WHERE WE ARE

I have previously analyzed eight different definitions of the word “miracle” into seven different elements:

In Part 1, I examined the elements of Impact, Genus, and Species. In Part 2, I examined the elements of Cause/Agent, Exception, and Baseline. In Part 3, I argued that we should eliminate the Exception and Baseline elements from the definition of the word “miracle” in order to avoid importing questionable or controversial philosophical assumptions into the definition.

THE ELEMENT OF PURPOSE

In this current post, I will examine Purpose, the seventh element of definitions of “miracle”:

PURPOSE – the goal or intention behind the making of a miracle

Habermas indicates that miracles must have some sort of purpose, they are “effected for a purpose”. This seems only to imply that miracles are events that are produced intentionally by some person or agent. If the definition already requires that God be the cause of the event, then this very general requirement is redundant, because any action by God (or by any agent) is necessarily effected for a purpose. There can be no actions apart from some purpose or other.

Swinburne, Kreeft & Tacelli require that miracles have a general kind of purpose, namely they must be “of religious significance” (Swinburne) or “religiously significant”. This requirement is clearly mistaken. God, if God exists, is a perfectly morally good person. A perfectly morally good person would have many different purposes besides religious significance for performing actions.

For example, a perfectly good creator would want humans to be happy and healthy, and thus might perform a miracle to help some sick person to become healthy, even if doing so had no religious significance for anyone. A perfectly good creator might perform a miracle to relieve a child of the pain of hunger, even if doing so had no religious significance for anyone. Performing an action for the sake of bringing about something of religious significance is a legitimate reason for God to perform a miracle, but God, if God exists, has many other purposes besides that very specific purpose. A creator who only intervenes in the world in order to do something of “religious significance” would be a selfish and egocentric creator, not a perfectly morally good person.

Purtill and Flew require that miracles be performed for a fairly specific purpose: “to show that God is acting” (Purtill) or to be an event “that manifests divine power” (Flew). These requirements are even narrower than the general purpose of bringing about an event that was of religious significance. Thus, these requirements are even more obviously mistaken than the requirement that all miracles be performed for the purpose of bringing about an event that was religiously significant. God, if God exists, would not be so egocentric and so selfish as to insist that every intervention into the physical universe be done in order to show off his power or involvement in the world. A perfectly morally good creator would have many other purposes besides this narrow and egotistical purpose.

THERE IS NO NEED FOR THE PURPOSE ELEMENT

On the one hand, the very broad requirement by Habermas that a miracle involves bringing about an event that is “effected for some purpose” is unnecessary, because if we specify that a miracle must be caused by God, then it follows that every miracle will have some sort of purpose. The idea of an action logically implies the existence of a purpose for the action. If God performs a miracle, then God performs an action, and that will necessarily involve God having some purpose or other, some reason for performing that action.

On the other hand, the narrower requirements of some specific purpose in the definitions of Purtill, Kreeft & Tacelli, Swinburne, and Flew are clearly mistaken, because they constrain the purposes of God in ways that make God less than a perfectly morally good person. These requirements assume or imply that God is selfish or egotistical or obsessed with theological truths/dogmas. God, if God exists, is a perfectly morally good person, and the purposes of such a person cannot be limited to the narrow purposes specified by the definitions of these philosophers.

Therefore, either the purpose element consists of a requirement that is vague and redundant (e.g. “effected for a purpose”) or else the purpose element consists of a requirement that assumes or implies that person/agent performing a miracle has a narrow range of purposes, and thus is NOT a perfectly morally good person. But if the agent who performs a miracle is NOT a perfectly morally good person, then that agent cannot be God. Since we have already determined that it is best for a definition of “miracle” to require that the cause/agent of a miracle be God, such a requirement of a specific purpose for a miracle would contradict the heart of a correct definition.

We could try to specify the purpose by requiring that the purpose be one that would be consistent with the cause/agent of the miracle being a perfectly morally good person, but this would, like the Habermas requirement, be redundant. Since we already require that the cause of a miracle be God, and since God is by definition a perfectly morally good person, God is unable to perform any action that would be inconsistent with his own moral character.

It appears that there is no reasonable and non-redundant way to narrow down the range of purposes that God might have for performing a miracle. Therefore, we are justified in eliminating the element of purpose from our definition of the word “miracle”.