What Is a Miracle? - Inters.org

1 Special Section: Spirituality/Medicine Interface ProjectWhat Is a Miracle? Daniel P. Sulmasy,OFM,MD,PhDAbstract:Based on arguments from theology and the philosophy ofscience, a miracle may be defined as: (1) a real, individual event, theoccurrence of which must be (or must have been), at least in prin-ciple, susceptible to empirical verification; (2) an event which mustbe extremely unusual or historically unprecedented from the per-spective of empirical scientific knowledge; (3) must evoke wide-spread wonder; (4) must be something freely given by God and notconjured; (5) must be understood as a special sign from God thattranscends the bare facts of the case and communicates a spiritualmessage; and (6) must have been affirmed as a miracle by thecommunity of believers to whom the message of the miracle must beaddressed, at least issue of theSouthern Medical Journalundoubtedlyrepresents the first time a multi-article section of a medicaljournal has been devoted to the subject of miracles.

2 Given allthe talk in popular circles about miracles and medicine, aserious treatment of the topic is long overdue. And given theviews expressed by the Buddhist,1 Islamic,2and Jewish3con-tributors to this issue, culturally competent clinicians willneed to be aware that the idea of miraculous healing is ac-cepted far outside the confines of fundamentalist no word is more abused in medicine than theword miracle . Sometimes this word is used to describe thework of a surgeon who has successfully performed an oper-ation that no one has done before, or to report that a medicalscientist has produced a wonder-drug. At other times theword is used by tabloids to describe a story about a so-called miraculous cure. These sorts of uses of the word miracle make genuinely religious people notion of religious miracles, however, sits awk-wardly inside the temple of scientific medicine. The idea thata patient is praying for a miraculous cure concerns manyphysicians.

3 Skepticism about miracles is most commonamong scientifically educated persons who balk at the ideathat anything can happen contrary to the laws of nature. Against the Laws of Nature?The idea that miracles are events that contravene thelaws of nature, as Pawlikowski relates in his article in thisspecial issue, dates to a 13thcentury Oxford professor oftheology, Alexander of Pawlikowski points out,for the first 12 centuries of Christian theology, this was not anecessary part of the definition. It has been under this for-mulation that skepticism about miracles has developed in was preeminent among these ar-gues that the idea of something happening contrary to thelaws of nature is irrational, and he concludes that belief inmiracles is therefore irrational. The Humean critique of beliefin miracles succeeds only against those who believe in theGod of the Deists, who stands outside the order of nature, setsup rational natural laws at the beginning of creation, and then,if he later intervenes, must do so irrationally and contrary tothe perfectly rational laws he established at the beginning oftime.

4 Orthodox Christian belief rejects this suppressedpremise, which is necessary for Hume s argument to the fact that he therefore is attacking a belief main-stream Christians do not hold, and that most deists have beendead for centuries, Hume s argument should cease to be con-sidered anything more than a curious historical Pinches points out in his article, Aquinas is oftenmisinterpreted regarding does not holdthat miracles are events that contravene nature. Rather, heargues that there areneverany events that occur contrary , he suggests, events may occur in a way thatis contrary to theorderof nature. what he means by thisdistinction between nature and the order of nature is that,according to orthodox Christian belief, God is the sustainingand first cause of everything in the knowable universe. Godis the creator-cause, as well as the occurrent cause of everything that exists and the ground of all proximate causation.

5 Inother words, orthodox belief rejects the deist presumptionthat God is only the first cause, ie, the creator of the world,but then stays out of the world and its independent asserts the orthodox belief that God not only createdthe world at the beginning of time, but is also intimatelyinvolved in the world as the occurrent, sustaining cause ofFrom St. Vincent s Hospital, Manhattan and New York Medical College,New York, New requests to Dr. Daniel P. Sulmasy, The John J. Conley Departmentof Ethics, Saint Vincent s Hospital, Manhattan, 153 W. 11th Street, NewYork, NY 10011. Email: 2007 by The Southern Medical Association0038-4348/0 2000/10000-1223 Daniel P. Sulmasy, OFM, MD, PhDSouthern Medical Journal Volume 100, Number 12, December 20071223everything that exists at every moment that everything thatexists, exists in contemporaneous and necessary relationshipto God. This necessary, sustaining, ongoing relationship withGod as the occurrent cause of everything is essential to thenature of things.

6 God is thus not outside of nature as anunnatural proximate cause that manipulates the natural, but isimmanently present to nature as the ground of all existingthings and the ground of causation. Nor is God just someother thing inside nature causing things to change by proxi-mate causation as a force of nature or as one superhumanthing exhibiting agency among the other things in the worldlike a neither case would God be , a phrase such as the laws of nature can onlymake sense if it is interpreted as the order of nature: a setof descriptions about how things usually operate, includingcausal explanations that trace back, imperfectly and incom-pletely, a chain of causes that would ultimately lead to a firstcause, a Prime Mover the god of the philosophers. Thetask of natural science is to explicate this natural order. None-theless, nothing that actually happens could ever be contraryto the nature of things or contrary to God s plans or rational-ity.

7 When something appears contrary to the order of nature,it may either be because we have incompletely understoodthis order of nature through our fallible science; or, it couldnot be described as unnatural because the nature of every-thing and every causal relationship that exists includes a nec-essary, contemporaneous relationship to God as its occurrentcause. Existence is always open to new disclosures of thereason and love of God. One might not understand how aparticular event comes about, but this does not imply that it isnot, at least in principle, knowable as a reasoned and free actof God s continuing creative engagement with the Cannot Be Explained by Science?Events happen naturally. No event is ever contrary tonature. People of faith call some of these events, which ap-pear out of step with the usual order of nature, miracles. Someclaim that these events are miracles because they cannot beexplained by science.

8 To illustrate why this view is also mis-guided, consider the following story:A 60-year-old Franciscan patient named Friar Roy de-velops pneumonia. As the infection resolves, his internistworries that a density persists on the chest x-ray. Friar Roy isa smoker, so the concern is quite real. Computerized tomog-raphy (CT) suggests a malignancy, and repeat scanning dem-onstrates its persistence six months after the original pneu-monia. The location of the lesion precludes transbronchial orpercutaneous biopsy, and he is scheduled for open biopsy andresection if the frozen section proves malignant. He gathersthe night before the surgery with his fellow friars for a com-munal celebration of the sacrament of the sick. He is anointedwith oil and his brothers pray for him. The following dayFriar Roy returns to the friary from the hospital early in theafternoon because his surgery has been canceled. His routinepreoperative chest x-ray, taken that morning, showed no le-sion to be removed.

9 A hasty CT scan confirmed that thelesion, which had been present for six months and was lastseen 10 days before, was no longer this a miracle ? Friar Roy and his Franciscan broth-ers thought it science settle the question of whether this was amiracle? The answer is absolutely not. Science might suggestthat this event was contrary to the order of nature, but as Ihave explained, this does not mean that this event was con-trary to nature. More importantly, deciding whether this eventcould be explained by science cannot, in principle, provedecisive in evaluating whether this event was a miracle . Yes,Friar Roy s lesion could have been a malignancy that re-gressed spontaneously, but it would have been highly un-usual. If this is what it means for something to happen withinnature but contrary to nature s order, one could affirm , this could this have been a peculiar case of a verypersistent scar from a pneumonia, but again the long persis-tence and then sudden disappearance of that scar would behighly unusual.

10 Again, if this is what it means for somethingto happen within nature but contrary to nature s order, onecould affirm this. Alternatively, could Fr. Roy s history havebeen an historically unprecedented expression of God s ra-tionality, love, and creativity with respect to the world? Theanswer is yes. This would have been highly unusual, and ifthis is what it means for something to happen within naturebut contrary to nature s order, one could also affirm cannot settle the question: it cannot decide betweenthese three or a thousand other explanations. Science cannotfully explain any individual reason that a particular event cannot be explainedby science might be due to human ignorance. Our scienceis fallible and constantly under revision. In fact, the knownuniverse seems far too big for us to believe that we willever fully comprehend all of its potentially knowable sci-entific reason why a particular event cannot be ex-plained by science might be a result of the laws of probabil-ity.