The miracle between faith and science
The Notepad of Michael the Great
"Like the notion of mystery, even that of miracle (from the Latin miror, to marvel) has the religious as its natural and original context, although both lend themselves to a variety of understandings and lexical uses that have inevitably made their meaning migrate also towards other contexts. Miracle indicates something out of the ordinary, which refers to a sphere of possibilities and activities that go beyond what man is used to knowing and experiencing in his daily life. Hence his natural connection with a sphere of forces and possibilities that belong to something or someone who is "other-than-man", and therefore the understanding of the miracle as an intervention of the gods or of God in the world of men.
From this point of view, the miracle closely accompanies the phenomenology of religion and somehow shares its results. That is, it can be an expression of genuine openness to transcendence and to the possibility of divine revelation, supported in this by a corresponding judgment of philosophical reasonableness; or degenerate into a credulity separated from the exercise of rationality, anxious to find the divine in what is not such, or worse by trying to subject it to one's own purposes, imitating its works in counterfeiting and in the practice of magic.
The notion of miracle mainly refers to the idea of "prodigy" or "portentous works", precisely because of its recognition as the intervention of the divine that bursts into the spaces and times of the ordinary; but does not neglect a certain connection also with the idea of wonder and amazement in the face of nature, reality, things, meaning by this to indicate that simple experience with which man accesses deeper layers of insight and contemplation of being, thus showing himself capable of recognizing the divine even in what is ordinary. It is in this sense that we speak, for example, of the "miracle of life" or the "miracle of technology", referring in the latter case, indirectly, to our surprise at the human intelligence that made that technique possible "( Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti, Science & Faith, 2002).
In the Christian tradition the miracle has never been identified only with a prodigious or inexplicable fact. This characteristic alone is neither sufficient nor pertinent to qualify its theological and religious nature. Thomas Aquinas recalled it a long time ago, with vivid examples taken from the scientific context of the time: “The word miracle derives from wonder. And the wonder arises in front of evident effects whose causes remain hidden: so it happens to be surprised to those who see an eclipse of the sun and ignore its cause, as Aristotle points out [Metaphysics].
“However, it may be that the cause of an event is known to some while remaining hidden from others. Then the fact can be marvelous for some, but not for all: the ignorant, but not the astronomer, is amazed at an eclipse of the sun. The miracle, on the other hand, is a totally marvelous fact, since it has a truly hidden cause for all. And this cause is God. Therefore the works performed by God out of the order of the causes known to us are called miracles ”[Summa theologiae]. In De Potentia Dei, in place of the eclipse Thomas puts as an example the magnet that attracts iron, which to the inexperienced might seem like a miracle, because an action apparently against nature, but in reality it has nothing miraculous, because it conforms to nature of the magnet.
Spinoza (1632-1677) dedicated an entire chapter of the theological-political treatise to miracles. His pantheistic vision of a single substance, in which God and nature coincide, leads him to deny the "exceptional" or "unnatural" character of miracles, and this simply because the activity of nature coincides with the activity of God : in nature there can be nothing extraordinary, as everything that happens necessarily happens. The immutability of natural laws is such that even when they violate their course, it would not be a violation, but the manifestation of a necessary behavior: consequently, the miracle is an absurdity for Spinoza.
David Hume (1711-1776) directs his critique of the miracle on the historical-religious ground, mainly from the pages of his Researches on the human intellect. If the miracle is defined as a "violation" of the laws of nature, our direct experience of their stability and immutability leads us to conclude – he argues – that a person of common sense cannot reasonably give them credit. Furthermore, the testimonies handed down to us on miracles would not be reliable, since they are narratives originating and then transmitted within religious and mythical contexts, whose foundations have gradually disappeared with the progress of rational knowledge.
If for Spinoza the miracle was absurd, for Hume the miracle is simply “incredible”. It should be noted that his firm conviction of the iron immutability of the laws of nature coexists with his well-known denial of the principle of causality, for which the emphasis is placed not on philosophical necessity (as in Spinoza) but on the absolute absence of contrary experience, and therefore from a typically empiricist point of view. His criticism therefore does not lend itself to being simplistically circumvented by insisting on the exceptional nature of the miracle – that is, as something that is recognized precisely because it contradicts common ordinary experience – because what he claims is the unreasonableness of believing in this type of event. .
In the entry of the same name in his philosophical dictionary, Voltaire (1694-1778) speaks of the miracle as a contradictio in terminis, a sort of "insult to God", because the operation of correcting, through his miraculous interventions, is ascribed to him. what he himself created and brought into being. Even before Voltaire, Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) had developed similar arguments in which the denial of the miracle is not an indication of a denial of God, but of a certain image that popular credulity and the religions that nourish it would like to give him. .
In these authors takes a voice the harsh criticism addressed by deism to revealed religions; God is recognized only as the architect of the universe and the guarantor of the laws of nature (as well as of the moral order), whose misunderstood transcendence on history and existence prevents us from recognizing him as present in human affairs or attentive to listening to them the invocations. In the nineteenth century, when the criticism of the miracle converges in the denial of God by positive atheism and modern materialism, miracles are seen as the sign of a credulity directly proportional to the influence of religion on the popular mentality and inversely proportional to progress. of science. In the thinkers of the Hegelian left religion, now understood as a myth, is replaced by rationality, but also by the creative potential of the idealist Spirit, to the point of theorising a purifying work of science against irrational beliefs.
“The most amazing thing about miracles is that they happen,” said Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Is that so? The question is not rhetorical. Various historiographic sources collect, at least starting from the seventeenth century, numerous testimonies of episodes considered inexplicable, mostly healings, which took place in a context of prayer and religious faith, on which even scientific observation has been able to offer some documentation. A special role in this regard (also for their impact on public opinion) is played by the miraculous healings reported in Lourdes (France), on the site of the Marian apparitions of 1858.
Now, there is no doubt that the question of the miracle continues to belong to the life of faith of the Church and, not infrequently, the miracle is invoked by the prayers of believers. However, not infrequently this invocation distances itself considerably from authentic Christian religious life, when it loses its Christological-salvific reference and becomes a decomposed expression of a request for "prodigious facts" sought for utilitarian purposes.
As for the medical healings, which represent the great majority of what the Church still qualifies today with the term "miracle", those that took place in Lourdes, for almost 150 years from the beginning of the Marian devotion in that place, were numerous (besides a thousand claimed), but there are canonical recognitions for only about sixty of them. Among the best known, it should be mentioned that of Marie Ferrand, a patient of tuberculous peritonitis followed in first person by the agnostic doctor Alexis Carrel (1873-1944), Nobel Prize for medicine in 1912, eyewitness in 1902 of the event that was then to prove to be decisive for his conversion to Christianity.
Finally, among the events of greatest public resonance, the so-called “miracle of the sun”, which took place in Fatima on October 13, 1917, must be mentioned, interpreted by the majority of those present as confirmation of the Marian apparitions in Cova da Iria. The phenomenon (anomalous motions of the sun on the celestial sphere), however, was not recorded by any scientific source and was the subject of often conflicting descriptions, which seem to be affected by the presence of psychological factors, which led to advance more than one reserve on its nature of objective physical event.
On February 14, 1969, Paul VI approved the new universal liturgical calendar with the Mysterii Paschalis. The reform made the memory of September 19, traditionally dedicated to San Gennaro, obligatory and solemn in Naples, but optional in the rest of the Catholic world. The "downgrading" of the saint stunned the city. However, non-believers usually do not change their minds in the face of evidence. And whoever believes does not need it. In any case, the Neapolitans always square around the saint. In fact, at the news of the relegation of the patron's miracle to a "prodigy", an invitation appeared on the walls of Naples, written by an unknown hand, an expression of ancient Neapolitan wisdom: "San Genna ', fottatenne".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-miracolo-tra-fede-e-scienza/ on Sat, 09 Oct 2021 05:30:42 +0000.