Yes to Miracles

(but no to omnipotence)

​​First Thoughts (Jay McDaniel)

In China today, just before national exams, parents and children will sometimes go to Buddhist temples to pray for good luck.  Typically these parents and their children have prepared for these exams very hard, and they are not asking the spirit whom they address in prayer -- Kuan Yin -- to provide an alternative to hard work.  They are not asking for a "miracle" that obviates the need to study, but for a "miracle" that is complementary to study.  They are seeking divine guidance and assistance which works with, not against, their own efforts.

In Rwanda today, when a loved one is seriously ill, his or her friends and family will do something similar.  They will go to a church and pray to God for healing.  Of course, at the same time, the will provide their loved one with the best medical help possible.  They know that diseases have power, too, and that death takes its course on all people.  They ask God to help in whatever ways God can to extend the life of their loved one, until death can come naturally.  They are not asking for a "miracle" that violates God's will, but for a "miracle" that is complementary to God's will, whatever it is.

Of course, these kinds of activity are occuring all over the world today, and not just in China and Rwanda.  I mention China and Rwanda because, as it happens, I am faculty advisor for international students at the college where I teach, and I have been visiting with students from these two countries over the past few weeks.  On every continent people are praying for what John Cobb calls miracles of local significance.

In addition to these local miracles, there are people all over the world today who are praying for translocal miracles: that is, miracles which involve large numbers of people who do not know one another in an intimate way, but who are nevertheless implicated in one another's lives.  After the genocide in Rwanda, many people in that country prayed for healing for the people of Rwanda.  They prayed that the people in that country might come to care for one another and live together in peace and freedom.  And today there are people in China praying for their nation in similar ways.  They are praying for miracles.

Is it reasonable to hope for miracles?  Is is reasonable to pray for them?  Can a person believe in miracles and in science?  We asked John Cobb, one of the world's leading Christian theologians, to help us begin thinking about this question in a philosophical way.  He is not offering a final word, but he is offering an encouraging word.  Keep in mind that. for process theologians such as John Cobb, our universe is indeed enfolded within a Life whom people address by various names.  He uses the word "God."  And keep in mind that, for process thinkers, this Life is continuously influential throughout the universe, and also on our small planet, both locally and translocally.  God does not come and go; God is always here, with us.  But also know that God's power is that of love not compulsion.  Often this power is soft and quiet.  But sometimes, as John Cobb makes clear, this power can be dramatic and astonishing.   It can be miraculous.  What you below, then, is an encouraging word about miracles, followed by a more specific discussion, again by John Cobb, about how mental influence may play a role.

Photo: Susannah Stubbs (Artist in Residence, Open Horizons)

We Live in a Thoroughly Miraculous World
by John B. Cobb, Jr.

Miracles have a bad reputation in the modern world.  Hume spoke for “modern man” when he said that it was vastly more probable that people lied or were deceived than that their accounts of miracles are true.  The issue since the Enlightenment, however, has not been a factual one.  The flat denial of miracles is based on metaphysics rather than on experience.  Themetaphysics is based on a physics that declares that “natural laws” have universal validity and can explain everything.  In this context “miracles” are defined as events that are in conflict with natural laws.  Clearly they are excluded. 

The fact that miracles play a large role in traditional religious thought shows, to the modern mind, that religious thought must be superseded by science.  Deception and fraud play a role in every dimension of human existence, and perhaps more in the realm of “miracles” than elsewhere.  In any case, the discovery that deception and fraud do occur in some accounts of miracles is used to justify the total rejection of miracles. This modern way of putting matters, however, is confused and confusing.  Traditional religious teaching never affirmed miracles in the sense of "conflict with natural lawas."  Since traditional thought did not include the idea of natural laws it cannot say anything about the breaking of such laws. 

Miracles of Translocal Significance

The critics of Christianity and other traditional religions are right in one respect.  “Miracles” play a large role in the Bible and in Christian history.  But if they are not violations of natural law, what are they?

In the Bible, miracles are astonishing events in which God is seen to work dramatically.  The definition is difficult, because the line between what is ordinary and what is miraculous is not always clear.  God is at work in everything; so simply appealing to divine agency does not draw that line.  However, a major significance of miracles was to give divine authority to someone.  In the Gospel of John, the miracles worked by Jesus are called “signs.”  The Catholic Church often appealed to the many miracles worked by its saints as a “sign” of its legitimacy and divine authority.

A very remarkable occurrence which is felt to represent God is a “miracle,” and in that sense I affirm miracles.  For example, there have been some very remarkable events of great historical importance that I think of as miracles.  The shift without violence that took place in South Africa from apartheid to an inclusive democracy was, for me, a miracle.  I think of it as a miracle not only because it was very different from what was expected but also because the key players were serious believers in God who were open to divine guidance.  Through them God brought about results that were the opposite of what I and almost everyone else expected.

Miracles of Local Significance

Most miracles are events of local significance.  They are especially important in the Catholic Church because people cannot be named saints unless they worked miracles.  The great majority of these events are remarkable and unexpected healings.  When a healing occurs in direct contradiction of what responsible medical professionals anticipate, we are inclined to speak of this as a miracle.  When the one who is healed is a person of strong faith, or when some individual who is well known for the gift of spiritual healing has been involved, or simply when many people have been praying for this healing, the sense that it is miraculous is heightened.

There is no strict contradiction between affirming that natural laws are never broken and affirming miracles in the biblical sense.  No one supposes that we know all the laws of nature.  In any case, these laws need not be understood as rules imposed inflexibly upon the world.  They may be understood as descriptive generalizations about what happens.  In this case they are statistical.  Statistical laws are not broken when something happens very different from what they lead one to expect.  But astonishment and wonder are often appropriate responses. 

Further, one may even formulate some generalizations or “laws” about these miracles that we often call “faith healings.”  Common sense based on extensive experience recognizes that the emotions and expectations of one who is sick play a large role in the process of healing.  The effects that expectations have on the body are such that no test of the value of a drug is valid unless the drug is proved to have more benefits than a placebo.  A change of emotional or spiritual state can have a quite dramatic effect on the body.  This can be the result of the influence of others.  More surprisingly the attitude and expectation of one person may also have a direct effect on the body of another.  

The Tip of the Iceberg

The body is always working for its own healing.  Some of us associate that with God’s universal activity in the world.  When the mental and emotional state of a person supports this healing work it can achieve quite remarkable results.

Parapsychologists have engaged in numerous experiments that show the influence of a person’s mind on her or his body, of one mind on another, and of the mind of one person on the body of another.  Modernity has pushed all this to one side in order to develop chemical cures and remarkable operations.  This has led to astonishing advances.  But none of this in fact excludes the functioning of the human spirit in other ways that interact with the physical causality that modernity has emphasized.  In cases in which this other functioning becomes the dominant factor in what happens, believers speak of miracles, whereas modern people are likely to suppose that further scientific study will provide an explanation at the approved physical level.  

I do not doubt that more and more can still be learned about the body.  But I am a believer who is also convinced that more and more can be learned about the amazing capacities of the mind, the soul, and the spirit.  If their influence on the course of events is all considered “miraculous,” then the world we inhabit is thoroughly miraculous.  The events we are likely to call miracles are just the tip of the iceberg.  

Miracles and Mental Influence
by John B. Cobb, Jr.

Question: 

In prayer, Dr. Cobb said our thoughts can impact another's body—often times these healings are called miracles, although they are not supernatural. Can this effect positive and negative? Did the imprecatory psalms affect the bodies of others? Does this validate the possibility of magic, telekinesis, Criss Angel, and voodoo, among other things? Furthermore, can a human influence the nonthinking physical world? According to process thought, could Jesus have walked on the water. Could Peter?

Reprinted from Ask Dr. Cobb in Process and Faith
Publication Month: December 2007

Dr. Cobb's Response: This question raises the question of the limits of possibility. This is a good question for process theology, because this theology rejects the limits on possibility established by the mechanistic, materialist world view. In that world view, still largely adopted by scientists, the sphere of subjectivity can have no effect on what happens in the objective world. This is, of course, contrary to common sense, and extremely few people really believe it. But it has a great influence still on the explanations scientists seek and prefer.

For example, in the field of physiological psychology, scientists study the brain to explain what happens subjectively. Very few study what happens subjectively to explain what happens in the brain. Years ago the Center for Process Studies held several conferences with Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the split brain. Sperry came to the conclusion that conscious experience was required as an explanatory factor for his data. He became quite excited by this, thinking this would bring in a new day in reflection about the status of values. Regrettably, from my point of view, this part of his theory was simply ignored by the scientific community. The assumption remains intact that eventually the study of the brain as an objective phenomenon will explain all subjective experience.

Process thought, on the contrary, takes subjective experience very seriously and sees it as causally efficacious. Ontologically it is primary. Objects are objects for subjects. The actual entities that are objects for subjects were, in the moment of their occurrence subjects. All past subjects have some effect on all future ones. Clearly the objects studied by science are affected by what happens subjectively. Clearly, also, this expands the sphere of what is possible. But how far?

Most of us would start with the influence of our personal experience on our bodies. We process folk do not doubt that when one decides to type a word, and then does so, that the decision plays a causal role in relation to the movements of our fingers. But can our decisions or our emotions affect the flow of blood through the body? I am not one who has engaged in much experimentation along lines like these, but I did once learn to raise the temperature of my fingers by concentrating attention. On a wider scale, no medicine can be approved today without taking account of the placebo effect. The evidence that mental attitudes and expectations affect general bodily conditions seems indisputable. Even though scientific theory has not been adjusted to take account of any of this, and even though most philosophers ignore it, the public accepts it, and those involved professionally in health care assume it.

One more step is hardly controversial with the general public. People are affected by the feelings and attitudes of other people in their environment. Some would argue that this influence results from the interpretation of sensory queues. Process thinkers are open to the view that we can quite directly feel the anger or joy of others. This can affect our own mood, and through that our bodily condition. A hypnotist has a great effect on her or his subject, and can get the subject to do things that seem physically impossible when one is not hypnotized. It is not a long step from phenomena such as these to the influence of intercessory prayer by persons who are present.

The questioner points out that this opens the door to negative influences. There is no doubt of this. To be surrounded by angry, threatening people certainly has a negative effect on one’s feelings and even on the functioning of one’s body.

But many people place the limits somewhere around this point. They do not believe that persons who are not in close contact can affect one another’s subjective states. For process thinkers, this is an empirical question. Metaphysically, the assumption is that every event in the past has some effect on what happens now. But most of the content of the vast majority of past events has no effect. We cannot deduce from the metaphysics that any particular type of past event can have any particular effect in the present.

The metaphysics is open to the view that events are causally efficacious in other events only through the mediation of contiguous events. This would exclude mental telepathy; for the events lying spatially between the sender and the receiver cannot be thought to contain the messages attributed to telepathy. The limitation of influence to direct or mediated contact would set rather narrow limits of possibility. Some process folk take that view.

Whitehead himself did not. His metaphysics allowed action at a distance. His judgment was that the most likely situation was that there is no action at a distance in purely physical relations, such as the transmission of energy, but that there is action at a distance where mentality (in his highly generalized senses) is involved. Since his day, the evidence for action at a distance in the realm of quanta has increased. This opens the door to both positive and negative influences at a distance.

The main point to be made from the side of process thought, however, is not that paranormal events occur or do not occur, but that evidence for and against their occurrence should be examined without prejudice. In my view, when this is done, mental telepathy must be accepted as probable.

Thus far I have stayed close to Whitehead. The question is also about psychokinesis, a topic Whitehead did not address. Can subjective states affect physical conditions outside of one’s own body. First, can they directly affect the bodies of other people? Second, can they affect inanimate objects?

In technical terms, Whitehead’s view is that “hybrid feelings” are the ones that feel the mental elements in other subjects. Hybrid feelings are prominent in human subjects; so both positive and negative influence is not hard to understand. We may assume that hybrid feelings are significant elements in cellular experiences. So that subjective states of one person may have an effect on living things, including human bodies, is not implausible. I believe the evidence for this is considerable.

What is hardest to believe is that subjective states influence inanimate bodies. We are inclined to think that hybrid feelings play a very small role in the constituents of such bodies. I myself would guess that they do not influence these sufficiently to cause significant changes. However, this, too, is an empirical question. Stories of bending spoons and teleportation should be examined with an open mind. Theory should conform to fact and not refuse evidence because of prior expectations. Quanta may be highly sensitive to human feelings, for all we know.

The questioner asks specifically about Jesus or Peter walking on water. I doubt that these are factually reliable stories. However, if the question is about possibility, I do not want to take a wholly negative view. There are better evidenced accounts of persons floating in the air than these. Some Hindu yogis are reported to be able to do this. I find it hard to believe and do not know how well occurrences of this sort are attested. But I keep an open mind..

Our ignorance in these matters is vast. A major contribution to this ignorance is the strong bias among scientists against even studying these questions. Those who have done so despite the strong prejudice incurred have had their data and conclusions largely ignored, and often ridiculed, by their colleagues. I feel strongly that the commitment of so many scientists to an outdated metaphysics is a serious social and intellectual problem, one that we should directly confront and challenge. Meanwhile we have a gullible public ready to believe almost anything about such matters, a media that increasingly panders to their interest, and an academic community that will not even investigate these matters except from a hostile perspective.

By far the most thorough study of all of this has been done by David Griffin. Approaching matters open-mindedly as a process thinker, he was convinced by evidence for many of the claims of parapsychologists. His book is Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Explanation. I commend it to all who have serious interest.

Photo: Susannah Stubbs