What makes a miracle a miracle? Is it the type of causation that issues in the miraculous event? Or is it the fact that the miraculous event fails to fit an expected pattern? Suppose God parts the Red Sea in the manner depicted in the movie "The Ten Commandments." Does the miraculousness of this event reside in the fact that this TYPE of event does not occur (except for the one miraculous occasion on which it does occur) and so constitutes an exception to a regularity? Or does the miraculousness of the event reside in the fact that a supernatural cause brings about this event TOKEN? Or both? My claim is that both are involved. A miracle is both a violation of a law of nature and something whose cause is supernatural.
Strictly speaking, ontically speaking, a miraculous event is not an inexplicable event. If we are ignorant of the natural causes of an event, we may be tempted to call it miraculous, but this is a loose epistemic use of the word that we should avoid. A miracle, strictly speaking, is an event for which there cannot be any natural explanation. It is an event for which there is a cause but not a natural cause. An event that occurs without a cause is not a miracle but merely a brute event.
So a miraculous event is one that has a supernatural cause. But it cannot be solely in virtue of supernatural causation that a miraculous event is miraculous. Suppose I am about to light a cigar. I bring the flame close to the tip of the cigar. Suppose that at that instant God suspends the natural causation whereby flame ignites flammable material and directly causes by supernatural means the cigar to ignite on the occasion of the flame's coming close to it. Now it seems as clear as anything that cigar-ignition is not a miraculous event-type. So this token of cigar-ignition is not miraculous despite the fact that its cause is supernatural.
A caused event that is miraculous, therefore, is not miraculous solely in virtue of its having a supernatural cause. The event must also constitute an exception to a regularity. By a regularity I mean a pattern of property-instantiations 'out there in the world.' I don't mean a statement that expresses a regularity. I should think that there are some exceptionless regularities in nature. At every spatiotemporal position the maximum velocity of an electromagnetic signal is 186, 282 miles/second. No matter where you go in spacetime there is this cosmic uniformity.
Could God create a universe in which this uniformity is not to be found? Presumably yes. But in the actual universe it is found. So I am still having a hard time understanding how God could intervene in the workings of the actual universe so as to bring about some such miracle as that of of a signal that travels faster than the speed of light. Such a signal would be an exception to an exceptionless regularity and to that extent a logical impossibility. Recall the quotation I pulled from John Earman (Hume's Abject Failure, p. 8): ". . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity."
Recent Comments