Miracles are a joyous release from everything we expect is possible. But they lay a trap for both sides of the God debate. For believers, if miracles aren’t real, then God might not be real either. For unbelievers, the trap is just the opposite: If a single miracle can be proven to have happened, then the door is open for God. It might seem easy enough to validate a miracle and agree that it was real—such effort has been going on for centuries. But there can be no common ground when both sides are deaf to each other’s arguments. Atheists are unconvinced by any amount of eyewitness testimony to a miracle. They deem fake all apparitions of the Virgin Mary, of which there are hundreds. They regard all faith healing as mere coincidence; the patient was about to recover anyway. They think psychic powers have no basis in fact, despite numerous controlled studies to prove that they exist.
One advantage of coming from India is that it remains a faith-based society, untouched in many regions by the inroads of modernism. A boy growing up in such a setting could easily accept that supernatural occurrences were not deviations from reality. They were part of the landscape where God seeped into every nook and crevice. One heard of holy men and women, for instance, who never ate food or drank water. Their devotees claimed to have kept close watch for years, even decades, without seeing any food pass the holy man’s mouth. For two weeks in 2010, a branch of the Indian defense department put a yogi named Prahlad Jani under hospital observation with round-the-clock attendants and closed-circuit television. Jani ate and drank nothing during that time and showed no changes in his vital signs or metabolism. A team of thirty-five researchers took part in the trial, so the possibility of collusion or fakery was basically nonexistent.
Jani, who tested medically like someone half his age, was eighty-three and lived in a temple; his devotees said that he hadn’t eaten for seventy years. Skeptics dismissed the results on various grounds. Some pointed out that Jani was allowed to gargle and bathe, which gave him access to water. Others noted that he left the sealed room to sunbathe, and that devotees were occasionally given access. Since the results of the test were medically “impossible,” some form of cheating must have taken place.
When such an episode is transposed from a society steeped in faith to a society steeped in science, almost no reaction is possible except disbelief. Yet in the West cases of the same kind have been documented. In the eighteenth century, a Scottish girl named Janet McLeod lived for four years without eating. A detailed report was submitted to the Royal Society in London in 1767 attesting to the reality of the case. While the Catholic Church has amassed its own records of saintly people who lived without eating or drinking, in other cases, such as Janet McLeod’s, there was no spiritual connection. In fact, she was deemed seriously ill.
Even if you find the evidence compelling, what causes such an extraordinary phenomenon? When the few individuals who have totally stopped eating are asked for an explanation, they don’t agree. Some stopped as an act of faith; others spontaneously began to live, they say, on sunlight or the life-force (prana). A handful quit eating as the result of illness, while a modern group calling themselves Breatharians believe that the most natural way to gain nourishment is through the air we breathe.
Strong skeptics accept none of these accounts as anything but fraudulent or delusional. In his 2011 book for young readers, The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins devotes a chapter to miracles, which, as one would expect, he approaches with a mixture of strict rationality and debunking fervor. The purpose of the book, as encapsulated in its subtitle, is to instruct its readers in “How we know what’s really true.” Dawkins’s agenda is given away by the cautionary word really, implying that there are ways of knowing the truth that might seem valid but aren’t.
Miracles serve as an object lesson in every frailty of belief, from mass hysteria to hallucination. Methodically Dawkins tells us that any number of miracles are the tricks of stage magicians working in front of credulous audiences. At other times eyewitnesses are so primitive and childlike that natural phenomena awe them, as in the famous “cargo cults” that arose on the islands around New Guinea after World War II. The islanders had looked on as Japanese and Allied airplanes landed, unloading huge amounts of war supplies. They had never seen airplanes before, and the sudden influx of material goods seemed to be a gift from the gods. When the foreigners disappeared after 1945, the islanders appealed to their gods to bring back the “cargo,” the material goods that had flowed in abundance. To entice the gods, the islanders built crude replicas of airstrips and planes. A supernatural significance was attached to events that seem completely natural to us.
Dawkins’s skepticism about miracles is certainly defensible. It’s possible, as he argues, that the miracles recorded in the New Testament are just as unreliable as modern-day miracles but have acquired legitimacy simply through the passage of time. (Dawkins can’t control his tendency to insinuate bad motives, so he cheerfully tells young readers that miracles are generally associated with charlatans, implicitly including Jesus and the disciples.) But I imagine his unsophisticated readership won’t spot the weakness of Dawkins’s “proof” that miracles don’t exist. Once more he relies on probabilities, just as he does with God. He proposes that if any other explanation is more probable than a true miracle, one must accept the alternative explanation.
He prominently cites the “Miracle of the Sun” witnessed by numerous people gathered in an open field near Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917. Thousands were assembled (the estimate varies widely, from 3,000 to 400,000) because three young shepherd children had predicted that the Virgin Mary would appear at noon that day. For the children, who had already had visions of her, the prediction came true. They reported seeing Mary, Jesus, and other holy apparitions. What many eyewitnesses saw was something different but equally inexplicable.
The day had been gray and rainy, soaking the ground and the expectant spectators. All at once the clouds parted, and the sun showed itself, not in its usual brightness but as a dark, opaque orb. It radiated multicolored beams across the sky and on the whole landscape. Then the sun zigzagged its way closer to Earth, making some terrified observers believe that Judgment Day had arrived. After ten minutes the phenomenon was over, and as reported by local journalists, many witnesses attested that their clothing and the muddy ground had become completely dry. After extensive examination, the Catholic Church recognized the genuineness of the miracle in 1930.
Dawkins cannot prove that such events didn’t occur. His task is simply to state definitively that they are impossible and then argue his way back from there. The problem is that “impossible” is the very assumption that miracles disprove (should they be real). To cover this weakness, Dawkins falls back on probability, telling the young reader to consider two possibilities. A: The sun behaves the way astronomy says it behaves. B: The sun jumps around the sky and does crazy things the way the eyewitnesses at Fatima claim. Which is more likely? A sane, rational person must pick A, the view of science. He makes a more extended presentation than this, to the point of reducing astronomy to baby talk, but the gaping hole hasn’t been filled. Miracles defy science; they don’t contradict it. Astronomy can be right 99.9999 percent of the time. That doesn’t disprove miracles, and by the same token, the miracle of the sun doesn’t disprove astronomy.
The whole thing is an inescapable conundrum. Something has been intruding into everyday existence that must be explained. History was once on the side of miracles, which were accepted without question. Now skepticism is accepted without question. Thus miracles are a vexing problem when we try to straighten out the muddle surrounding God. Do they have to be real for God to be real?
No. When Thomas Jefferson edited his own version of the New Testament, he deleted the miracles while retaining his faith. Among the four gospels, the Book of John tells Jesus’s story without mentioning miracles, not even the virgin birth and the Christmas story. One has to be clear that every faith contains denominations that accept God without accepting miracles. But skeptics use supernatural as a buzzword for ignorant credulity. In his chapter on “the tawdriness of the miraculous,” Christopher Hitchens scoffs that “the age of miracles seems to lie somewhere in the past. If the religious were wise, or had the confidence of their convictions, they ought to welcome the eclipse of this age of fraud and conjuring.”
Most miracles, however, do not have a star player who offers amazing tricks. Jesus was an exception. More common was the appearance of the Virgin Mary in the hardscrabble village of Knock in Western Ireland in 1879. Two women walking in the rain saw an illuminated tableau that replaced the back wall of the local church. They summoned thirteen other people, who attested to seeing the vision over the next two hours, when Mary appeared in white robes and a gold crown, her hands raised in prayer. She was flanked by Saint Joseph and John the Evangelist; before them was an altar circled by angels. The spectators ranged in age from five to seventy-five. They were strictly examined for truthfulness by the Church that same year and again in 1936. Other villagers who didn’t rush to the scene described seeing bright light emanating from the locality of the church, and several healings occurred in the vicinity. There was no possibility of a stage illusionist, in any case. One can choose to shrug off the event as a fraud, mass delusion, or a phenomenon awaiting explanation. Without a doubt, however, all believed in what they saw.
Hitchens is obviously wrong to label miracles petty and tawdry. Still, it’s undeniable that religion brings the supernatural down to earth, so to speak, from its home in another, invisible dimension. Saint Augustine declared, “I would not be a Christian except for the miracles.” The onus is on believers in miracles—they must show that miracles can exist peaceably beside reason, logic, and science. We’ve already seen the limitations of choplogic, reason mixed with prejudice, and pseudoscience. Skeptics can’t disprove miracles, so they cut corners to provide a show of proof. Faith has a stronger position, and not merely by amassing eyewitness accounts of miraculous healing that extend even to the present day. Faith sees the divine in every aspect of creation. All the world’s wisdom traditions declare that there is only one reality, which embraces any conceivable phenomenon. If miracles have any chance, they must fit into reality as securely as planets, trees, DNA, and the law of gravity.
Establishing that miracles exist requires two steps. First, we have to take down the wall that separates the natural from the supernatural. Fortunately, that’s fairly easy to do since the wall was artificial to begin with. The basis of everything in the physical world is the quantum domain. If anything deserves to be called the zone of miracles, it is this level of nature. Here the laws that make miracles “impossible” are fluid. The constraints of space and time as we know them do not hold.
One of the most revered among modern Catholic saints was a humble southern Italian priest, Padre Pio (1887–1968), who caused consternation in the Church by gathering huge crowds and countless believers among the common people. Besides healing the sick, one of Padre Pio’s miracles was bilocation, appearing in two places at once. If this occurrence happened at the quantum level, miracles would be a simple matter. Every particle in the universe can also transition into the state of a wave embedded in the quantum field, and instead of existing in two places at once, such waves exist everywhere at once.
But Padre Pio wasn’t a quantum; therefore the behavior common to the subtlest level of nature can’t automatically be transferred to the grosser level where we live our lives. There must be a second step of proof, showing that the merging of natural and supernatural takes place all around us. Skeptics consider this step impossible, but that’s far from the case. Scientists have been present for supernatural events. There have been hundreds of controlled experiments in psychic phenomena, for example. When a scientist views an actual miracle, however, the inner conflict that results is acute.
In May 1902 a young French physician named Alexis Carrel boarded a train bound for Lourdes. A friend, another doctor, had asked him to be in attendance on a group of the sick who were traveling to the famous shrine in hopes of a cure. Normally the dying were not permitted on board, but a woman named Marie Bailly had smuggled herself on. She was dying of complications from tuberculosis, the disease that had killed both her parents. Her belly was hard and distended from peritonitis; doctors in Lyon had refused to operate given the severe risk that she would die during surgery.
During the trip Carrel was called to Bailly’s side when the woman became semiconscious. He examined her, confirmed the diagnosis of tubercular peritonitis, and predicted that she would die before reaching Lourdes. But Bailly regained consciousness, and when she insisted, against medical advice, on being carried to the healing pools, Carrel accompanied her. The reader will have no trouble anticipating that I am about to recount a miraculous healing—Dossier 54, the official medical records of Marie Bailly’s case, are among the most famous in Lourdes history. But the presence of Dr. Carrel makes the tale far more enigmatic.
Bailly was carried on a stretcher to the pools but was too fragile to be immersed in the waters. She was in her mid-twenties and had already survived a bout of meningitis brought on by her TB, which she attributed to Lourdes water. Now she insisted that a pitcher of the pool’s water be poured over her swollen abdomen. Carrel, who was an assistant professor in the anatomy department of the medical faculty in Lyon, stood behind her stretcher taking notes. When the water was poured over her abdomen, which was covered by a blanket, Bailly felt hot pain, but she asked for a second application, which was less painful, and then a third, which gave her a pleasant sensation.
Over the next half hour, her distended abdomen shrank under the blanket until it became completely flat. No discharge was seen from the body. Carrel examined the patient. The hard mucinous mass that he had detected on the train was completely gone. Within a few days Bailly rode back to Lyon to tell her family about the miracle. She joined a charitable Catholic order that cared for the sick and died in 1937 at the age of fifty-eight. A medical exam in the aftermath of her recovery revealed that Bailly had no signs of tuberculosis; she passed all physical and mental tests.
For all the hundreds of thousands of visitors to Lourdes, the number of confirmed healings accredited by its medical bureau is scanty. In Bailly’s case, two other physicians besides Carrel attested to her cure, but the Church eventually rejected the case as miraculous in 1964. They cited as their reason that the attending physicians had not considered the possibility of pseudoscyesis, or false pregnancy. Skeptics have leaped on that diagnosis, even though false pregnancies do not reveal hard masses in the abdomen when a physician palpates it; it is also unlikely that Bailly would have convinced a number of physicians that she was dying if she wasn’t, or that her belly could have flattened in half an hour without discharge.
But it’s Alexis Carrel who fascinates me, since he serves as a proxy for the inner struggle we experience between faith and reason. Having witnessed the healing firsthand, Carrel returned to Lyon with no desire to publicize the event. The University of Lyon was strongly anticlerical in the medical department. Unfortunately for him, a local newspaper carried a story about Bailly’s healing, which became a sensation. Carrel was mentioned as one of the witnesses, and he was forced to come forward with an account. He tried his best to hedge, declaring that what he saw was real but must have some unknown natural cause. But fence-sitting did him no good. When the medical faculty got the news, a senior professor told him, “It’s useless to insist, sir, that with views such as these you can ever be received as a member of our faculty. We have no place for you here.”
Unable to secure a hospital appointment, Carrel emigrated to Canada, then to the United States, where he joined the newly established Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1906. He remained intrigued by what he had seen but was not a believer in miracles—he had been brought up in a devout family and educated by the Jesuits but was no longer a practicing Catholic by the time he became a physician. Another event, fortuitous for him rather than miraculous, had shaped his career. In 1894, when Carrel was a young surgeon, the president of France, Sadi Carnot, had been stabbed in the abdomen with a knife by an assassin. A large abdominal vein was severed, and there was no reliable surgical technique for suturing large blood vessels. Carnot lingered and died two days later.
Carrel was then motivated to study the anatomy of blood vessels and the way they connect naturally or through surgery. For his work he was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1912. Upon returning to France, he followed up on his fascination with Bailly’s healing, returning to Lourdes repeatedly on the chance that he might observe another possible miracle and find a natural explanation. In 1910 he witnessed an eighteen-month-old infant suddenly regain its sight after being born blind. But he never satisfactorily resolved his perplexity. After the publication in France of his memoir, The Voyage to Lourdes, in 1948, four years after his death, Carrel became controversial: Scientific American published a skeptical article in 1994 (which also covered, with admiration, his work with blood vessels), yet he was hotly defended among the Catholic faithful.
Where do miracles belong in regaining one’s faith? They would appear to be a prime example of “what you believe, you see.” The faithful are primed to accept miracles; skeptics are primed to reject them out of hand. This may seem obvious, but we can go deeper. If factors hidden inside your mind dictate your perception, then the whole issue of searching for rock-solid evidence may be a red herring.
The real issue is how to unite the natural and the supernatural, just as Dr. Carrel wanted to do. Separating the two is merely a habit. Science is made to fit inside one mental box, miracles inside another. The time has passed when the boxes have to be kept sealed. I want to show that you don’t have to abolish miracles to have science—quite the opposite. When Einstein said that a sense of awe and wonder was necessary for any great scientific discovery, he wasn’t being soft-minded. In a universe where visible matter accounts for only 0.01 percent of creation, it would be foolish to undertake science without a sense that reality is extremely mysterious. Dark energy exists on the fringe of the unknowable, and so does a saint who exists without eating. The simplistic logic and outmoded science applied by Dawkins and company don’t remotely approach how reality works.
In 1905 Pope Pius X declared that rigorous medical investigations must be conducted at Lourdes before any healing could be confirmed as miraculous. To date, after extensive critical review, sixty-seven cures have been officially confirmed as miracles. The latest, from 2002, is of a Frenchman who was healed of paralysis, an event that twenty physicians at the Lourdes Medical Bureau have labeled “remarkable.” That’s a considerable distance from miraculous, but do numbers really matter? It would be necessary, not to tot up all the supposed miracles in history, of which there are thousands, but to explain just one. The supernatural has no validity until it can be connected to the natural; a world apart satisfies no one except believers, who are simply the reverse of skeptics, accepting as easily as their opposites reject.
Because there is only one reality, it is continuous. Chopping reality up into slices like a loaf of bread makes it more understandable. The slices that taste of the supernatural can be thrown away. Science has made finer and finer cuts, getting near the very source of matter and energy. But if you claim that bread comes only in slices, denying the whole loaf, you’ve made a mistake. The analogy may be humble, but this is the mistake made by modern science: It has brilliantly subdivided nature into tiny packets of knowledge while missing the miraculousness of the whole.
The healing of Marie Bailly may seem like a supernatural event, but it was surrounded by everyday occurrences. Her sickness had proceeded normally. It was about to follow a natural course that ends in death. Then suddenly, without apparent cause, the seams of everyday existence came apart. What possible explanation begins to make sense of it? A hint of the answer was provided decades ago by one of the most brilliant quantum pioneers, Wolfgang Pauli, when he said, “It is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will neither be ‘psychic’ nor ‘physical’ but somehow both and somehow neither.” By using a word that science shuns—psychic—Pauli was pointing to a kind of ultimate mystery.
The vast physical mechanism we call the universe behaves more like a mind than like a machine. How did mind ever find a way to manifest as the physical world? That question brings us to the merging of the natural and the supernatural, because the very fact that anything exists is supernatural—literally beyond the rules of the natural world.
• No one can show at what point simple molecules, like the glucose in the brain, become conscious. Does blood sugar “think” when it enters the brain? It doesn’t think in a test tube. What makes the difference?
• Tissues automatically heal when they are injured or invaded by disease organisms. The healing system spontaneously assesses the damage and brings the exact repairs needed. It defies explanation that a machine could learn how to repair itself. The laws of nature should dictate that physical breakdown is permanent: Cars don’t inflate their punctured tires. Damaged organisms, if they are subject to the same physical laws, should stay damaged—but some kind of X factor has changed that.
• Ever since the Big Bang, the energy in the universe has been dissipating, like a hot stove cooling off. This dispersal of heat, known as entropy, is inexorable. Yet somehow islands of “negative entropy” have evolved. One of them is life on Earth. Instead of dissipating into the void of outer space, the sunlight that hits green plants begins the chain of life, holding on to energy and converting it into incredibly complex forms that hand the energy around, recycle it, and use it in creative ways. It is impossible for random events to explain how entropy could be defied for billions of years.
• DNA was born in a hostile environment filled with extreme heat and cold, toxic gases, and a firestorm of random chemical reactions. Unlike any chemical in the known universe, DNA resisted being degraded into smaller molecules; instead it built itself up into higher complexity and learned to replicate itself. No explanation for this unique activity has been offered.
• All the cells in our bodies, trillions of them, contain the same DNA, yet they spontaneously “know” how to become liver cells, heart cells, and all other specialized cells. In the embryonic brain, stem cells travel along precise paths, stop when they reach their destination, and become specific neurons for seeing, hearing, controlling hormones, and thinking. This spontaneous ability to “know” how to suppress one part of the genetic code while enlivening others is inexplicable.
• DNA can tell time. From the moment an ovum gets fertilized, a single cell contains time-sensitive triggers for growing baby teeth, entering puberty, causing menopause, and eventually dying. How all these sequences, which span seven decades or more, can be contained inside a chemical is beyond explanation.
These mysteries—I’ve selected a mere handful out of many—cry out for explanation. We mustn’t lose sight of what they have in common: They all defy the separation between natural and supernatural. If you aren’t wedded to materialism, then you will recognize that there is a common link between islands of negative entropy, embryonic brain cells traveling to their final home, blood sugar learning to think, and the rest. Intelligence is at work. In an uncanny way, molecules “know” what they are doing, whether in the ancestral chemical soup from which DNA emerged or in the chemistry of your brain cells as you read this sentence.
This implies a completely radical view of where the mind began and where it resides. The founder of quantum physics, Max Planck, had no doubt that mind would eventually become the elephant in the room, an issue too massive and obvious to ignore. Planck is worth quoting in full:
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.
If mind is everywhere, we’ve taken a huge step toward merging the natural and the supernatural. When a person like Marie Bailly is selected to be healed, that’s an act of intelligence, no matter how hidden its motives may be, and once the decision is made, the molecules in her body act as if directed—a natural miracle. The healing system we all depend upon, when we cut a finger or come down with the flu, turns into a supernatural miracle. Yet neither can be explained. So there is no reason, in theory, why the intelligence that guides immune cells to rush to the site of invading bacteria might not rush even more quickly to heal an incurable disease.
In other words, there’s a sliding scale for the body’s response to disease. Let me sketch in the extremes of that sliding scale, keeping in mind than not a single phase can be explained medically, even though one extreme is considered natural and the other miraculous, i.e., supernatural.
A patient gets sick and recovers in the expected time, without complications.
Another patient contracts the same disease and recovers much faster or much more slowly than normal.
A patient contracts a life-threatening disease and dies.
Another patient contracts a life-threatening disease and recovers with normal medical treatment.
Yet another patient contracts a life-threatening disease and recovers without treatment.
Very rarely, a patient contracts a life-threatening disease and recovers inexplicably because healing happens too fast to fit the medical model.
This wide range of outcomes defies any system of prediction. It is as quirky as thoughts, moods, and other mental events. Different bodies “decide” how to respond to the same physical condition.
One of the everyday mysteries that medicine can’t explain is control by the host. Every minute you and I inhale millions of microbes, viruses, allergens, and toxic substances. The vast majority reside in us harmlessly. Our bodies control them from harming us. But when AIDS destroys the immune system, the host loses control, and rampant disease breaks out in an autoimmune disorder like rheumatoid arthritis. The system for protecting the body turns upon it instead. Even an innocuous condition like hay fever indicates that control by the host has failed. In all these examples, the breakdown is a breakdown of intelligence. Thus mind is pervasive in every cell and swims invisibly through the bloodstream.
The reason that mixing mind with matter disturbs mainstream doctors, who are trained to be scientific, isn’t a secret. Mind rules the subjective world, which science distrusts, while matter is the basis of “real” knowledge. Heart patients feel all kinds of pain, pressure, and strangeness about their condition; an angiogram tells the doctor what’s really going on.
Subjectivity is mistrusted for being fickle, individual, shifting, and prey to all kinds of bias. But this mistrust exhibits a strange prejudice, for the body displays all these qualities. Bodies are fickle and highly individual. They make decisions about getting sick that cannot be explained. Medicine has no idea why someone develops a sudden allergy after years of not being allergic. When your body confronts a single cold virus, unpredictability is at work. (Medicine knows that direct contact with a new cold virus infects people only around one in eight times. Why this is so cannot be explained.)
I’m sure that Planck and Pauli were right to suspect that consciousness is more than a given, and that mind and matter are indissolubly linked. Among physicists, these two were not alone. Mind holds some kind of key to the ultimate nature of reality. Once you admit that this is true, the possibility of miraculous events increases, because the non-miraculous has shifted so much. Natural and supernatural are infused with the same properties of consciousness. It turns out that supernatural is the label we apply to things we aren’t yet comfortable with. In reality, nature goes to the same source to create a galaxy as we go to think of a rose. The field of consciousness embraces both.
Intelligence
Intention
Attention
A bridge from mind to matter
An observer
A connection between events “in here” and events “out there”
Everything on this list is built into our awareness. As conscious beings, we use them every day, almost entirely without being aware of what we’re doing. If you have a math problem to solve, you can select one aspect—intelligence—and focus it on the problem. If your mind wanders from a task, you can bring in another aspect—intention—to combat your distracted mood. So you have no need to go anywhere outside yourself. You possess everything it takes to make the miraculous live peaceably with the rational. The essential thing is that reality is participatory. Nothing is real for us outside our experience of it, and experience is a conscious creative act.
This sounds strange at first. How am I participating when I see the stars at night? The act feels passive. In fact, seeing the stars—or anything at all—requires having every ingredient on the list:
Intelligence: I know what I am looking at and can think about it. Microbes and plants exist under the same stars but are (presumably) unable to think about them.
Intention: I purposely focus on the stars. I see them in particular, as opposed to a photograph, which indiscriminately depicts all objects without singling any out.
Attention: I consciously focus my mind. If my attention is elsewhere—walking home in the dark, listening to music on my iPod, wondering who is walking up behind me—the stars lose my attention.
A bridge from mind to matter: Experiences can’t happen without processing in the brain. How photons of light from the stars turn into a visual image in the mind has never been explained. However, it is undeniable that I am experiencing the stars, so something is bridging the purely mental and the physical.
An observer: Without me, an observer, there is no proof that the stars exist. This is why Heisenberg declared that consciousness is something science cannot get behind, or go beyond. We only know that we are here observing the world. What happens when nobody observes it is a mystery.
A connection between events “in here” and events “out there”: Quantum theory, as part of the so-called observer effect, holds that observation isn’t passive. It causes waves to collapse into particles. Something that is invisible, all-pervasive, and subject to the laws of probability turns into something else that is local, physical, and certain. One interpretation calls the observer effect a small glitch in the mathematics that support quantum mechanics. Another interpretation says that the observer effect operates in the real world. In either case, events “in here” are tied to events “out there.”
Have I just done what I accused science of doing: cutting up reality into small slices? In the everyday world, all these ingredients merge and operate together. To participate in seeing the stars—or in seeing the Virgin Mary where a church wall should be—you call upon the same aspects of consciousness. None can be left out. What is more important, science does not understand these aspects of consciousness. Are miracles all in your mind? Yes. Is the everyday world all in your mind? Yes again. Having turned its back on consciousness for several hundred years, science is hardly in a position to say what consciousness can or cannot do. The crude manipulations of science by Dawkins and company are even less credible.
Neither Planck nor Pauli followed up on the mystery they had uncovered. They had no need to, not for a long time. Quantum physics blossomed into the most accurate and mathematically sophisticated model in the history of science. It achieved such precise results that its predictive powers were stunning. As the eminent British physicist Sir Roger Penrose notes, Newton’s gravitational theory, as applied to the movement of the solar system, is precise to one part in 10 million. Einstein’s theory of relativity improved upon Newton by another factor of 10 million.
As spooky as the domain of quarks and bosons may be, even to trained physicists, it obeys mathematical rules and can be predicted using those same rules. Reality, it cannot be denied, has led science along a very productive path. But leaving consciousness out of the equation was like leaving metaphysics out of cookbooks. You don’t need metaphysics to measure cake flour and butter, but the commitment to follow reality wherever it leads can make science very uncomfortable, especially when it’s time to overturn some cherished assumptions. That time inevitably arrives, for one simple reason: Reality is always more complicated than the models we use to explain it.
Every experience we have, mental or physical, is a miracle, because we have no way of explaining experience scientifically. We assume that photons give us the experience of form and color, yet photons are formless and colorless. We assume that the vibration of air creates sound, but vibrations are silent outside the brain. We study the receptor sites on the tongue and inside the nose that give rise to taste and smell, yet what takes place at those sites is chemical reactions, not an experience. (What did it taste like for oxygen and hydrogen to bond into a molecule of water? The question is meaningless without an experiencer.)
Materialism, in its conquest of the spiritual worldview, has burdened us with explanations requiring just as much faith as believing in miracles. Faith alone supports the notion that sodium and potassium ions passing through the outer membrane of neurons, in turn setting up electrochemical reactions that span millions of neural networks, create sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts. These are assumptions with no explanation whatsoever. Chemicals are just names we have applied to a mystery. Brain scans are snapshots of activity, telling us nothing about actual experience, just as snapshots of piano keys tell us nothing about the experience of enjoying music. Only consciousness makes experience possible; therefore, as the source of consciousness, God exists outside the domain of data.
The same road that leads to miracles leads to God. We haven’t traveled the road yet. We’ve only made the goal possible. That is the role of faith, to expand the range of possibilities. I am not asking anyone to believe in miracles; still less am I attesting to the miracles amassed by the church. All that the supernatural needed, to escape the ridicule of skeptics, was a level playing field. Nature can accommodate any imaginable event. The next step is to turn the highest possibilities, so long cherished in the human heart, into reality.