do you believe?

Do you believe in ghosts?  Do you believe in miracles?  Do you believe in the supernatural?  In spirits?  In life after death?  In literal plenary inspiration?  In the Virgin Birth?

Christianity seems to be based on most of those (spot the odd one out!).  And to those of a modern mind-set, they are concepts from the pre-scientific age.  They are best dismissed as fantasy or mistakes, as neat ideas which turn out to be unsupported by evidence: like alchemy, the ether, or scientific determinism.  Healing - like homoeopathy - is readily explained by the placebo effect; some other miracles by the human propensity to see patterns where none exist.  As far as we can tell, the laws of physics (and other branches of science; indeed the laws of information theory which some now think make a better foundational theory than particle physics) are uniform and immutable across time and space - albeit with special perturbations near singularities and the big bang.

The last bit is, I fear, code for saying 'we're still working that bit out'.  Since we plainly do not know everything yet - and some have begun to say that actually we never will; that the enlightenment itself is running out of steam - it is a little surprising that some will go so far as to say 'there is no such thing as ...', or even perhaps 'I don't believe in ...".   It's a reasonable short-hand, but we can hardly say it's an accurate, scientifically supported statement: it's hard, after all, to prove a negative.

So, I think I'd rather prefer a different kind of dialogue.  If we offer a Christianity based on miracles ("they happen today") we alienate a lot of scientifically-minded people.  If we major on bizarre bits of the supernatural, we are liable to persuade people - at least the kind of people I mix with daily - that we are nutters.  So let's not do it.

I'm not going to go so far as to say there are no miracles: we have much too much to learn about the world to say that there are no mechanisms which suspend the regular laws of physics.  But I don't think it's very helpful to talk about them.  If we're going to read biblical accounts of impossible things, I'd certainly rather dwell on the message and the point, rather than on their historicity.    Does that defame the God of scripture?  Is it dishonest?