Chet Raymo, “Miracles”

“Miracles”
by Chet Raymo

"It has been something of a sport for skeptics such as myself to debunk the so-called miracles of the Bible; that is, to suggest that events deemed miraculous- Noah's flood, the parting of the Red Sea, the fall of the walls of Jericho, and so on- have natural explanations. As much imagination has gone into the debunking as went into the accounts themselves. This always seemed to me a fool's errand; one might as well offer up natural explanations for the fantastic events of a Grimm fairy tale. My proper work, it seems to me, is not to show that miracles are natural, but to celebrate the natural as miraculous.

Remember this from Augustine's City of God? “Nor are those to be listened to, who say that the invisible God does not perform miracles, for even according to them he made the world, which surely they cannot deny to be visible. Indeed, whatever miracle may occur in this world, truly it is far less than the whole of the world, heaven and earth and all things that are in them, which God certainly made. But just like the Maker himself, even so the mode of his making is hidden and incomprehensible to man. And so, although those who constantly behold the miracles of visible nature hold them in small regard, nevertheless, when we consider them wisely, they are greater than the rarest and most unheard-of things.”

It is a theme you have heard here a thousand times: Why get excited by some imagined violation of natural law– raising Lazarus, ESP, the face of Jesus on a cheeseburger, crop circles- when far more spectacular things are happening all around us every day, indeed in every cell of our bodies at every instant. Why should I get excited about a fairytale story of water into wine when the plant on my windowsill turns water, air and dirt into red, ripe tomatoes?

The "mode and making" of the universe may be "hidden and incomprehensible to man," as Augustine says, but we can probe that incomprehensibility, as the perhaps-successful pursuit of the Higgs boson makes clear. The Higgs doesn't debunk the miracle of creation; it is part of the miracle. I think of something the Irish naturalist Tim Robinson says in “Stones of Aran”: “Miracles are explainable; it is the explanations that are miraculous.”

As I wrote I remembered a phase from a poem of Robert Lowell: "Our monotonous sublime." That's it. A three-word phrase. I don't remember the poem, or the context. Only the phrase, lodged somewhere in the tangled neurons of my brain. Our monotonous sublime.

That phase seems to encapsulate so much of what I am doing here, why I spend this hour every morning at my keyboard, stringing a few hundred words together, taking a few inchoate thoughts and buffing them up, tweaking a shine. I'm not tweeting. I'm not even blogging. I'm trying to keep myself awake. Awake to the sublime. The monotony of the commonplace. The tedium of the everyday. The humdrum ordinary. How easy it is to forget that that the ordinary is extraordinary, the commonplace is uncommon. How easy to fall asleep to sublimity.

Consider that phrase from Lowell that I pulled up from memory. No big deal, you say; I carry around a lifetime of memories. Every minute of every day I am evoking memories. As I write I am drawing upon remembered words, syntax, spelling. I remember who and where I am, and a good part of the 75 years of getting here. I don't stop to think about it. Drawing upon my store of memories is about as monotonous an activity as you can get.

And yet, and yet. That phrase from Lowell was somehow stored as a trace of neurons, electrochemical connections. For decades. Retrievable. No one yet knows how. Oh, how I wish I knew where and how the phrase was stored. By what sublime mechanism. And now I'm remembering something else, a line from the scholar of medieval Ireland John Carey that I quoted in Climbing Brandon. Carey is describing what we can learn from early Irish Christian writers, such as Augustinus Hibernicus: "Existence itself, them, is the ultimate miracle; had our eyes not grown so dull, they would be dazzled with ineffable wonder wherever we turned our gaze."

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

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