Making Miracles Possible
Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars in which Ed Brayton responds to some of the scientific claims, I found this post.
Now I’m not particularly interested in the specific scientific claim, and whether it makes the virgin birth more “possible” somehow. What interests me here is the tendency to try to find natural explanations for miracle claims. DaveScot says:
I have a problem with these people in that they arbitrarily limit what science can potentially explain. The so called supernatural remains supernatural only as long as there’s no metric by which to measure it. Once a metric is discovered the supernatural becomes the natural.
Paul quotes someone on the virgin birth of Christ saying that it defies everything
science has revealed in regard to mammalian reproduction. This is utter dreck.
My response, however, is disbelief. First, explaining that some part of the reproductive process might be compatible with the human reproductive process seems to me to accomplish precisely nothing. Is it DaveScot’s intention to claim that the virgin birth is a purely natural event? But second how is it that he expects to come up with a metric to measure the supernatural?
Bluntly, this illustrates even more why much of what is claimed for intelligent design (ID) is simply horrifying theology. First, the virgin birth in which I express belief each Sunday in the apostle’s creed is not a natural event. I don’t care how easy or hard it might be made to appear, it’s not natural. The key point of having it in the creed in the first place is that it is an ultimate example of God stepping into history. It’s different from those natural occurences, such as gravity or my own birth that occur due to natural law, or what I would better express as the consistent will of God.
What DaveScot appears to be proposing here is that one eliminate the supernatural through learning to measure and presumably explain it. But that goes quite contrary to the primary intelligent design claim of either irreducible complexity or specified complexity, which requires something other than a natural process to explain. Now I must ask which ID theorists want. Do they want to stop looking for a natural explanation, or would they prefer to explain everything naturally. If the latter, in what way are they not more anti-God than their opponents. (Personally I don’t think DaveScot’s claims here would hold general acceptance amongst ID proponents, but I could be wrong.)
On my second point, however, I affirm God the creator in the same creed with the virgin birth, by which I do not mean a God of either disappears or becomes natural as we find a way to measure him.
I have always had little sympathy for the tendency to try to explain miracles. Either one believes God can intervene or one doesn’t. If one does believe God can intervene, no natural explanation is necessary. There could, of course, be alleged miracles which are merely fortuitous natural events. But that is not the claim of believers. The claim of believers is that God did, in fact, intervene in the case of the miracle. For the virgin birth, the bigger claim than the physical event is that Jesus the human being was/became God incarnate and lived on earth as a human being. No amount of explanation of the human birth processes can explain that.
My personal belief is that while God created a universe that will successfully run without intervention, God does interven to communicate. But I need no physical explanations of the possibility of such intervention. If I had such, that would simply become another natural part of the universe.
Again, I believe I’m confronted with the mysteriously shrinking god of ID. It just doesn’t make it theologically.
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As usual, well said. Thanks.
Thanks! I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed the problem, but there’s a commenter over on Uncommon Descent who is also asking about this matter of explaining miracles.
This is interesting speculation. And it has a fascinating corrollary: if this was the mechanism of Jesus’ birth, he had XX chromosomes and so was not properly biologically male. So much for those who insist on the theological significance of Jesus’ maleness.
But if anyone is looking for a naturalistic explanation of a virgin birth, the following seems more plausible to me. I don’t know what girls in Mary’s time used as sanitary towels. But if Mary accidentally (in God’s providence) used a towel which was contaminated with human semen, a stray sperm could have found its way into her womb and fertilised her egg.
I guess this may have happened rather more often than the apparent uniqueness of the virgin birth suggests, but many of the girls it happened to would have been condemned as prostitutes. After all it took divine intervention (Matthew 1:20) for Joseph to accept Mary.
Thus at the cell level Jesus’ conception would have been normal, but without normal sexual intercourse, and Jesus would have been a biologically normal male. And in terms which would have meant anything to the biblical authors, Mary would have been a virgin. So the miracle might have been only in the timing, this rare form of apparent virgin birth having coincided with Mary’s vision of the angel Gabriel (Luke 1:26-38).
Well, I’m not sure if we need to look for a non-miraculous explanation, but my one seems to fit the bill rather better than DaveScot’s one.
It’s an interesting possibility, but isn’t the whole point of this the miraculous sign? In other words if we find a normal way for it to happen, how does it fulfil its place in Christian theology any more?
I recall someone explaining one of the “fish” miracles by Jesus being able to see the school of fish while the guys in the boats couldn’t. That makes no particular theological difference, IMV, and thus is just interesting speculation. But if one “explains” the virgin birth or the resurrection, it seems to me that it would do some damage to Christian theology.
Oh well . . . it’s all speculation. My answer is always “you ask me how I know he lives–he lives within my heart!”