The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this.

Miracles are a clue. You don’t even have to invest yourself in supernatural ones: as David Ben-Gurion put it, “In order to be a realist, one must believe in miracles.” Now that we agree that miracles happen, we can argue one of two things, as a source of them: luck or providence. My argument, however, is clearly one-sided at that point. When you call something luck, if you don’t realize, it is just a clever way of giving up trying to find the real answer. Why did something extraordinary happen? This and that just happened to coincide in a most favorable conjunction. You know, a confluence of forces joined in an uncanny orchestration, just because. There is no reason, for any of it. It just happened to happen. That’s luck.

OK, maybe there’s something more, right? You have enough cases, enough situations where miracles are possible, then you’re liable to have a miracle happen. Like if enough people play the lottery, you’re bound to have a winner. That’s luck then, not really a miracle there. So someone’s going to generalize it to maybe there’s umpteen bazillion universes out there, and we just happened to be in the universe that can support life. We won the lottery, nothing to see here. We’re just lucky, and it didn’t need God to make it happen. This would be an atheist argument for the existence of the whole shmegegge.

But who or what made the condition for winning? Why is it possible to win? Why is it possible at all that things can work, at all? What makes the possibility of not just a miracle, but just anything, conceivable? In other words, even if we posit an infinite number of universes, there does not necessarily need to exist one that supports life like us.

Now, what is a miracle? When something meaningfully spectacular happens, correct? Not just winning a lottery? Then how can you believe in the miraculous and leave out God? Not that you’ll get right what the reason for any miracle might be, but to believe in meaning without the meaning would seem to me the flipside of the mental gymnastics that fundamentalists perform when they deny science, that the world is billions of years old, and we are not the center of the universe. True, along with the rare beauty, there is ugliness in the world, but as U2 put it, “Don’t believe the Devil / Don’t believe his book / But the truth is not the same / Without the lies he made up.” One can say that at least, in the contrast, we see beauty the clearer.

And when you see that miracles are a clue that hints at the presence of God, try and see that absolutely everything is a miracle. Or say it’s all just luck. Given enough time, it was bound to happen. And when you do that, you say nothing at all. It is true that science can go theorizing forever and not admit that God is behind it. That doesn’t stop you from seeing that God is, indeed, behind all the things there are.