Dear Isabel,
In the Bible, the Quran, and other holy books, God speaks directly to people like Abraham and Moses. Miracles happen all the time. Why are things so ordinary now? Did God stop speaking and stop performing miracles, or what happened?
Wondering
Dear Wondering,
You aren’t the only one who wonders. Even in the time that the Psalms were written down (which was probably over 2500 years ago), people seem to have thought their time was very ordinary compared to earlier times: “I will remember your miracles of long ago,” it says in Psalm 77. I don’t have a firm answer to your question, but rather a few possibilities.
One possibility is that the stories of conversations between God and people might be in the realm of myth and legend rather than history. We don’t know whether Abraham and Moses were actual historical figures. (I realize you were just giving a couple of examples. Some people in the Bible do seem to have truly existed, while in other cases, such as these two, there’s no good evidence for it.)
Another is that people do witness miracles in the present day. A few minutes with a search engine will turn up many reports of miracles, from infants returning to life after being declared dead to a rescue from natural disaster against formidable odds. Are they really miracles or just highly unusual events? (After all, it would be unusual in the extreme if nothing unusual ever happened.) Either way, maybe they are the same kinds of things that occurred in ancient times and were handed down in scriptures.
Likewise, people do report conversations with God. I occasionally receive a quite detailed account of one, because when someone has an experience like that they want to record it and share it, and they sometimes send their accounts to clergypeople. Today, we’re likely to consider mental illness an explanation: they’re hallucinating, we say, or they had a psychotic break. But they sound like the kinds of conversations recounted in ancient scriptures. Are they actually speaking with God and having God answer them? Or conversely, were the ancient conversation partners with God actually mentally ill? Either is possible. It’s also possible that some of the ancient people suffered from psychoses (humans are humans), and that any deity who spoke to people then is still speaking to some people.
That brings me to another possible explanation: there is nothing in scripture to suggest that miraculous occurrences and divine conversations were ever common. If they happened to some people, even just a very rare few, then they’d have been retold, written down, and passed along, because they were the notable events. If they really did occur, but rarely, maybe they still occur, but rarely, and so the vast majority of us never experience them.
And finally, of course it is possible that there is a god who is capable of working miracles, and that this god just doesn’t see the need to anymore. To understand why, we’d have to understand the mind of a god, so I won’t venture a guess.
Which possibility do you think is the most likely explanation? Or is there another one that I haven’t considered and that you prefer?
Wishing you well,
Isabel
Next week: Should this reader join a religion?