CONTINUED…

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

For millennia, humankind has had a nascent understanding that God gives us "free choice". We have tended, I submit, basically to think of this at a fairly macro scale. In the Catholic Church in recent times it has largely been interpreted within the limited domain of Sixth Commandment behaviours: I have the freedom to obey or disobey the Church and engage in sexual intercourse according to prescribed conditions. Most of us simply do not think of it in terms that our individual actions might actually change the future course of human history.

On television last night, if you watched the program on Global Dimming, you might have been shocked to learn that pollution in Europe and North America in the 1970s and early 1980s was most probably the direct cause for millions of people dying in the Ethiopian Famine of the early 1980s.

On television last night, if you watched the program on Global Dimming, you might have been shocked to learn that pollution in Europe and North America in the 1970s and early 1980s was most probably the direct cause for millions of people dying in the Ethiopian Famine of the early 1980s. Think about it — our behaviours and lifestyle in the Western world almost directly killed millions of God's most helpless people. Such an idea would have simply been inconceivable even forty years ago, and certainly at the beginning of my lifetime in 1948. We might have thought of the President of the United States having the power to "blow up the world" or kill half of humanity. We didn't have an understanding that we (yes, little "ordinary" you and me with our trips down to the shops in our motor cars and our airline trips for holidays) could have a direct hand in that though as we can now see from the fresh information revealed last night on this BBC documentary.

Now we get to the most difficult part of this argument. I do pray that I can do it justice. They are not merely my arguments but they are gleaned for the arguments of a large number of theologians and philosophers I have been studying over recent months in preparation for this article.

If God has granted us "free will" on this scale. Or, if God invites us into a partnership with him that is not merely on the scale of some minor tinkering with the future history of our own lives, but it is actually on this enormous scale where we can actually now at least perceive that we can make contributions on a, wait for it, a "cosmological scale" what are the implications of all of this for our understanding of how God responds to our interventions, or participation?

That is not a question that you are going to answer in five seconds, or even in five minutes or five years. The leading theologians have been reflecting on it for half a century now and they still do not know anywhere near the full implications of this. If you think you are better than all of them, by all means, spray your mouth off and display your own ignorance.

ONE of the implications that does flow out of all of this is a dawning realisation that Einstein was correct when he said "God doesn't play dice!" In other words God does not "correct" our mistakes. Neither does he "intervene" to "help us along" as it were by "giving the chemical reactions" a short extra burst, or he gives the laws of motion a "gentle nudge" with his elbow.

In my earlier posts, I hope I demonstrated that the evidence presently available to us from the sciences is that God does not intervene in either the "Big Big picture of the outworking of the future history of our Cosmos", nor does he seem to intervene at the "tiny, tiny, tiny Quantum level where truly 'weird' things do happen". In recent days I trust I have helped demonstrate that there is no evidence to demonstrate that God intervenes either at the macro level, for example, in "intervening" to magically stitch a person's arm back on without scarring after it has been blown off, and blown up in an industrial accident or an explosion. It simply does not happen. The only "miracles" we are constantly exposed to take place in the interior of the human body where our (medical and scientific) knowledge is still relatively limited, particularly as far as the brain and emotions are concerned and the contributions they might make to recovery from various diseases or accidents. All the evidence points to it being less likely, rather than more likely, that God does not intervene in the internal "curing" or "healing" of disease or injury in ways that are akin to some "Wizard of Id" intervention.

There are arguments that He might intervene in other ways. Some theologians speculate it might be through the mind. My own argument is that the interventions, and relationship with God, are conducted through the sub-conscious and this internal Mystery we each have within us which we label "the Soul". It may well be that these interventions or suggestions, made by God do lead to "miracle-like" happenings – for example we might somehow intuit how to right a chemical imbalance in our bodies, or we might intuit how to produce the antibodies that enable a more rapid "cure" of some cancer or disease, or we might intuit precisely how to write the application that finds us the ideal job we were looking for. (Or he might serendipitously give us the winning numbers one week in Lotto.) All these things though are a totally different concept to a "Wizard of Id" imagining of God as someone up there who himself intervenes and "pushes the levers, or stirs the chemicals" that "suspend, break or temporarily distort" the normal laws of his creation.

Could I leave you with the insightful words of another member of this community whom I have come to deeply respect. They are from Grahame's Lenten Reflection on Monday:

A bruised reed he shall not break - and glowing embers he shall not quench.

As Blessed Julian [Juliana?] of Norwich said, Jesus is always the PERFECT GENTLE MAN. He never imposes his will upon us. He never "gate-crashes" into that inner sanctum of one's own being, which the Church calls CONSCIENCE, where entry is "by invitation only." Instead, Jesus "woos" the soul as the prospective Bridegroom woos the prospective BRIDE - always respecting to God-given primacy and privacy of each person's own central being.

But He remains a light for the nations — each person's own light and salvation — the light of enlightenment.