Eric Metaxas, bestselling author of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy and the acclaimed Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery, today published his latest book: Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life. I checked Amazon and read the endorsements -- wow! Genuinely impressive:
“As a secular reader, I come to such books with a certain resistance. Metaxas won me over instantly by meeting me where I live. His intellectual honesty, coupled with an open-hearted wonder at the sheer breadth of human experience, is irresistible.”
—Christopher Noel, author, Impossible Visits
“If you’re a skeptic, read this book with an open mind and you might just discover that miracles are real. If you’re already a believer, be ready to be inspired.”
—Kirsten Powers, columnist for USA Today and The Daily Beast
“A dense, edgy and awe-inspiring report on the possibility of the impossible.”
—Dr. Markus Spieker, Reporter for German National Television and bestselling author of Hollywood Cinema in Nazi Germany
““No Christian thinker today combines reason and wit, argument and imagination, to greater effect.”
—Joseph Loconte, Associate Professor of History at the King's College, NYC and author, God, Locke, and Liberty: The Struggle for Religious Freedom in the West.
"Metaxas has done it again....he presents hope for the tone deaf who cannot hear the splendor of the music of the spheres, and he brings in sunlight for modern cave dwellers who have become accustomed to only shadows on the wall of our increasingly windowless world."
—Os Guinness, author Long Journey Home
Metaxas produced a Breakpoint commentary today titled "Existence Itself Is a Miracle" which is well worth reading. He writes (or speaks, if you click the audio below):
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In my new book “Miracles” I point out that possibly the greatest evidence for the existence of miracles is the fact that we exist.
The universe as we know it requires such a careful calibration of variables as to render its mere existence—never mind the presence of intelligent life—a miracle in itself. The British astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle, who coined the phrase “the Big Bang,” summed up the sheer improbability of existence by saying “The universe looks like a put-up job."
For instance, if the earth were slightly larger, it would of course have slightly more gravity. As a result, methane and ammonia gas, which have molecular weights of sixteen and seventeen respectively, would remain close to the surface of the earth. Since we can’t breathe methane or ammonia because of their toxicity, we would die.
If Earth were slightly smaller, water vapor would not stay close to the planet’s surface, but would instead dissipate into the atmosphere. Obviously, without water we couldn’t exist.
What’s true of Earth is true of the Universe as a whole. What physicists called the four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces—are so finely-tuned that if any of them were in the slightest degree different, our universe would not exist.
What’s more, each of these crucially precise values was established once and for all within one millionth of a second after the Big Bang. In other words, immediately.
When faced with these facts, materialists and devotees of scientism often take recourse in the so-called “multiverse” theory, which states that if there exists an infinity of other universes—that’s one huge “if” by the way—then one of them must of course by chance possess all the variables perfectly right for everything to exist just as it does in fact exist. Wow.
Physicist and clergyman John Polkinghorne dismisses that by saying “Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes.”
The saddest thing about these types of evasions is that they’re unnecessary. There is no real conflict between faith, including belief in miracles, and science. For starters, as John Lennox of Oxford has said “Rationality is bigger than science.” The world of scientific inquiry does not encompass all rational inquiry. Science has limits. It can describe the universe of matter and energy, but it cannot account for that universe, or for that matter, for the existence of such immaterial things as love or good or evil or even logic.
The so-called conflict between faith and science occurs when this reality is forgotten or denied. And the conflict is perpetuated by those ideological materialists who take it as a matter of faith that there are no and can be no such things as miracles.
As G. K. Chesterton summed up brilliantly in his book “Orthodoxy”: “The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.” . . .
Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life
Eric Metaxas | Penguin Group | October 2014