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January 9, 2011

If a miracle can be defined as: "A marvellous event not ascribable to human power or the operation of any natural force and therefore attributed to supernatural, esp. divine, agency; esp. an act (e.g. of healing) demonstrating control over nature and serving as evidence that the agent is either divine or divinely favoured" (OED), then wouldn't [g]od [h]imself be a miracle, as he doesn't exist within the confines of or according to the very laws of nature [h]e created / willed into being?

If not, then wouldn't natural law itself be a miracle if whatever existed prior to it was somehow more genuinely natural, if eternity was real and time illusory? As humans (theologians, philosophers, the good folks over at the Oxford English Dictionary) define the word / concept in such a way, wouldn't a miracle itself in that sense be self-contradictory, oxymoronic?

Given the nature of time, and the fact that if [g]od exists [h]e does so in eternity, far removed from our temporal existence in the universe, how could [h]e cause / effect events from outside time? [G]od is said to possess "the divine gaze," with which [h]e can see all time at once, and so knows when, at what point in time, to act from [h]is eternal vantage point, should [h]e favor one particular sports team over another, or this or that religious group killing this or that religious group in [h]is name.

Then there remains the question, which I'm quite sure I'm not the first to ask: When did [g]od create the universe, if [h]e exists in eternity, and, if that is somehow miraculously calculable, why didn't [h]e create it sooner? If [h]e didn't create it immediately, what took so long?