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In my earlier post I made the following observation on what is happening in human reproduction:

Just as when we (human beings) have sexual intercourse and two tiny seeds come together that are so small that you can only see them through a relatively powerful microscope yet those two seeds, between them have the whole code for one complete human being. God doesn't have to "add anything later"! It's ALL there from the very beginning. That code basically will determine what you'll look like at the age of 90 or whatever time you live to. Nothing extra has to be added.

I would now like to qualify that slightly. Unlike the animals, and other reproducing species and parts of creation, there is a part of the "human/sentient" life form which is different. We also have a capacity for self-reflection and, more importantly than that, we have this sense that we can help shape our future. From this flows this entire sense we have had, from the very earliest times in human history that we are "called" to some special kind of relationship with God. "Something else" is added — it's our growing relationship with God!

I do believe that, slowly, slowly, down through time we have been developing a deeper and deeper understanding as to the nature of that relationship. There have, of course, been the "large step" advances from what would have been a naïve understanding to an Old Testament understanding to a New Testament understanding. I believe though there has been a gradual increase in our understanding since the advent of the Messiah who gave us "the fullness of Revelation". I believe the "fullness of Revelation" as defined by the Church is a misunderstood term. Some endeavour to treat it as though we "know all the rules" — that somehow Christ "gave us all the answers" and that Scripture is some sort of "list of instructions" like what we might get to operate a video recorder except these are the a-b-c instructions of life. I think that is a misreading of what the Church is trying to convey.

The correct understanding is that "nothing more is going to be revealed to us" by, for example some other prophet or Holy Man or Woman. The "words, the life and the actions" of Christ as they've been given to us in the New Testament stories are "the whole model". That is not necessarily the same thing as saying that we yet understand that "fullness of Revelation" or that we understand "the whole model". I believe we are "a pilgrim people" and the journey of each of our lives, and the journey of the life of humanity is leading to a deepening of our understanding of "the fullness of Revelation" that is to be found in Jesus Christ.

All the foregoing may seem to be a "distraction" from this discussion on miracles. It is not. At the heart of these understandings it has been slowly dawning on us (as individuals and as humanity in the collective sense) that this relationship God calls us into is far, far more humungously awesome than anything our ancestors might have thought it was. When our scientific and theological knowledge was more limited, when we couldn't "see" much further than the horizon that surrounded our local villages, the "power and might" of God seemed overwhelming in comparison to how we perceived of ourselves. We perceived of our relationship to God as we might perceive of ourselves as a pet dog, or a pet cat, might perceive of its relationship to its master. Basically "the master" has almost "life and death" control over the pet. For a wholly domesticated pet, if the owner does not feed it the pet will die.

As our (humankind's and the individual's) "horizon" has expanded through travel, through education, through modern communications, and through theological understanding and science, two things have happened. Firstly, and as postulated in my earlier posts, our perception of the "awesomeness, power, and omniscience of God" has also expanded. 500 years ago, before the invention of the telescope, humanity thought the stars might be painted on some kind of "ceiling" in the sky a thousand kilometres or so above our heads. Since the Hubble Space telescope we now know the vastness of the Universe is something that even at the beginning of the 20th Century was vastly underestimated.

Secondly, and at the same time though, our own knowledge of our own "power" to contribute to the unfolding of history has also expanded. Just last evening on the ABC you might have happened to have seen the BBC documentary on Global Dimming [See LINK or click image below]. In centuries past it was virtually inconceivable to even the most powerful political leaders and kings that we (human beings) could have such an impact on our habitat that we could actually render the earth uninhabitable. The dawning of this first changed on a massive scale in 1945 when the leading scientists of the day, including Albert Einstein, wrote to the President of the United States because they were worried that once the first nuclear chain reaction was started it would literally continue on until the whole of plant earth was consumed in a massive fireball. Nobody had ever conceived of such a possibility before except perhaps in dreams.

Today, as last night's television program demonstrated, there are very real fears that our collective human acts are now capable, through a combination of global warming and global dimming to actually make this planet uninhabitable. I do not believe most people, including theologians and Church leaders, yet understand the enormous theological implications of all this. To take another example, where the theologians and Church leaders are more worried, we do have an acute understanding today that human beings do have the capacity through genetic engineering to make enormous contributions — both positive, and negative — to the very core architecture of God's creation.

The critical theological question we face today is this question of "WHAT ARE THE LIMITS, AND THE RULES, TO THE INTERVENTIONS GOD INVITES US TO PLAY IN THE VERY HEART RULES THAT GOVERN THE FUTURE UNFOLDING OF THE CREATIVE PLAN?

I think most people would agree that we do not have the freedom to do "anything we like". Self-evidently though, God does extend some freedom, or what we call "free choice" to make some interventions. What is breathtakingly important, and awesome, in all of this is that today we have a dawning understanding, totally unlike anything our ancestors have ever had, that our interventions can actually change God's plans at a massive scale.

In the Pacific Ocean, we already know that occasions have arisen when whole communities have had to migrate to new islands because their original home became uninhabitable. If we (society) do not get the equations right between global warming and global dimming the prospects are very real that many more island communities in the next few decades will have to make similar decisions. Beyond that though, it is not entirely inconceivable that the space exploration that NASA is presently involved in might be a necessity if we make this entire planet uninhabitable and we have to find a new home elsewhere in the Milky Way or some other galaxy. Think about it!

So, what in the dickens has any of this got to do with miracles?

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