Does God continue to do miracles today? Unequivocally, yes. And the reader of this article knows that to be true, if they take a moment to reflect on things.
Philosophically, miracles are (1) highly unusual events in the physical or material world,
(2) possessing likely supernatural or immaterial causation, and (3) possessing likely revelatory significance. (1) By highly unusual events in the physical or material world, what is meant is that (a) they rarely occur (second class miracles) or (b) they never occur (first class miracles). (2) By possessing likely supernatural causation, what is meant is that they apparently occur without any known natural causes or without any reasonably potential and knowable natural causes, necessitating one to posit the existence of a supernatural or immaterial cause for their very occurrence. It is an open question whether that supernatural or immaterial cause is divine or angelic, and if angelic, whether Satanic or not. (3) By possessing likely revelatory significance, what is meant is the miracle is a sign, a moral sign to something or someone beyond itself. It confirms an existing truth or establishes a new truth about something or someone. It is always the production of something really good, whether that real good be temporary or more permanent. (Geisler, N., Christian Apologetics, p. 276-283 (Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 1976)
If you want to see just one of those miracles, hold up a mirror to yourself. You are that miracle, you are the special and direct creation of Almighty God. And you already know or suspect that to be true. Here is that insight fleshed out to help you understand what you already know.
1. You already know you exist in a world that is at least partially material. You directly and infallibly perceive a world external to yourself. You perceive material things in it. These material things are reducible to matter and energy. This world is called reality. And you know yourself to be a part of it. This direct awareness is called the self-evident truth that is perception. At the instant you perceive this world, there is no doubt in your mind that you are perceiving this reality. With all other aspects of the mind: remembering, imagining, conceiving, reasoning, judging, desiring, you can have doubt. But in the simple act of perception, you never have doubt. It is as if your judgment that the perception is true is fused with your perception.
2. You already know you possess a mind and a will that is at least partially immaterial. You directly perceive or observe three things about this reality. (a) You perceive the mental activities of your consciousness and distinguish them one from another: perceiving, remembering, imagining, conceiving, reasoning, judging and desiring. They are at least partially immaterial. (b) You perceive the mental products of your consciousness: objects of perception, memory, imagination, conceiving, reasoning, and desiring. Some of those objects are at least partially immaterial; some, wholly immaterial. You already know the immaterial ideas of truth, goodness, beauty and God, the ideas by which you know. You already know the immaterial ideas of justice, liberty and equality, the ideas by which you judge and choose. These immaterial ideas are not reducible to matter or energy. (c) You perceive human behaviours being played out in the world. The name for these three self-evident truths of perception is introspection. And you know these things to be infallibly true in your own life. You already know these three things to be effects; they exist, but they need not exist. You can imagine a time when they did not exist or would not exist; namely, a time when you did not exist or would not exist. From these effects, you directly infer the existence in yourself of three powers: a power to be acted upon, a power to know, and a power to choose. These powers are necessarily at least partially immaterial to explain your direct knowledge of immaterial things. The name for them is the human mind.
3. You know yourself to be one of those highly unusual events in the physical or material world, that never occurs through material causation: you are conscious being, possessing a mind and a will that is at least partially immaterial in character. In other words, you are a first class miracle.
4. You already know your mind to be a product of supernatural creation. You know the material never gives rise to the immaterial. This is the case whether the material body is put together randomly (Darwinian evolution) or through design (directed evolution, scientific or biblical creationism). It never happens that the material causes the immaterial. The categories of material and immaterial are distinct categories of being. We are not talking about the creation of the material human body. We are talking about the creation of the immaterial aspects of the human mind. The gulf between the material and the immaterial is impassible from the purely material side going up. However, an immaterial being God possessing infinite power reaching down in infinite love can readily span that gulf. God created reality. God can work a miracle, and, it appears, already has worked a miracle in your life: he has already infused you with a mind capable of knowing the immaterial, capable of knowing him.
5. Your very existence is a sign to you and to others that God exists and moves in the lives of each and every human being. Only God has the power to create something (your mind) out of nothing.
What do you do with that? The issue is not with the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection. We will get to that in a later article. The issue is with you.
If you have turned from that knowledge already given to you, already known by you to be self-evidently true, you are already lost. You have already denied truth and love. You have not responded with gratitude to the love already shown you: the unsurpassably great gift of consciousness. It is not something you earned. It is not something you deserved. It is a free gift from Almighty God. And more gifts are to come as you respond appropriately to truth and love. The great sin of atheism or agnosticism is not so much the sin of ignorance, but the sin of ingratitude. Atheists and agnostics already know truth and love and turn from both.
Jesus would repeatedly say his opponents reject him because they know not (in the sense of truly understand) the scriptures. They do not recognize God as he stands before them in himself. They do not recognize the hand of God as he works in their lives through him. It is equally true that the non-believer rejects God because they know not (in the sense of truly understand) themselves. They do not recognize God as he metaphorically stands before them in the special creation that is themselves. They do not recognize the hand of God as he already has worked in their lives to create them as who and what they are.
The promise of God is to you can turn back and metaphorically return home at any time. Isn’t now a good time?
Rob Sutherland is a graduate of University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School He is a criminal defence lawyer with 30 years experience, a member of the bars of Ontario, Alberta, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and Manitoba. He is a Senior Canadian Fellow at the Mortimer J. Adler Centre for the Studies of the Great Ideas, an American think-tank based in Chicago. He has published one book “Putting God on Trial: the biblical Book of Job,” a defence of God’s goodness in the face of his authorization of undeserved and unremitted evil in the life of Job and the world, which is taught at a number of Canadian, American and Indian universities and available through Amazon. He is writing a second book “Putting Jesus on Trial: the biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,” a defence of Jesus’ divinity.
