Miracles and Mini-Miracles

The End of Certainty by Ilya Prigogine

In A God of Beckoning? I embroidered upon the science laid out in Ilya Prigogine's book The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature a theological theory, if you will. It was a theory of mini-miracles. Where Prigogine saw occasions of pure random chance sparking evolutionary changes in living systems in the natural world, I saw opportunities for God to work little miracles.

Every time one of Prigogine's so-called dissipative systems — all living systems are dissipative systems — reaches a crossroads in the course of its development, a little miracle can occur. Instead of blind luck being responsible for which future path the system is going to take out of its present instability, God can beckon and the system can freely follow ... or not. God does not coerce compliance.

If the system indeed responds positively to God's call to it, it is as if it is echoing Mary, the mother of Jesus, when she answered the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation told of in Luke's Gospel. Mary assented by saying, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it to me according to your word." No coercion there.

Prigogine's pure science contains no such theological speculations. And it applies equally well to other types of systems subject to motion and change, including the moving, roiling particles that make up atoms, as understood today by quantum physics. Quantum objects, too, are supposed to be probabilistic with respect to the odds of whether certain events occur or not. I'd say they, too, are candidates for mini-annunciations and mini-miracles.

Likewise, the systems studied in the branches of physics called thermodynamics and chaos theory — not to mention in the theory of classical dynamics inherited from Newton — are aptly described by Prigogine's mathematics. These as well can receive and assent to mini-annunciations, in my theory, and be the occasions of mini-miracles.

All these types of systems have in common the fact that they change irreversibly over time. This means they evolve. Evolution is a word we typically associate with the origin of biological species, à la Darwin. Some believers in God feel the theory of evolution works against religion. In my view, there is ample reason to believe that the evolutionary history of living systems and of the several other kinds of systems subject to Prigogine's mathematical descriptions amount to a skein of mini-annunciations assented to, making for mini-miracles without number. All that is necessary to bridge theology to science is an image of every so-called "chance event" as being an opportunity for a mini-annunciation and a mini-miracle to occur.


It seems to me all of a sudden — I don't think I really believed this before — that a belief in miracles is indispensable to a belief in God. Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, confirms this in his op-ed piece "Much revealed in telling of the Hanukkah story."

The Jewish festival of Hanukkah which began last Tuesday night, and which Greenberg discusses, might be seen as a memorial of a military victory of the Jews over Seleucid Greek hegemony some 2,200 years ago, but Greenberg brings out the fact that what it really celebrates is a miracle. After the Jews' victory, there didn't seem to be enough oil to light the lamps of their Temple in Jerusalem, and keep them lit until a new oil supply could be prepared. But, no; a seeming one-day supply lasted fully eight days: the "miracle of the lights."

Greenberg explains it thus:

In the glow of the candles, the heroic feats of the Maccabees [in defeating their non-Jewish enemies] have become transmuted into acts of divine intervention. The blessing over the candles recited each night of the holiday goes: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, who wrought miracles for our fathers in days of old." Miracles, not victories.

... The victory is to be celebrated not for its own sake but for what it reveals.

One more violent confrontation has been lifted out of history and enters the realm of the sacred. A messy little guerrilla war in the dim past of a forgotten empire has become something else, something that partakes of the eternal. ... [This] may be the greatest miracle of Hanukkah: the transformation of the oldest and darkest of human activities, war, into a feast of illumination.

... If there is one, unchanging message associated with this minor holiday magnified by time, it can be found in the unchanging portion of the Prophets designated to be read for the Sabbath of Hanukkah. It is Zechariah 4:1-7, with its penultimate verse:

Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.

The Spirit of God is revealed not by might, nor by power ... but by miracles. The candlelight which by ordinary reckoning would last only a day instead lasts a week and a day. A world which by ordinary reckoning hasn't a prayer of evolving animals with God-blessed souls does so anyway. Who is to say that all such miracles are not skeins of mini-miracles? Such occasions of surprise would not defy the laws of nature at all, except that an event which by ordinary reckoning is the product of blind chance would actually be in a long series of nature's numberless assents to God's ceaseless mini-annunciations?