Are Miracles Possible?

Social media has been recently awash with videos of purported testimonies.of miracles by members of The Lord’s Chosen Charismatic Revival Ministries. Some of the stories have sounded too fantastic that many have simply dismissed them as tales by moonlight. The church has been roundedly mocked and trolled by many social media users including skit makers and other content creators.

However, the church has also come out to clarify that some of the stories in the videos are not real-life events but mere accounts of dreams by the people giving the testimonies. The Head of Public Relations and Media of the church, Pastor Chidi Louis, told Punch newspaper that the videos were deliberately edited to create a false impression regarding, for instance, the story of the woman who disarmed assailants holding AK-47 rifles and the man who rode on the back of a lion. He claimed that these accounts were just a part of the testimonies of the devotees where they were merely narrating their dream experiences and not the full story of their miraculous encounters.

Even though given the sheer dramatic nature of the whole thing, I had also given thoughts to the possibility that someone somewhere might be manipulating things to create the sensations, it is still the truth that claims about miracles have always been with us and testimonies have included incredible occurrences like raising the dead and curing incurable diseases. Therefore, even if, as has been claimed by the Lord’s Chosen Charismatic Revival Ministries, some of the dramatic accounts we have watched on social media are mere narration of dreams, it does not detract from the fact that their members and many other Christian believers have routinely made claims of miracles of such scale that tests one’s credulity.

Beyond the jokes and banters on social media, claims about miracles are indeed very serious and require very serious attention given their implications for individuals and society. The reality or otherwise of such claims is essential to what we make of our world and how we approach life. Little wonder such claims have often generated intense public interest just as seen in the current social media sensation. In the same vein, claims about miracles have, over the centuries, attracted attention of thinkers and writers who have given their various perspectives on this titanic cosmological question.

For instance, Scottish philosopher, David Hume, almost 300 years ago, put up what has become a popular argument against miracles. In his seminal work, An ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING, Hume argued that in any claim of miracle, there will always be weightier evidence against the genuineness of the claim than in its favour. His reasons include that human experience has established that the universe operates by certain laws and that miracles amount to violation of these universal laws. For instance, when one claims that a dead person has been brought back to life, accepting the truth of the testimony amounts to conceding that the natural law of irreversibility of death has been violated. Other reasons why Hume believed evidence would always be against claims of miracles relate to errors of perception, delusion and insincerity on the part of the individual purporting to have witnessed a miracle.

However, his argument hinging on the inviolability of the law of nature appears to be the strongest, hence has attracted much more response from other thinkers. Prof. J. I. Omoregbe, eminent philosopher, formerly of University of Lagos, faulted Hume’s argument by pointing to its inconsistency with the empiricism espoused by the same Hume in the same famous work of his. The Scottish thinker had argued that we do not perceive casual relationships between phenomena, rather we arbitrarily establish causality based on our observation of consistent patterns over a long time. Thus, because we have consistently observed that rain follows dark clouds, we have come to conclude that dark clouds result to rain i.e. that there exists a necessary causal link between dark clouds and rain. Hume contended that we do not perceive this causal relationship but that we merely assumed it because rain has always followed dark clouds. In other words, possibility exists – no matter how slim – that the phenomenon we have observed may have been a product of a mere coincidence.

Prof. Omoregbe, therefore, argued that for Hume to deny the certainty of causality in nature, he has, by implication, denied the certainty of any law of nature upon which he hinged his argument against miracles. When we make assertions that there exists something called law of nature, we are necessarily affirming that there is consistency in nature; for instance, that when a tree is deprived of water for a long time it will go lifeless, when you throw up an object within the gravitational field of the earth the object must fall back to the ground. Hume’s empiricism is unconventional vis-a-vis the modern science where assertions are made based on the assumption that things follow consistent patterns in nature.

Beyond the internal contradiction in Hume’s argument, there is even a bigger problem of asserting that miracles are impossible based on the inviolability of law of nature. This problem lies in knowing exactly what the law of nature is in the face of human limited knowledge. In other words, granted that there is law of nature, can we certainly affirm that we have sufficient knowledge and understanding of it? Have we gained sufficient insight into nature to be able to assert that we know all its workings and intricacies such that we can, with absolute certainty, affirm that it is impossible, for example, for a dead person to be brought back to life or for a lame to walk?

Science has given us a marveling level of insight into nature’s laws as evident in knowledge gained through inquiry into the various aspects of the great nature; from anatomy to molecular biology, from classical mechanics to quantum physics, and from geography to astronomy. However, even the greatest of the scientists know that there is still so much to be known, too many gaps to be filled for the inquiring human to claim sufficient understanding of nature. For example, with all the tremendous breakthroughs made in the study of human anatomy, it is common knowledge that very little ground has been covered in unraveling the “mystery” of human body. Some experts believe that we have only covered about 10 percent of the ground, while some others are less generous believing we have covered just as little as 2 to 5 percent.

There is also the question of the reliability of scientific knowledge. This question has become more pertinent for the scientific community since Einstein propounded his General Relativity and Special Relativity theories and the emergence of the field of quantum physics. Einstein’s ingenuity has brought to scrutiny our concept of space and time. His science has convincingly demonstrated that space-time is relative depending on factors like motion and gravity,; that time can be altered (time dilation) such that two persons born on the same day can be made to age differently with one becoming eventually older, if the two are subjected to varying kinetic or gravitational circumstances causing time to slow down for one.

Einstein’s science also gave us the idea of black hole, a region in the universe where, as a result of extreme density and extreme gravity, time literarily stops counting. Einstein believed one of such black holes exists somewhere around the centre of our galaxy (the Milky Way Galaxy). But it was not until April 2019 (100 years after) that the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) captured the first image of a black hole, a breakthrough that not only generated massive sensations around the world but finally gave an indisputable stamp of proof to Einstein’s assertions.

The implication of all this is that there are regions of the universe where space-time becomes distorted and laws of science as we know them cease to operate (or at least manifest differently from what we know). As a particular science writer puts it, inside the back hole, “the laws of physics as we know them cease to exist.” At that point, science can only speculate about what the universe and its laws are.

Furthermore, our scientific understanding of the universe has its foundation in the operation of the four fundamental forces viz: strong nuclear forces, weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity. However, as evident from the Big Bang Model, the origin (and therefore the functioning) of the universe has more to it than these four forces; but unfortunately, beyond the operation of these four cosmological forces (assumed to be the foundation of the physical universe), science can practically do no more. Here science literally comes to the end of its inquiry. The.end of science?

However, it is the field of quantum physics that has brought the bigger scrutiny on the reliability of what we know as science. By looking at nature from the subatomic level, this approach to physics has given us a number of curious revelations. One of them is that reality is one and undifferentiated, and that differentiations and individualities we perceive in nature are nothing but illusions imposed by our perceptual limitations as humans. Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and atheist, writing in his popular work, THE GOD DELUSION, speculated that we do not perceive this singularity in nature just because our level of evolution so far has kept us incapable of doing so thus leaving us to grope in continuous illusions. But for Indian physician and vedic scholar, Dr. Chandra Bhan Gupta, this is a scientific proof of the pantheistic cosmology of the Eastern religious and philosophical traditions where the universe and all in it are viewed as ultimately one undifferentiated divine reality – BRAHMA.

From the foregoing, it becomes obvious that given the limitations of our scientific knowledge, it does appear that it will be difficult for one to reliably assert that what we know as miracles are impossible solely on the basis of natural law as revealed by science and our everyday ordinary observations. Hume’s argument is unconvincing and it appears no such argument will be convincing so long as we are yet to fully figure out the great nature.

For certain religions of esoteric persuasion, what we call miracles are well within the operation of laws of nature, only that our perception and understanding of these laws are highly limited. Hence, whenever we encounter events that are based on those aspects of laws of nature that are unknown to us, we are quick to invoke words like “miracle” and “supernatural” to explain them. The adherents of these religions believe that nature is one and that reality cannot be polarized into “the natural” and “the supernatural” even though we may talk about the various levels or dimensions of nature’s laws. In his book, YOU HAVE ONE FATHER WHO IS IN HEAVEN, late Rev. Fr. Dr. Raymond Arazu, C.S.Sp., observed that western esoteric traditions uphold this sort of belief. They see God as not separate from nature, but nature itself; God is thus conceived as the immanent force that manifests as nature.

However, it is of paramount importance to point out that the question of possibility of miracles is different from the question of the genuineness of claims of miracles by individuals and religious communities. It is also different from the question of the desirability of emphasis on miracles by churches.

Join me next Sunday as I take up these two subjects.

Henry Chigozie Duru, PhD, teaches journalism and mass communication at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria.