Miracles

Sometimes I hear people talk about something in the Bible that is normally believed to be a miracle, and then they try to explain it away, as if it didn’t really happen, or it wasn’t really a miracle. Usually it’s something along the lines of: “That couldn’t possibly have happened!” That would be why it’s called a miracle.

Sometimes it’s along the lines of, “Well, that isn’t a miracle; there’s a scientific explanation for that.” For example, Joshua led the Children of Israel into battle against the city of Jericho; Jericho had great walls, and it was considered to be impenetrable. Joshua had the Israelites march around the city once a day for six days, and then, on the seventh day, they marched around it seven times, and the priests blew a loud blast on their trumpets (called shofars), and then the walls collapsed, and the Israelites were able to invade the city and vanquish its inhabitants. There’s nothing quite like a surprise attack after spending a week within sight of your opponent. Now, the walls would have had some resonant frequency. It is entirely possible that the frequency of the shofars was close to the resonant frequency of the walls. It is even conceivable that the marching around the city set up subterranean vibrations which caused the walls to settle imperceptibly such that their resonant frequency matched the shofar frequency exactly, so that, when the priests blew their trumpets, it set up a vibration in the walls, essentially causing them to self-destruct. All of this is feasible if Joshua had an advanced degree in civil engineering from MIT, and, even then, I suspect it would have been easier to modify the shofars to sound a different note, than to calculate how many times the Israelites would have to march around the city to change the resonant frequency of the walls (particularly when you consider too much settling would have changed the resonant frequency too much, and there would have been no way to undo that). When you also consider that Joshua had no tools for gauging the resonant frequency of the walls, or even the frequency of the shofars, it suddenly becomes clear that only one of the people involved could have possible made it work, and that’s God. My point being, if God chose to knock the walls down by His own power at the moment that the priests blew the trumpets, or whether He set up the situation so that the sounds of the shofars knocked down the walls, it is still a miracle.

Another one that I hear sometimes is the story of David and Goliath. The medical condition known as gigantism includes among its symptoms a resistance of the skull bones to join together, leaving “soft spots” in the head, even as an adult. Commonly, one of these spots is right in the middle of the forehead. That might suggest that David killing Goliath wasn’t really a miracle, he just happened to put a stone in Goliath’s “soft spot.” Let me ask you a question, though, if it were common knowledge that Goliath (or giants in general, for that matter) had a soft spot in such an easily accessible part of his face, wouldn’t he have had a helmet made that covered up his vulnerability? If it weren’t common knowledge, how did David know where to aim? Are we to believe that David killing Goliath was just dumb luck, or that the God that created man in the first place knew about Goliath’s weakness, and guided the rock from David’s sling to exactly the right place to do the most damage? Of course, the other thing to keep in mind is that, since, clearly the symptoms of gigantism were not common knowledge, the person who put pen to paper did not simply make up the story. They may not have had a full understanding of what really happened, but the fact that the account fits with medical knowledge that has been acquired since, shows that this miracle clearly really did happen.