Glenn fears the "one miracle" people--whose who see the resurrection as the
only "true" miracle in the Bible--and George denies being one. This past
fall a good friend in the ASA (not a participant on the listserve, as far as
I know) called Polkinghorne a "one miracle" person, but I immediately called
attention to the strong things he says about creation, implying his belief
in creatio ex nihilo, and then my friend said, well, OK, two miracles, but
added his own view that the creation miracle isn't necessarily taught in
scripture (I think he meant that creatio ex nihilo is an inference, not a
direct teaching), so we're back to one *biblical* miracle.
Well, I don't know about Polkinghorne, he might well believe in lots of
other miracles, and George can speak for himself. As for me, I believe in
*many* "true" miracles in the Bible, and also many since the biblical
period. I don't buy the old Protestant stuff about miracles ceasing with
the apostolic age, indeed I believe a woman in my church was miraculously
healed of pancreatic cancer six or seven years ago (you don't live that
long, esp without any medical treatment, if you really have that).
But I *do* start with the resurrection as a "real, historical, physical"
event, ie, I think the women went to the right tomb, found it really empty,
and Thomas (somewhat later) touched the hands and side of a man who had been
crucified. Obviously this is in the realm of faith, and "violates" all
sorts of physical "laws," but nevertheless I believe the story and think
that a real event of this type--or sequence of events, if you will--is in
fact the best explanation of the profound fear and bewilderment of the
disciplines being turned into the church, and of the profound struggle of NT
writers to speak of the man Jesus as God, which for Jews is way over the
idolatry line. They simply had to, they had no other choice, given what
they had heard and seen.
I also believe in creatio ex nihilo, not only from faith but also strongly
from science. I think that the many worlds hypothesis is, for nontheists,
the functional equivalent of the "god of the gaps" for theists: they've got
no other explanation for fine tuning, so they invoke the atheists's
god--infinity--to account for it. And when you do that, just as invoking
God, all bets are off.
So being a "two miracle man" (at least as I construct my thought) leaves me
open--very open--to being a more than two miracle man, as indeed I am. But
all this is a long way from looking for miracles under every rock. I hardly
need add that.
Ted Davis
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