Henke 2022aa
Lundahl (2022i) is Wrong Again: Miraculous Healings Would Violate Natural Law
Kevin R. Henke
September 15, 2022
Earlier with the C.S. Lewis (1960) pool game analogy, I admitted in Henke (2022b) that if God exists, he could play a game of pool without violating the laws of physics:
“When humans play pool, we’re stuck obeying the laws of physics. Now, if God exists, he, by definition, is not necessarily forced to obey natural laws. He supposedly created natural laws and if he can create natural laws, then supposedly he can make exceptions or undo them. God could play pool by either using his supernatural powers or he might simply restrict himself to using only natural laws. If he exists, he could do anything he wanted to. God could remove the effects of gravity from a pool ball and cause it to pass through the ceiling or allow the atoms of the ball to pass through the table, but humans can’t do these things.”
Now if God decides to play pool without violating any natural laws, I would not consider God’s actions to be miraculous any more than if Jesus walked on the beach or ate some fish like any human being. I also admit that Mr. Lundahl’s far-fetch speculations about God creating invisible forces or invisible angels holding up Jesus so that he could walk on water or ascend into Heaven also might not violate any of the laws of physics (Lundahl 2022a; Lundahl 2022b; Lundahl 2022i).
However, if we are to believe the healing stories in the Gospels and the book of Acts, then it becomes far more difficult than a simple pool game or even Jesus walking on water for Mr. Lundahl to make up excuses to explain how these events could have occurred without violating natural law. In Henke (2022b), I stated:
“According to the gospel stories, blindness, deafness, and lameness could be supernaturally healed by Jesus. In these stories, natural law doesn’t apply when these miracles occur. Miracles counteract and replace the natural consequences, they don’t “add” to them.”
Lundahl 2022i relists my statements and gives the following replies:
Kevin R. Henke
According to the gospel stories, blindness, deafness, and lameness could be supernaturally healed by Jesus. In these stories, natural law doesn’t apply when these miracles occur.
Hans Georg Lundahl
What exact law involved in medicine would be broken by such healings?
Btw, that is one area in which the presence of Christ would actually make those around Him expect the normal course of events (but not the natural laws) to be very often broken.
Kevin R. Henke
Miracles counteract and replace the natural consequences, they don’t “add” to them.
Hans Georg Lundahl
In miracles, God adds to the agencies usually involved in a process, those being the ones described by natural laws.
Natural consequences of a pre-existing condition, and the laws of nature applicable to them, are not coextensive. There is natural law about natural healing of wounds taking time and after a certain amount of damage has been reached being impossible. They remain applicable to the normal agent of natural healing processes, since the agent actually replacing tissue damaged by either leprosy or the fall from the window (boy raised by St. Paul, in the presence of St. Luke who had seen him dead) is other than the natural agent for healing. Hence, no laws actually broken. But precisely added to. [my emphasis]
How can the “natural course of events” be very often broken, but not the laws of nature in the process? Normally, a human eyeball, hearing system, and nervous system takes several months to develop in the womb and the development may continue after birth. However, Jesus healed the blind, deaf and lame immediately. Mr. Lundahl needs to explain how speeding up the healing process to mere seconds would not violate natural law. This is not how natural healing operates. Depending on the cause of blindness, optic nerves may need to be regenerated in a matter of seconds. How is this not a violation of natural law when nature takes months to do the process? The speeding up of the exothermic biochemical reactions during a miraculous regeneration would also produce a lot of heat. How would Jesus get rid of potentially destructive excess heat by not doing a miracle?
If an ear drum or other parts of a hearing system are completely missing, how is creating them from nothing (ex nihilo creation) not a violation of natural law? How is this consistent with the Law of Conservation of Matter-Energy? How is repairing a spinal cord and replacing other degenerated body parts in mere seconds so someone can walk be done without speeding up the process and violating the slow processes of natural growth and healing? Natural processes are often slow, but miraculous healings require that they be instantaneous. How do these purported miracles not involve violations of the rates of natural law?
Creating new body parts from nothing or rejuvenating damaged body parts is not God adding “…to the agencies usually involved in a process, those being the ones described by natural laws.” It’s God supernaturally interrupting the natural process of decay, overriding the effects of natural law on human biology and immediately reversing the damage or creating new body parts out of nothing when natural law dictates that that can’t happen. Mr. Lundahl needs to have a better imagination and explain his arguments better.
Reference:
Lewis, C.S. 1960. Miracles, 2nd ed., printed 1974: Harper One: HarperCollinsPublishers, 294pp.