Skip to main contentAccessibility feedback

Don’t miracles mean that God has violated his own laws of the universe?

Question:

How can there be miracles? If there is a God--and I’m not sure there is--he couldn’t perform miracles. To do so would violate his own laws and disrupt and destroy the whole order of the universe as we know it.

Answer:

You seem to know what the “whole order of the universe” is and what all its “laws” are. Your picture or model of the universe is a limited (and limiting) one. It presumes you can and do know all that there is to know. You exclude a transcendent God because he would be stepping into a model you have constructed, like a house of cards, and knock the thing down.

Physicists and other scientists tell us how little they know and understand about the nature of the universe. Science does not know how the universe was created. It does not know ultimately what constitutes matter or life, and it does not know what the purpose of existence is. God is the Creator of the universe and only he has complete knowledge of and power over it. God’s infinite power over the universe is the first true law of the universe.

Miracles exist and are an exercise of that supreme power, though they may upset your limited view of the universe. Here are two books to clarify things for you: Old Errors and New Labels by Fulton Sheen (out of print but worth checking out of the library) and Miracles by C. S. Lewis (still in print).

Did you like this content? Please help keep us ad-free
Enjoying this content?  Please support our mission!Donatewww.catholic.com/support-us