God clearly used a well-thought-out design to create the universe. When we’re young, we see it in the beauty we observe within nature, but we can also see it throughout the universal rules within the sciences and mathematics, and many aspects of human behavior represent this pattern. Everyone intuitively understands these patterns, even if they deny the Patternmaker.
But, like most well-designed things, God didn’t simply make it look good, and this design has many hidden features.
- The laws of the universe use clever wrinkles that permit complex maneuvers (e.g., physics, star movements, quantum mechanics).
- Common design patterns within all of nature give humanity a certain cross-compatibility of understanding (e.g., we can understand human DNA by observing bacteria or social behavior by observing rats).
- Even when we diverge in our experiences, our common characteristics permit us to share many aspects with each other. The mechanisms for how we perceive, our tendencies to identify stories, and our generally political nature all unite us, even when their specific implementations differ.
- Naturally, given that this is God’s design, all the systems also have built-in features we haven’t and never will detect, at least this side of eternity.
Miracles
This means, therefore, that it’s a bit of an illusion to call something a “miracle”.
- The conventional idea is that miracles are “an event that violates the laws of nature”.
- However, if God already designed that miracle as part of the system, it’s still conforming to the system because the laws of nature aren’t being violated.
- Therefore, a better term for a miracle would be “an event that goes beyond expectations our experiences would have inferred”.
With this viewpoint, God is not merely making events happen that are favorable to Him, since He has always had full control of the events. Instead, God performs what He wishes with the full creative control of the system He made, and we simply group things as miracles when they don’t fit our rational framework.
This doesn’t mean, however, that miracles are beyond explanation. Consider the following questions:
- If God permitted a large comet to come very close to the Earth to halt its rotation for one day as indicated in Joshua 10:12-14, would that have been any less miraculous?
- If the parting of the Red Sea in Exodus 14 was caused by a strange coincidence of an earthquake that created an underwater plateau mixed with a high wind corridor that pushed the remaining water to the side, would that have made God’s actions less significant?
- When Jesus turned water to wine in John 2, but did so by exploiting a concentration in a nearby well’s water of a specific and obscure chemical reaction to rapidly change somewhat bitter water into wine using a chemical present in the jars, would that make it less spiritual?
In our comparatively primitive existence compared to eternity, we can look back to the past and see God work elegant solutions. Just because we don’t understand them doesn’t mean they’re forever beyond human comprehension.
Probability and miracles
God’s natural law is profound because it’s very predictable many times. We can safely assume an object heading downhill will keep going downhill until it hits something or reaches the bottom.
However, in that predictability, that’s partly God’s cleverness. He makes everything in a predictable way so He can then shift things when He wishes to. Every single person has an experience where something highly unlikely has happened, and it has personally affected the consequences of their life.
A huge part of this “improbability toward specific outcomes” is because God likes to stay hidden most of the time. I’m personally convinced it’s a combination of His desire to draw us to trust His goodness when the unpredictable events happen, but also to intentionally confound the people and spiritual beings who wish to stop His plans.
Besides enhancing our general trust in God’s cleverness and sufficiency, this also gives us opportunity to see His craftsmanship. Take, for example, the sun standing still in Joshua 10:12-13:
- It’s entirely possible that God simply made the sun stop in the sky.
- But, it’s just as reasonable to assume that the Earth stopped rotating for about a day.
- And, if that’s the case, given what we know of astronomy, it could have meant that a very large mass moved close enough to affect the Earth’s gravity.
- In that context, we could probably examine every trajectory of every celestial body, and we could reverse-calculate what object came close enough at that time.
Further, it’s not simply something we can do, because God actually wants us to find those mysteries that are within our capacity (Proverbs 25:2).
Therefore, just like how humility isn’t simply looking like a lowly worm, doing things for the glory of God will not always look the same for everyone. Seeking out mysteries with your mind on Him is exactly what He wants us to do (1 Corinthians 10:31).