David Cowles
Apr 1, 2025
“…Everything that happens happens only once…there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Being and novelty are synonymous.”
We’ve got it all wrong. How unusual! Ok, not so unusual. Let’s start over: We’ve got it all wrong as usual!
When you’re 10 year old, beginning to question what you do and don’t believe, the miracle stories from the Bible and the lives of saints are a real stumbling block. At 10, God’s still in the mix but Santa no longer makes the cut. But what about miracles?
The Red Sea parting.
Jesus walking on water, curing the stick, ‘multiplying loaves and fishes’.
Mary appearing at Fatima (and elsewhere).
The sick inexplicable cured at Lourdes (and elsewhere).
Of course, these are just the stories that made the nightly news. Every day, all around the world, people are attesting to ‘miracles’, most not camera ready. But what are we post-Enlightenment science aficionados to make of these alleged events?
A bunch of people lying to make an ideological point?
Fictional parables that have been mistaken for historical reporting?
Symptoms of mass hallucination?
Exaggerated or otherwise distorted accounts of everyday events?
If you are a believer, the authenticity of such miracles may be a load bearing column of your faith; or miracles may support a faith based on a ‘personal encounter’ with the Transcendent; or miracles may be a slightly uncomfortable aspect of a faith deduced through reason.
If not, you may believe that the Bible’s miracle stories are meant to be understood metaphorically: “It was as if the food supply had increased; it was as though Jesus had walked on water.” If you are a non-believer, the objective impossibility of most reported miracles may contribute to your skepticism.
Finally, you may accept the validity of at least some so-called ‘miracles’, but you may chock them up to non-miraculous causes:
The parting of the Red Sea was caused by a strong wind.
The apparitions at Fatima were an optical illusion.
The cures at Lourdes testify to the healing power of the human mind.
But what if I were to tell you that all of these explanations are wrong…on both sides?
Inspired by the positivist philosophers of the early 20th century (e.g. Ayer, Wittgenstein, Austin), we normally sort events into three buckets: (1) the set of all events that can be reliably repeated at our discretion (scientific method), (2) the set of all events that may repeat but cannot be replicated on demand and (3) the set of all events that can never be repeated.
The first set contains the propositions of empirical science. The second set concerns potentially recurring patterns. The third set consists of events that can (or will) never be repeated under any circumstances:
Given certain standardized conditions, water will always boil at 100°C.
The Boston Red Sox have won a few world series and may do so again, but neither wishing nor rooting can make it so.
Humpty Dumpty can only fall off the wall once (since all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again).
Would it surprise you to learn that our first two sets (above) are empty (ø)? The Universe consists entirely of events belonging to the third set. Sometimes two events are so similar that we’re tempted to use an ‘R word’ (repeat, reflect, recur, etc.). But similarity, no matter how close, is never identity. Regardless of resemblances, every event is unique; otherwise they would all be just one event.
On one level, all events are congruent – they are all ‘event-shaped’, whatever that means; but on another level, no two events are ever the same. Consider the cells in your body. There are more than 30 trillion of them living at any one time. Enough? (BTW, the national debt of the United States is also 30 trillion…dollars.)
They are all descended from a single cell, and they all have certain structures and processes in common, but no two cells are the same cell. Two cells may be of the same type, but no two cells are the same cell. Each cell is an independent organism, occupying a unique region of spacetime at a particular site in the body, performing a specific set of functions, enjoying (or not) a unique life trajectory.
Outside the classroom ‘A = B’ if and only if A is B, in which case A and B are just two names for one event. “You call it corn; we call it maize.”
There are no absolutely, positively repeatable events because…
It is impossible ever to reproduce exactly the initial conditions of any experiment.
No true event is ever entirely the product of its initial conditions; there must always be an element novelty - the sine qua non of Being.
The initial conditions of any event are always the entire Universe of past events.
Each event is a unique reaction of a unique antecedent Universe to itself. Every event automatically becomes part of the antecedent Universe of all future events. Therefore every event contributes novel conditions that ensure that no future event can ever duplicate any past (or present) event. (Is this an extension of Godel?)
The Universe is a block chain. Every novel event adds to the chain, making it unique. Therefore, every event has a unique pre-history. No one ever steps in the same river twice (Heraclitus), not just because the river flows but because every ‘stepping in’ changes the river forever.
Patterns that appear congruent are only congruent down to a certain level of detail. All events appear ‘congruent’ on one scale, but any two events can always be differentiated on another scale.
The structure of the Universe is fractal. Everywhere and on every scale, it is self-similar. As your perspective broadens, the same patterns repeat. On the other hand, every iteration is slightly different from any other iteration on some scale.
“There is nothing new under the Sun!” That’s the adult version of my children’s frequent complaint, “Mom, there’s nothing to do, I’m bored” to which my spouse would always reply, “Only boring people get bored.” She’s right, of course! How can anyone ever be bored when so much is happening all at once all the time and everything that happens happens only once?
In fact, there is nothing under the Sun that is not new! Everything that is, is new, always. Being and novelty are synonymous. How could they be otherwise? What claim to being would Y have if Y were identical to X. Y would simply be X…X would be, period! ‘Being Y’ would not be being at all.
So where do so-called miracles fit in this picture? Nowhere…and everywhere. ‘Miracle’ is simply another name for ‘Event’. Every event is miraculous, i.e. unique – a novelty, the product of creativity, ultimately uncaused. An event may (or may not) be predictable, but it can never be certain.
Analyzing the apparent consistencies in the physical world (induction), we agree with Annie: there is a high probability that the Sun will come up tomorrow…but it’s not a certainty. Therefore, every sunrise is a miracle, exactly as the Ancients taught. Have you ever truly watched the sun rise? Then you know. Every sunrise is unique, every sunrise is a miracle. Arguing whether miracles are real is a colossal exercise in self-deception. Miracles are events so of course they’re real (unless your cosmology does not include ‘real events’).
You object: It was a miracle that the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI, beating ‘the greatest show on turf’ but it was not a miracle that there was an Equinox on March 21st. But these events are only apparently different: one was a ‘long shot’, one a ‘sure thing’, but neither was ultimately guaranteed. I wasn’t brave enough to bet on the 2001 – 02 Patriots, but I’m all in on the time of tomorrow’s sunrise; even so, it’s still a gamble.
Miracles do not violate the Laws of Nature! How could they? The ‘Laws of Nature’ are just one way of conceptualizing what is. (Joyce’s Ulysses is another.)
Every event is, and is not, the same as any other event. To the extent that one event appears to duplicate another, we call it natural. To the extent that it doesn’t, we call it novel. When an event is massively discontinuous with its predecessors, e.g. the Red Sea parting, we call it miraculous.
But we are just putting labels on a continuum. It’s like the EM spectrum. It’s smooth but we call one part red and another part blue. In reality, it’s all just light. Every event is natural; every event is novel; every event is miraculous. For all their connotative differences, the three words are denotatively synonymous.
Nor can we explain away ‘miracles’ by reducing them to safe, every day, non-miraculous, seemingly repeatable processes. Rather, the events we call ‘miracles’ are simply demonstrations of Nature’s creativity. They reveal aspects of nature we don’t often notice.
Nature is not an inert stage set, suitable only as background for a Broadway blockbuster; nature is a force, an eruption, a physis. Nature does not merely ‘contain’ events. Nature lends its shape to events and is in turn shaped by them.
Nature does not follow some pre-determined set of rules; it makes the rules. Whatever events occur, whenever and wherever – that’s nature; we abstract patterns from those events and call those patterns, laws.
Miracles do not occur outside the sphere of the possible; but they do live on the frontier. They encourage us to expand our sense of what’s possible, of what’s natural. They expose us to the transcendent power that is immanent everywhere in our material world.
It’s a great mistake to imagine that Nature constrains variety. Rather, it is the rich top soil from which novelty continually sprouts. Nature is more than just the tiny subset of phenomena that can be approximated in a laboratory setting. Nature is what’s happening! Call it ‘miraculous’…or not, “It’s still rock and roll to me.” (Billy Joel)
Image: Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1818. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Oil on canvas, 94.8 cm × 74.8 cm (37.3 in × 29.4 in). Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.
