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Thursday, December 30, 2004Cicero is talking up a religio-philosophical storm, including this post in which he asks:Given that God can do miracles, (a) are there grounds for saying in a general way whether or not he would do miracles and, (b) supposing he would, are there general factors that would help us sort out the real thing from lies, hoaxes, honest mistakes, the meddling of aliens with a sense of humor, etc.?He goes on to note that while many other issues regarding miracles get debated, nobody seems to address these two. The answer to the second question, at least, is "no." I suspect it's the answer to the first as well. Here's the problem and the paradox that explains it all in rendering it inexplicable (who was it who said that anything worth knowing can't be taught?): Basically, it goes like this. Physicists disagree on how many dimensions there are, with even level-headed ones coming up with numbers in the twenties. From the vantage point of mortals, though, there are four. Those are, of course, the three we inhabit in space along with a timeline along which we are confined to stumbling forward. If you operate according to the human senses, that fourth one really stands out. That's because we can only go one way along that axis, whereas we can go two directions along all the other axes. Mathematically, going two minutes forward in time and two feet forward in space are not remarkably different things. They're both little hops in which our molecular groupings, at bottom energy clusters, skitter along the grid and wind up slightly reformed and slightly displaced. What makes humans unusual (perhaps with a few of the other higher animals) is that the molecular groupings can be changed a great deal as we move along the axes but still be the same thing because of something ineffable that makes them what they are, namely personalities or souls. Where God stands in all this, of course, is that He is of it, with it and the thing itself, and always has been: In the beginning was the word, and the word was God and the word was with God... Which means, if the world is one big, multidimensional edifice, His is the reason which created and organized and still creates and organizes it. Here's the tricky part: Can He see the whole thing at once? We can't. Along the fourth axis, we can only see one room at a time and we don't even get to pick which room. But God's ability to see all or part or all or a part of His choosing determines, in its perverse way, whether there's free will granted us as we march from room to room on the time axis or whether, because He can look at us in a room we won't reach for twenty years and see what we're doing there, if it's all predestined. How He chooses to observe the world He has created, then, determines how this all works out, and that's up to Him. All I'm doing is offering my best guess of how free will and predestination reconcile. If you're still with me - and God help you if you are... I got lost after the second paragraph - there is a point this is leading to, and that is the question of miracles. A miracle is a thing to wonder or marvel at, presumably because it was caused by forces quite out of the ordinary. In its own way, that defines the whole of the universe, a wonder to behold and full of such stuff as we dare not dream. All we see is - at least by the book I was raised on - the stuff of divine creation, ultimately. When one reads of the 20 day old baby found safe upon a floating matress in the tsunami's wake, one gets the feeling that some of that divinity is still floating around. The larger question, the one the Catholics in their sainthood evaluations are especially trying to flush out, then, is not where God's hand is in all this, but where He has reached in a made a small adjustment contrary to what we'd normally expect. Where the little rooms I've spoken of have gotten their furniture rearranged after the whole mess was first put up. Considered in this way, there is a good definition of a miracle: it is a thing that should not have happened but did for reasons we cannot explain. Figuring out an origin, likewise, is an exercise in silliness for whatever created it stems first from the Creator. If space aliens want to cure cancer or turn the Statue of Liberty pink, they still need divine permission at one level or another. Which means the answers to Cicero's questions are yes, and yes. Looking at the clock, I see the hour is late. Looking at the paragraphs above, I see I've offered two completely contradictory answers to worthy questions, and done so starting with the same points of departure. Fortunately, it is probably my premises that are flawed, rather than the very notion of logic. In other words, a wash, a mishmash, a bit of conclusive inconclusivity. In my experience, that makes it perfectly good religio-philosophizing, since if things could be conclusively shown we wouldn't need faith. On a side note, does the tolle, legge passage from Augustine's Confessions, along with Augustine's canonization, mean the Catholic church sanctions bibliomancy? How about God? And are Augustine's works less sacred if the tolle, legge bit resulted from sunstroke and luck than if God actually sent word that it was time to do some reading? Or is the moment one within a multidimensional edifice of divine creation, rendering the question moot because everything is a miracle, with this whole argument being centered less on how the divine creates than on how and what the mortal perceives? By the way, if the above were an exam question, I'd deduct 20 points from every essay that suggested that if everything is a miracle, nothing is a miracle. 
posted by gbarto at 1:30 AM |
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