The 18th century thinker rDavid Hume criticized those who accept miracles in the New Testament with the argument that any argument from sensory evidence is stronger than hearsay argument not based on same level of sensory evidence. To paraphrase, he said that sensory evidence is stronger and therefore clearly more trustworthy than hearsay about miracles. It is a little odd to use such arguments against the New Testament. Paul noted that foolishness of God is greater than any human wisdom. And God uses weakness, foolishness (weakness of logic and thought) to accomplish his purposes and make known his strength. Some thinkers, such as one of my favorites, the American theologian and scientist Jeremy Belknap, played Hume's (and the American Deist Thomas Paine's) game, trying to conform the New Testament to standards of human science. Belknap published a book doing just this. But think of the Gospels itself. Jesus repeatedly challenges our basic ideas, received tradition, expectations, customs, and thoughts with his teaching, some of which could appear almost foolish. Clearly the Gospels cannot be read with logic and science but with feeling and intuition. And is this also not the way Elder Scripture, Natural Theology, must be read? At the same time, we are rational creatures. We do study, analyze, and think. Science and logic toward natural history is clearly justifiable. There has to be a balance—of faith and reason, credulity and incredulity, intuition and logic analysis, deduction and induction. The Gospels, Paul, the Old Testament, indeed any good book, even history, even science, has this duality. To assume it is one or the other, as Hume did, is wrong.
I often feel oppressed by time and worry over its passing and the passages of my family and my life. I seem to want to record or grasp hold of passing moments, perhaps to the exclusion of actually experiencing and savoring them. Each moment is a gift from God and should be savored—one doesn't know how many such moments one has in life, how many are remaining. On the other hand, I have also felt dissatisfied in various moments, like I cannot wait for them to pass to get to another time, another day, another week. I feel restless and often at a loss at to what to do. My books often seem to be a panacea for this restlessness, but in the act of writing them I am restless for the end of the book to come. What folly!
Why can't miracles, the supernatural, be true? If there is a God, if that God is active not passive, if that God has power and uses it, even the power to listen to prayers and respond, if God is the God of Creation, the maker, even the originator, of all things, if God is outside of time in the one moment and sees all things, knows all things, then why cannot such a God of creation of time, of knowledge, hence of power, cause the physical and material world, time and space, to alter according to His will? To us who live in time and space, living moment by moment in the material world, the normalcy and predictability of it, of the laws of nature, are expected and assumed by our observation and confirmation of the process of cause and effect. Cause and effect, time, the physical world, are all we know. But God and His ways are so different, so beyond our comprehension limited by time and space, that it requires singular arrogance to assume we know, and only what we know and observe, or hypothesize and predict, can exist, and eliminate all miracle or the supernatural.
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April 2018
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