Friday Night Theology

When is a miracle not a miracle?

18 January 2008

'A miraculous emergency landing' was the opening line in one of our papers this morning as it reflected on the Heathrow plane crash yesterday. It seems likely the plane had a catastrophic failure of power and only due to the pilot's skill, and maybe some luck, was a disaster averted. The interesting question for me though is why we so rapidly reach for religious language in these situations. What precisely are the commentators saying when they call it a miracle? Do they really think that God intervened to bring the plane to safety? Or are they merely saying that something very extraordinary, very unusual took place? I suspect the hacks don't really know what they mean - it just seems to be the right language at the time. Maybe God did intervene, maybe it was just luck, maybe it was all down to the pilot's skill - whichever of these is the case, our society seems happy to call it a miracle.

Secular philosophers, though, will tell us that the miraculous simply cannot happen. David Hume, the 18th Century thinker, suggested that miracles should be defined as 'violations of the laws of nature'. He stated that the laws of nature cannot be broken, therefore miracles are 'by definition' impossible - even for God. This is not, though, how a Christian would see things. In the first place, those laws were written by God, and to put it bluntly he can do whatever he wants with them. Perhaps more importantly, have you ever asked your atheist friend which particular laws are being broken in the context of a possible miracle? I suspect you will find that they do not have an answer. The majority of these so-called 'laws' are not laws in an absolute sense, but merely the regularities that we observe in nature. And there is nothing to stop a regularity being broken. Even Richard Dawkins, at the end of The God Delusion, acknowledges that no scientific 'law' would be broken if a stone statue waved at us - it would just be an extremely improbable event.

If we examine Scripture, then, we see sometimes miracles do seem to be just unusual events, though with timings that are orchestrated by God. When Peter found the coin in the fish's mouth what made it miraculous was not that fish never swallow coins, but that at that particular time the first fish Peter caught would have one. At other times, the miracle does seem to be something that is not just very improbable, but entirely impossible from a human point of view - the resurrection of Jesus Christ for instance. Both of these events are miracles, and the bible does not appear to distinguish between them.

Perhaps the reason for this is that in Scripture God isn't presented as isolated from the world, every now and again putting his foot in to stir the pot and do something amazing. Rather, God is involved with his creation continually. That involvement will at times lead to nothing extraordinary, and at other times it will involve what we perceive to be 'miraculous'. Either way, it is God continually active within his creation.

Maybe, then, the journalists weren't so wrong after all. Maybe it is absolutely right and proper to describe yesterday's events as miraculous. For whether the plane was brought down safely by the pilot's skill and judgement, or whether God intervened in some more extraordinary way, it was still God at work in his creation - and that is always a miracle.

Justin Thacker, Head of Theology