Miracles as Pointers Today

In a previous post on miracles, I considered how differently we think about them today as compared to the way they were thought of two thousand years ago, certainly before the Enlightenment. I suggested that miracles served at least two different purposes – one was to bless people because of the Savior’s compassion, and the other was to be signs that point to spiritual truths.

Thinking about these differences, it seems that the first use is primarily expressed within the church today as God continues to bring comfort to His people. This follows on from Scripture passages such as Matthew 14:14, when Jesus healed the sick because He felt compassion for them, or Matthew 15:32 when He fed the crowd because He had compassion for them. He still does this today.

Their use as pointers outside of the church seems to have changed, however.

In Scripture, Jesus’ miracles were consistently examples of power that caused wonder. They were used to validate His nature as the Messiah, such as when responding to John the Baptist’s disciples (Luke 7:22) or challenging the religious leader’s disbelief (John 10:37-38). Paul similarly pointed to miracles to validate his apostleship (2 Corinthians 12:12).

Similarly, John chose to highlight certain miracles (“signs”) in his gospel in order to bring people to belief in Jesus (John 20:21), and miracles in Acts often led people to personal belief in the gospel (eg, Acts 5:12-16, 9:32-35 and 36-42, 13:12, 16:25-33, etc). The disciples seemed to anticipate this application of miracles when they prayed for them (Acts 4:30).

However, miracles in the sense of events that defy the laws of nature don’t seem to be used for pointing unbelievers to Christ as much any more, at least in the West. The reasons for this may be varied or may be simply related to the growth of secularism since the Enlightenment. But in any case, their rarity seems clear.

I don’t think this is because God is done using wonders to point to Him, however. Instead, I think He provides many things that still point to Him and can bring people to accept the gospel, if we open our eyes to the same spiritual principles, but without expecting the same physical manifestations.

I gave one example in that previous essay, but here are some other possibilities:

• Fine tuning (explained before)
• Consciousness. Often referred to as “the hard problem”, even atheists are increasingly being drawn to non-physical answers because of the nature of the questions raised.
• Why is there something rather than nothing? A question that has plagued scientists and philosophers for millennia, and for which God is a clear answer.
• A well-known paper by the secular Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner points out that the correspondence between subatomic physics and mathematics goes beyond what one would expect. He even refers to this as a “miracle” to indicate the profound nature of the question, even though he himself is not a believer. Many other mathematicians and physicists have wrestled with this without any clear solution.
• The observation above can be extended to correspondences between math and physics, and the human mind as pointed out by the Nobel laureate Roger Penrose. This also works much better than purely physical reasoning would predict.
• Although quantum physics has been highly successful as a tool for exploring physics, scientists still don’t know what the equations actually mean, even after more than a century of using them. In particular, the point at which the equations result in specific answers seems to depend on humans being involved, as if consciousness was necessary to make the universe real. For Christians, this obviously points to a Creator who is constantly involved with reality. Secular scientists have to go to great lengths, such as suggesting an infinite number of parallel universes, to avoid that conclusion.
• Ethics, morality, the very notion that there are some things that are right or wrong. There seems to be something deep within us that looks for justice. Without a real judge, however, there can be no final determiner of morality and one simply cannot avoid nihilism.
• For many, concepts like beauty point to aspects of being human that transcend strict materialism.

These are often thought of as reasons for God, arguments that can be used to intellectually convince someone of God’s existence. While this clearly has value, the discussion here suggests another way of thinking about them is simply as pointers that express the truth of God’s existence and the reality of Jesus as the Messiah.

Apologetics also includes things that try to validate the Biblical narratives, but are not necessarily attention-grabbing themselves. This is helpful, too, but not the same thing as something that independently catches people’s attention and points to God. Most, if not all, of the items above have independently captured the attention of non-believers in very deep ways.

That’s what pointers do — catch people’s attention and lead them beyond their normal ways of thinking.