I have been doing a bit of thinking about Ted Davis recent post
(of this past Thursday 5 Sep 96)about how we interpret miracles.
It raises some good questions about how God operates in the
world. While I don't want us to digress into a long discussion
again on providence, the idea of how God works in the world is a
critical issue and appropriate for this forum. The miraculous
can, it seems to me, be very helpful in our understanding God's
working.
Ted's post seemed to have a twofold focus. On the one hand it
lamented the mentality he saw especially among students (and
?perhaps laity) of seeing God's miraculous work as being
something so mysterious that it does and should not fit at all
with our concept of the ordinary work of providence. I think
this concept is fairly widespread and has some real associated
dangers. In this view one tends to see God working in an almost
MAGIC mysterious way in the miraculous and perhaps more
dangerously may lend itself to not seeing Him being much involved
in the ordinary workings of the world. Ted saw this in the
student that could not believe that God could use a wind to move
the water of the Red Sea when the Israelites crossed it. Like Ted
I too sometimes find it useful to press students to think about
the means God may be using in a miracle. Sometimes I will ask a
student if would they thought they would feel the wind in their
face, if as they walked with the children of Israel crossing the
Red Sea they decided to approach the wall of water. It is
surprising the number who will indicate that because it is a
miracle they would not have been able to feel the wind in their
faces.
Yet, and you probably knew there would be another hand, I was
almost more worried about another mentality that Ted was talking
about that is found among many of us scientists. This is the
pressure to almost limit the manner of God's working even in the
miraculous to within the limits of the laws we have made to
describe his ordinary workings. In this mentality, even if the
odds stretch the mind, explanation that fit within the framework
of these laws - even if it must be stretched to the very unlikely
- are much to be preferred (an earthquake for the Red Sea etc.)
than something that we can not explain. There is areal danger
here that our concept of God tends then toward the deistic and
things happen inevitably following the laws he made up. Again
let me use an illustration I use with my students. I suggest to
them that I can offer several explanations of how Peter walked on
water. The first is that God caused two large bottom (flat) fish
to rise to the surface and swim right under Peter's feet. When
he lost his faith God then caused them to go back to the bottom.
Somehow students don't like this example and don't think it will
help them when they teach Sunday School. And I agree.
I think there are dangers in both not seeing God in the ordinary
and trying to make his miraculous fall within "the laws of
nature." I like the warning that the late Cornelius Van Til made
on this topic. He said it is a bit dangerous to think of laws
when talking about God's workings because we soon make them
things that limit how God works and we end up with a deistic
concept of our God. Rather than guides for God, laws are the ordinary
way in which God works and, since he is faithful, we can describe
them as laws. When he works in the miraculous he is upholding
the world in an different way then we expected and we may or may
not be able to describe it by the same laws.
:
James F. Mahaffy e-mail: mahaffy@dordt.edu
Biology Department phone: 712 722-6279
Dordt College FAX 712 722-1198
Sioux Center, Iowa 51250