Confronting Religious Denial of Science by Wallace Catherine M.;

Author:Wallace, Catherine M.; [Wallace, Catherine M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532603501
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2016-07-05T07:00:00+00:00

4. Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral, 229

5. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, 5.

7

Miracles

In the eyes of many Christians—not just fundamentalists—narratives recounting Jesus’ miracles must be read as factual accounts of real events. And why? Because miracles proved that Jesus was God. Miracles proved that Jesus was God because miracles proved that Jesus had a level of control over reality that only God has: just as God could reach down and turn the coffee in my mug into wine if God so desired, so also Jesus could turn enormous tanks of bathwater into wine. And so forth. Furthermore, if Jesus were not demonstrably divine, and furthermore recognized as divine by his contemporaries, then Christianity would never have arisen in the first place. But here we are, thousands of year later. Of course Jesus could work miracles. What kind of Christian am I to question that?

As I have already explained, acute problems follow from the assumption that God has omnipotent control over all of reality. Just for starts, it is then God’s fault that reality is so replete with pain, suffering, and natural disasters.

But even aside from that argument, the claim about miracles doesn’t hold. Just for starts: at the time, the miracle narratives would not have established the divinity of Jesus. They would not have done so for several reasons. First and foremost, it was not assumed that reality was consistent and organized according to rational and empirically discoverable mechanisms. Quite the contrary, in fact: the dominant world view of the day held that earthly reality was programmatically and necessarily irrational, inconsistent, and arbitrary. The movements of the stars were regular, and to some limited extent the movement of the stars induced certain rough regularities, like the changes of the seasons. But all the rest of it? It was quite up for grabs. The ancient world was as comfortable ignoring regularities as we are at ignoring the exceptions and unpredictabilities of what we regard as a highly rule-governed material world.

Second, it was already widely assumed that those favored by the gods could do anything. Moses, for instances, works all kinds of miracles, but no one ever claimed he was divine. Jewish prophets worked miracles too. Such abilities were signs of divine favor or divine warrant for teachings, but not divinity itself. Even through the Middle Ages, miraculous powers were attributed to the king’s touch and to a colorful array of other things. Black cats and spilt salt and ladders still have ominous associations.

What makes the miracle narratives featuring Jesus remarkable is not what these stories implicitly claim about Jesus, but what they claim about God. They make these remarkable claims within a world view which already accepted that gods—any god at all, and countless minor spirits as well—could do anything they wanted. In the world view of classical antiquity, the natural order was easily malleable. It was not rule-governed in a post-Newtonian mechanistic way. That’s the cultural context of the miracle narratives. We need not accept this ancient-world physical cosmology in

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