nothing is yet in its true form

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what we, as normal, everyday, scientific human beings would call miracles. I believe that most people would admit that events do occur for which science or reason can offer no logical explanation, but I believe for the most part people are not willing to believe in a god that involves himself in the everyday lives of us. For most people God is a very foreign and distant entity, who plays little or no part in what we would call reality. The philosopher Voltaire made the assertion that “a miracle is the violation of mathematical, divine, immutable, eternal laws,” and for this reason he concluded that miracles do not exist because they would contradict the very idea of the immutability of God.

While Voltaire’s argument does strike me as problematic, I think we must consider what the immutability of God is contingent upon. People would like to suggest that if God creates rules of nature, then it would go against His own rules to break those laws in the form of a miracle. But is that really true? Let us first suppose that God made the entire world around us and set everything – chemistry, physics, and biology – into motion. Let us then suppose that God made Himself known to us by creation, His words, His prophets, and finally by the incarnation of His Son on earth. In all of this making himself known, to my knowledge, God has never specifically revealed to us exactly how the universe works.

All that we know of as science is merely our grasping and groping for what tiny bit of knowledge and understanding we have. But we try to take our tiny bit of knowledge and apply it to an infinite God. When we look at the world and then we examine our understanding of God, any problems we may find are not the fault of the deity. We may try to take our finite knowledge and apply it to God, but this as a means to an end will always fall short. What we call theology is but mere approximation. The task at hand is not to take our ultimate truth and apply it God, but rather to find God’s ultimate truth and apply it what we see around us.

We cannot simply put God in the judgment seat and expect Him to conform to our rules. In An Experiment In Criticism, C.S. Lewis wrote, “In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.” I want to have growing understanding of God, but if this is to occur I must accept the fact that I may not always be right. I am very capable of bad thinking, but I am also capable of putting my errors aside in place of truth. God is immutable, and I want my mind to be conformed to His truth, not mine.