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Should We Seek a Naturalistic Explanation for Miracles?
Should We Seek a Naturalistic Explanation for Miracles?
Many appreciate Christianity but find miracles hard to accept. To them, Jonah swallowed by the fish is more suitable for Disney. Baalam’s talking donkey sounds like Aesop’s fables. Lot’s wife turning into a pillar sounds like an etiological myth to explain salt formations near the Dead Sea.
Thus, denying the supernatural, they seek a naturalistic explanation for the miracles of the Bible. To them, the walls of Jericho collapsing must have been an earthquake. The parting of the Red Sea must have been a typhoon. Even Christians get caught up in efforts to “explain” the Bible by scientific possibilities, as if that will lend the Scripture more credibility.
God certainly can often use natural phenomena to carry out His will. The miracle is often in the timing rather than the deed. One example is found in Joshua 3, when God told the people to cross the Jordan River, which He promised to dry up for them. The Bible says (3:16) the river stood in a heap twenty miles upstream. This sort of thing has happened at least once in modern times, when a landslide plugged the Jordan River gorge for several hours, leaving miles of the Jordan River a dry riverbed, until the water overcame the blockage. The real miracle in Joshua 3 was that God had timed the events so that the instant the priests’ feet touched the waters of the Jordan, the river went dry. That means the landslide had already occurred hours before the priests approached the banks of the Jordan!
No matter how interesting these naturalistic explanations are, we should never drain the Scripture of the miraculous. I’ve heard of scientists calculating what foods the fish would have had to digest to provide Jonah the oxygen to breathe for three days. I’ve heard of historians figuring out how the ten plagues of Egypt were a series of coincidences—a mudslide filled the Nile with reddish silt which caused the frogs to head for dry land; when they died their rotting bodies caused swarms of gnats, then flies (whose larvae take longer to hatch); these flies carried diseases to the livestock; then to the Egyptians; the hail and locusts were just extreme cases of the usual; darkness was an eclipse; and the firstborn died because of heavy toxic gasses from a volcanic eruption which settled close to the ground (since the firstborn often slept on the bottom bunk).
Isn’t it better to admit it was the miraculous “finger of God” (Ex. 8:19)? The plagues were thoroughly miraculous. They were divinely severe (not just the Nile turned to blood, but pools and bowls). They were divinely predicted by God’s spokesman Moses (the Nile turned to blood at the exact moment Moses struck it with his staff). They were divinely selective, affecting the Egyptians while sparing the Israelites (Exo. 11:7).
Thus, it is pointless, and often counterproductive, to seek a naturalistic explanation for every miracle in the Bible. If we’re not careful, we’ll end up denying the testimony of Christ (Matt. 12:40) and of His inspired apostles (1 Peter 3:20). Miracles don’t happen very often in the Bible, but when they do, they happen for a very good reason. Miracles are designed to turn man unto God. Many miracles stubbornly resist any naturalistic explanation (History Channel, want to take a shot at Jesus walking on water?)
The two most preposterous miracles recorded in the Bible are two that we cannot explain away nor live without—the creation of the Universe by the word of God, and the resurrection of Christ from the dead. God has supplied ample evidence to prove that these two miracles are historical facts! If we can accept that God created the Universe by the power of His voice (and we must), we can accept that He allowed Jonah to live in the belly of a fish.
--John Guzzetta
