The Greater Miracles of Science
The wonders of artificiality and of nature’s absurdity
The philosopher David Hume showed that, by definition, the empirical evidence in support of a miracle story can never overwhelm the support for naturalistic explanations of the event in question. As far as the common discussion of miracles goes, then, monotheists and pseudoscientists have to live with the easy demonstration of the unreasonableness of their core religious or cultish convictions.
But this is far from the last word on miracles, because it turns out that there are more useful, nontheistic definitions of “miracle” that aren’t self-refuting and that have the ironic implication that science, the paradigm of rational institutions is a source and sign of miracles.
Welcome to the inner sanctum of miracle discussions.
Technology and the Miracle of Anti-Nature
Miracles needn’t be understood as being inherently dubious, which is how the confused monotheist understands them. The early biblical view was that miracles are what we would call natural wonders or (with irony) “acts of God,” since like prehistoric animism, the ancient folk religions had no recourse to philosophical abstraction, and located gods, spirits, and divine purpose in the everyday, perceivable world.
In early Judaism, God or his spiritual henchmen (angels, demons, or hidden beasties) operated in all natural events, steering them towards God’s desired ends, rewarding or punishing us even in our mundane interactions. This is why Job’s friends assumed he’d done something to deserve his physical afflictions. Moreover, the divine realm was simply outer space, while the spirits of the dead were transferred underground, to a physical place the Jews called “Sheol” and the Greeks “Tartarus.”
For the naïve theist, the entire universe is the miracle of God’s creation of something from nothing, so the events within nature that the scriptures called “miracles” were just the rarer, more devastating or life-altering natural wonders, such as floods or draughts, defeats in battle or prophetic inspirations through altered states of consciousness.
That ancient impression of the enchanted status or inherent meaningfulness of nature falls by the wayside with science’s relentless exploration of natural processes. Contrary to Richard Dawkins’s reassurance that unweaving the rainbow doesn’t disenchant the world and deprive nature of inherent purpose, we do tire easily of the overly familiar. This is just the collective analogue of the individual transition from wild-eyed childish openness to magic and wonder, on the one hand, to adult disappointment and jadedness on the other.
As Heidegger stressed, we late-modernists aren’t impressed anymore by the sheer fact of being or by the reality that there’s something rather than nothing. On the contrary, we adopt a hubristic, pragmatic attitude towards nature, eager to use our understanding of how the world works (or to defer to the experts who have that understanding), to control and to reshape the given facts of the wilderness to suit our preferences. Just as age and experience transform childish naivety into skepticism and cynicism, rational understanding of the universe is accompanied by active, societal alienation from the pristine, prehumanized world.
It’s not just that we don’t respect nature or that we take life for granted; technology reinforces our vanity by demonstrating our godlike position. Plainly, we don’t need a supernatural creator if we are obviously already the creators of anti-nature.
Here, then, is the making of another way of understanding the miraculous. The supernatural can be opposed to the natural in a metaphysical sense, as in the case of confused theism, but there’s also the dichotomy between the artificial and the natural. We intelligent primates are the lords of artificiality. Our linguistic symbols, moral principles, cultural conventions and of course our tools, machines, vehicles, cities, and other technologies are all artificial rather than natural.
Metaphysically, these technologies are natural in that they’re not miraculous in the theist’s dubious, self-refuting sense. But these artifacts of our consciousness and intelligence are unnatural in that not only is the technosphere a novel, emergent level of natural being, but these devices of ours are intended to oppose nature, to thwart the universe’s mindless and monstrous indifference, amorality, and absurdity.
In so far as we think pejoratively of nature as the wilderness, we civilized creatures stand opposed to that horrific godlessness, by injecting purpose and value where there was none before: we create a legacy of vessels for our plans and ideals, but we also demonically threaten to destroy the planet’s capacity to support life.
If human “progress” can be honestly mistaken for satanic nullification of nature’s creativity, for psychopathic glorification of human dominance that has the potential to turn our planet into a Venusian wasteland, we can suspect there’s another sense of “miracle” afoot. Here, the miraculous isn’t a benevolent god’s intervention in nature, by which he hints at the supernatural wonders of Heaven and Hell, but the result of a deluded or desperate species’ vain attempt to eclipse nature with symbols of our magnificence, with our cultures, civilizations, and machines that advance only like cancers to the point of despoiling our planetary host.
Science in particular, then, is itself a source of the miraculous. Reason empowers us with technology which turns us into undoers of the natural. Our understanding and creativity make us godlike compared to other species, and our artificial refuges are antinatural and thus, in a worthy sense, miraculous. This is because these refuges flow from us rather than directly from nature’s impersonality, and because they violate nature not by breaking natural laws but by undoing or subverting the prehumanized world’s aimless developments.
Volcanoes, floods, and hurricanes aren’t miraculous, since we understand how they happen and no longer have the luxury of ignorance-based wonder at such eventualities. What’s miraculous, rather, in the sense of being so deeply unnatural as to be systematically antinatural is a clever animal’s ambition to explore how the world works for the sake of foiling nature’s given, impersonal path and of creating an alternative world in that heroic animal’s image.
The Mocking of Human Intuition by the World’s Inhumanity
There’s a second viable sense of the miraculous that arises from scientific advances. Recall the human-centeredness of the theist’s archaic notion of miracles. In that case a miracle represented an intrusion of supernature into nature. Miracles were awe-inspiring because of the presumption that natural events are ordinary and familiar.
Contrary to David Hume’s strict empiricism, the reason for that familiarity with nature wasn’t just that the ancients practiced induction. In addition to having repeated experiences of natural regularities, which led to the idea of causality, the ancients and early-modernists tended to explain those regularities by appealing to human-like agents. Living, crafty, sociable minds or “spirits” like ours were thought to be responsible for the natural order.
Even in Hume’s time, many scientists or natural philosophers were deists who conflated natural and social laws, since they assumed God created the universe, which meant natural laws were part of a divine plan and were therefore infused with a purpose that was based on God’s intentions. Just as a can-opener has a function because it’s intelligently designed and fabricated, the universe would have a purpose and would unfold to achieve God’s aims, and natural laws would be proofs of divine wisdom.
To understand the history of modern science is to understand how all of that fell apart. No more personification of nature, no more deism or cryptotheism, no more quasinormativity of natural laws — scientists became more objective and neutral, excepting only their antinatural pragmatism, that is their arrogant instrumentalism, otherwise known as the “humanist’s” set of values. Natural laws were no longer necessary truths guaranteed by ontotheology, but were just the least tentative components of explanatory models.
Once scientists wholly abandoned their commitment to religious traditions and to moral principles, in their professional capacity at least, the world opened up to them. We saw the universe for what it really is, that being something which only the ancient atomists had an inkling of. As we understand it in our post-scientific period, the universe is a monstrous, inhuman, counterintuitive plenum.
The size and age of the cosmos are plainly inhuman. No human mind can encompass those vast magnitudes, since we evolved to excel at more paltry and ignoble endeavours, such as to hunt or to copulate while avoiding getting eaten by a mountain lion. But we’ve peered into the depths of matter and found no happy clockwork that can be chalked up to human-like intelligence; instead, we discovered the alien realms of relative spacetime and quantum mechanics. We’ve peered into the depths of space and found black holes, edges of nature that threaten anyone who contemplates them with horror and insanity.
The universe is monstrous, then, in its runaway defiance of human intuitions. Nature itself now is as strange as any supernatural event could have been. So what need have we of the theistic miracles when science has shown that the whole of the natural order amounts to a dark miracle?
Did you want the explanatory emptiness of a divine intervention, such as Moses’s magical parting of the Red Sea? How about, instead, a universe popping into existence due to a pointless quantum fluctuation? Isn’t nature’s absurd physicality miraculous enough?
The miracles of monotheism, including God’s healing of the sick and his smiting of our enemies were all meant to testify to a power of benevolence and wisdom that underlies all natural events. The universe, then, was indirectly good and rational since it was in God’s hands. Science eliminated the need for the theistic hypothesis and discovered the world in all its brute objectivity and impersonal creative destruction.
Instead of the strangeness of the source of natural patterns making itself apparent from isolated wonders, proving that a reliable deity is in control of everything, we have the strangeness of nature’s godless, monstrous indifference, amorality, and absurdity that conflict with our self-centered intuitions and prejudices.
Take the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection, which was thought to indicate that we have a way of escaping our apparent mortality. The story of that miracle is a comedy since it has a happy ending in which everything works out, with God’s justice and foresight prevailing after a coming day of divine judgment.
By contrast, the miracle of objective nature is a tragedy: morality, justice, and wisdom lie only on our puny side of the cosmic ledger, and are mocked by the universe’s preposterous dimensions and barbaric evolution. Instead of turning to a happy anomaly such as God’s providing us with scriptures that reveal his intentions towards us, we late-modernists can turn to all of nature as it’s presented by physicists, chemists, and biologists, and encounter a transcendent power wherever we look, albeit a power that humiliates rather than uplifts us.
Instead of the supernatural transcending the natural, we have nature’s objective inhumanity transcending human biases. Instead of a handful of comedic miracles, we have a material universe full of tragic ones. Instead of a light-oriented religion, we should learn to make friends with the looming darkness; instead of theism, we ought to suffer under cosmicism.
This is the deep reason why we demonically seek to blot out the wilderness and to replace it with the artificial cities and civilizations that flatter and infantilize us by obeying our designs. We’re at least unconsciously offended by the dubiousness of our personifications of nature, since we’ve always suffered gross injustices in life, even when we tried to trust that benevolent spirits have everything under control. But with the relatively recent developments of high technology, corresponding to the growth of authentic, methodologically-naturalistic science, we’re racing to condemn the real world for what it is. We’re the epic hero slaying the monster and our weapons of choice are nature-killing vanity and technology.
By indicating that our intuitions are parochial and vainglorious, by humiliating us with their reports of the universe’s alienness and indifference to our survival, let alone to our happiness, objective scientists might as well be prophets testifying to the pantheistic miracle that nature transcends us. Ironically, by discovering the shocking truth, science re-enchants the cosmos or learns that the world has been enchanted all along. It’s just that the deepest magic has nothing to do with us and therefore can’t responsibly be attributed to the theist’s stalking horse of a human-like god.
Nature is virtually magical by mindlessly creating and evolving itself and by having no ultimate reason or point. The highest transcendence for us, then, isn’t any merger with a perfect deity, but the horror of understanding our smallness in the shadow of a great absurdity. If nature is absurd, so are we, which is why the heroism of our technological, progressive revolt is tragic.
All of which is to suggest that the conventional discussion of miracles is tedious. That discussion revolves around the confusions of theism, but monotheists and polytheists have hogged the discourse for over two millennia. Maybe it’s time to reflect on the miracles that are closer to our secular home.
