What, then, are the limits of personal agency? The limits set to that incarnated intelligence which organisms possess. The ability to re-direct and distribute the energies which surround them in accordance with laws which study reveals, the ability to build dwellings for shelter and for adornment, the ability to use medicines for healing, the ability to drain marshes, dig canals, girdle the earth with iron roads, the ability to conceive things of beauty and to translate these conceptions into sensuous form, all these abilities are theirs. Such agency works within nature as a highly gifted part within a whole to which it is not alien. But experience gives us no hint of a transcendent agent for whom the earth is as a footstool and who whirls stars and planets through space to their appointed orbits.
CHAPTER X
DO MIRACLES HAPPEN?
Do miracles happen? I am often asked this question by young people who are trying to combine religious tradition with modern thought, and find a disharmony. Ecclesiastical authority urges them to the acceptance of miracles, while the principles and conclusions of science as obviously militate against any such belief. Many halt half-way between these two opinions and drift through life without having been able to come to a decision. In their moments of mysticism, when the past religious view of the world with its prestige and emotional appeal gains the upper hand, they are persuaded that all things are possible. They lose sight of nature with its massive constancy, and float back into the sentiment of personal agency so natural to man. As they listen to the poetry of the familiar passage read by the clergyman, their memories awaken, and vague hopes for they know not what are stirred to a restless life. All the surroundings and accompaniments reënforce these suggestions, for that is the transformed purpose of modern rites. The music throbs in their ears, now plaintive and low, now bursting into triumphant peals. Incense fills the air, and the lights burn dimly. Then a new psychological world is created within them. The erstwhile solid earth with its blind driving power becomes transparent and a thing to despise. The Lord reigneth to Whom all things are possible. His the power to create or to destroy, to bind or to loose, to wither or to make whole.
The next day in the laboratory, perhaps, the same individuals watch the circulation of the blood in the thin membrane of a frog's foot, or measure the transformation of energy in a chemical reaction, or examine the nerve-tissue of the human brain, and another outlook forms itself. They see a world of harmonious movements, of gigantic forces, of delicate adjustments, of slow birth and quick decay. The sentiment of law, the feeling for fact, the sense of nature grow upon them. For the time being, they are the conscious spectators of an immense reality it would be meaningless to set aside. The complexity and autonomy of nature thrusts all thought of superpersonal agency into the background. Thus the pendulum swings back and forth from supernaturalism to naturalism. They believe, and yet disbelieve. What answer must be given to these troubled minds?
Now the question, Do miracles happen? presupposes a single, unambiguous meaning for the term, miracle. Yet to secure such a single meaning requires an effort. It is so tempting for the advocate of miracles to make qualifications when the argument goes against him, to say that he did not mean an act of a supernatural agent but only an extraordinary event, something marvelous and not easily accounted for. We shall concern ourselves primarily with what may be called a theological miracle, an occurrence confidently assigned to the will of a divine agent. Incidentally, however, we shall discuss the logical attitude to take toward marvels which cannot easily be fitted into the usual scheme of events.
To understand the ideas and sentiments associated with our term, we must go back to the past. We are sufficiently acquainted by now with the setting of the religious view of the universe to know that the gods were at first forces in nature and only slowly became spiritual agents outside of nature. We cannot too often remember that man had no instinctive knowledge of what energies operated in the world and what were the conditions of their operation. He peopled woods and fields and sky with invisible agents who could do almost all they wanted to do, and with no hindrance from distance. We may put it this way: man had no idea of spatial process but thought of all events as acts of will. The gods had mana, or power, just as the medicine man had, only greater. And miracles were, for ages, only extraordinary events due to the power of gods or other power-possessing beings. So long as this primitive view of things was prevalent, miracles were only especially significant events assigned to the will of the gods. They were events which transparently revealed their anger, or favor, or purposes. There was nothing illogical or puzzling about them.