The Miraculous

Everybody is interested in miracles. Most of the time we look at extraordinary moments, and consider the very most extraordinary events as 'miracles'. Professor Van der Veken, once answered a student's question concerning miracles, with the the challenging reply that though we cannot see it most of the time, each and every moment is miraculous. At least one way to understand this is reflect upon the sheer improbability of life itself.

For every process to have aligned in harmony whether you conceive of this as God's hand, or simply as the result of nature, represents a stupendous fact, especially when conceived through the lens of Physics. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, probability theory, quantum mechanics, relativity---these approaches to understanding the material universe leave 'life' "in the cold."

Life is mysterious because it is reflexive: that is to say the one who conceives of it asks into the question standing upon the very ground of life that supports it. Yes, many riddles can be puzzled out mechanically "within the game" and yet it is all still within the game. By 'game' I mean the "lens" through which you interpret your existence. Reflections follow below which establish that the 'world' of the rabbit and the world of the person are not conceived in the same way, and yet, it is obvious that the rabbit or the squirrel coexist with us, and from a third point of view we can see that there is a common world including both the rabbit and the human being. I mention this in the case that someone may be thinking that I have overlooked the "subjective" problem. At any rate, to continue with the 'reflexivity' of our life, we ask after life from the life we share. We want to search out an 'answer' to life, some account for its being there, in what should be a very cold and dusty universe.

We are attempting to "transcend" the matter of life in order to find its "cause" or some reason- satisfying account for life. We simply cannot "get outside", we are firmly situated within life. For those who read Scripture, we find in the Bible: "In Him we live, move and have our being." Acts 17:28. This is spoken about God. We cannot get outside of "God." We call God 'omnipresent.'
The Zen Masters speak of the same sort of thing when they talk about 'the ten thousand things' which means 'all what is" to use Van der Veken's expression. And this line of thinking may also be conceived in a Process philosophy following Albert North Whitehead and the Claremont School. There are many approaches to this fundamental question, including Saint Thomas Aquinas. Which is my preferred account. [The fact that I prefer it does not make it true or satisfy the other guy in argumentation. It simply means that in my case, I find Aquinas' overall account of Reality to be the most satisfying account on almost every score. I find purely rational accounts of Reality to be 'cut short' to be incapable of grasping life! No one should seriously think that that life in its totality is 'graspable' in some sense. Rationalists would be surprised to learn how mystical Aquinas' thought really is.]

This is not a wimp out to believe in God, though it seems so to the steely minded physicist. Whichever way you cut the cake, the scientist wants a reproducible account, which is preferably finite and discrete. In many cases, it seems to me, scientists will even "overlook" mysteries ('miracles') in order to provide a more convenient and satisfying Gestalt, or fundamental 'take' on the nature of the mystery that greets them every day. The mind wants order and order it will have! For example, a great advance in Physics might mean that a scientist has learned a new way of looking at the universe, even though this is often incomprehensible to the ordinary non-physicist, at times, popular accounts are given in order to communicate these gains in knowledge. But adding this 'knowledge' does not expand my grasp of the more basic question about Life. In fact, it starts one out on a very long road, which promises to 'explain' everything, but when may I ask is this day? We have a lot riding on this bet.

No, it is so much more natural to simply ask into one's root of life, rather than attempting to "get outside" and "transcend" the phenomenon and to give an account for it. Though reason pushes us on these paths, we alone can decide to say "enough" "I will use reason as it suits me." To really pursuse reason is not reasonable. What is reasonble is that there is a stopping point to thought, called mystery.

In Aquinas' philosophy the question lands on Being and God as prime being, all roads lead to God. If you take the Zen approach, you leave the question intact, you enter the question but do not expect an 'answer'. The Western engineer and scientist employs a system of rationality borrowed from physics but stripped bare of its historical underpinnings. There is a 'physics' with no attempt to offer a 'metaphysics'. This does not mean that metaphysics goes away! It functions now hidden, behind the rules of culture as 'strategy', 'plan', the way things get done, what works, etc... And we have forgotten about the basic questions as Heidegger laments.

In the end God either exists or does not: to say that God exists for those who believe that God exists is not satisfying to my mind because if we mean the content of 'God' to fulfill the concept which includes pre-existent, self-sufficient, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent then we are not talking about a hallucination or some "psychotic break" if we think through what we mean by 'God' seriously then it is in my estimation not possible to say that this Being does not exist. Here I go along with St. Anselm's famous argument 'Id quo maior non intellectum' These proofs of God's existence fascinate me but I think that they commit a blunder which is attempting to 'lecture' someone who fundamentally does not conceive of things this way. It is like a friend who wants to share a piece of favorite music, it is a very disheartening thing when we learn that the others are not as interested in the thing we like or may think that the music we love 'sucks'. Call me naive but I always figured that they just did not hear what I though was so great in the Beatles music or the Moody Blues. Taste, they say, and that is all there is to it!

If things were that way I for one would be brokenhearted. If I learned that the music which consider 'beautiful' was deemed equally as good as something that I really dislike, then I would feel somewhat 'shortchanged'. Allow me to explain, my reason wants to complete the world in which it discovers this beauty, it wants to give a 'beautiful' account for the beautiful music. The account which gives the greatest run for the money as satisfying reason, which then gets coupled with the essence of truth as a Being whose being is radically inconceivable to human reason, though he knows it must exist. This account leaving the door open for faith is so much better than a system that wants to get to some final answer, and "closes shop down." The human being functions best in a 'balance' with some open doors, it is here that I discover beauty, and harmony in these magic moments, these mini-miracles, until the day when we wake up to the total, 24/7 miracle.