חדש באתר: עוזר בינה מלאכותית המבוסס על כתביו ושיעוריו של הרב מיכאל אברהם

Q&A: Miracle and Naturalism

Back to list  |  🌐 עברית  |  ℹ About
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Miracle and Naturalism

Question

Good morning!
Quite simply, it would certainly seem that the concept of a miracle does not assume that God does something that essentially contradicts nature and its laws; rather, He does it within the framework of the rules of nature (just not with prior determinism, but by intervening at a specific point). Otherwise, a miracle would have no meaning for us, since we act only through the world and are not capable of grasping anything else. More than that, the role of a miracle is to operate within nature, not to take us into metaphysical realms (something like the claim of an Epicurean that God cannot exist because His essence necessarily contradicts material nature, and therefore He necessarily has no significance for the material world; and likewise Spinoza’s claim that the infinite cannot contract itself into nature—the kabbalistic question of contraction, but in a philosophical form. In any case, this is my claim regarding the concept of a “miracle”).
That is, contrary to the childish view—a miracle necessarily cannot be metaphysical or logical (like the paradoxical things that happen in Alice in Wonderland)!
If so, when a miracle occurs, then it is not really a miracle at all, but simply a change in the statistics of what should have happened. That is, since all the laws of nature are not essential, but merely a statistical description, then any miracle can be explained as ordinary nature, except that we happened to fall upon a one-in-a-million event (for example, ordinarily the sea does not split because the molecules and atoms are bound up with one another, although some are not; but most are, and that is enough for the sea to remain whole. Yet in principle it could happen that at the same time every atom would go in another direction all at once). So a miracle is only the timing!
And so I would like to argue against the claim of naturalists who maintain that in principle there cannot be a supernatural miracle, since there is only nature and by definition the supernatural has no meaning—that in any case a miracle is indeed not supernatural, but operates within the framework of the laws of nature, and merely disrupts the imaginary order in the consciousness of the observer, who, simply out of habit, sees in statistics the essence of nature?
Thank you very much!

Answer

There is no randomness in nature (except perhaps in quantum theory at very small scales, and even that is not certain), so your whole argument is based on a mistaken assumption. I have discussed the impossibility of a miracle within nature in several places, mainly in the series of columns 459466.

Leave a Reply

Back to top button