VII. WONDERS AND NATURE

Then Maul, the giant, appeared.

His business is to spoil young pilgrims with confused reasoning.

Bunyan

If God exists and if He created nature, this does not mean that miracles exist or can be. Perhaps miracles are not in His taste; perhaps He created nature in such a way that nothing can be added or changed. We'll start with the second assumption because it has more adherents. In this chapter I shall consider its most superficial forms.

First, we often hear people (even believers) say, "No, I don't believe in miracles. They were believed in earlier, in the old days, when the laws of nature were not known. And now, when we know that miracles are impossible from a scientific point of view..."

By "laws of nature," I think, they mean what people have seen. If something more is suspected, it means that the speaker is not just a person, but a philosopher-naturalist, and we will talk about him in the next chapter. Simply, man believes that our experience (especially artificial experience, called experiment) is able to tell us what happens in nature. And he also believes that this excludes the possibility of miracles. But he is wrong.

If miracles are possible, of course, only experience will show whether a miracle happened in this particular case. But experience, even if it is a thousand years old, is not able to show whether they are possible. He discovers a norm, a rule. However, those who believe in miracles do not deny the norms. But the very definition of miracle is an exception. When we are told that the rule is A, experience can show that the rule is really B, and nothing more. You will say: "But experience shows that the rule is not broken"; we will answer: "Well, if so, this does not mean that it cannot be violated. And is it so? A lot of people claim that miracles happened to them. Maybe they lie, maybe they don't. As we said in the first chapter, we cannot decide this until we know whether miracles are possible, and if so, whether they are."

The idea that the progress of science has somehow affected our problem is connected with the talk about the "old time". For example, people say, "The early Christians believed that Christ was the Son of the Virgin, but we now know that this is scientifically impossible." Apparently, it seems to them that people were complete ignoramuses and did not know what this miracle contradicts. Think about it for a second and we realize that this is complete nonsense, and the miracle of the Immaculate Conception will show this especially clearly. When St. Joseph learned that his bride was pregnant, he quite reasonably decided to let her go. Why? Because he knew as well as a modern gynecologist that girls do not have children. Of course, today's scholar knows much that St. Joseph did not know, but all these are details. The main thing is that the Immaculate Conception does not agree with the law of nature, and St. Joseph knew this very well. If he could, he would say that it is "scientifically impossible." Everyone has always understood that it is impossible if something does not interfere with the normal course of nature. When St. Joseph believed that Mary's pregnancy was caused not by adultery, but by a miracle, he accepted the miracle as a violation of natural law. Any miraculous story tells us the same thing. A miracle always frightens, surprises, and testifies to an extranatural force. If there were people in the world who knew no laws at all, they would not be amazed at anything. Belief in miracles is not based on ignorance; it is possible only insofar as knowledge exists. We have already said that the naturalist will not notice the miracle; Now let us add that a miracle is not noticed by those who do not believe in the orderliness of nature.

If we were asked to consider miracles to be normal, they would become increasingly difficult to believe in as science advances. This is how science destroyed faith in ant-people, in one-legged people, in islands that attract ships, in mermaids and dragons. But all this was not considered a miracle - this information was, in fact, science and the best science refuted it.

With miracles, everything is different. When it is known in advance that we are talking about a foreign invasion of nature, no new knowledge can contribute anything. The reasons for belief and unbelief are always the same. If St. Joseph had lacked humility and faith, he could have doubted the miraculous origin of the Infant, and any modern person who believes in God will accept the Immaculate Conception. Perhaps I will never be able to convince you that miracles happen. But don't at least talk nonsense. Vague talk about the progress of science will not prove that people who have not heard of genes or eggs thought that nature could give a child to a virgin who knew no husband.

Secondly, many people say: "In the old days, people believed in miracles because they had a wrong idea of the universe. At that time, it was thought that the Earth was the most important, and man was the most important thing in the world. Therefore, it seemed reasonable that the Creator was especially interested in us and even changed the course of nature because of us. Now we know that the universe is truly huge. We know that our planet and even the entire solar system is just a point. We know how insignificant we are, and we no longer think that God is interested in our insignificant deeds."

To begin with, this is simply not true. People have known for a very long time that the universe is big. More than seventeen centuries ago, Ptolemy taught that compared to the distance to the stars, the earth is only a mathematical point. The insignificance of the earth was as common to Boethius, King Alfred, Dante, and Chaucer as it was to Wells or Professor Haldane. Modern authors deny this simply out of ignorance.