I have a problem with how people use the word miracle.
The dictionary definition is "a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency." So this would undoubtedly qualify:
But other than claims of honest-to-goodness angels appearing and stopping someone from getting murdered, the occurrences people usually call miracles seem to fall into two categories:
- Events that have a positive outcome where one can imagine all sorts of ways they could have gone very wrong. An example is when I was driving down my road in the middle of winter, hit a patch of black ice, and spun out -- coming to rest in a five-meter-by-five-meter gravel patch without hitting anything, where other trajectories would have taken me into a creek, an embankment, or oncoming traffic.
- Events that are big and impressive, and about which we don't understand the exact cause.
It's the second category that attracted the attention of one Michael Grosso, who writes over at the site Consciousness Unbound, in a post this week called "A Trio of Obvious Miracles." I was intrigued to find out what Grosso thought qualified not only as miracles but as obvious ones, and I was a little let down to find out that they were (1) the Big Bang, (2) the appearance of life, and (3) the evolution of consciousness.
The problem with all three of these is a lack of information. In the first case, we have a pretty good idea what happened shortly after the Big Bang -- and by "shortly after" I mean "more than 10^-35 seconds after" -- but no real idea what triggered the expansion itself, or what came before it. (If "before the Big Bang" even has any meaning. Stephen Hawking said the question was like asking "what is north of the North Pole?" Roger Penrose, on the other hand, thinks that a cyclic universe is a real possibility, and there may be a way to detect the traces of iterations of previous universes left behind in our current one. The question is, at present, still being hotly debated by cosmologists.)
As far as Grosso's second example -- the origins of life -- that's more in my wheelhouse. The difficulty here is that even the biologists can't agree about what makes something "alive." Freshman biology texts usually have a list of characteristics of life, which include:
- made of one or more cells
- shows high levels of organization
- capable of reproduction
- capable of growth
- has a limited life span
- responds to stimuli
- adapts through natural selection
- has some form of a genetic code
- has a metabolism/use of energy
Not only are there organisms that are clearly alive but break one or more rules (sterile hybrids are incapable of reproducing, bristlecone pines appear to have no upper bound on their life spans), there are others, such as viruses, that have a few of the characteristics (organization, reproduction, limited life span, adaptation, and genetic code) while lacking others (cells, growth, response, and independent metabolism). We talk about something "killing viruses," but the jury's still out as to whether they were alive in the first place. (Perhaps "inactivating" them would be more accurate.) In any case, the search for some ineffable something that differentiates life from non-life, like Henri Bergson's élan vital, have been unsuccessful.
With the final example, consciousness, we're on even shakier ground. Once again starting with the dictionary definition -- "an awareness of one's internal and/or external environment, allowing for introspection, imagination, and volition" -- it remains to be seen whether we're unique in having consciousness, or if it (like intelligence) exists on a spectrum. I'd argue that my dogs are conscious, but are insects? How about earthworms? How about amoebas? All of them have some awareness of their external world, as evidenced by their moving toward pleasant stimuli and away from unpleasant ones; but I doubt very much if amoebas think about it. So is our much more complex experience of consciousness simply due to our large and highly-interconnected brains, which would suggest that consciousness arises from a purely physical substratum? If so, would it be possible to emulate it in a machine? Some people are arguing, from a Turing-esque "if you can't tell the difference, there is no difference" stance, that large language models such as ChatGPT are already showing signs of consciousness. While I find that a little doubtful -- although admittedly, I'm no expert on the topic -- it seems like we're in the same boat with consciousness as we are with life; it's hard to argue about something when we can't even agree on what the definition is, especially when the characteristic in question seems not to exist on a binary, you've-got-it-or-you-don't basis.
In any case, the whole thing seems to boil down to an argument from incredulity -- "I can't explain this, so it must be a miracle." Grosso writes:
I grant the astonishing character of the miraculous, and the rarity. But in the parapsychological definition, the term refers to phenomena that are extraphysical; cannot be physically explained. But what is causing these deviations from physical reality?... Of course, we generally don’t kneel in awe at the miraculous sunrise or shudder with wonder as we wolf a burger down our gullet. We are in fact swamped by what in fact are obvious miracles, the whole of nature and life in its wild multiplicity. But thanks to habit and routine our imagination of the marvelous is deadened.
Honestly, I'm not even all that convinced about the rarity of miracles. He's picked three things that -- so far as we know -- only happened once, and from that deduced that they're miraculous. I did a post here a couple of years ago about Littlewood's Law of Miracles (named after British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood), which uses some admittedly rather silly mathematical logic to demonstrate that we should, on average, expect a miracle to occur every other month or so. So I'm not sure that our perception of something as unlikely (and therefore miraculous) means much.
The thing is, we can't really deduce anything from a lack of information. Myself, I'm more comfortable relying on science to elucidate what's going on; like the astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace famously said to Napoleon when the latter asked why Laplace's book on celestial mechanics made no mention of God, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" ("I have no need of that hypothesis."). If you're claiming something is a miracle, you're saying it's outside the capacity of science to explain, and that seems to me to be very premature.
My stance is that in all three cases he cited, science hasn't explained them yet. And that little word at the end is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
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