Miracles Exist. But Perhaps They Are Only

Miracles exist. But perhaps they are only miracles to our eyes, because they seem to defy known laws of biology or physics. My thesis is that miracles are everywhere, from the tiniest single-celled organism up to the milky way, but that all miracles -- those we understand and those we don't -- follow natural laws. The universe itself could not exist without consistent and natural laws.

Let's consider one of the most miraculous events of all: the existence of life. Nobody can prove just how life came about, and though we have many theories about its origin -- from the idea that God created life, to the idea that life came in the form of microbes from outer space, to the contention that life arose from an amino acid soup over 4 billion years ago -- there is no doubt that even a simple bacterium is a miracle. Consider that some bacteria can survive in the boiling hot temperatures of the thermal vents at the bottom of the sea, while others can survive freezing temperatures, and still others live deep in rocks and must wait for a single photon or two to come their way before they can metabolize light and "eat." The diversity and creativity of life, from these hardy, unseen organisms all the way up to peacocks with their gorgeous, iridescent tails, all things great and small -- this is miraculous. And yet what is miraculous does follow natural law. Richard Dawkins, of Oxford University, has noted that sometimes the beauty and creativity of nature is so incredible that people call it an act of God, a "miracle," something that cannot be explained. He calls this "the argument for God from awe." The awe that nature and the universe inspires sometimes leads us to believe it is a supernatural miracle. But in truth, the great naturalist Charles Darwin offered profound insights into how this diversity is created, through a process called natural selection. Natural selection, and a variation on it (sexual selection), can explain much of nature's profound variety.

It is miraculous, as well, that the universe has created life, and that life has evolved to the point of homo sapiens -- ourselves -- who can actually peer into the secrets of that universe. Some might call this a supernatural miracle as well, and assume that "God" created "Man" to gaze upon and appreciate his creation. The physicist John Wheeler spoke of the miracle of the cosmos when he described the Universe as a giant "U," beginning with the Big Bang, and ending up with the human eye looking back at the beginning. It is almost incomprehensible, and truly inspiring, to witness the scientific leaps made in physics in the last century. We can now split photons. We have a strange theory called quantum mechanics, which has given us superconductors and may soon give us quantum computers. We have gazed into the very machinery of the cell and found ways to understand and manipulate its genetics. With stem cell therapy and cloning we may find that science brings us many "miracles" -- many unforeseen cures, and much suffering alleviated. However, there is no doubt that the amazing fact of human consciousness and intelligence can at the very least be correlated with brain size, and that we can trace a path of evolution from the great apes to chimpanzees to ourselves. Our brains are four times the size of a chimpanzee's. As cell biologist Christian de Duve, a Nobel Prize winner, has stated, our descendants many eons from now may have brains two or three times as big as our own, and for them, relativity theory may be like a child's game, and perhaps they will literally hear the music of the spheres.