One day in my philosophy class, while we were discussing whether or not God exists, one argument came up suggesting that our existence was too well designed to have just naturally occurred we had to have been engineered by someone. The example that was given was that if you have a machine with hundreds of knobs and it will only work if all the knobs are lined up exactly right, it isn't going to function just because all the knobs just naturally landed in the right place, someone has to set them. Life as we know it could be nonexistent if any number of things were just slightly different. Like the amount of oxygen in the air or the strength of gravity. Therefore the argument states that in order for us to exist, God, our creator, must also exist.
This may be a stretch, but it made me start thinking about miracles. This is a story a friend of mine told me about a miracle he experienced.
The day that we went to Loma Linda, I was afflicted with a really bad headache. As my mom and I were waiting in the waiting room in between the various tests they did on my head, I slept on my mom’s lap. Sleep was the only way I knew to escape the pain, so I did as much of that as possible. They performed every head scan and test known to man and then they sent us home to wait for the results. A week or so later, they called us back. My parents went in to meet with the doctor and discovered that I had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Upon returning home they told me nothing. They tried not to worry me, but even though I didn’t know what the doctor had said, I wasn’t fooled by my parents’ attempts to keep me calm. After that day I knew everything was different and that something was seriously wrong. It was that night that I started praying my own prayers to the Lord to heal me.
Along with these, I had the prayers of my home church, and several other churches that we had family and friends in. This included my great uncle Jack, who had basically prayed me into existence because of my parents’ inability to have children. We had to make another appointment to have more tests and scans done. During the down time, all we could do was pray and try and enjoy life. One night, I had a really bad headache, so my parents put me to bed really early. My mom tells me that the next morning I woke up late (which was normal when I had headaches) and walked into the kitchen, groggy as usual. She asked me how I slept because of the migraine and I responded, “I slept well, the man kept me safe and took the pain away.” She must have freaked out hearing her eldest son talk about a strange man in his bedroom. She immediately asked her seemingly crazy son what he meant. I went on to describe a “Big” man in white robes who was sitting on the edge of my bed. My mom asked me if I was scared and I asked “Why would I be scared mommy? He was sent there to help me.”
A while after this, we went back to Loma Linda to have the follow up tests done. Unlike the last time, I hadn’t had a major headache in several days, and I felt fine during the tests. Some time after that, my parents were called back in again for the results of the new tests. The doctor first asked them if they were religious at all, and my parents said that they went to church and had a lot of people praying for me. The doctor said that the brain tumor had vanished and that he had no other explaination except that I had been miraculously healed."
There are stories of miracles in every culture all over the world. Are they universal because they are real? Or are they our way of explaining the unexplainable? Would you call them superstitions or miracles?
3 comments:
That is an amazing story. I would have to say that I would put my money on miracles. I am a Christian, and I agree with your first statement from a discussion in your Philosophy class. Humans are so complex, and we live in a complex universe, therefore I think it is much easier to say that we were created by someone rather than to believe that somehow we came into existence out of nothing. My dad is an athiest and he tells me that the belief of scientists is that all of the matter we see around us, including ourselves came about through proteins coming together to form matter. I find this much harder to believe than the belief that someone created us. Its like you said, if one little thing wasn't right, we would not exist at all. Humans have such specific needs and are so complex that it seems almost impossible that we weren't created. Also, animals and their mating rituals and survival tactics are so complex that they must have been thought of by a creator. The story you told, in my opinion was a miracle. I think that everyday each and everyone one of us will witness a miracle. Like you said, miracles happen all around the world, and I don't think that these miracles are unrelated coincidences, I think they all happen for a reason.
That is definitely an amazing story. I'm not sure about the money thing, though.
I think it's difficult to talk about miracles unless of course you're the one the 'miracle' is happening to. One common conception of miracle is that it is supposed to show something of God's nature in performing the miracle. This I think makes sense given that there are many extraordinary things in the world but not all of them we would call 'miracles'.
The problem with talking of miracles or God I don't think is because scientists have discovered that there are natural events that brought us into being. I don't really question the fact that we came about by some natural process, and neither do many religious believers. There are even conservative Christians that have no problem with this conception of origination. They say, if that's the way God formed us and that's the path God took in creating the world, then that's the way it happened.
The problem that arises, at least for me conceptually, is that for every incredible miracle we hear about there are a million more horrifying things that happen to people: men, women, and children alike. The question in comparison with the miracle here that comes up is why did God save this child and not these other children? Now we might jump on God's side to try to make some sense out of it. But I don't think that there are any explanations that will do justice to the lives of those who are not saved or released from their pain. Even if we say, on God's side, that God saving this child showed something of God's goodness, power, foresight. Because, if we do say these things, we might want to try saying it in front of those who were not saved. For example, no one saved the child who was immersed in boiling water.
This doesn't mean that I'm saying that miracles don't happen or that God doesn't exist, or that God is finicky about who should be saved. In your friends view, a miracle happened. That's what is important. But if 'we' say it, then how are we to respond to these other tragedies? By contrast, the task is a difficult one with no easy answers.
Are there stories of miracles all over the world? The problem is that while we might see them as miracles, in certain cultures where extraordinary events happen, they may say that the spirit of their ancestors came and took the tumor away. In a shamanic culture, they would say that the village shaman went into the spiritual realm and saved the child's soul from some sort of depletion of spirit or what have you. In Tibetan Buddhism, they might say that their prayers were heard by the Buddha of healing and the boy was cured. In other words, I don't think they would see them as miracles in the sense that God performed them. So if this is the case, I guess the question is would we still consider them miracles?
I would have to say that in many instances miracles are the only way to explain why something extraordinary occurred that no one seems to be able to figure out. In some events it is impossible for something like a tumor or a cancer to be in full swing and just somehow disappear. As for how we came into being, I find it hard to believe that we are a random set of events that led to the conception of an entire world and ecosystem. Even in taking courses that I am (biology and chemistry) it is hard to believe that random atomic elements came together and created a world or that life was created with a random spark of energy. There are even things that scientists cannot explain as far as how the world works and why certain things behave as they do. Is there a God because of this randomness? I have to believe that there is.
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