makes my question irrelevant, I accept that.)
I wanted to ask about this: how do we know that miracles happen in a way that has to be visible, open, and clear to human eyes? If we take the most classic example of miracles, the plagues of Egypt, I think we actually see the opposite. Most of the miracles were natural phenomena—hail, locusts, boils, and so on. It seems to me that what leads us to perceive them as miracles is the divine revelation that comes and tells us so. Had Moses, the Lord’s messenger, not been in Egypt and conducting the dialogue with Pharaoh, would we have suspected that the locusts were a supernatural phenomenon rather than like the locusts now striking Africa? Would we have thought that the hail, even though there had never been anything like it in Egypt until then, was divine intervention in nature?
What I mean is: insofar as we have no prophets today, and we do not have an external source that comes and explains to us, “Look, this is a miracle,” then naturally it is not in our power to identify miracles that do not utterly depart from the framework of nature. (Of course there were more extreme miracles, like the splitting of the Red Sea, and we do not find things like that today, but does that suffice to rule out divine intervention?)
Many thanks in advance, and again, I apologize if I did not correctly understand your position; it’s hard to go through all the material here.
Answer
You’ve burst through an open and overcrowded door. Please browse the site and you’ll see tons of discussions about this. Countless.
Discussion on Answer
They don’t have to appear openly, but the assumption is that science works, meaning that things happen naturally. Anyone who wants to claim there is intervention has to prove that there is. There is no intervention within the framework of nature (every intervention is a miracle).
But I’m not going to get into this issue here again.
You can look at the columns devoted to this issue, and at the talkbacks after them: 280, 281, 297, and many more.
The miracle is that a human being can understand nature and control it, and then produce hail and darkness and light and firstborn-plague viruses.
But fools don’t understand that. They want Santa Claus.
I browsed as far as my mouse could take me, and I didn’t see any reference to this point.
If it’s not too much trouble, I’d appreciate a short reply to the claim itself.