Modern science depends on an understructure of physics. Physics works presuming no preference in time or space. (Don't tell me it doesn't work, if reading this in air conditioning on an electronic computer.) In contrast, miracles introduce just such a preference. I don't mean miracle in its colloquial, "this bright spring day is a miracle" sense; rather I mean the something special happened, something we'll never see again, something we can't explain! And it happened right there, right then only - because if it's predictable, and repeatable, it's not a miracle.

Miracles are undesirable discontinuities in reality. Miracles are undesirable because they are essentially extra parts, and reality isn't made up of extra parts. Our senses may not be the best to investigate that reality but they're what we have. They might come in handy, but we can do without them; the fewer miracles informing our comprehension, the better. A miracle is a wall beyond which inquiry cannot pass.

Truth? Yes, we need buckets full of that. Eschewing miracles does not necessary imply, though it ought, a complementary compulsion towards seeking the truth. Confidence in continually improving our understanding, in appreciating the underlying unity of it all, should encourage us to avoid the easy explanation of miracles.

Dreams are different than miracles; hopes are different too. Either however, that requires a miracle will go unfulfilled. We've come, sensibly, to prefer reality to dreams. Mankind has no more need for miracles; "we find the one, quite adequate." That miracle includes the word that there are to be no more messengers. But does that exclude the possibility of subsequent messages? The word is that, seeking peace, every nation (language?) receives a message. Is Star Trek such in English? The iconoclastic Great Bird never assumed the airs of a miraculous messenger, yet a message emerged which inconceivably would have occurred without him. That doesn't make him a miracle worker.

The realization of our dreams by our own hands will satisfy us sweeter if we haven't counted on the necessity of a miracle. The plaintive demise of Trek on the screen should mean nothing. "He's not really gone, so long as we remember him." Similarly the message is not really gone, so long as we remember it. It becomes its own challenge, its own test: that should it not persevere, it really wasn't a message. Does that make it far less than a miracle, or actually more? The paradox of the miracle in life, is that the best miracle is no miracle at all.


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