Rain: A Miracle Right Before Your Eyes?
Many’s the time in every life that circumstances can seem overwhelming. For thousands of years Christians have looked to God for guidance and support. It is comforting to have faith that God will protect and provide for His people. To unbelievers such notions may seem unreasonable, unscientific or simply mystical. Antagonism toward religious faith has been present from the beginning and today sources seemingly everywhere dismiss religious faith and its followers as unsophisticated gullibles. Still, family leaders may discover new found relief if the comforting benefits of Christian faith are reliably true.
The Bible combines with Christian history to reveal innumerable miracles of faith in support of the truth of God and His divine providence protecting and providing for his people. The commonly accepted definition of a miracle is:
A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws bringing very welcome consequences and therefore considered to be the
work of a divine agency.
Are miracles as described in the Bible and Christian testimony true? Are they possible? Can they and do they still occur today? Can a miracle happen for me?
Throughout history, many remained unconvinced. Famous Scottish Enlightenment polymath and skeptic David Hume defined a miracle:
A violation of the laws of nature, and interruption in the patterns of behavior of physical matter.
Many unbelievers consider miracles impossible and those testifying to them are ‘lying, mistaken, deceived or otherwise wrong’ about what they observed or experienced. As with faith itself, miracles may be beyond proof or disproof, a comforting notion – perhaps even an experience – available to some and out of reach to others. Some events observed by all and open to interpretation may promote closer examination, especially for those yearning for truth.
John Piper is a pastor, college chancellor and founder of desiringGod.org.
Here is his account of his consideration of rain:
Picture yourself as a farmer in the Near East, far from any lake or stream. A few wells keep the family and animals supplied with water. But if the crops are to grow and the family is to be fed from month to month, water has to come from another source for the fields.
From where?
Well, the sky. Water will be carried in the sky from the Mediterranean Sea over several hundred miles and then poured out on the fields from the air.
Carried? How much does it weigh?
Well, if one inch of rain falls on one square mile of farmland during the night, that would be 2,323,200 cubic feet of water, which is 17,377,536 gallons, 144,735,360 pounds or 72,368 tons of water.
That’s heavy! So how does it get up in the sky and stay up there if it is so heavy?
Well it gets up there by evaporation. That means water stops being water for a while so it can go up and not fall down.
How does it get down then?
Condensation. Water starts becoming water again by gathering around tiny dust particles called condensation nuclei that are between only .001 and .0001 millimeters wide.
What about the salt? The Mediterranean Sea is salt water. That would kill the crops.
Right. The salt needs to be taken out, by desalination.
Oh. So, the sky picks up millions of pounds of water from the sea, takes out the salt, carries the water (or now gas?) for three hundred miles and then turns it back into water and dumps it on the farm?
Well, it doesn’t dump it. If it dumped millions of pounds of water on the farm from high above, the wheat would be crushed. So the sky dribbles the millions of pounds of water down in little drops. And they have to be big enough so that they don’t evaporate on the long way down, and small enough to keep from crushing the wheat stalks.
How do all these microscopic specks of water that together weigh millions of pounds but individually are almost weightless get heavy enough to fall out of the sky?
Well, its called coalescence. It means the specks of water start bumping into each other and join up to get bigger, and when they are big enough, they fall. If of course, there is sufficient thermal updraft, but not too much. And understanding they would just bounce off each other instead of joining up, if not for the specific electric charge of the droplets and electric field of the clouds . . .
Rain, it would seem, is very nearly, ‘A surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws bringing very welcome consequences and therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency.’
And what of any ‘violations of the laws of nature, and interruption in the patterns of behavior of physical matter’? While any one of the processes of evaporation, condensation, desalination, coalescence, nuclei bonding, thermal updraft, electric charge and electric field must operate according to the laws of nature, it seems utterly astonishing that 72,368 tons of salt water could be uplifted, carried by the air and deposited as fresh water rain drops many days and hundreds of miles away.
Statisticians could calculate the probability that each process occurs at the optimal time in sequence, in the optimal range of outcomes to produce pure rainwater from salty seawater in the far inland distance. It would seem the product of the calculation must be infinitesimally small, a probability approaching . . . impossible.
For millennia believers have looked at the wonders of nature and seen the face of God. In Romans 1:20 Paul explains, “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.” By one count there are at least 87 verses in the Bible about Rain. The Book of Deuteronomy verse 11:14 written 3,400 years ago proclaims, “He will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil.”
Still, unbelievers maintain that all of nature results from the blind, random, purposeless ‘pattern of behavior of physical matter’ over time. That view offers cover for those claiming to follow the science, though maybe at the cost of peace mind. Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit that fact.”
An atheist transformed by his searching into a Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis explains his view this way:
“If the solar system was brought about by an accidental collision, then the appearance of organic life on this planet was also an accident, and the whole evolution of Man was an accident too. If so, then all our present thoughts are mere accidents—the accidental by-product of the movement of atoms. And this holds for the thoughts of the materialists and astronomers as well as for anyone else’s. But if their thoughts—i.e. of materialism and astronomy—are merely accidental by-products, why should we believe them to be true? I see no reason for believing that one accident should be able to give me a correct account of all the other accidents. It’s like expecting that the accidental shape taken by the splash when you upset a milk jug should give you a correct account of how the jug was made and why it was upset.”
Whether by recurring accident, the result of extraordinarily complex coordination and interaction of natural processes, or something more, we all observe rain and its nourishing and glorious gifts. Astronomers also tell us that in the whole wide universe, rain water is unique to Earth. If it is a stupendous recurring cosmic coincidence we are thankful for it, if not necessarily comforted at the thought of being spiritually alone. Of course, rain is but one wonderful and nearly inexplicable feature of our utterly unique planet. It is almost as if it was created just for Mankind.
Scotus
desiringGod.org
The Great Work of God: Rain, Taste and See, John Piper, 1999
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dosteovsky, 1879
photo credit: The Storm Center, Alfred G. Buckham, The National Galleries of Scotland, 1920