The Record (Waterloo Region)

Insight, December 24, 2001

The Christmas Story: Miracles can and do happen

HENDRIK VAN DER BREGGEN

For The Record

The biggest megahit movie of this holiday season is certain to beThe Fellowship Of The Ring, the first installment of the film version of the fictional trilogy by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. For readers around the world, Tolkien is famous as an unmatched writer of fantasy.

But what many of even his most ardent followers don’t know is that the man who wrote fantasies believed in the absolute truth of Christianity’s miracles—including the miracle of Christmas.

Tolkien claimed that in Jesus of Nazareth, the ancient myth of a dying and rising God became fact. Tolkien even argued for this view with his unbelieving friends, one of whom was the Oxford professor, C. S. Lewis. Tolkien’s arguments were so forceful that Lewis became a Christian. Later, Lewis wrote: “The miracles (of Jesus)…are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

Clearly, Lewis thought Tolkien had put him onto something big.

Commercialization, political correctness, and Lord-of-the-Rings mania put temporarily aside, this Christmas season is an appropriate time to reflect on what Lewis’s claim means to us today, given our scientific understanding of the universe.

Christmas is (or used to be) the celebration of Jesus—the Son of God—being born, miraculously, of the Virgin Mary. More plainly stated, in 21st-century scientific terms, the major (but not whole) idea in this miracle is that God impregnated Mary by making a Y-chromosome in her ovum. How? Through a supernatural creation of some highly complex, specifically structured matter/energy.

Closely connected to Christmas is Easter. Thirty or so years after Jesus’ birth, Jesus was killed by crucifixion. Easter is (or used to be) the celebration of Jesus’ bodily resurrection to life from His grave. The New Testament claim concerning Jesus’ resurrection is that it is a sign to vindicate Jesus’ teachings about Himself, the hereafter, and the good news about God’s offer of forgiveness.

The religious significance of the Easter sign hangs on the idea that God miraculously brought back the dead body of Jesus as a “glorious resurrected body” (the same body, but very much alive, with some new and extraordinary powers). How? Once again, through the supernatural creation of some highly complex, specifically structured matter/energy.

So, are the Christmas and Easter miracles ridiculous ideas, belonging to an unenlightened and bygone era? Before we answer yes or no, let’s look at the concept of miracle as well as its fit in the universe as we know it.

The concept of miracle that Jesus’ virgin birth and resurrection present us with can be summarized by the following list of conditions: (1) a miracle is a religiously significant event; (2) it is produced by a very powerful, nature-transcending, intelligent causal source of matter/energy; (3) it is an extraordinary event whose extraordinariness consists of a coming into being of some highly complex, specifically structured matter/energy.

Is such a concept at home in our universe as understood by contemporary science? Curiously, it seems very much that it is.

Contemporary science tells us that about 15 billion years ago the universe began with a big bang—that is to say, a finite time ago, physical space and time as well as matter and energy came into being.

Because it is reasonable to think that whatever begins to exist has a cause (even in the quantum realm), it follows that it is also reasonable to think that the universe’s beginning was caused. Because the cause produced the entire physical universe, it is reasonable to think too that the cause is very powerful as well as transcendent (“outside” of the realm of space, time, matter and energy).

In other words, contemporary science tells us that the universe’s cause is supernatural.

Also, contemporary science strongly suggests that the universe was exquisitely fine-tuned at the start of the big bang for the subsequent development of life. Contemporary science tells us too that the basis of life, the cell with its DNA code and its molecular machines, consists of marvellously complex, specifically structured matter/energy.

These findings very strongly suggest that the universe’s supernatural cause is intelligent.

Now, if the universe points to a causal source of matter/energy which (who) transcends space and time, is very powerful, and is intelligent, then surely the universe is religiously significant. But this means that the universe, like a miracle, points beyond itself—very apparently to God.

In other words, the idea of miracle is not ridiculous: it fits very well with our contemporary scientific understanding of the universe.

Lewis, then, was on to something. Christmas and Easter are, in an important sense, a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters perhaps too large (and sometimes perhaps too small) for some of us to see.

If this is so, then evidence for any alleged miracle needs to be examined with care. Perhaps God has acted again. And perhaps the New Testament is true: The dying and rising God—the Lord of life—actually visited Earth. Lewis and Tolkien believed it. The Christian community believes it. I believe it, too.

Hendrik van der Breggen is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Waterloo and adjunct philosophy instructor at Emmanuel Bible College in Kitchener.