Miracles and Science: A False Conflict

We should first briefly consider some objections to the concept of miracles. Today, in the secular Western world, many are skeptical of the very possibility that miracles can occur.  

This is an assumption of secular Westerners, but it is not shared by other peoples. And there is actually a great deal of evidence that miracles do occur, including in today’s world. The Catholic Church has rigorously evaluated many reported miracles throughout history and approved some as genuinely supernatural.  

Yet skeptics claim that miracles are part of a prescientific worldview. Today, they say, we understand that the universe operates according to scientific laws. There is thus no room for miracles to occur.  

This misunderstands the nature of both miracles and science. The ancients knew as well as we that nature obeys particular “laws,” and the idea that there is no room for miracles alongside natural laws reflects an anti-miracle bias, not real science.  

People in the ancient world were more in touch with nature than we. They knew that it behaved according to regular cycles, with things happening in predictable ways. They knew that the sun rises every day, that crops need rain, and that stones fall down rather than up. All of these were regularities that ancient people observed. Ancient people also were aware that, in the ordinary course of nature: 

• Virgins do not give birth. 

• Water does not turn into wine. 

• Loaves of bread do not spontaneously multiply. 

• People who have been dead for several days do not come back to life—much less ascend into heaven. 

It was precisely because they knew the regularities of nature that they were able to identify the latter events as miracles. They saw miracles as unusual events that stood out in comparison to the regular way nature normally operates.  

The difference between then and now is that we have a more detailed knowledge of the regularities of nature. We have precise measurements of many such regularities, and this allows us to describe them with mathematical formulas. Some are so well established that we refer to them as scientific laws.  

But these “laws” are merely descriptions based on observations of how nature usually works. Nothing says that the world always acts this way. Science is based on observation, and the only way we could know that the world always behaves a certain way would be to observe the entire history of the universe and see what nature does at each moment.  

We can’t do that. We have no way of scanning the entire history of the universe. Consequently, the idea that nature must always behave in the ways it normally behaves goes beyond what science can establish. It’s a philosophical assumption, not a scientific fact.  

It’s also an assumption that is not shared in other cultures; and one that flies in the face of the evidence we have for miracles occurring in today’s world. The open-minded way to approach this issue in particular cases is not to begin with an anti-miracle assumption, but to look at the evidence. We can acknowledge that nature normally works in certain ways but still leave open the possibility that unusual, miraculous events sometimes occur.

Evidence for Christ by Jimmy Akin explores the historical, philosophical, and biblical reasons to believe Jesus is who he claimed to be. Order your copy today!