 | By JUG SURAIYA
Miracles: The Biggest Miracle Is Faith Itself
When Father Zossima dies in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, the holy man's devotees expect a miracle: They assure themselves that the corpse will not suffer the taint of physical corruption. To their dismay, the body begins to decompose even more rapidly than normal.
A follower supplies a 'solution' by arguing that the purity of the priest was such that the pace of nature was hastened so as to dispose of his mortal remains as speedily as possible. A miracle indeed. Dostoevsky's point is clear: The faithful will discover miracles in anything. Because the biggest miracle of all is faith itself.
Following Mother Teresa's beatification, miracles are once again centrestage. Are miracles just mumbo-jumbo, products of a willing suspension of disbelief? Or are they 'real', as the faithful would have us believe? A miracle, essentially, implies a hiatus in natural causality, brought about by divine or supernatural intervention.
The classical Greek dramatists used the 'miraculous' device of the deus ex machina (literally, 'god out of a machine'), a figure who would be lowered onto the stage to resolve some otherwise irremediable conflict through supra-normal intercession. The device was an endorsement of what the sceptical Greeks tacitly acknowledged. That what we call 'reality' is only a working hypothesis, based on our limited understanding of the infinitude of nature, and can be changed or even completely overturned by another hypothesis, or reality model, as and when our understanding of natural laws increased. To someone unschooled in astronomy the accurate prediction of a solar eclipse might seem miraculous; to an astronomer it is merely a matter of having an almanac handy.
The unfolding drama of scientific exploration has seen many an instance of the deus ex machina . The billiard ball precision of the Newtonian universe gave way to a shadow play of phantom particles that slipped in and out of existence in a 'miraculous' manner. Even Einstein was not proof against the impish gamesmanship of a god of the machine. God does not play dice with the universe, pronounced the Swiss patent clerk. But it seems that not only is God - which is another word for our understanding of the ultimate underpinning of the real - an incorrigible gambler but He also changes the rules of the game as He goes along. For instance, Bell's theorem postulates that each of a pair of identically charged particles separated to either end of the universe would immediately synchronise itself to a change of spin in the other. But such simultaneousness implies a 'messaging' system faster than the speed of light, which in Einsteinian terms is an absurdity. Or a miracle.
At a recent cosmology conference in Cleveland, Ohio, scientists discussed the mystery of the 'cosmological constant', or lambda. Lambda is a measure of the cosmic repulsion caused by the dissipation of energy in space after the Big Bang. Theoretical calculations of this constant have resulted in figures over a thousand times higher than what actually has been measured by astronomers. Going by the 'rule book', the universe, along with us, should never have existed in the first place, because the repulsion after the Big Bang start-up would have prevented its formation.
We are here because the nascent universe broke its own rules on our behalf. We are here thanks to a 'miracle'. Which, among other things, allows us to discuss, and dismiss, Mother Teresa's 'miracle' cure of a tubercular patient as mere hocus pocus.
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More from same author see: JUG SURAIYA
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