Probably the greatest miracle is human consciousness. To make an example, if everything has to have a scientific explanation we should be able to develop a truly self conscious AI, yet I believe it will never be done. I firmly believe that machines will never be able to experience qualia and subjective experiences.
I agree. My point is that I donât think it needs to be framed as violating a sort of law. This framing opens you up to a philosophical problem for science. If God will just upend natural law anytime he sees fit, can we really trust that any phenomenon is actually a result of scientific laws as opposed to God just performing another miracle? Also, what does it say about the rational character of God that he will just violate his own laws that he has set for creation on whim? This philosophical problem actually contributed to the decline of science in the Medieval Islamic world since accepting the idea that God was not bound laws of any sort essentially undermined the philosophical foundations of Islamic science since every phenomenon could just be another miracle and not a natural process. I think the way to avoid this is to say that God isnât violating a natural law when he performs a miracle and that there isnât actually a dichotomy between miracles and natural phenomena. An event can be both at once. There is a normal way that God does things, which we call science, and an extraordinary way that God does things that we call miracles. Both of them are ultimately following laws that God established, but we know much more about the former than the latter.
I think itâs more going beyond the law than violating it. The spiritual realm is above the material realm, they are not on the same plane of existence, we can see that when we read what Jesus did after the Resurrection when he was able for example to pass through walls. The glorious body will be subjected to the laws of the spirit and not to the laws of the material realm. More than breaking them I think itâs just a superior realm of existence with laws that are different from this one and when the spiritual realm interacts with the material world the former takes precedence. The ancient romans used to say âubi maior minor cessatâ , which means âwhen the greater is there, the lesser ceasesâ.
I also believe that God many many times uses natural laws not yet fully understood to make miracles but I think that there are instances where this is not the case and there is a true supernatural act.
For example the resurrection (I donât believe that we will be able to truly resurrect bodies, unless we are talking about zombies maybe, but I donât think that we will ever be able to resurrect a body with the soul and everything, especially when we know that after death there is the particular judgement and it would be very problematic -to say the least- to summon someone back after the particular Judgment) or, like I said, human consciousness, which I really believe is probably the greatest miracle, yet we take it for granted because having a subjective consciousness and experience is one of the things that define a human being, so we take it for granted as if it was something âmundaneâ, but there is no way to explain qualia and subjective experience under a materialistic framework. Even though many would love to be able to do it in order to provide a âproofâ of the annihiliation they apparently desire so much.