The Israelites, fleeing Pharaoh’s oppression, are trapped between the Red Sea and the advancing armies of the indecisive king of Egypt. Moses raises his staff, inscribed with the names of God, and when Nahum, certain about the Creator’s mercy, wades in to the sea until water flows into his nose, the sea splits, leaving a path of dry land. The Zohar tells us that this miracle was beyond reason, yet it was the nature of the sea from creation to split at that moment.
My point in retelling this most famous story is to illustrate a kind of thorn in the paw of some lions of science. There are scientists out there with most spiritual views about the unity and majesty of creation, and who may concede on that basis that there is a god, if not a personal or transcendent one. Yet confronted with miracle stories, they balk, and reject as superstition the foundation stories of Monotheism. The problem for some is the recourse in explanation to the supernatural. As long as the world is ordered according to natural law, they may entertain the notion of a god who created a universe but that otherwise doesn’t intervene in our affairs. According to such Deists, let alone atheistic antagonists to religion, supernatural means anti-scientific, and thus unreasonable. In this article I’ll examine this claim, and whether science in general can either prove or disprove miracles’ existence.
To begin, let’s consider what kind of explanations these skeptics require. The primary requirement for a materialistic explanation of an event is that the explanation employ mechanisms known to science. Proposals that include mechanisms that are unknown to science are not necessarily a problem for the skeptic, as long as the proposition itself is scientific, meaning that the person making the proposal frames it as a hypothesis testable using the scientific method as I’ve previously described it. Now, the key point I want to make is that the process of characterizing an explanation as either materialistic and “scientific” or “reasonable,” as opposed to supernatural and “unscientific” or unreasonable is not itself science. That process, however formal, reasoned and interesting is criticism at worst and philosophy at best. That process does not involve the kind of controlled experimentation at the heart of science for determining hypotheses’ validity. As I’ve written before, unless you can actually recreate the conditions under which frogs fall from the sky, or at least accurately predict when it might happen on its own, the wrath of god is as good an explanation as waterspouts selectively sucking up frogs and dumping them on you.
Now let’s say that we wanted to rise above the level of criticism and philosophy and actually scientifically investigate a miracle like the parting of the Red Sea. Can it be done and what would the attempt entail?
The first step would be to establish a testable hypothesis, which is a kind of proposal specified in enough detail that it could be proven wrong. The simplest kind of proposal is along the lines of “it didn’t happen.” In the case of manifest miracles like the parting of the Red Sea, this is a preferred alternative for some. If the event didn’t happen supernatural explanations are irrelevant. Furthermore, if one simply hypothesizes that all of the Bible is fiction, then it follows that this story is fiction as well, so you can see it’s attraction. The problem with a proposal like “it didn’t happen” is that it is impossible to prove or disprove. How do we establish control over a phenomenon admittedly past? Well, one might try to prove the more general proposal that “the Bible is fiction,” but how does one prove that? One could find a document from antiquity that says “I made the whole thing up,” but how do we validate that document? There is an important lesson here. Statements like “it didn’t happen” fall into a class of proposals that are either true or false, yet can’t be proven so one way or another. Science is restricted to a certain class of proposal called hypotheses which are either true or false and can be proven true or false. One way to know whether something can be proven true or false is that it must be true or false in both the past and the future. If a proposal is not true in the future we can establish control over it in a laboratory (for example), so the scientific method does not apply. That means all history, which by definition are proposals about the past and only the past, is composed of statements that can’t be validated scientifically. Do we consider history to be “unscientific” and “unreasonable” on that basis? Now we have backed our skeptics into a corner. They appear to be holding allegedly historical records to different standards. There only recourse is to claim the record is neither science nor history. See above.
I’m being a little unfair to our skeptical friends. One need not be so extreme as to claim that the Bible is fiction in its entirety, to reject claims of the miraculous. Perhaps the miracle stories are just ethical or theological embellishments, or perhaps they are just good style intended to make the story interesting. Even so, this doesn’t explain why miracle stories themselves would be the selective targets of doubt. Let’s examine another kind of proposal that gets more to the heart of the skeptics issues with miracles. The skeptic might claim, “The parting of the Red Sea couldn’t have actually parted because real physical objects like seas don’t behave that way, moving against gravity and such.” Now our skeptic has apparently provided us with something real to work with, a nice juicy statement that the alleged miracle contravenes the known laws of physics. But how does this argument really work?
Let’s simply the proposition to “if an object is physical, then it obeys the laws of gravity,” and “if an object is not physical then it is not real.” In the case of the Red Sea parting the assertion is that seas are physical and so obey the laws of gravity. If it didn’t than it’s not physical, and if it’s not physical than it’s not real. This seems airtight, but things are not always as they seem. There is a hidden assumption here, namely that the laws of gravity are to be assumed and not proven. This is a fallacy. There is nothing in science so sacrosanct that it should be assumed, including the laws of gravity. Indeed physicists already understand that there are extreme conditions under which gravity may behave strangely, or types of matter to which gravity doesn’t apply at all. So we should really be looking at proposal like “If an object doesn’t obey the laws of gravity, then the laws of gravity may be false,” at least in an instance limited to the alleged miracle. In other words, the parting of the Red Sea could disprove of the laws of gravity, or at least illustrate a limit or special case of that law. The bottom line here is that historical records of physical miracles can’t be dismissed on the basis that they violate physical law, because if true, the laws may be false. However, rest easy you spirits of Newton and Einstein, Biblical miracles can’t be used to disprove scientific laws because we can’t prove or disprove miracles within the framework of science. See above.
To summarize skeptical scientific responses to miracle stories vary between unsupported critical assertions, unprovable statements, and logical fallacies. It could still be true that miracle are fiction, but one can’t prove that they are. Thus the name-calling by scientific skeptics aimed at believers is unfair and unjustified.
Miracles either happened or they didn’t, and are either consistent with known physical laws or not. The rest is just debate, not science.
