Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
November 10, 2024 | "Understanding Miracles in the Modern Age"
Can miracles stand up to the scrutiny of modern science? Join as we tackle this provocative question head-on, exploring the realm where faith meets reason. We'll journey into how the New Testament's miracles are viewed today, often overshadowed by scientific explanations and technological advances. Yet, despite a world leaning toward skepticism, the possibility of witnessing a miracle as described in the Gospels could stir a forgotten wonder and rekindle faith. This episode promises a deep reflection on the role of miracles, challenging the notion that science has diminished their power to inspire awe.
************
Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolfe. Living Catholic is a fresh look at issues confronting each of us today. This show deals with living Catholic, what that means for Catholics, as well as the impact on the rest of society. You certainly don't have to be Catholic to enjoy this show. And now your host, Father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 1:Welcome, oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Fr Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Read through the pages of the New Testament and you find what miracle after miracle. In fact, as you read through the Gospels, they're virtually on every page. So what do you think they mean? We, of course, live in a scientific age and we're comfortable with the naturalistic explanations of things in the world. We don't believe in demons or imagine that they are the reasonable cause of disease, or that the planets are moved by angelic powers, or that spirits represent and guard the various nations and contest with one another if those nations go to war. The truth of the matter is, it has been very productive to exclude the miraculous and the spiritual from the sum of our experience. They play no part in the explanation of our world. Our analyses are reasonable and certain. They are, after all, scientific. So what are we scientific people to make of these miracles we run across in the Bible? They're puzzles for those who believe and stumbling stones for those who don't. Coming from an age in which ordinary people had no idea of how the world actually worked or who understood the dynamics of natural processes, it's easy to cut them some slack as far as what they saw and tried to explain there in the New Testament. For them, miracles were easy, and everywhere, weren't they? Certainly, they saw the phenomenon of Jesus' presence and attributed to him what looked to be extraordinary and divine. But who can trust what they said or what they believed? We are not bound by their understandings, are we?
Speaker 1:A prominent science made the point that if we went back in time to say what the 7th century, with our technological capabilities and our technology, we would be regarded as gods. If we had the mechanical assistance of engines and the assistance of batteries and motors, the whole world might regard us as wizards or perhaps as angels. If we could bring along with us antibiotics, anesthesia and modern dentistry, we might be embraced as truly divine, since we have a good handle on how the world really works. We'd be equipped to explain and make use of the means available to us in ways the benighted people of that time simply wouldn't know, and all the talk about miracles of the New Testament and the extraordinary accomplishments of the saints would sound tinny in our ears. That's been the problem that we've faced as believers for the last many years, ever since science as a discipline has taken off in the common imagination, we've been left holding a weak hand. As we sit around the table of the world's business.
Speaker 1:Especially as the technology revolution began in the 17th century, the world of the faith has faded in the minds of those who have most benefited from the innovations of the time. There was less and less room for miraculous behavior as we began to understand how things truly worked, for miraculous behavior. As we began to understand how things truly worked, god was pushed out of the center of life and off to the margins, where he has remained since then. After all, it wasn't that long ago that if an explanation was forthcoming for Jesus being the Son of God, accomplishing all that is claimed of him in his ministry and his mission, it was because he could do miracles. Who else but someone endowed with the power of God himself could accomplish all Jesus did? The miracles proved his identity. But if he became harder and harder to believe in the miracles, then it became harder and harder to appreciate Jesus and all he claimed of himself. If there just wasn't any more room for the supernatural, if the capacity to be amazed has been corralled because we've done such a good job of explaining how the world really works, then who Jesus is becomes a lot less interesting.
Speaker 1:Of course, it's not that the miracles of Jesus disappear in the understanding of our age. Reading what he accomplished, we're still rightly impressed at what took place in the events recorded in the Gospels. Even in our age of surgery and pharmacology, if a paralyzed man were to be brought to the most skilled doctor in the world, he could not say Stand, pick up your mat and go home. And if, by chance, some doctor were to repeat those words, even in jest, and the man did pick up his mat and go, everyone there would regard it as deeply miraculous as they did when Jesus himself did it. We've only to look at the times he commanded the lame to walk, the deaf to speak, the mute to hear, the mute to speak and the blind to see and those with withered hands to move to be amazed at what took place. Were there any single one of these events to happen among us, we would talk about it and regard it with the same amazement as those who witnessed it in Jesus' presence. It wouldn't take long for someone who did these things regularly to be regarded as someone who was inaugurating a whole new way of looking at the world, and it wouldn't be too extreme to imagine that we would begin to pay attention to his teachings and his proclamations with a new focus. In fact, there's nothing in the New Testament that we wouldn't be amazed at when it comes to what is recorded concerning the miracles that happened there.
Speaker 1:But it's not whether we would see such things or not that makes us skeptical of miracles. It's that, with the intervention of science, we rule out the possibility of miracles altogether. There is simply no place in our conventional understanding of the scientific world for something such as spontaneous healing or extraordinary things to take place. It's not a matter of experience, it's a matter of explanation. Even before we get to the Gospels or see a miracle ourselves, we've already ruled them out of existence. Things like that just don't happen. That's what we believe.
Speaker 1:After all, in the scientific universe, plagues are not caused by God's punishment or by angels who go about causing misery. They're caused by otherwise invisible germs, too small to see but real as mountains, those germs that infect and then spread from one person to another until a whole population becomes sick. What seemed in the past to be a matter of curse or of spiritual intervention can be explained by natural causes. In fact, once we know about germs, we not only can explain plagues and diseases, we can go about preventing them. There is no reason to keep angelic intrusion in the explanation if tiny viruses will do.
Speaker 1:What had been the realm of the spiritual is simply the exercise of nature, and once we believe that, then there's no reason to keep the miraculous and the spiritual around as explanatory factors. What we once believed as sufficient causes, having been debunked as spiritual, are rendered purely physical and natural. It's a short journey from that level of explanation to leaving God with nothing much to do in the world. Rather than being involved in the day-to-day work of the world and having an interest in punishing those who sin with disease and rewarding those who don't with good harvests, god stands on the outside looking in, and once we leave God on the outside, no matter how fervently we believe in him, he begins to fade away In our day and time. With the sufficiency of our explanations, god has just about disappeared, and when God disappears, then all of the activities and concerns about God's work also begin to disappear. If God is not at work, holding the planets in their courses, or sending rain on time, or keeping the people healthy, then why would we be concerned about whether he'll send us to hell or keep us to heaven. If there's nothing for God to do here and now, there's less and less for him to do hereafter, which is what we see among our brothers and sisters.
Speaker 1:I find an almost complete lack of concern among anyone about the consequences of their decisions or the directions of their lives. Certainly, there seems to be less and less anxiety about what God might think of the decisions we make. In the end, it makes perfect sense. Might think of the decisions we make. In the end, it makes perfect sense. God just doesn't have a place in the world.
Speaker 1:This understanding that God stands off to the side has often been called the God of the gaps. That is, god is kept around for a while in our imaginations in order to cover those parts of the world that we don't have a good explanation for. We need God to fill in or to make sense of the world, because we don't yet know how things really work. For example, when Isaac Newton began describing how the planets moved, he had no real explanation for what gravity was. He could explain it as a force and he could provide a formula for how it operated, and with the power of his mathematics, he could describe where the planets would move, but he just didn't know how it worked. Eventually, he could simply leave it to God to establish and to stabilize this force at work. The gap in his understanding was filled in by God's intervention. Now we still don't know how gravity works, but we're confident we don't need God to stand by and keep the planets on their pathways, moving around the sun.
Speaker 1:The progress of science, in fact, was measured by the ability of the scientists to close the gaps in knowledge and chase away the specter of God at work in the machinery of the world. The amazing power of mathematics to describe the working of the world and the function of the systems of the world was almost magical. It still is. By the way, no one knows how it is that the math that we've come to know has the power to describe things as remote as the swirl of millions of stars in a galaxy, in the orbital state of an electron around an atom. But the more accomplished our mathematics became, the less God had a position in the world, as the great mathematician-scientist Pierre Laplace wrote. When asked about God and the system of the world, he said I have no need of that hypothesis. In his explanation. God was out of a job and if God is not necessary for the heavens to go pretty soon, we'll stop consulting him about how to go to heaven.
Speaker 1:In the 20th century there was a brief resurgence in finding a place for God as quantum physics began to be understood Rather than a tight universe running like a clock everywhere according to the sprockets and gears of invariable natural laws, it was found that at the basic level of matter, all manner of spontaneous, non-causal, unpredictable things begin happening naturally, it seemed. In this description, all duly laid out in mathematical precision according to the equations and laws of science, the work of the divine could have some free play. If the universe was more like a conversation than a calliope, then God might have some new, heretofore unrecognized place to work in our world. But this quickly died away. In the quantum description of the world we simply got used to quirky, unpredictable outcomes. Take the quantum description of the creation of the universe in the Big Bang.
Speaker 1:According to the common explanation, in one sudden moment, from nothing came everything. Rather than being an expression of the creative power of God in the world, it was explained in simpler terms it was merely the creation of the universe, that is, since there is only this universe and it sprang into being at one moment, unanticipated and uncaused from nothing. That's just how universes are. End of story. No need to think about anything else or to draw any conclusion for it at all. God has no place in our explanations and therefore bringing God in to explain is simply not done. No matter if there is no explanation for everything coming from nothing uncaused, unanticipated and unmade we don't have to worry about it. The biggest gap in the world anyone could imagine is not enough to invoke God, so we leave God out of it completely. We have to reemphasize because of the explanatory power of science, we scientific people simply leave God outside of the explanation. There's no room for the miraculous, and so we decide that the miraculous doesn't happen. It can't. This is our prior understanding. It's written into our contract with the world. In our age, we don't believe it and so it's not happening. We still have the New Testament, of course, so we have to make some sort of accommodation.
Speaker 1:Finding some place for the miraculous, for the work of God as God in the world, is what the modern religious person does. One version of this is what Thomas Jefferson did. He simply went through the Bible and razored out any description of miraculous events and left in place the rest. Jesus became a teacher, a rye rabbi, who's sharp about the moral imperatives of a divine presence in the world, but not a miracle man, not a thaumaturgist. In his mind and in the mind of his compatriots, even up to our day, religious in his mind and in the mind of his compatriots, even up to our day, all the talk of miracles was just misplaced wonder from the minds of the simple, silly people of the day. It's not that. It's not that hard to dazzle people with your teaching. So they begin to invent stories about you, stories that grow in wonderment the more they're told. So so that after a while even a carpenter could become a god, if the gossip is good enough and enough people are willing to suspend the limits of good sense. Our second president thought he'd do away with the first century blather and read the scriptures like an honest scientist.
Speaker 1:Even these days, the same effort goes forth from the desk of struggling believers. There are pastors who proclaim their loyalty to the age that they're a part of and explain why it is the case. We need not believe in miracles while we still remain faithful Christians, while it sounds stark when somebody actually says this. It's been preached 100,000 times from 10,000 pulpits all over the world in our generation. Those pastors simply invite the citizens of our world to lay the scriptures aside and choose what sounds congenial. In one notable story from the Christian Post, a pastor let his church know that they only have to believe in two miracles in order to remain good Christians. The only one they had. They only had to believe in the miracle of the universe, whatever that is, and resurrection.
Speaker 1:A Christian has to have some measure of appreciation of the resurrection. It is going to retain some connection to the life of the faith and we've already dealt with the universe. But according to his yardstick, everything else is dispensable. So don't worry about the science involved and the amazing cures or the astounding actions of Jesus. He won't ask you to compromise your citizenship in this world of ours. You can keep on believing the child of the culture we've built and all will be well. Just be a person of our age. Don't worry about the obvious exaggerated language of the deaf who hear, the lame who walk and the hungry who are fed.
Speaker 1:And at the end I suppose it's a fine message. There's nothing obviously more pacifying than walking out of church knowing that nothing in your thinking has to change. In fact, looking around at what's most popular when it comes to religion in our day and time, I'd say it's amazingly popular to assure everyone that we can slide over all the parts of the Bible that pricks our conscience or challenges our points of view. It seems riotously trendy. To be sure, our notions of life are never touched by a hint of the amazing or of the astounding.
Speaker 1:It does make it a bit boring to read about Jesus, though. He comes from Galilee, he preaches the kingdom of God. He talks about how God's going to reach into our lives to reorder the promises we receive and the lives we have. Then people make up stories about him which are perfectly ignorable, including some crazy first century stuff about him. Walking are perfectly ignorable, including some crazy first century stuff about him walking on water. And then finally he's executed by jealous religious types and then he rises from the dead. That's the end of the story there. You need not stretch too far to make that work in your life. He was good, he was killed, he rose Good enough, right. Of course that doesn't work out so well.
Speaker 1:Cs Lewis said it best. He said that if we strain at the gnat of multiplying loaves and fishes, we'll eventually not swallow the camel of the resurrection. After a while, leaving behind the reporting of what Jesus did, we'll leave Jesus behind as well. It's what always happens, and when it does, god remains in the garage with the rusted bicycles and the old Volkswagen, all of which we intend to get busy restoring one of these days, because it might be valuable or even fun to ride around with them again when we have time to get used to it. We leave behind one or two things besides the divinity of Jesus and his accomplishment of our redemption. The most central is that we never pierce the insensible pride we have in what we think we know. Yeah, we've been amazingly successful in explaining and getting along in life, especially compared to our ancestors, but what we know and how we get along is something we don't much think about. Try this experiment. Oh, and how we get along is something we don't much think about. Try this experiment.
Speaker 1:Imagine getting in a time machine and going back to, oh, 12th century France. If you'd studied Latin very well, you could begin to explain to the people there all of the great and wonderful accomplishments of the 21st century. But what could you actually do. Unless you were able to bring your machines along, you'd be almost helpless. And if you could somehow fit your modern accoutrements in the rather substantial time machine, when they ran out of power or a wire broke, or they got wet or you dropped them, you'd be bereft. Think about it. Could you cultivate a plot of land, put in a crop, harvest it and preserve it for the coming year? Could you make a quill pen, make a piece of paper or find ink to write with? Would you be able to make your way according to what would be available to you In that world? You would almost certainly be helpless. The average person of the 12th century would be more able to survive and prosper, including medically and technologically, than you could. Even if you were transported to the end of the 19th century or to Amish country at the beginning of the 21st century, you would be effectively unable to do anything other than beg. Everyone would know more about how to live than you would be effectively unable to do anything other than beg. Everyone would know more about how to live than you would.
Speaker 1:So let's not push the people of the first century over the ledge. They were able to accomplish the amazing goal of wringing a living out of the land using little more than the tools they could fashion with their own hands. Not only that, they created a world in which teaching and learning were focused and celebrated in ways that we can hardly begin to understand. Disputation and skepticism were highly developed and widely practiced. The notion that their world was full of credulous fools doesn't bear up. Who's most likely to witness an event and celebrate it for its amazement and boundary-breaking reality? A peasant close to the land who knows the cycle of seasons and the function of water, soil and weather, or an effete modern who never looks at the clouds or notices the wind? My bet is on the peasant.
Speaker 1:There's a story from the early years of the Soviet Revolution in Russia that makes the point. When the Bolsheviks settled into making the country in the image of their beliefs, they sent their agents out to the villages and hamlets of the motherland to explain how this new way of life was going to change everything. They were, after all, the vanguard of the science, of progress in history and life. The people had to know what to look forward to and how to contribute, but those agents didn't have much success. It was easy to talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat and the seizure of the means of production in cities full of factory workers and service personnel. But among the fields and on the farms, where people actually had to challenge themselves to raise crops and care for their animals, there wasn't much interest, no sooner than the teacher from the capital was getting in his stride and talking about the inevitable revolution. The bells in the church would ring and then everybody would get up and leave. Since it'd be time to milk or to bring in the hay, or to cut the sauerkraut or any of the dozen things the community needed to do to get ready for the winter, they didn't much care or concern themselves with the airy uncertainties of revolutionary promises. Eventually, the Soviet state would seize and melt the hundreds of thousands of bells throughout the countryside, providing metal for their new factories and shutting out the audible competition with their teachers.
Speaker 1:Peasants don't jump at fancy thoughts just because somebody talks about them. They have to be convinced, usually by seeing with their own practiced, skeptical eyes. So remember miracles are part of our history, they are our heritage. We might want to think about them a bit more deeply than we have before. We, in our skeptical scientific age, might not know quite as much as we let on Back in just a moment. Welcome back to our final segment, faith in Verse.
Speaker 1:We have a poem today called the Cold Comes. The cold comes to us now, as the calendar turns, we accept, as we allow our lives to relearn the obvious the true happening among us. Browning leaves the sky blue. The world we can trust. Button up, then it'll be cold out, as always in November days, we know without a doubt the season is cold and gray. When the chill comes again, we here seem surprised, like the darkness of sin, its impact. We seldom surmise Our air conditioning insulates, oh, our cars aid also shutting tight heaven's gate. We hardly even notice though, since we grow so used to now and ignore what will be. We seldom pause to ask how, then are surprised suddenly, quickly, after so much time, our summer warmth is gone. We suffer the variable climb on nature's chessboard. The pawn that's the cold comes. Living Catholic means first of all living, and that's what we try to do as we continue to explore these invitations to live in Christ. I hope you can join us in the weeks to come.
Speaker 2:Living Catholic is a production of Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.