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
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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
Now youâre engaging my argument. Thank you. In support of point 1, I appealed to the expectations of the vaccine and its development at the beginning of the pandemic when we were told that it couldnât take less than 18 months, and experts were hoping for 60% effectiveness. Whether those hurdles were scientific, bureaucratic, or cultural, Iâm not sure it matters. Getting vaccines approved for use in less than a year with 95% effectiveness seems pretty extraordinary given that. Perhaps that was just rhetorical bluster, and the experts knew all along that weâd easily have a good vaccine in that amount of time.
It is a different issue to discuss whether God is responsible for the bad stuff in the world that happens. But I donât see how the bad stuff points to the reality of the Kingdom of God (as I very briefly described in the passage from Luke 4), and so wouldnât qualify as miraculous on these criteria.
Thereâs an underlying point thatâs not getting much discussion in this thread about the nature of language itself. Our words are not just labels for things in the world. The words we use are constitutive for our experience â not in some ridiculous post-modern sense that there is no reality. But rather, the words we use for things shape our understanding and even shape our perception. And these words change over time. There was no word âmiracleâ that biblical authors had at their disposal. So now weâre trying to see what range of experience should fall under that term. Our culture has largely adopted Humeâs usage of the term. Iâm pushing back, saying his usage conditions us to see things in a certain way that is unhelpful. Iâm drawing on biblical categories to say they allow us to see things like the development of the COVID vaccine as miraculous in the sense that it is marvelous and gives us a glimpse the physical wholeness that God has promised for our future and that we should be working toward now. When we have the eyes to see, we might move beyond the dichotomous thinking that supposes nature runs just fine on its own, or God is violating the laws God set up. Perhaps a more expansive (and biblical) application of âmiracleâ would help us see more of our experience as God nudging the world toward its ultimate telos, while we also fulfill our roles in working toward that too. If I may be so bold as to quote some more Scripture, I see this parallel to the two-sided understanding of salvation Paul gives in Philippians 2: âwork out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.â Salvation in the more expansive sense of God saving and redeeming all of creation is on display in COVID vaccine: scientists working it out with fear and trembling; God enabling them to will and and work for his good pleasure â the health and wholeness of people. I continue to think âmiraculousâ is an entirely appropriate way to see this.
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Miracles to me are rare. But if they happen everyday and are commonplace, I would expect more prevention.
For me something seems miraculous if it is possible to imagine it never having happened at all and no clear reason is available to explain why it did happen. I find evolution pretty miraculous, especially the elaboration of sensory cognitive processing capacity. It is easy for me to imagine a world in which life emerges but carries on without any such development. Of course the emergence of organic chemistry itself also seems miraculous. After all people are actively trying to recreate that transition in the lab without much success so far, so it is hard to think of it as inevitable.
Having watched the new Extra Life documentary @beaglelady recently posted about, I think vaccines count as miraculous from my perspective. When you look at how the vaccine effect was discovered it is very easy to imagine it never having come to light.
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As someone that works in web development where I often have to estimate the time needed for a job, I can attest to how you never want to go with the lowest possible time you might complete something, but a time that is more realistic if there are bumps along the way. I donât recall anyone saying that it wasnât possible to have vaccines sooner, just that 18 months was a reasonable expectation to have them. Very big difference.
As I pointed out as well, most scientists making these predictions really had no way to predict ahead of time how well we would control the pandemic many months later. If we had kept it better under wraps, it easily could have added months to the time needed to reach statistical significance with the vaccines. Just as they had a pretty good indication from mRNA vaccines already in development that these had a good chance to be very efficient. But you donât want to promise the very best you think you can get⌠as then have to explain why they didnât turn out to work that well if you donât hit that high a target.
I think of it like Scotty from Star Trek. Who revealed that the reason he got the nickname of âMiracle Workerâ was he would take his time estimates for repairs and just double them. That way he could easily meet Kirkâs demands to do it in less time than that, and look like he could âbreak the laws of physicsâ.
So yes, to the general public, it certainly may look miraculous to have gotten them completed so quickly. But it really wasnât when you understand all the science behind it and why the timeline was so shortened.
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Any new innovation or discovery is going to seem âmiraculous.â The development of antibiotics. Corticosteroids like prednisone. Cancer therapies. Insulin for diabetics. And so forth. And thatâs just medical stuff.
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And in other areas ⌠what if weâd never developed language, the ability to use fire or basic farming? None of those seem inevitable.
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Canât you just imagine what Captain America felt when he woke up in these times?
I prefer the faith definition. The miracle lies not in the event but in the response. Perhaps a researcher is struggling to find the correct formula for a vaccine, prays, & finds it. Or someone prays for a vaccine to protect them and suddenly one is provided. For those people, the vaccine is a miracle.
I Kings 19:11-13 is instructive:
He said, âGo out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.â Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; 12 and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. 13 When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, âWhat are you doing here, Elijah?â
Iâm reminded of what Arthur C Clark said, âAny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.â
Arthur C Clarke might disagree. 
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Thanks. Fixed it.
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That is probably true. But looking back in time, good luck or providence can seem inevitable. I wouldnât take magic for granted.
And then thereâs Godâs âtechnologyâ, speaking of miracles.
Reminds me of the wonderfully charming little comedy The Gods Must Be Crazy. I wonât give away the plot but it starts off with some Aboriginal people discovering something we wouldnât even consider âtechnologyâ it was so commonplace to us, but they thought must be a gift from the âGodsâ for how unusual to them that it was.
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Therefore technology is time relative but not to God who being in all truth is aware of all possible technology and is tolerant of whatever level of knowledge his creation chooses to live in. Wow his patience and love is amazing
Itâs certainly a miracle if it kept you or yours from getting a disease that could be very nasty.