Where Science and Miracles Meet

According to the Pew Research Center, as many as 79 percent of Americans believe in miracles—events that lie outside natural law and any explanation by science. Not just the parting of the Red Sea or the resurrection of Jesus or the splitting of the moon by Muhammad, but “supernatural” phenomena in the world of today: such things as ghosts, voices

Many miracles are associated with God, but not all are. According to Pew, 65 percent of Americans believe in miracles not necessarily connected to God.

We desire escape from the limited capacities of our material bodies. We yearn for some kind of permanence, something eternal, something beyond our impending personal death. A world in which miracles occur might contain such a possibility.

So we have reached a paradox: The commitment to a totally scientific view of the world has led to theories that may be unscientific, according to Popper’s definition of science. In a sense, the miracle believers and the miracle nonbelievers have found a bit of common ground. This is not to say that the transcendent experience of miraculous phenomen

I would suggest that those of us who believe in miracles are more able to surrender ourselves fully to our emotional experiences and the nonmaterial world they might represent, without attempting to analyze or reduce such experiences.

The miraculous has meaning and definition only by comparison with the nonmiraculous. That is, for an event to be declared “supernatural,” we must first have some concept of the “natural,” the ordinary course of events. Early human beings had no such concept—except perhaps for individual deaths and the repeated rising and setting of the sun. Phenome