Then a Miracle Occurs

by Nic Samojluk

I received this letter written by one of the Forum members addressed to Dr. Bryan Bull. I thought it was very important since it raises a challenge to Dr. Bull's favorite and well publicized ideas about the real meaning of biblical miracles. This is why I decided to post it here in its entirety.

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"Dear Dr. Bull,

As you know, this topic strikes rather close to home for me, so I hope you'll understand. In any case, I've been meaning to talk with you about a few more ideas that have come to me after spending more time thinking about your ideas concerning science and religion, especially as far as they relate to the Genesis account and the origin of life on this planet.

It does seem clear to me that those who wrote the Bible did attribute certain phenomena to God that we may attribute to some other cause today. You make the argument that they defaulted to the "God explanation" whereas today we default to the "natural explanation." You go on to suggest that, "This does not exclude the possibility of 'miracle', but we require substantiating evidence before accepting a claim that a miracle has actually occurred. To use 'then a miracle occurs' to get out of a sticky spot in explaining a natural event is, to us, funny. To them it would have been 'business as usual.'"

At this point I must ask about several cases where actual experiments were set up to test the hypothesis that some phenomenon was in fact of directly divine origin - a "miracle", or not. Take the story of the Philistines who captured the Ark of God and put it in the temple of Dagon. Not only did bad things immediately start happening to poor Dagon, but to the Philistine people as well. To test the notion that this was not simply due to "chance", as they put it, they decided to send the Ark back to the Israelites with the use of cows that had just given birth to calves.

If the cows went against their "natural" urge to stay with their calves and took the Ark back to Bethel, then they would know that all the bad things really were the result of Divine action and were not just "random" natural bad luck events. It seems clear, by this and several other similar stories, like the story of Gideon and his fleece, Pharaoh and his plagues, etc., that the concept of random chance and even of scientific method were known and used by Biblical writers and thinkers.

But what about stories like the quail story where the people died from eating naturally tainted quail meet. Certainly that calamity was wrongly attributed to a direct act of God - right? Well, I'm not so quite so convinced about that. This story still seems quite miraculous to me if taken just as the author told it. Consider that despite overwhelming evidence of Gods power and providence, to include a personal appearance by God himself where everyone heard the very voice of God speaking the Law, the complaint about the manna and the lack of meat was a direct complaint about the leadership and goodness that God had so far provided.

God therefore announced that he would give them what they desired, with all the natural risks and consequences entailed in deliberately forsaking the leadership, providence and direction of God. The arrival of the quail certainly is miraculous. God told Moses not only exactly when the quail would arrive, but how much quail would arrive. That is a miracle. In fact, the quantity was to be so great that even Moses doubted the possibility of God's word and thought to question God's promise. God reproved Moses by saying, "Is the LORD'S arm too short? You will now see whether or not what I say will come true for you."

Then, of course, when the people actually ate the quail meet in great quantities, they did so as an act of rebellion against God's leadership. Prior to this, God had miraculously protected them against all manner of dangers, to include venomous serpents, sickness, poisons, and all disease. So, when they deliberately forsook their rock of protection, they became subject to these natural "random" calamities, to include being poisoned by naturally tainted quail meet. This, in itself, was a miraculous event in that it gave evidence of the removal of Divine protective power, especially from those who were foremost in this particular rebellion.

You see, it seems to me that such stories are indeed evidence of God's very direct involvement with His people in a very special and extraordinarily miraculous way. God will actually protect his people from random dangers and he will also allow them to leave that protective care if they so choose. If one doubts the miraculous nature of such stories, then how can other even more amazing declarations of the Bible, such as the virgin birth of Christ, be taken as "reality"?

Anyway, back to the flood story. As far as the flood story is concerned, you seem to argue, as far as I understand your argument anyway, that the lack of explanation or apparent concern about where the flood waters came from or where they went or about how and when the mountains were formed etc. is a significant problem as far as believing that these events happened as described by a "plain reading of the text."

Given our current scientifically based knowledge, many of the former interpretations of the church concerning the Genesis account simply seem untenable. Perhaps, then, the "plain reading" of some is not so plain to others. To the view of others, and even perhaps the authors of Genesis, the intent was completely different than the historic interpretation of the SDA church in particular.

While I understand this as a very real possibility and certainly agree with you that the Bible must be interpreted in the light of the historical context in which it was written, I don't see that the historical context, as I understand it at least, allows one to so easily interpret the Genesis account as anything other than a fairly clear description of a very recent literal 6-day creation event followed by a very real worldwide flood that did indeed kill everything that moved along the surface of the ground which had the breath of life in its nostrils. In other words, everything that could be drowned or killed by such a flood was destroyed - according to a straightforward reading of the author's account.

I'm not sure how such physically descriptive account could be so easily misinterpreted even considering historical context? Certainly there may be various kinds of life that could such a flood, as you point out, but this really seems irrelevant in light of the rather obvious point of the author(s) - isn't it? And, the fact that the author does not dwell on how all this was done also seems to me to be irrelevant to the point and credibility of the stated observations that are presented. The fact that one cannot explain a given phenomenon does not necessarily remove the fact that it happened as described.

I might not be able to explain gravity, even after some in-depth physics classes and long discussions about relativity, but my observation that an apple did fall off that tree over there and hit the ground is still valid - isn't it? A child may not understand how the T.V. works, but his or her observation that people and other moving images and noises come from a screen on a black box is still quite valid - right?

Why isn't the same thing true of the claim that the entire world was deluged by a single event and that this water eventually subsided during a great wind? Isn't that a potentially valid observation regardless of one's lack of understanding of all contributing factors involved? It certainly seems internally consistent with the story anyway. And, do we really know enough to say that such an observation is physically impossible?

I've made note of this before, but I must ask again. What happens to the internal consistency of the story if the flood really was a local flood as many have suggested? If this story was truly about a local flood where is the need for the ark? With over 100 years of warning, certainly it would have been much easier to just move out of the area - right? Also, why the need to save so many different kinds of animals in the ark if the flood was just some local calamity? As I see it, this makes absolutely no sense unless the author really did intend to indicate that the flood in this story did destroy every other representative of that kind of creature. The story just falls apart internally if the universal nature of the flood is removed from the author's deliberate intent in his telling of the story.

Of course, the author(s) could simply be wrong. That is also a possibility - especially given the clarity of the statements found in the Genesis account. The author's statements are so clear as to lend themselves to fairly unambiguous falsifiability. If there is enough evidence to show that the author was wrong, then the story itself becomes nothing more than a moral fable. However, if the weight of the available evidence does indeed support the very clear claims of the author, then the true story of a worldwide flood means something very much more than a fable. Even children recognize the increased value of a true story over the best made up story. You can practically guarantee that a child will ask, "Is that a true story?" after being told some tall tale.

Well, as you know, I think the evidence, as I understand it so far, is clearly weighted in favor of a very recent formation of the most of the geologic column by shortly spaced catastrophic events. You think otherwise. Why is it then that over and over again the absolute evidence for the old age of the geologic column ends up on shaky ground or completely falsified by subsequent discoveries? - Like the sudden collapse of the Grand Canyon lava dams a very short time after their formation when it was previously thought to take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to erode them away? Beyond this, the overwhelming statistical evidence of uncrossable boundaries to genetic evolution is, for me at least, the biggest nail in the coffin.

In short, I recognize the Biblical account as clearly understood by a simple reading of Genesis (even in historical context), internally consistent, and supported by the weight of physical evidence. Certainly there are a great many phenomena and questions that I cannot at all explain or answer, but for me these are overcome by those evidences that I think I can understand and explain. You, knowing much more than I do, may have much more reason than I do to think otherwise.

Perhaps one day I will understand things the way you do given a few more years of experience with these ideas. Until then, I really do think that the story of a recent creation week and a literal worldwide flood is so much better and far more hopeful than the "fable" version. The fable version requires the author(s) of the Genesis account to be so limited in understanding and expressing true reality as to give but a feeble reflection of the fact that God used billions of years of pain, suffering, sickness and death experienced by sentient beings to create human kind in his own image only to come and die to destroy suffering and death - the very foundation of creativity? I just can't buy into that and continue to be a Christian much less an Adventist.

I do thank you again for the time and effort you have taken to share your thoughts and ideas with me and to consider mine. I really do admire the motive behind what you are doing.

Sincerely Yours,

Sean [Pitman]"

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