It’s been said that no rational person can be a Christian, and here’s why: you have no choice but to believe in miracles. Miracles are, by definition, irrational; they require the suspension of the laws of physics, which can’t happen.
Sometimes when I hear someone say, “It’s a miracle!” I have to bite my snarky tongue.
You couldn’t bear children, but now you’re pregnant with twins? That’s great, but it’s not technically a miracle. What really happened is you paid a lot of money for IVF treatments and they worked, right?
You miraculously avoided a head-on collision? OK, or maybe you’ve got good reflexes or you’re just plain lucky. You flew Spirit Airlines and made it home alive and on time? Ok, that might actually be a miracle.
Everything that happens in the universe seems to have a natural explanation, and if scientists haven’t found it yet, they probably will one day. But there is no explaining the virgin birth or turning water into wine or coming back from the dead. How can any sensible person believe in miracles?
It’s a common assumption that Christians believe in miracles because our dogma insists we must, while intellectuals don’t believe because they’re free to think for themselves. But is that really the case? Who’s locked into their dogma here? Christians, who consider humanity’s historic, universal belief in miracles worthy of our attention, or atheist academics, who insist that what we can observe is all there is and will ever be?
The late astronomer and prominent atheist Carl Sagan once said, “The Cosmos is all there is and all there ever will be.” Think about the level of hubris behind such a declaration. He didn’t just say the Cosmos is all we know about; he said the Cosmos is all there is and all there ever will be.
How can anyone – much less a noted scientist – make such a claim while offering no evidentiary support? It’s one thing to say, “Science can only observe the natural world;” it’s quite another to say, “The natural world is all there is.”
I understand why it’s hard for people to believe in miracles; many people say they’ve never seen one. Even if they are real, miracles seem to be rare to the point of irrelevance.
I suppose if your understanding of a miracle is something so inexplicable and extraordinary that it leaves you breathless, then miracles would be exceedingly rare. But for me, the question begins and ends with the most shocking miracles in the universe: that anything exists at all, and the existence of intelligent life.
Most of us learned about the Big Bang in middle school science classes, but how can we explain the appearance of the preexisting conditions that made the Big Bang possible? In the same vein, how can we explain the existence of anything at all?
Consider the unthinkable odds against the possibility of life, which, according to astrophysicist Hugh Ross, can be illustrated in this intentionally absurd, five-step analogy:
Step 1: Cover every square inch of the surface of North America with dimes.
Step 2: Add another layer of dimes, and another and another until you’ve reached the moon – 238,000 miles up.
Step 3: Find a billion other continents the size of North America, and stack dimes reaching the moon on all of them.
Step 4: Randomly choose one dime from your billion, 238,000-mile-high stacks, paint it red, and put it back anywhere you wish.
Step 5: Blindfold a friend and tell him to pick one dime from any stack.
The insurmountable odds of your friend picking out the red dime among all the other dimes are the same odds that stacked the deck against the emergence of life in this universe. And the odds against the emergence of our particular brand of life – human life, intelligent and self-aware – are even more unimaginable!
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.” After years of doubting the supernatural, I’m now confident that believing in miracles is more rational than not. It’s all a miracle. Life is a miracle. Your life is miraculous, and so is mine, so let’s choose to live accordingly.
