Miracles yes and no

I am hard wired to believe in miracles but I am culturally programmed to poo poo them. So, depending on my mental mood in a given moment, I am or am not a believer.

Fan Heater

I noticed the ambivalence when I realized that my hands were cooler than I would like. I flicked a switch on a box and it immediately pumped hot air.

This reminded me of a first year student in my boarding school in Zambia. She came from a village without electricity. She was standing stupefied by the door of the dormitory flicking the light switch on and off. A miracle!

I am a sophisticated, modern scientist. The fan heater in my study did not, on its own, generate awe and stupefaction. It was nothing but a machine that converted electrical energy into heat and movement energy and created sound energy as a waste product. Clever stuff but hardly a miracle!

But then the back stories came to mind. The electricity gets to my house via copper wires from hydroelectric dams where the movement energy in falling water is converted to electrical energy. And the movement energy is due to the water cycle where the heat from the sun evaporates the oceans to make the clouds that fall as rain to make the rivers that feed the dams. Electric sunshine.

But there is more. Civil engineers were involved in building the dams, in mining the copper for the wires, in manufacturing the plastic to shield them, and in erecting the pylons to carry them across the country.

But there is more. Politicians, businessmen and financiers would have made policies and plans and encouraged research and development. Managers and administrators would have dealt with the paperwork involved in billing customers.

But there is more. There are never-ending numbers of people doing all manner of jobs in our modern social systems with their ever-increasing divisions of labour. Enormous complexity. Awesome and stupefying. It is tempting to see Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work. But is it miraculous?

It is miraculous if it is extra-ordinary in that it seems to transcend the laws of nature and/or involve a supernatural power or agency. But what constitutes ordinary?

Our ordinary worldviews – both conscious and unconscious – depend upon our nature (genes), nurture (learning) and serendipity (luck). What we know about the world depends on how the brain interprets the signals that are sent from the sense organs which are tuned to limited ranges – visible light, audible sound etc.

The human brain evolved to operate within the limits that were good enough to outwit the competition during our hunting and gathering days. Our hard wired understanding of time and space is at a human level – from seconds to seasons for time, and from mm to Km for space. Our mind boggles when we try to understand infinity (from quantum to cosmos) and eternity (nanoseconds to light years).

The real modern miracle is that there are counter-intuitive beings that are (a) conscious of their consciousness and (b) capable of conceptualizing the vital churn that is the unspeakable Oneness.

A Miracle – yes and no!