Epistle to Ansgar Letter 13: God and Miracles
March 9, 2025 AD
Feast Day of St. Cunegundes
Dear Godson,
On this day we celebrate St. Cunegundes, who was crowned Empress by Pope Benedict VIII when her husband St. Henry, Duke of Bavaria and King of the Romans, was crowned Emperor. She was avowed to virginity, and, with his consent, lived in continence with him. Calumny accused her of adultery, but she was vindicated by a miraculous sign: walking across flaming iron ploughshares without injury. She ruled as regent in the interregnum after Henry’s death in 1024. Thereafter, she became a nun, entering a convent she herself had built, and turning from a life of pomp and power to prayer and humble labor.
In addition to walking across flaming hot iron without hurt, the story is told that when her maid fell asleep one night, an unwatched candle lit the bed afire. Waking up in the midst of the blaze, the Cunegundes made the sign of the cross and the flames immediately disappeared.
It is often argued by atheists that reports of miracles must be false, because miracles abridge the laws of nature; and because the laws of nature cannot be abridged by definition, miracles do not exist.
This argument is circular.
Moreover, this argument it merely defines miracles as that which does not exist. Ripping down a roadsign leaves the road running to same destination. Likewise, changing the definition of a word does not change reality.
So, here. A miracle is a sign or a wonder deliberately sent via supernatural agency to convey a message or demonstration or achieve a divine end. A wonder, to be a wonder, must be wondrous, that is, outside the expected course of events. To be deliberate means it cannot be coincidence. It is possible to mistake a coincidence for a supernatural event; superstitious people do so all the time. Likewise, it is possible to mistake a supernatural event for a coincidence; atheists, who are, in their own way, superstitious people, are required by their worldview to make and repeat this mistake, regardless of evidence.
Let us put the superstitious and the atheist aside, because a debate over whether a specific event were miraculous or not, such as the parting of the Red Sea, or the Angel of Mons, is a moot question likewise if everything is a miracle, or if nothing is.
Instead, we turn to the root of the question: for the core of the skeptical argument assumes the laws of nature are not and cannot be breached, but also says miracles are fiction, since, were they real, they would breach natural law.
This argument overlooks the more fundamental assumption being made. The laws of nature, as we understand them, are the those motions and changes in earth, sea, and sky that occur in with predictable, indeed, mathematical regularity, repeatability, predictability. The great progress of natural science is the discovery of regularity hidden beneath the apparent irregularity, so that causes and effect, once unpredictable, now can be predicted with reasonable assurance, and coincidences or false opinions about the cause of certain effects can be dismissed.
The great boast of the Skeptics of the Enlightenment, and the utter falsehood, was that Churchmen preached the false opinion that the will or God was the efficient, immediate, and empirical cause of all effects from lightningbolts, to prophetic dreams, to plagues, to prosperity, to astronomical motions, to the origin of Man; but that all these things had natural causes, from atmospheric electricity, to Freudian psychology, to microbes, to economic forces of history, to Newtonian mechanics, to Darwinian natural selection; and once the true and scientific cause of these things can be known, there is no need to suppose the Will of God causes anything at all, or, for that matter, no need to suppose God exists.
In the Enlightenment account, God was only a provisional hypothesis offered to jury rig an otherwise empty theory of physics, meteorology, psychology, epidemiology, history, biology.
In reality, no Churchmen ever promoted any such idea. It is a strawman argument.
God is not a theory of physics. Living a god-centered life is not an astronomical model like heliocentrism or geocentrism. God is the first cause of all reactions, and the final cause of all willed actions, and is the ultimate cause of all things, including those granted to be within the free decision and will of God’s created beings, including us. Sin, evil, death, and the rebellion of nature against man all spring from the free disobedience of man and devil against the Divine. Why God permits free will hence permits evil is a deeper question, perhaps the deepest, but it is incidental to the challenge raised here by the Skeptic.
The Skeptic argues, namely, that the Laws of Nature include the efficient, empirical, and immediate cause of every physical motion, ergo God causes nothing.
The fallacy is twofold. First, the statement is ambiguous. The skeptic is conflating empirical causes with several forms of non-empirical causes. Second, the statement simply does not follow. It is a non-sequitur. Whether or not the Laws of Nature include the efficient, empirical, and immediate cause of every physical motion has no bearing on who and what causes the Laws of Nature to be as they are, or to be at all, and why. In addition to efficient causes, there are formal, final, and material causes; there are secondary and ultimate causes in addition to immediate causes; there are non-empirical causes in addition to empirical.
And there is evidence, physical as well as eyewitness testimony, that what men presume to be the Laws of Nature can be and have been abridged by odd events, unrepeated event, signs and wonders, in times past and continuing to the present. Speculation about what may happen once science determines the physical causes of all physical events is idle speculation, having no basis in fact. What men presumed to be the Laws of Nature in times past is not what men presume now.
When the Red Sea parted for the escaping Hebrews, it was to save them from pharaoh’s chariots. At present, there is no known physical explanation, no know physical process, which would make two halves of an ocean stand up like a wall and allow a multitude to walk dryshod between. If a physical process were to be discovered in the future, we would then know the immediate cause of the parting of the Red Sea, but we would not suddenly lack the knowledge that the ultimate cause was divine will. No matter how it was done, it was done by God. If, in that future day when the physical cause of the sea parting is known, the skeptic who claims this proves the matter to be a coincidence may be safely dismissed: for it would prove nothing of the kind. The event has none of the hallmarks of a coincidence, and every indication of being deliberate.
To use the opposite case, when the Children of Israel stood before Mount Zion, and beheld fire and lighting and voices and heard the blast of trumpets, they did not know the physical causes of ground lighting, which we now do, nor were they aware that subterranean gasses, heated, and blown at high pressure out of sinkholes or cracks in the ground produce a trumpet’s sound. However, to argue the lightnings and trumpet blasts just so happened to occur on the day and hour when Moses climbed the mountain to address the Lord and hear the recital of the law is a coincidence is absurd. Coincidences cannot be predicted, or summoned at will.
The assertion that the Laws of Nature are sovereign over any higher law is gratuitous assumption. In logic, a gratuitous assumption can be gratuitously denied.
One cannot argue that God does not exist because miracles are not real, if we have eyewitnesses to miracles both ancient and modern, and physical proof, such as the Shroud of Turin or the healings at Lourdes.
Likewise, one cannot argue that the laws of nature cannot be suspended by the lawmaker, as whoever has the power and authority to make a law has the power and authority to amend or break it.
And yet again, one cannot argue that an extraordinary event, even if it seems to break the Laws of Nature has done so: what we call the laws of nature are our intuitive inductions of what events preceded or cause other events, where repeated experience shows what is causal and what is coincidence. But a single event, with no prior precedent, not repeated, is immune from analysis. The cause versus the coincidence cannot be determined with certainty.
Even were that not so, the skeptic cannot carry the argument: what the ordinary operation of the law allows in ordinary circumstances is simply not what the law allows in extraordinary circumstance. In human law, for example, ordinarily a man convicted by a lawful trial, after the verdict and appeal, is punished. But it is not a breach of the law, not a crime, if the governor signs a pardon and commutes his sentence. In fact, there is a whole body of legal precedent, statute and caselaw, surrounding the gubernatorial right to pardon convicts, even if that right is rarely exercised and that law is rarely used.
God, being a timeless and transcendent spirit, is not now and never was regarded as the empirical cause of anything, God not being empirical. He is not a physical being bound by physical laws.
When God is praised for bringing the Hebrews out of bondage in Egypt with a strong and might hand, not even the most superstitious of foolish folk think a physical hand with four fingers and a thumb, each digit of a measurable length, mass and hue, complete with hair follicles and fingerprints of giant size but made of flesh and blood, reached down from the vault of the sky and physically picked up Jews in Goshen, knocking over houses and cows with his thumbnail, hoisted the hosts hundreds of feet in the air, and set them carefully on the far side of the Jordan. It is clearly metaphorical language.
Likewise, when heaven directs a storm to cease or heaven tells history to cast down a king from his throne, or heaven causes manna to fall, a stern man with a white beard is not picking up and throwing down clouds or sovereigns or bread form heaven with physical arms and fingers, any more than Shakespeare, when he decides Mercutio is to be stabbed, drives the iron into the young man’s gut himself.
Let us suppose the Prince of Verona ordered his officers to examine the crime scene with utmost care to determine the cause of death. No physical examination of the kinetic forces acting on Mercutio’s blade, not biological examination, howsoever fine, of his nerves moving the muscles in his arm, no psychological examination of Tybalt’s thoughts and desires will show the presence of Shakespeare. Shakespeare is not in Tybalt’s brain, or arm, or hand, or sword.
Shakespeare is not in Verona any more than God is in Creation. Shakespeare is not a character. He stands outside the fictional universe he creates. No empirical description of any action inside the world of the play will discover a chain of efficient causes and effects leading back to Shakespeare’s hand and arm. He mere decides that Tybalt will duel and stab Mercutio, and so it is written.
Likewise, God Almighty stands outside time. His Almighty Will decides the hosts of Sennacherib will perish, or Daniel in a lion’s den will be preserved. Whether an archangel or a pest of unseen microbes strikes the army is not to the point. Whether an invisible angel physically hold shut the mouth of the lions, or lion’s inspired awe of a holy man held them back, is likewise not to the point. The empirical causes, if any, could have been whatever was needed to carry out the divine decision.
God is the cause of all things in the world, save sin, for the divine will granted his creations freedom of the will whereby we stand or fall. But God is not the empirical cause, the efficient cause, the immediate cause, or any physical effect, save when it suits Him, any more than Shakespeare is the empirical, efficient, or immediate cause of the physical motions or mental changes of any of the props or characters in his plays.
Based on all that we have said, we now step into the most fundamental question: if cause and effect is real, not merely a mental convenience caused by the imperfect perceptions of man, if the Laws of Nature are real, and not merely a word-game invented by social convention, what caused them? Why are the Laws of Nature as they are, as opposed to another way? Why is the speed of light not twice its observed velocity in a vacuum, or half, or a hundredth? Why does gravity work by an inverse square law rather than by a linear proportion? Why is the universe finite in time, rather than unbegotten, infinitely old?
The study of the Laws of Nature operates by observing repeating regularities, measurable and mathematical, in models based on observations of the motions and changes in nature. No motion nor change happens without a cause. For from nothing, nothing comes.
Those who assert that all changes and motions are statistical, saying that such and such a cause gives rise to such and such an effect so many times out of a hundred trials, merely confess that their knowledge of the combination of causes giving rise to the effect is incomplete: they see the child and the mother, but know not the father. The idea so often bruited about by modern physics that effects, at times, arise from no cause, or causes, at times, fail to produce effect, is a gobbledygook of imprecise thinking, a by product of a contempt for rigorous philosophy. We know an unknown cause is operating when we see an effect and cannot identify the cause. We may or may not have false ideas about the unseen cause, but the idea that effects arise spontaneously is logically absurd.
Therefore every change and motion in the universe must have both efficient and immediate cause sufficient to account for it, and an ultimate cause which set all the chains of cause and effect in motion. And those ultimate causes must have further ultimate causes, all leading back to a First Cause.
The cause must be single for the same reason the universe must be single, and by the universe here, we mean all that exists, not merely events within range of our senses, within our lightcone, of within a continuum of events known or knowable. If two events interact with each other, or with a third event able to effect or to be effected by them, then whatever the reason is why they interact as they do, and not some other way, is mutual cause for them both. And whatever caused the universe is the cause of all mutual causes connecting otherwise apparently disconnected events.
The chain of cause and effect cannot be infinite, because there are no actual infinites. There must be an uncaused first cause at the outset of all chains of cause and effect for the same reason there must be an engine as the first cars of any railway train, no matter how long the train might be.
By the same logic, all effects must have a cause, since every effect is dependent upon, that is, conditional upon, its cause. If chicken eggs hatch into chicks, their existence is conditional: any time of place where chicken eggs cannot and do not exist, can have no chicks hatch there. If the chicken egg had been a vulture egg, a vulture would have hatched out, not a chicken. The species of bird depends on the species of egg. Change the egg, change the bird.
But the first cause, if it is first, must be unconditional. It must be something that could not be otherwise. It cannot be changed. Therefore this must be a necessary being. If invulnerable to change, since we observe everything in time changes, this necessary being must be timeless, outside of time, eternal. If outside of time, therefore outside of nature, therefore spiritual. The act by which the first cause gives rise to the universe must therefore be a spiritual act, that is, an act of will, that is, deliberate.
This being has the power and authority to create all of nature and all things in nature, including man, and to do so deliberately. What is deliberately created is known to the creator, hence the creator of all things must know all things. And the power to create all things in the universe necessarily involves the power to change and order all things, so the creator must be all powerful.
Hence the first cause is the eternal, omniscient and omnipotent creator, the necessary being and the supreme being. This all men know to be God.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
