Description

Rav Michael Laitman, PhD and Jeffrey Satinover, MS, MD approach miracles from a scientific standpoint: that “the judge has only what his eyes can see.” Rav Laitman states that the only reason we perceive phenomena as miraculous is because we have an incomplete perception of nature, and that by attaining a complete perception of nature, we would not perceive miracles as “miracles,” but as preordained events in nature’s plan. Dr. Satinover continues by giving a scientific example of a miracle stemming from an incomplete perception of nature.

Transcript

Miracles

Question: Are there miracles in the world? Does the Creator create miracles?

Rav Michael Laitman, PhD: Miracles? No, there's no miracles, there's no holy water, there's no amulets. Forget about these things.

For thousands of years people have believed in them. It would have been very nice if we had them. But, other than psychological support, there's nothing to it. Although psychological support is something needed, because if we believe in something, it gives us additional strength and it can be turned into a real miracle.

But again, a miracle is not something above Nature. Everything that we research and everything that we know is at the end of the day-Nature. Outside of Nature there's nothing.

And the wisdom of Kabbalah, too, only expands our knowledge about the existing reality, within which we exist. So there's no miracles. If you bring a primitive person here, he'll think everything around here is a miracle. It depends on our knowledge of reality.

Dr. Jeffrey Satinover: Now, I'll answer in a kind of funny way. I could start out half-seriously by saying, "Well yes, as a matter of fact, there are miracles," except that Rav Laitman was very careful to point out that a miracle is something outside of Nature.

But this would surely sound like a miracle to you. There's a theoretical physicist at the University of Paris named Roland Omnez who teaches an introductory course in quantum mechanics. And he has his students calculate the probability of the Earth and all its inhabitants, without any disruption whatsoever, simply disappearing from its orbit around the sun, and then, appearing intact around a star eight or ten light years away.

The point being: that that is not an impossibility. That actually could happen. There's a finite possibility that it could happen in the next couple of minutes. Now that probability is on the order of one over ten to the tenth to the eighty fourth power, which is an extraordinarily tiny probability. So it's not something I would get terribly exercised about.

But the point is that in a classical understanding of the physical world, in a deterministic view of the world-which is now understood not to be the case, such a thing is an utter impossibility. The probability of its happening is exactly zero, not just almost zero.

And throughout the modern physical understanding of the world, we see "miraculous" things happening. Now, I don't mean just miraculous, in the sense that a primitive person seeing it would find it miraculous. I mean, for instance, that a sub-atomic particle will routinely be in one place one moment, and then will suddenly disappear where it is, and reappear at a distance, wholly intact, without traversing the intervening distance.

Now, that happens absolutely routinely, trillions and trillions of times a second. The reason that happens is because of the scale, the nature of the particles. The reason that his students were able to calculate that number ten to the tenth to the eighty-fourth, has to do with the mass of the Earth, the complexity of the system, the number of particles involved, and so the probability has become very, very small.

But in fact, it is intrinsic to nature that utterly miraculous things are happening all the time. If you define a miracle as something that stands outside of Nature, then by definition, miracles never happen. But if you define miracles as things happening for which there is no cause in the physical universe then in fact, all the physical reality is shot through with miraculous.