Miracles
On the Supernatural
07/16/07 12:40
So the other day I was asked what the explanation was of the manna in the desert. The manna was a bready sort of food that seemed like it was made of coriander that God sent every night with the dew, and the Israelites collected it in the morning to eat for the day. The point of the question is not simply about the nature of this manna, or why God had to send it (they were wandering across the desert and had no food). The point of the question is about worldview, about the miraculous, about how and if God acts in this world. It is a necessary question. It is necessary because I have never seen manna. I have never seen anything so blatanct. There are things that I would consider God acting, stories and experiences that were so coincidental.
The problem seems to remain though: we have so many stories of God acting in such, well, blatant ways. Ways that are impossible to ignore or deny. The Bible is replete with them, but where are they now? I do not mean that they do not occur now, though for most people in the States we never witness them. There are stories from Africa, Latin America, Asia. But we condiser these folks pre-scientific, less sophisticated. There ahve been numerous scientific studies into miracles and all have come up with the same result: they could be explained in physical ways. Now, I have no problem with this sort of a conclusion. Just because something can be explained in physical terms does not mean that it was an act of God. The philosophers of the 1900s showed us that we have no reason to expect God to act in any other way (interventionist vs. immanentism, cf. Nancey Murphy’s Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism).
The real question is does God that way? Can we really believe that these miracles occur? Can we really believe that in history manna fell in the desert? Most important of all, can we really believe that Jesus rose from the dead? Not just a rising in a metaphorical sense in his follower’s minds and hearts, but in a bodily, I’m-walking-around-and-eating sort of way.
This really seems to come down to worldview. If we believe in God… if we think that S/He is personal, caring, loving… if we believe these things, it would not be a question of whether these sorts of miracles happen. It would be a question of why they do not happen more. It all breaks down to different worldviews, and these worldviews require the same amount of faith as each other. This is something that perhaps we don’t talk about enough. It takes just as much faith in the scientific worldview/tradition as in a religious worldview/tradition. So then it becomes a choice. A choice between which faith is the better faith, the more rational faith, the more believable faith. And that choice takes time, intentional pursuit, and hope that we are able to settle on an answer.
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