Iâm not sure I understand you, then. It sounds to me like youâre saying if people put in effort, then God couldnât have had anything to do with it. And youâre saying that if God gets credit for a miracle, then the scientists donât get any credit.
But when I suggested that you seem to be saying we canât say both at the same time, you say:
Iâm going to need a little more explanation.
I didnât say that God had NOTHING to do with the vaccine, I canât possibly know that. But fact remains that all the work has been done by PEOPLE, so if there was divine intervention then at most it would be perhaps preventing some obstaclesâŚeven if true, I still wouldnât classify it as a miracle, sorry.
Again, weâre back to what are we happy to call a miracle. You can say that we have the vaccine because itâs ultimately Godâs will, therefore miracle, but then you can say that about everything. Thatâs why I would only say something is a miracle if it happened completely against the odds or at minimal effort, and there is no proof of either in this case. Again, Iâm not saying that God definitely had nothing to do with it, if anything we wouldnât have advances in medicine needed if humanity wasnât granted enough intelligence, if we didnât have all these gifted individuals to come up with the vaccine this time etc. But these are indirect actions, so therefore to me not a miracle. By not calling it a miracle I can actually both credit everyone involved and be grateful to God as well, for making it even possible in the first place. Letâs not forget that there was no such possibility during Spanish flu.
I wasnât talking about miracles. More general stuff, like when atheist say that prayer doesnât work because itâs just your brainwaves making you happy etc.
Hope this clears it up!
Regards
Marta
I just read article by Jim Stump Is the COVID-19 Vaccine a Miracle?, which make my scratch my head. Conclusion of this article is that
My feeling is that enthusiasm of author, may God bless him, make him too careless in his thinking. I want to people stop dying from Covid-19, nothing surprising here, at the same time this article strikes me as very weird statement. Calling very secular thing like vaccine âsign and wonder that shows something important about Godâ make me feel uneasy and strange.
Main argument of this article is that, since one of the features of Kingdom of God is a healing the sick, so since vaccine is healing people (or preventing from being sick) so it is pointing to the Kingdom of God. And here my problems starts. When I go to doctor for help and I get cured this does generally make me thing about God, in fact it is often opposite of that. In moments of ordinary sickness I often overly concentrated on secular things and concerns.
Second thing, what about smallpox vaccine? This is probably one of the most important breakthrough in medicine of all time and since it eliminate smallpox to such extent, I have hardly think about it and never here about it spiritual interpretation. Covid-19 is with us today, so it is natural that we have strong feelings about it vaccine for it, but we should further.
Also, vaccine for Covid-19 points also to some darker things. We here about âNo one is save, until everyone is safe.â, but peoples actions are often different. United Kingdom and European Union make vaccines part of they political war started by Brexit referendum, Germany buy additional doses breaking the rules that they promoted, countries in Africa seems to be in very bad position to vaccinated people, etc.
And when I write this one of vaccine productions powerhouses India is at the pick of horrible second wave and its neighbor Nepal is probably following in it footsteps. What to think about that?
There are other things about vaccines to tell, but I will stop now.
Can you explain what it is part of the providence of God? In some sense you can say that everything is a part of providence of God, but this is general that it become void of meaning.
Good point. Smallpox is the only human disease that I know of that has been totally eradicated. (It only exists in a lab.) And the Soviets and the US, although enemies, cooperated to bring about its demise.
We (some of we, anyway 
) make a distinction between general and special providence.
General:
Special:
(I would put vaccine development in the general providence category, not that COVID vaccines are not extraordinary scientifically and in the speed of their development.)
Of course they do, but again, this was not completely brand-new development of the kind where you expect LOTS of failure along the way. Theyâd already used the mRNA technology to develop a number of other vaccines (which just hadnât completely made it to FDA approval, because as I described, the usual amount of time it takes for that process) so they had a pretty good expectation that it was going to work. And traditional vaccine development specific for coronaviruses already existed. Obviously with any new virus, there is the possibility of failure, but with so many different avenues being taken that were already known to work, there was more expectation of success than failure.
Getting it completed and tested before the end of the year was more in the range of an unexpected success⌠but again, no one expected that we would have not done a better job in controlling the pandemic, and that was a big part of how it was able to show effectiveness so quickly.
I see the ability given scientists to create a vaccine was given by God, the physical resources were given by God, etc. You make an excellent point that it also points to a lot of bumbling and downright evil on mankind part, and that gets to the problem of theodicy. It is easy to just say it is all due to sin, and sin is a big part of the problem, but some is also the limitations of resources and physical constraints. Of course, you also have to account for why God allowed such a virus to come into being if you give him credit for saving people with the vaccine. Those questions are above my pay grade, and I have really never been satisfied with the answers given, but tend to accept that such things are simply due to the nature of physical reality in this universe, and whatever is, is what it has to be.
I am not sure about miracle but I do believe God had a lot of âwhere two or more gather in my nameâ going on. I think He spanned time and space and put aside greed and power to the benefit of mankind all as examples of how the Kingdom is suppose to work when putting the great command to love thy neighbor into action. I do believe we are witnessing Godly intervention and maybe some Romans 8:28 going on
Welcome to our little corner of the internet, Tom. It is good to hear your voice, and I agree. The parable of the Good Samaritan is very applicable to the situation we have seen with Covid, as Jesus answered the question of who is our neighbor. The question we must answer is âWho are we going to be?â in the parable.
I like the definition given by Anthony Hopkins as Paul to Jon Finch as Luke in the TV movie âPeter and Paulâ.
âIt is an event that creates faith.â
If, for example, someone sees the birth of a child as a miracle and it creates or enhances faith in them, why shouldnât that qualify as a miracle?
âIf it was a miracle, why allow the virus to evolve in the first place?â
Couldnât that be said of any miracle in the Bible. For example, if it was a miracle why was the man allowed to be born blind in the first place, etc."
Thank you for clarification. I will try to read finally this thread on forum and think more about it. I always need a time to think about such topics.
Thank you. For me all the dark things around vaccine, which we shouldnât ignore, point primarily to us, humans. Why we can do evil things is one thing, but my attention is mostly attract by question: why in such situation we choose to do evil things? In many ways this is much more unpleasant and inconvenient question.
Also this bring to me this words. Again.
Hello Tom. I hope that we both can learn from each other here.
That doesnât address the question. It only multiplies it a hundred-fold.
Vinnie
This is why it has always made more sense to imagine God as evolving along side of nature and not some genie which can have anything it wants with a snap of the fingers. As a non Christian there are events I can think of as miraculous such as abiogenesis which, to the degree that any sort of cosmic intention was involved, I have to imagine being exercised with great skill and patience.
I like it to a degree but in the modern sense, miracles are considered supernatural events. To avoid confusion, we should probably call them signs or something else. That is my problem with Jimâs [ @jstump ] article. He is using the term miracle, admittedly, using the Bible, in a way most of the world does not understand it. In addition to this, by the same standard, we could also say, scripturally speaking, the Covid-19 virus itself was a Biblical miracle. God is certainly in control of nature via the Bible.
Amos 3:6: As a trumpet blown in a city, and the people are not afraid? Does disaster befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?
There are a lot of places where God punishes and kills countless swathes of people in the Old Testament. One can just as easily ascribe the virus itself to God as they can the cure, Biblically speaking. This is not good theology IMHO. It borders on proof-text hunting and equivocation.
I stated we probably should not imagine a deistic universe with God popping in here and there and that a true understanding of Godâs interaction is beyond us. But to the modern world, a miracle is something supernatural. Any definition to the contrary has to be flatly stated up front. Once you do so it becomes the same as the birth of a child or a sunset. It loses its force to many Christians and certainly to those outside the fold.
There is nothing special or miraculous about the vaccineâs production. There was a lot of money and lot of cold, hard, empirical science involved. Big contracts were given and a lot of manpower went into it. Most people arenât seeing that as a miracle. Bringing the people who died of Covid-19 back to life would be a miracle.
If we think the power of God allowed the vaccine to be created, just as it allows any good thing to be created, that is fine. It is just a generic assertion based upon oneâs a priori beliefs about Godâs nature and the world. We calling Tylenol and Advil miracles as well? Think of all the pain and suffering they have prevented.
Vinnie
Hence my call for âan act of linguistic resistanceâ!
No! That misses entirely the very clear criteria I laid out for what a biblical miracle consists in: 1) extraordinary or rare event; 2) points toward the reality of the Kingdom of God.
There are ways to argue against my position on those criteria, or saying that those criteria are the wrong ones. But youâve not done that.
You have not demonstrated point one. Most of us do not find the vaccine extraordinary or rare beyond any other âmodern marvelsâ like a bridge or skyscraper. Money, centuries of scientific research and manpower went into it. Point 2 is just too vague. Billions of events point towards the reality of the kingdom of God for his followers. You are doing little more than saying God is the sovereign creator. If that is all you mean by the term âmiracleâ I have no disagreement and my only reservation is that the title of your article is a little sensationalistic. Rather than talking about Covid, I personally feel it should be broader and addressing deistic conceptions of God unknowingly held onto by many Christians.
Edited to add: most would also consider any supernatural act a âmiracleâ by God. Thus Godâs many stories of death and destruction in the Old Testament do qualify. You have not addressed that the same reasoning used to attribute the vaccine to God as a miracle also attributes the virus to him. Cleansing the earth of wickedness could easily be a âkingdom of Godâ issue which is so broad as a term it can encompass almost anything.
Vinnie
âLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.â -Colossians 4:6
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