By Ryan LeBlanc

Are miracles real?

• Objection 1. There’s no such thing as miracles. It would seem that there is no such thing as miracles. The basis of modern science is that the physical world operates according to certain laws, namely cause and effect. Anything that happens which we can perceive with our senses must necessarily have happened because of a cause that would be discoverable should we understand what and where and how to look for it. Therefore, there is no such thing as miracles.
• Objection 2. What we call miracles are the effects of causes which we do not understand. It would seem that what we call miracles are nothing more than observable phenomenon which we do not understand. Someone who has never seen or heard of modern medicine, for example, would be astounded to see a doctor perform surgery or resuscitate a patient – they would call it a miracle. The term miracle can then become a deceptive or superstitious concept for places where our scientific knowledge falls short. Some people are frauds and will use knowledge they have to trick others who do not have that knowledge. Other people, especially in the past, are ignorant and describe entirely natural experiences in miraculous terms. In both these instances,the use of the term ‘miracle’ seems to be inappropriate and harmfully confusing.
• Objection 3. Miracles are past. The Biblical examples of miracles have nothing to do with the modern experience. Either God really did perform miracles in those times only, not in our own, or ancient people were ignorant superstitious and gullible and mistook natural causes as supernatural. For example, Jesus might have learned medical knowledge that was not widely known, and when he practised medicine, his followers interpreted it as miraculous.

On the contrary, from the first moment of the Church, the Apostles preach that Jesus of Nazareth was, “a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22b) that is, Peter considers the miracles as part of the public, universal experience. He does not need to prove that miracles happen because the crowd had seen it for themselves.

I answer that, in many cases, science does not and cannot understand why things happen. In some instances, there are indicators of what advances in knowledge are necessary to answer certain questions. In others, scientists must admit that specific evidence is inexplicable – such as in the rigorous scientific process by which the Vatican investigates miraculous claims.

The greatest evidence of supernatural causes which science cannot explain is the existence of the universe itself, and its laws. The foundational properties of space and time, and the fundamental forces of physics have no cause which can be understood within the physics of the universe. It is not unscientific to admit the cause of the universe is in explicable, and it is consistent with Biblical faith to describe the existence of the universe as miraculous.

The hierarchical Church’s attitude towards claims to the miraculous has always been deeply skeptical – it is always much more motivated to discover that a miracle is mistaken or deceptive than it is to claim it is authentic. The reasons for this are obvious. If the Catholic Church authorizes a miraculous claim because its advisors have incomplete scientific knowledge, and then someone with a stronger scientific knowledge disproves the miracle, that is, finds the natural scientific explanation for the phenomenon, the faith of the Christian people and the credibility of the Church are wounded.

In the modern age, the Catholic Church avails itself of the highest scientific authorities available when investigating miraculous claims. These scientists are provided all the available evidence and asked if there could possibly be any explanation. They are not asked to explain how the claimed miracle happened but only if there is a possibility that an explanation exists. Only if they say no could the claim be authenticated.

The consistent claim of Christianity is exactly that Jesus, who performed miracles by his own power, continues to live forever, continuing through the Holy Spirit the work he began in his life on Earth, including miracles. From the book of Acts to the present day, the followers of Jesus have consistently experiencedmiraculous phenomena of a spiritual and physical nature.

• Reply to Objection 1. It is not a claim of science that nothing happens against the laws of nature. While scientific inquiry presumes discoverable natural causes to every phenomenon, it only ever investigates when knowledge is incomplete. It would be unscientific to draw a conclusion about the results of an investigation without considering the data, for example, ruling out the possibility of a miracle. Science must consider the possibility of miracles and prove the presence and influence of natural laws in every instance as a part of its own method.
• Reply to Objection 2. Fraudulent claims to miracles do exist. Human understanding of the laws of the universe does progress, leaving old forms of understanding exposed as incomplete or misleading. These are not what the church means by miracles. As describe above, the evidence needs to clearly demonstrate (“prove”) that what we understand to be the laws of nature were contradicted by the evidence. It is not simply a gap in our knowledge but an outright refutation of the foundational principles of our knowledge. Such a rigorously scientific observation is rightly called a miracle.
• Reply to Objection 3. The Catholic Church avails itself of the highest scientific authorities available when investigating miraculous claims. The presumption that ancient peoples could not identify fraudulent miracles is unjustifiably prejudiced. If it were easy to convince wide and diverse populations of fake miracles, there would have been many more historical accounts of science-defying miraculous events beyond the Bible. Yet the gospels’ accounts of Jesus are unique in their claim to eye-witness accounts of inexplicable phenomena surrounding the person of Jesus. What is more, in the modern age there continue to be claims to miracles performed in Jesus’s name that cannot be explained by modern science, as discussed above.

Ryan LeBlanc is a teacher at Bethlehem Catholic High School in Saskatoon and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Family.