STEPHEN HAWKING, SCIENCE, AND THE MIRACULOUS

The late physicist, Stephen Hawking, had claimed that science and the laws of science are antithetical to the existence of miracles:

• A scientific law is not a scientific law if it holds only when some supernatural being decides not to intervene.

As brilliant a scientist as Hawking might have been, there is not one shred of scientific evidence that science has ruled out the possibility of miracles or intelligence working together with the laws of science.

For example, we can use our freewill and intelligence to build a plane which opposes the normal way that gravity affects objects. Consequently, flying does not contradict the law of gravity. Instead, it works in concert with gravity. Why then can’t miracles also work in concert with gravity or with any other law of science!

Hawking had assumed that the laws of science had to operate in a naturalistic vacuum apart from any intelligent intervention. However, he evidently came to this conclusion, not by virtue of the evidence, but the dictates of his naturalistic philosophy.

Mathematician and philosopher, John Lennox, agrees that there is nothing that would prevent the omnipotent God, who created the laws, from intervening:

• God is not a prisoner of the laws of nature . . . God, who set the regularities there, can himself feed a new event into the system from outside. Science cannot stop Him from doing that.

Can science discount the possibility that there are other causal factors beyond its direct grasp? Of course not!