Miracles
Requirements to know
In the previous posts we discussed how everything in nature happens because of necessity and with infinite accuracy. Perfection and reality are synonymous: the laws of nature cannot be broken. Now we arrive at the question of miracles.
What a miracle would be
A miracle is an event that happens without a cause or explanation, defying the laws of nature. We might see them as randomness, but randomness differs from unpredictability: randomness means no cause exists, while unpredictability means we don’t know the cause.
In the world described in the previous articles, where everything follows from necessity, miracles have no place.
To make a miracle happen, you need to break one of these:
- The laws of Nature: Like when Arthur in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy flies by throwing himself to the ground and missing. In our world, gravity does not work like that.
- Creation Ex Nihilo: Making something from nothing. Nothing can exist or be conceived outside God or Nature, see E1p15, so nothing arrives from outside. A new thing is always a new mode of what already is, and a bag appearing from nothing is not possible in our world.
We have never seen any effect without a cause.
We have never seen any cause without an effect.
We have never observed any of the rules of nature being broken in the process of causality. If it were possible to break them, we would have taken maximum advantage.
How impossible is it to break a law of nature?
Consider a triangle: it has 3 sides and 3 angles.
A + B + C = 180 degrees.
This is the rule that applies to all triangles in the world. To perform a miracle, you need to break a rule like this. Our mind knows it is impossible, because it is reality, and reality is perfect.
We can see how the triangle is perfect because its rules cannot be broken. The triangle is part of reality. We discussed this concept in the previous post: perfection and reality are the same thing. The rules of nature are perfect in the same way the rules of the triangle are perfect. In the perfection page, we discussed the deep concept of perfection.
E1p29 “Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.”
Two things to notice:
- Not contingent, but conditioned: Nothing is free in the world. Everything is conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature and can only follow its predetermined path.
- Necessity of the divine nature: Like the triangle example, divine nature represents the unbreakable rules of nature due to their perfect nature.
E1p33 “Things could have been produced by God (nature) in no other way, and in no other order than that in which they have been produced.”
Things could only happen the way they did. Not because someone chose it, but because the laws of nature made it necessary.
Every moment is a node
Assume every moment is a node in a linear graph:
1 → 2 → 3 → 4 → 5 → 6 → … → 1000
The result of the next moment follows from the previous moment, and so on. The sequence is fixed: the future results from the past.
You can predict the 1000th moment because the sequence is chained to preceding nodes. Now consider what a miracle would mean: breaking a link, making node 500 produce something different from what its causes determined. This is impossible because each node is the necessary result of the one before it. Considering a miracle's backward traversal of causes and effects, it's impossible to break the chain because it is fixed and the future is a result of the past, logically speaking.
As we discussed in the causality posts, to change any event in the world you would have to change the whole order that follows from God's nature, and that chain of causes goes back without end. That order is eternal, it is not something that switched on at a moment in time. Nothing can be changed.
Hume on miracles
David Hume argued that we should proportion our belief to the evidence. His question was whether any testimony could ever be good enough to justify believing that a law of nature was broken, when the evidence for the law is everything anyone has ever observed and the evidence for the miracle is somebody's report of it.
Notice what kind of question that is. It is about what we are entitled to believe, not about what can happen. Hume does not show that a miracle is impossible, and readers still argue about how much his argument actually proves.
Spinoza's argument is a different one. He says nothing happens outside the necessity of the divine nature, see E1p29, so there is nothing for the testimony to be about in the first place. Hume comes at it from the evidence, Spinoza from what God is. They end up equally sceptical about miracles, but the two arguments are not the same argument and neither one stands in for the other.
Conclusion
Miracles are events without a cause, beyond the laws of nature. It is impossible to break the perfect laws of nature because they are part of reality, the very same way the triangle is part of reality.
Everything happens because of necessity, with infinite accuracy. There is no room for miracles in the chain of cause and effect.