The Miracle Physics

Although I'm much delayed in noting it, Rev. Sensing had a worth-reading post on whether explanation disproves a miracle:

The fundamental understanding of "miracle" in Christian thought - and I'm pretty sure in Jewish thought, too - is not primarily supernaturalism (though that's there, to be sure), but the way that God's will is worked in the affairs of nature and human affairs, what America's founders, for example, called God's providence. So that the parting of the Red Sea might have occurred through natural causes disturbs this notion not a whit, because nature is under the dominion of God. Hence, I see no problem with Prof. Volzinger's observation that "God rules the Earth through the laws of physics."

As I explained in parts III and (more) IV of my "theory of everything" series of essays, timing and odds are really the relevant measures of a miracle. That makes direct sense, doesn't it? Perhaps people believe that they can imagine miracles that "defy the laws of physics," but I don't believe it's possible even to do that much.

The reason people err in this way has more to do with the understanding of laws of physics than of miracles. Whether or not something accords with the laws as we know them, if we can perceive that something, it must manifest in the physical world. Therefore, there will be a proximate cause (a change of velocity, a shift of atoms, a condensation of molecules, etc.), and since we will then know that the thing actually happened, it will, by definition, be allowed by the laws of physics.