When we examine this ancient notion of miracle, especially in the superior expression it receives in the Bible, we discover in it two things: it is made up of two judgments of a very different order: of an intellectual and scientific order, disclosing that which then existed in point of fact, a naïf and perfect ignorance of the nature and the laws of things; and of a judgment of a religious order, implying an absolute confidence in an all-good God who is almighty to respond to the cry of His children and to deliver them. These two judgments are so thoroughly blended in the biblical notion of miracle that orthodox theologians and irreligious philosophers agree in declaring them to be inseparable, and they would compel us to choose between a piety hostile to the elementary results of science, and a science radically hostile to piety. The dilemma is specious but false. To see it vanish it is only necessary to perceive that these two judgments, not being of the same nature, cannot be eternally solidaire. The settlement of the controversy in which Christian thought has been engaged for the last three centuries will consist in separating them.
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2. The Notion of Miracle in the Face of Modern Science and of Piety
Modern science neither affirms nor denies miracle; it ignores it, necessarily. It is, for it, as if it did not exist.
Religious persons, who often look towards science to ascertain what their faith may hope or fear from it, only consider its results, and as these are never definitive, but always variable, always being revised, enlarged, enriched, they secretly indulge the hope that a moment may come when science, which has not yet welcomed miracle, will welcome it; that such a fact, supported by such and such testimony, will in the end conquer its resistances and obtain a place in the category or the catalogue of scientific facts. They would quickly lose this illusion, if, turning away from the net results of science, they would fix their attention on its processes and methods of investigation. What is it, according to science, to know a phenomenon? It is to place it in a necessary link of succession, concomitance, and causality with other phenomena which explain it by analogy. Suppose a mysterious phenomenon without analogy and connection with any other; savants brought into its presence will declare themselves simply in a state of ignorance with respect to it. They will say they have not discovered the cause of it, that they cannot explain it; they will study it on every side a thousand times if necessary until they have torn out the heart of the mystery. Either they will succeed, or on this point there will never be science made or explanation established.
Savants, it is true, are the first to recognise and to proclaim, in all domains, the limitations of their knowledge. The most advanced are the most modest. They all have the feeling that their discoveries are but a beginning, and that the part of Nature they have explored is as nothing to that of which they are ignorant. They hold themselves in readiness to modify the laws they have established, to enlarge their hypotheses, to make new ones, to record all facts which observation may supply. That many facts astonish them and disconcert them, we see every day. But mark the attitude of the true savant in face of these new phenomena. Does he doubt a single moment that they obey laws, unknown perhaps, but certain? ... There can only be science of that which is general and constant.
It is therefore absolutely chimerical to expect of science the establishment of any miracle whatever.... Miracle, according to the only tenable definition, and this is the ancient and traditional one, is a positive intervention of God in the phenomenal order and at a particular point. Now science knows only second causes. How could it ever seize in the course of these causes the immediate action of the First Cause? Is God a phenomenon that the eye of man can ever perceive in any phenomenal series? And is not this the reason why science despairs of ever proving scientifically the existence of God? It recognises itself to be impotent to step out of the relative, to resolve anything outside space and time, and it has removed from its domain all questions as to origin and aim, because it has no means of reaching them.
To perceive God and the action of God in the human soul and in the course of things is the business of the pious heart (Matt. v. 8). The affirmation of piety is essentially different from scientific explanation. It places us in the subjective and moral order of life, which no more depends on the order of science than the scientific order depends on piety. There cannot be conflict between these two orders, because they move on different planes and never meet. Science, which knows its limits, cannot forbid the act of confidence and adoration of piety. Piety, in its turn, conscious of its proper nature, will not encroach on science; its affirmations can neither enrich, impoverish, nor embarrass science, for they bear on different points and answer different ends. My child is ill; I procure for it the best advice and the best remedies; but confiding in God's mercy, I beg of Him to spare me my child, or, in any case, to help me to accept His will. The child recovers. What savant will forbid me to thank my heavenly Father? Will this be because my thanksgiving will be a denial of the science of the physician? Certainly not, for my gratitude will include the fact of the doctor, the medicine, the care bestowed, the whole series of second causes that have contributed to the recovery of my child. Was not this the piety of Jesus when He taught us to pray: "Our Father which art in Heaven: Thy will be done: Give us our daily bread"? Was He ignorant of the fact that in order to have bread we must sow wheat? No; but none the less He asked His food from God, because He knew also that, in the last resort, it is the will of God that makes the substance and the order of things, that it is He who clothes the lilies of the field, feeds the fowls of the air, makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and sends upon the labourer's soil the early and the latter rain.
Reduced to its religious and moral significance, miracle, for Jesus, was the answer to prayer, as M. Ménégoz (pp. cit. pp. 19-29) has clearly shown, and this altogether apart from the phenomenal mode in which the answer was produced. God only manifests Himself in extraordinary events in order that we may learn to recognise Him in ordinary ones. The child asks, the father grants; but the child does not trouble himself about the means by which his wishes are gratified. The pious man adores the ways he cannot comprehend. This confidence in the love and justice of God may be accompanied in the mind of the apostles and of Jesus Himself by imperfect or erroneous scientific ideas as to the mode of divine action in Nature. But it is not solidaire, with them, and may easily be detached in order to bring it into harmony with the views of our present science, as in the mind of Jesus and the apostles it was in harmony with the science of their time. For piety, the laws of Nature which have since then been revealed to us in their sovereign constancy, become the immediate expression of the will of God. The Christian submits to them instinctively, saying: "Thy will be done." Which is only saying that these laws, which are sometimes spoken of with a sort of horror, as of a blind and brutal fate, become religious and are consecrated in the eyes of piety by a divine authority. Why then should not piety offer to science and its revelations of Nature the same frank and joyous welcome as that accorded to them by scientists themselves? The opposition established by scholasticism between faith and science, is it not as irreligious as it is irrational, and has it not been one of the chief causes of the death of theology in the Church and of the triumph of incredulity in the present age?
While developing themselves on parallel lines, can science and faith remain isolated? Man is one, and his scientific activity, like his religious activity, tends to a synthesis. The synthesis will be found in a teleological consideration of the universe. This universal teleology, faith predicts it, science labours to realise it. It can only be established by this twofold concurrence. Without faith, knowledge of the universe is impossible; without phenomenal science all interpretation of the universe becomes illusory. Faith, therefore, must become more and more an act of confidence in God, and the scientific study of phenomena ever more profound and rigorous. Of course the teleological synthesis will never be completed here below, but it will always find a provisional and satisfying conclusion in the act of confidence and adoration towards God.