Q&A: Prayer for a Miracle, and the Operation of the Miracle
Prayer for a Miracle, and the Operation of the Miracle.
Question
The Rabbi wrestled with the issue of prayer, because one may not pray for a miracle, and the Rabbi argued that it is always a miracle, even a hidden miracle. If so, seemingly it follows that one cannot make requests at all.
But it seems to me that what makes the miracle possible is statistics. Because there are two kinds of laws of nature. There is a law that explains the mechanism of the behavior of matter. And there is a law that comes to predict what is going to happen.
It seems to me that with respect to the laws of nature, the mechanism of a “miracle” can only exist if it changes the behavior of matter. And consequently it changes it into different matter according to the laws of nature. But in that case we are speaking of a change in nature, even though the laws of nature remain as they were. This reminds me of the splitting of the Red Sea, where it is said that they traveled through the sea on dry land, meaning that it remained a sea, and by the nature of a sea, and within it they passed on dry land. So there was no change in the laws of nature. The law remained as it was, and even so they passed on dry land. Until the Sages expounded “to its strength” as “to its stipulation,” meaning that this was embedded in nature itself at the act of Creation, when He said, “and let the dry land appear.” Therefore this is not a change in the essence of nature, even in such a great miracle. And perhaps one may say that precisely for that reason it is a full-fledged miracle.
But when there is a statistical law, that is a law of prediction, which may depend on the supreme will. But in the end that will becomes known to us as fixed statistical action.
And regarding this I have several possibilities:
A. It may be that what acts will act without this changing the statistics of the behavior of matter. But within those actions there are cumulative effects that add up to one significant effect, and that is the operation of the miracle. And this would be called a hidden miracle, because the statistics remained as they were.
B. The statistics changed, but this is not a change in the mechanism. The mechanism remains the same, but it behaved differently because of a different will. And perhaps this would be called an open miracle.
In such a case, praying for a hidden miracle is not a change in nature, not even in the statistical sense, and that seemingly resolves the problem.
Regarding changing the sex of the fetus, the Rabbi argued that ostensibly this is asking for something that might perhaps one day be done by human beings. But I have to reject that. Because changing sex is not surgery. Rather, it is changing the entire structure of the body, not only the sexual organ. Unless this is the body of a male, it remains male even if his organs were removed and others implanted, because naturally this body would not have developed that way. That is not the body’s tendency.
The Rabbi also mentioned praying about the past, saying that this is a vain prayer, and the Rabbi said that this is a miracle. But I do not agree. To pray about what already was is not a miracle. It is simply a contradiction. A miracle is to change the present despite what was. But to change the past is already meaningless words. Either that past was, or that past was not. Unless one prays in such a way that the One who foresees the generations in advance will hear his prayer and act so that the thing would not have happened that way in the past because of his prayer in the future. But it seems from the words of the Sages that this is still a vain prayer despite that line of thought.
Answer
I hope you understood what is written here. I didn’t. Everything I did understand is irrelevant, and this has already been explained many times (there is no such thing as laws of nature for predicting the future, and there is no such thing as statistical laws of nature, and even if there were, intervention would contradict them). Search for divine intervention here on the site.
Discussion on Answer
I also forgot to explain the distinction between a hidden miracle and heavenly assistance. Heavenly assistance operates in human choices. A hidden miracle operates in the world outside the person. An open miracle, by contrast, can be the stopping of the causes that produce nature, and revealing that everything is the will of God, and there is no nature without His will.
All these things were explained here in the past. I’ll respond briefly.
A. I did not write that according to the Sages it is forbidden to pray for a miracle. I wrote that according to our understanding today — that there is no such thing as a statistical law and there are no gaps in nature — it follows that according to the Sages it is forbidden to pray for a miracle. Clearly they did not think that way. All this business about states of consciousness has no meaning at all. The miracle can also change my own consciousness.
B. Prayer for a hidden miracle is also forbidden. I proved this from the Talmudic passage.
Your explanations of a hidden miracle are irrelevant. You are only explaining what statistics is. I know that too. The question is whether there is such a law in nature. The answer is of course no (except in quantum theory, and I have explained several times why even there there is no possibility of a hidden miracle).
If because of prayer a different law of nature is created, that means there are no laws of nature.
It doesn’t sound like the Rabbi read what I wrote. I refuted the proof that according to the Sages, if it is a miracle one does not pray. That is not correct.
I’d be happy to know where the Rabbi wrote about quantum theory. In any case, I argued that there could be a kind of butterfly effect in all those places, even if it starts in quantum theory. Since we do not know all the laws of nature, I do not see any reason to rule that out.
And regarding the assumption that prayer created a law — yes, that still means there are laws of nature, if those laws continue to exist and in every such circumstance in history that law existed (except that before the prayer there were no such circumstances).
I read what you wrote, and everything was answered.
I read the article about divine intervention.
A. The Rabbi’s claim that according to the Sages one may not pray for a miracle is incorrect. We see explicitly that people do pray for a miracle from the Bible, for example when God says that Abraham should pray that they be healed. That is literally prayer for a miracle. The Rabbi’s proofs from the words of the Sages do not mean what he says they mean. The example of someone who heard the sound of a cry in the city and says, “May it be Your will that this not be from my house” — the Sages defined this as a vain prayer, not as prayer for a miracle. The reason this is forbidden is because he did not pray that the future be changed, but that the past was different. And since he has already lived through the past, those words have no meaning. The same applies to someone whose wife is pregnant. The child is already male or female, so when he prays, “May my wife give birth to a boy,” he does not mean that the sex of the fetus should change. Rather, that the sex determined in the past should be male. But since that is meaningless, because the prayer is asking for a fact that already happened, it is a vain prayer that asks for nothing. A prayer with no benefit.
B. Even if we were to say that one may not pray for a miracle, that still does not mean that one cannot pray for a hidden miracle. And I will explain… The meaning of the laws of nature is that there is a cause A that brings about effect B. We might ask what the reason is that A caused B, and get another answer, namely that there is a much more immediate cause that brings about effect B. For example, if someone lets go of an object in his hand, the object falls. One can say that releasing the object caused the fall. But if we ask why, we would explain that in truth gravity is what caused the fall, and the holding of the object merely prevented that force from pulling in practice. Therefore the real cause is gravity and not the release of the hand. But once we reach the closest cause in relation to the effect, if we ask why A causes B, we will not have an answer in terms of another cause, because we already said that we are dealing with the closest possible cause and effect. So we do not really have an explanation of why A is the cause of B. Others will say: that is simply the nature of A, to cause B, but that is merely a description of a norm; it is not an explanation of why it causes it. Therefore the only way to answer the question is to say that A causes itself to be a cause of effect B. And that is exactly the definition of will. I call that the will of God.
And now that we have reached the conclusion that even the laws of nature depend on the will of God, let us continue and ask: what is a hidden miracle?
And to explain this I will present an example. Let us suppose there is a square of one hundred by one hundred holes, and there are many such squares side by side. And I throw into them balls of different colors. But for each square exactly 20 red and 30 black balls are always thrown. Then even though the throwing each time is random, we would have a statistical law requiring twenty red balls per square and thirty black balls per square. Only in what remains could balls of other colors be placed there. So here we have a parable for a kind of statistical law of nature.
Now let us suppose that I place a certain color there, say blue, in a certain arrangement in all the squares, so that in the end a circle is formed, and afterward a square, and so on, while each time I preserve the law that 20 red and 30 black are thrown. Then the statistical law regarding those balls has not changed, but a miracle has happened here — that is, intervention within the framework of that law. Certainly there is a statistical change here, but not with respect to the black and red balls. There, there is intervention. And this is an example of a hidden miracle. The meaning is that there are changes here that do not absolutely alter what is fixed in the statistics, for example the number of red and black balls. But when those changes are significant enough, and they accumulate in every square, we have a significant natural force — for example, one sees a circle and so on — and that can happen only through intervention. And even if we assume that statistically it could happen, then a square appearing after the circle completely teaches that there is planning here.
I can offer another explanation, but it would be a strained one for a hidden miracle (though it could join the previous explanation). Suppose there had been no circumstances for a certain law of nature, such that if the circumstances had existed, that law of nature would not have occurred. But by means of prayer, for example, a new law of nature was created that was suited to the special circumstances at the moment. And were it not for the prayers, even if those circumstances had occurred, there would have been no such law at all. But this is not a miracle, because those circumstances had never existed, so one cannot say that there was a law here that contradicts the previous laws of nature. Therefore, even though a law of nature was newly introduced here, and one can relate to it as though it had always been there, since the present circumstances had never existed, by the same token one could relate to it as though it had never been there at all. And only if the divine intervention introduced the law of nature can one say that there truly is a miracle within nature here, for were it not for the intervention, even in these circumstances the law of nature would not be present.