Dearly Father, we thank you for all your marvelous gifts to your church and to us as your people. We thank you, Lord, that you're just the kind of God who would send your Son to die and to die for us. We thank you for so great salvation for a grace that is far beyond anything we could ever observe, anything beyond we could ever imagine. We pray now that as we again turn our attention to your word, to look at issues of providence and miracles and angels and most sorts of things tonight, that again, our discussion would be faithful to your word and that it would seek to glorify and praise your name. We thank you for all you've given us now, for it's in Jesus' name we ask it. Amen. Last time we were together, we were talking about the issue of providence and I believe we broke our discussion somewhat in the middle of the outline before Roman numeral 4 providence and human sin. Just coming up to this, we were talking about the doctrine of concurrence. The doctrine of concurrence holds that human beings are responsible for their actions yet God is intimately involved with all historical events. As Calvin would put it, God is never idle. There is never an event, never a moment where God is on vacation. Thus, both God is sovereign and human beings are responsible. I believe we're on page 87. I was going to say 85 and I would have been wrong. 87 of your outline. Roman numeral 4 providence and human sin. Now if God is the sovereign lord over all things and he leads history through an intimate providence toward his goal, toward the goal of his redemptive and glorified kingdom, what are we to make of sin? What sense do we make of sin in relationship to God's providence? Well first off here scripture is clear. It's insistent that God is holy. God is not the author of sin. James chapter 1 verses 13 through 14 say this. When tempted no one should say God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he's dragged away and enticed. In 1 John chapter 2 verse 16 for everything in the world, the cravings of the sinful man, the lust of the eyes and the boasting of what he has and does, comes not from the father but from the world. So God is never the cause of sin. But further and just as importantly God is not the planner of sin. He does not conspire that we sin. The plan of God is a plan of redemption not a plan of sin. The popular notion that God plans sin as well as redemption in such a way that we sin because God has determined that we will do so is to make both sin and redemption equal goods for whatever God does is good. Well, if God is not the author of sin, if he's not the planner of sin, is it all as simple as saying that sin comes from man but good things come from God? No, it's not that simple. For that notion that sin comes from us but good things come from God is simply a division of labor. And last week we said that we can't get it providence that way, that we do some things and God does other things. God's relationship to sin is actually far more complicated than this. Well, let's turn our attention here more directly to it. God's relationship to sin. The fact of the matter is we do see that God does use human sinfulness for his kingdom purposes. We may speak of God as relating to sin in at least four different ways and I've enumerated four here in your notes. First of all, God does prevent sin. In Psalm 193, we see David praying that God would keep him from sin. David prays, keep your servant from presumptuous sin. Let it not have dominion over me. A good example of God keeping people from sin is found in Genesis chapters 20, the story of a Bimilek. Abraham, if you recall, passed Sarah his wife off as his sister and thanks to his cowardice, Sarah ended up as a member of a Bimilek's harem. But before a Bimilek touched Sarah, God came to him in a dream and told him that Sarah was married. And thus the Lord did not allow a Bimilek to touch her. We have those kinds of examples in Scripture, but it's not the case that God always prevents sin. Sometimes he permits it. At Leicester, Paul preached that in past generations, God allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways. And in Romans 1, Paul speaks of God having given men over to the impurity of fallen desires and improper modes of behavior. That's Romans 1 verses 24 through 28. Well the question is why? Why would God do this? Why would God permit sin? Why would a loving God permit what are often murderous and heinous human acts? This question is taken up over and over again in the Bible. The Psalmist continually asks, why do the evil prosper? Why do the innocent suffer? Why is there such a lack of equity in the world? Well several answers are hinted at, but they're all just hints and possibly none of them are sufficient for the whole. God sometimes permits sin out of the fact that he is long suffering. You see, if God brought immediate judgment every time there was sin, there'd be no chance for restoration, no chance for salvation. This afternoon I was looking at my notes and when I read that to myself, if God brought immediate judgment, if He brought a lightning bolt every time there was sin, we'd have a light show in this very room. You know, two or three of us might make it till break, maybe not that many. Sometimes God permits sin to teach his people other need for him, to teach his people of the destructive realities of their ways so that they will return to the Lord. But the fact of the matters when we look at these kinds of answers that God permits sin for the sake of his redemption, those kinds of answers I have to admit do sound somewhat trivial in the light of a Hitler in the 1930s. A Stalin in the 30s to the 40s, a Pol Pot in the 70s and the 1990s reality of an Iraq and a Bosnia. The fact of the matter is why God permits a particular sin, even a truly murderous sin is simply not clear to us. The irrational, even absurd reality of sin, introduces an element into our lives and into our history, which simply cannot be accounted for in any satisfactory way. Well, third, God also directs sin, and this really flows from number two. God sometimes permits sin because it becomes an opportunity for his redemptive purposes and thus he takes that sin and directs it. He turns evil to good. He uses an evil that's already there for his redemptive purposes and the Bible is full of examples here. Think of Joseph and his brothers. His brothers wanted to get rid of him and so they sell him off in slavery. And of course, years later when they meet him in Egypt, he tells them that God meant it for good. So their evil act ultimately becomes an occasion for him becoming their deliverer. In Exodus chapter 4, we're told of Pharaoh's hardened hearts, that God hardened his heart for 21. But it's already clear in the third chapter that Pharaoh is already and already by his own fallen nature a very hard man indeed. What God is saying is when he says I'm going to harden your heart, Pharaoh, don't change. I'm going to use you just as you are. The character that you are will be used for my glory. A third example here is of course the resurrection, the crucifixion as we're told in Acts 2 and unjust illegal acts. It's interesting here that God can do these kinds of things, that he can take our sinful acts and use them for his glory, that he can use them for his redemptive purposes. All of that presupposes an intelligence, a kind of military intelligence, a patience and a confidence that is truly supreme. Fourth here, God limits sin. There are times when God doesn't prevent it, but he rather restrains its extents. He places some limits upon the power of sin and the evil doer. Think here of Paul's promise in 1 Corinthians 10-13 that God will not allow you to be tempted beyond your strength, but he will provide a means of escape. Now those four points really come from an examination of biblical materials, but after we cite them, we're all still left, I think, wanting more. Saying, more needs to be said than that. And throughout the history of the church, theologians have felt that same reality and they've sought to say more. And thus we come to see the complexity of the issue and the limitation of our temporal horizon. Augustin was one of those people as a systematician who wanted to say more. His doctrine of monogistic election, the idea that redemption takes place by the singular action of God, called for an equally high view of divine sovereignty. Augustin said that God superintends the flow of history in such a way that he's present and active in all things. His will is efficient at all times. Yet Augustin saw the problem. If God superintends all of history, what are we to make of historical events that appear to be contrary to God's will? You see, if there are no such events, then all things are good. If God has willed everything, then all things are good because God is good. Augustin could hold that sin as contrary to the will of God, but he formulated the issue this way. He said that God, that, excuse me, sin does not belong to God's decree. Augustin would speak about a decreative will. God has decreed only the good. Sin, however, belongs to God's permissive will. What you might think of here is God just slightly turning his back. Augustin had this idea of God's passive actions and his active actions. Now in the end, Augustin knew this construction was not sufficient, but he was willing to live with the antinomy of it because he thought it did justice to both sides of the biblical equation. God is sovereign, yet we are responsible for our acts. God does not tempt anyone to sin. He's not the author to sin, yet he's involved in every moment. I think John Calvin, I'm going to spend most of our time here, I think Calvin gives a more fulsome answer, a more satisfying answer. Like Augustin, he also acknowledged the anomalous nature of the issue. He said, there's no way to formulate the matter such that it's perfectly rational to the human mind. Man cannot measure the measurelessness of God. Indeed, Calvin warns us against penetrating too deeply into the sacred precincts of divine wisdom. Rather than talk about a decreative will and a permissive will, as if these are two different kinds of things, two different kinds of wills, as if they function differently. Calvin preferred to speak of God's revealed will and his secret will. We've got to be careful here. By this language, Calvin did not mean to refer to two different things, two different wills. By the term revealed will, Calvin meant the singular, all-embraceive purpose of God, insofar as God's purposes have been revealed to us and they can be understood by us. By the term, the secret will of God, Calvin meant the same singular will, but as that will includes realities or depths of God's intention that are unknowable to us. An example here might help. You're out on the ocean, and you see an iceberg, we now know that there's much of an iceberg that is underneath the ocean. There is that part of the iceberg which is perceptible above the water, and there is that part of the iceberg which is imperceptible. I think this analogy comes close to what Calvin means by secret will and revealed will. We're talking about the same iceberg, but it actually has two manifestations. By God's secret will, he governs all things and he destines them to their end, but this will is far beyond our knowing. While God calls humans to obedience, and our obedience and the possibility of our disobedience is real, we can never limit God's governments to that reality. We can never limit God's government to those things that we can comprehend, to those things that we can ascertain, to those things that we can know. You see, God's covenantal obligation of being the governor and the preserver of all reality demands far more of him than merely what we can see and comprehend. He not only drives the celestial frame in all his parts, but he also sustains, nourishes and cares for everything he has made, even the least sparrow. In his commentary on Genesis 2, Calvin said this, if he should withdraw his hand even a little, all things would immediately perish and dissolve into nothing. Now this means that God directs all according to his providential plan, all events, our manifestations of God's purposes and his fatherly providence. And yes, this intimately fatherly providence extends even to sin and evil. Although in ways, we can't fathom. Again, God is not idle. He's always thoroughly engaged with this creation, even in the sin of man. Now with this construct of a revealed will and a divine will, Calvin was able to affirm both the proposition that one, God calls all to redemption. That's his revealed will. Yet God intends only to save the elect. Again, this is part of the mystery of his secret will. Mystery not in the sense that it's withheld from us, but mystery in the sense that we simply do not have the capacity. Let me finish here to ascertain it. I'm going to continue on with Calvin and then maybe raise some questions. Now, none of this means that Calvin is a hard determinist. I want to defend him here. At one point in his career, he found himself engaged in a debate or controversy with a group of people called the Libertines. The Libertines believe that all things are traceable to a single causation, something which determines everything, good or bad. They had a kind of hard determinist view. Calvin responded that this kind of view reduces the distinction between good and evil to mere appearance and it destroys human responsibility. Calvin wanted to defend that we are responsible creatures. God has not planned everything in such a way that our present is actually his mental past. We're not simply playing out the divine record that was determined in the distant past. To the Libertines, Calvin responded that God has charged us to exercise care over our lives and to pray for others. These things are real and we're responsible for them. Yes, secretly in ways we most certainly cannot comprehend all of these are part of a secret plan. Now, notice here that Calvin has refused to reduce the whole thing to a nice division of labor. I do this. God does that. I do the bad. God does the good. God gets the glory when I'm good and I get the ashes when I'm bad. The hailstorm which destroys the crop and brings famine is not beyond God's fatherly care. He's not idle even there, even though we can't understand his purpose. He said this, whatever happens to us, happier, sad, prosperous or adverse comes to us from him. Well, as God willy-nilly in his plan then, Calvin would say, no, he's not. Since we have faith in God's goodness, we can firmly believe, and I'm quoting him here, that God always has the best reason for his plan. Even if that plan is not immediately transparent to us. God's love and wisdom apply to the world in such a way that our human understanding of those things, his love and his wisdom are weak and trivial by comparison. As we don't understand, as God does, fundamental questions about the relationship of God to the world remain incomprehensible to us. Calvin's conclusion in this discussion in the institutes turns to Romans chapter 9. I'm going to turn there as well. Romans chapter 9 verses 20 through 21. And Calvin reads this, not as an accusing question but as an adoxology. Romans 9 verses 20 and 21. Who are you old man to talk back to God? Shall what is formed, say to him who formed it? Why did you make me like this? Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? And he ends his discussion in chapter 17 of book one of the institutes by saying, we do not try to make God render accounts to us. Now the purpose of Scripture talking about God having a plan that includes all things and there are plenty of texts here and I'm going to bother to get into them. I might just think of Isaiah 42. I determine the ends from the beginning. The purpose of this kind of language is not meant to render our responsibility void. The purpose of this language is not meant to deny God's wholeness and His justice. Nor is the purpose of this language meant to give us a nice, neat, tidy, rational explanation of reality. The purpose of the biblical testimony to God's plan is to comfort us that God is in control and that we do not live in a world that's a mad chaos. Let me just say something real quick about Jonathan Edwards and I'll open up the question. And I'll just very quickly with Edwards and have already said, good more time here than I wanted to. In his book The History of Redemption, Jonathan Edwards likened God's providence and by extension I guess all of history to a vast river system, a system that has many tributaries and streams. A system whose sources are lakes and mountains, snowpacks that are hundreds, maybe thousands of miles distant from one another. You see up close we see merely a single stream or a tributary. And often the tributary or the stream we're fishing on appears to be flowing in the opposite direction for more of the big rivers ultimately going to go. Quite simply, from our temporally limited vantage point, history of the mass. It's a complex of competing motives and cacophonous voices. And often it's difficult to hear God's voice or to determine its motive. And I throw that analogy from Jonathan Edwards out for you. I might want to add it to Calvin's notion of secret and revealed will. Edwards gives us, I think, some help with the issue of perspective. But I did see at least one hand. Okay, let me, well, I can only, I'm going to deal with the example you gave. Okay, I'm going to pick on you a little bit. Okay, because I think the example as you gave it almost sounds like you hadn't heard what we said. Well, that's the end of the picking up, okay? Remember, a declaration of God's sovereignty, both I think in Calvin's construction of it and Scripture's construction of it, can never be used as an excuse, as a leap, to say, Well, you know, I'm nearly the wrong person, but it was God's idea, you know, whatever. And that's not the purpose of making those declarations in the first place. Nowhere is God's sovereignty articulated to take the gun out of our hand if I can put it that way. It is again to make it clear that we don't live in a willy, nearly universe. You are still responsible for your actions, Rhonda. And this whole thing of, ultimately, our decisions, even in sin, concurring, remember from last week, with God's secret choices. These belong, for this time, where we're at, to God's secret will. I can't work from them, I can't use this as an excuse, okay? I was going to say more here and forgot, is that help a little bit? And again, remember that concurrence tells us that we cannot limit or reduce anything to a single causation. One of the problems here, it seems to me in the history, the so-called history of Calvinism versus Armenianism, is that Calvinists many times, we are so eager to defend the sovereignty of God, is that we talk about all things happening because God wills them. And we forget that human beings are also responsible actors in the covenant of history, okay? And the Armenians seem to come from the other side. They're so eager to defend a human libertarian freedom that they reduce God's sovereignty to a merely kind of persuasion. It seems to me that biblically we need to affirm both. God's a full actor in history. And we are full actors. And there's no division of labor in such a way that you can say, it's a 70-30 deal, it's a 55-45, it's a 37, whatever the rest would be from that. It is rather, it makes bad math, but the Bible makes bad math a lot. It's a 100-100 reality. Does that make sense? And it's never the case at any point that one can say, God has willed this, it's not my fault, it's not my responsibility, okay? And that's certainly Calvin's affirmation of God's sovereignty was never meant to fall into that kind of determinism. Does that make sense? Sometimes God's providence is blatant, it's unmistakable. Sometimes God's action is not concurrent, but unilateral. You see there are some works of God's providence which appear to fall outside the norm, outside of mere preservation or governments. In fact, some works of God appear to be inexplicable on the basis of the usual patterns of history and nature. And we call such things miracles. Yet within Christian circles, there have been many different perspectives on miracles. What I would like to do this evening is to concentrate on the thought of one person here, Johann Deemer. Deemer was a, he wasn't a theologian, he wasn't a philosopher, he was in fact a biologist at mid-century, he worked primarily in the 1940s as a Dutchman. But he raises the question, he raises questions about miracles, I think that are very interesting, and he puts them into interesting context. Well, the first thing we know here, and you see it as point A in your outline, is that Deemer's argument is polemical, he's arguing against someone. He has approached toward miracles, was directed against the supernaturalism that grew up in 18th century orthodoxy. A supernaturalism that arose as a kind of response to enlightenment deism. Now I'm going to go a little bit slowly here, because some of the terms we'll use here in talking about miracles are somewhat philosophical, so it may take you a second to mentally get a connection on them. And I can't see anything out of these new glasses. According to Deemer, 18th century orthodoxy by and large accepted, bought into a deistic worldview. The idea that God may have been the creator, God is the creator, but he in fact runs the world by way of a collection of imminent natural laws. The creator order is run by a series or collection of autonomous natural processes. But against deism orthodoxy still wanted to hold to the idea of miracle. On occasion God interferes with the regular cadence of things by way of a radical intrusion of foreign and novel power. And this is what deemer means by dualism here. You have on the one hand this collection of autonomous natural forces, and on the other you have God acting personally, dramatically, supernaturally. So we have a normally self-sustaining natural order and an interventionist supernaturism. And that construct did comport well with the definition of miracle as it was commonly understood in the 18th century, and I provided it for you there. A singular unexpected event which clashes with the usual order of events or at least departs from the laws which experience has discovered. Now deemer critiques this or judges it to be dualistic. We have autonomous nature and on the other side supernatural occurrences which scrap the natural order by an arbitrary act of the divine will. Now deemer suggests that the motive behind this conception of things was really to preserve miracles. What the 18th century church wanted to do is it wanted to preserve the miraculous. But it did so at a great cost for it impoverished creation, for it divorced the natural world from God's divine concern. If we want to know the natural world we look at the natural laws that control the natural world. As deemer put it, seeking to preserve the miraculous powers of Christ, supernaturalism allowed itself to be imprisoned in a rationalistic concept of nature. That's a quotation from him. In the end not only does nature suffer but our conception of the miraculous and the supernatural does as well. If you're going to have a dualistic structure here, if you're going to try to bring together a natural physics together with a supernatural interventionist miracle, you hurt both your understanding of creation and miracle. By creating a radical disjunction between the natural and the supernatural, what we in fact do is we push the supernatural off into a realm where it's of little or no good. To us, anyone here will presume the opposite. How many of you have had a miracle? About 20%. The other 80% of us just got secularized here because we haven't. See what the structure does. For those of us who have not had a miracle, have not had a miraculous healing, have not, you know, whatever it might be, our entire lives is governed by an autonomous physics that has nothing to do with God's kingship, has nothing to do with his kingdom. We end up defending an abstraction. Demar argue that supernatural seeks to explain as much as possible by way of imminent physics and what happens is it allows whatever falls through that net to be caught up as a miracle. Supernatural events, unlike natural events, do witness to God's power. But those events are locked up by and large in scripture. In other words, they belong to a different time in a different place. So Demar suggests that one of the problems of the usual understanding of miracle is that it in fact secularizes nature. God works in miracles, not in natural order. The doctrine of creation also suffers here because this dichotomy between the natural and supernatural tends to view God not as creator, not as sovereign over all things. But rather as something akin to the deity of ancient gnosticism. The gnostic God was not the creator. He was only a redeemer. He would sneak in in the darkness while the God of creation was sleeping. And he would perform his magic shows which would take a soul off to redemption. In fact, a deity whose miracles violates the natural order of things shows a disrespect for creation because he violates the norms to which creation is subject. Well, so much for Demar's critique, what's his own view? And here we come to point B in your outline. Does he deny the miraculous? Well, he doesn't say that this dichotomy, this distinction between the natural and the supernatural, is unnecessary for making sense of the biblical events. But by doing that, he doesn't mean to suggest the adequacy of purely naturalistic explanations either. Demar thinks that the key here is not so much analysis of those events, but rather a philosophical analysis of nature. And I've provided for you a number list of points here from Demar's position. Let's look, let's look very quickly if we can. First of all, Demar held that the law structures that God originally designed into creation still hold. The fall did not mitigate God's law, God's word for his creation. The earth is still the Lord's. Second, that which we call miraculous is not an intervention. It's not a suspension of imminent physics. Rather, Demar held that miracles take place fully in accordance with the divine order established in creation. There's no release from the creation order either under the realities of sin or redemption. You can see the word lap serian there, it only means sin. When you lapse, you make a fall and soteric redemptive circumstance. He said this, God never works outside of the roots of nature. Third, miracles then do not violate nature. What they do is they open up the natural depth dimension of the created order. I got to think about that sentence for a minute. They open up the depth dimension of the created order. We'll come back to that. In the conditions of fallen history, miracle manifests the restorative powers of God. Here's a quotation on your outline there. With the signs and miracles of God's providence and the history of mankind, no laws or fixed relationships are circumvented. But under other than the ordinary, well-known conditions, other powers are opened up. Point five is going to shed more light on what he's saying here. We'll say more here a second. Number four, miracles run neither counter to nature nor above it, but rather miracles restore nature to its original purposefulness. Deemers have the miracles of Jesus, did not metal with the natural law anyway, but were an extension of Jesus' own natural dominion over creation. Now, Deemers following this approach because he holds that Scripture does not speak of God as working either in tandem with or in opposition to any autonomous forces. There's no such thing as an autonomous process. Nor does Scripture depict God as a kind of God of the gaps, one who acts supernaturally wherever some kind of imminent physics are insufficient. All power, and here's the point he wants to get to, all power is God's. And by his power, all things are done. Thus we see that for Deemer, the dualism between nature and supernature evaporates because all things are miracle. All things are supernatural for him. Number five, the miracle of recreation calls forth the powers quote which sleep in creation. He actually talks about nature having a creation having a natural healing process. Thus, a miracle is not a categorically different kind of act. It's just an action with a different goal. It's goal is to restore rather than to perpetuate. Six, we must say that all phenomena is miraculous, that the signs and wonders of the gospel story are of one piece with the balance of creative reality. So there's categorically no difference between you're being healed from cancer or you're growing a new fingernail. Number seven, the restorative act of miracle transcends fallen reason and is known only by faith. Let me repeat what he just said here, miracles transcend our fallen reason and can be known only by faith. But that's no, you know, an asylum of ignorance. What Deemer wants to say here is that all things can be known only by faith. There is never, it's never the case that nature is a raw given. Nature is never openly exhaustible by natural reason. And here he's not only arguing against 18th century deism and 18th century orthodoxy but he's also arguing against the tomistic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. Our confession cannot be brought in as a stopgap to fill the space left by rationalism. In other words, our confession that God has acted is not an epistemological adjunct to reason. Rather, our confession, the fact that God is the sovereign order of all things, is an essential ingredient of any adequate epistemology. Nature is nothing by itself. All nature comes from the hand of God. Thus all nature is miracle. But it's only by faith that we will know that. Does that make sense, man? Do that's slowly enough? Okay, now how do we take stock of what Deemer's done? Well, let me be critical on him first. I think number five is the rough proposition, is the problematic statement here. This idea of a natural healing process. Deemer seems to subsume sin and redemption under creation because he seems to suggest that restoration is inherent to creation. And if that's the case, if restoration is inherent to creation, then so is sin. The further here we must point out that the law structures of creation do not necessitate the gracious act of God to get rid of the creation to get rid of sin. Another way of getting at this. For Deemer, grace is almost built into the mechanism. If things break and they heal by themselves, then we can say that healing is inherent to it, is intrinsically part of it. Biblically, however, what we see is that God's grace is grace. It's gift. You can't presume upon it. You can't assume it. It's not something that's owed. It's not automatic. Grace is not grace if it's part of the mechanism. This brings us to point three very quickly. I think that Deemer misses the fact that in grace there is a new action of God. God did not have to save. He could have left his fallen. He didn't have to perform healing miracles. He could let us die. And then finally here he doesn't do justice to the wonder of miracle. The fact of the matter is the biblical language of miracle is that there is a difference between different kinds of events. The biblical language of wonder, of marvel, there is a kind of oh gosh, G-Wiz kind of reality to two biblical miracles. And I think that Deemer emphasizes these things. But what's good here? Again, very quickly. I think it's good that he wants to criticize the dualism that we often think about when we come to the issue of miracles. We often do as Christians. Even as Christians, we often think of the material world as just being there as acting all by its own. It's got its own kind of system. It's got its own kind of laws. God acts by miracles. But we all know where babies come from. God has nothing with that. And on and on. So I think I find his emphasis upon the sovereignty of God here. Very helpful. How can we fix maybe what's wrong with Deemer? If Deemer gives us some positive advice, some positive help in thinking about miracles, maybe we can fix what's wrong with him. Well, here I would appeal to C.S. Lewis's notion of countervailing force in his book Miracles. In that book, Lewis gives us a way of thinking about miracle. As a second work, you know, we have creation and now we have redemption. We have the first creation of God. Now we have the miraculous act of God. He gives us a way of affirming that second action, but without falling into the dualism that Deemer fears. Lewis suggests that in a miracle, the usual processes, God's usual working, is not suspended. It's not violated, but it is overruled. Think, for instance, of an axe head that floats. That's because there's an unseen hand holding it up. The law of gravity is still working. But there's a physics that we don't understand. Unusual, you bet, miraculous, G-Wiz, but not anti-creational, not a violation. This allows the very kind of distinction between miracle and everyday occurrence that scripture seems to affirm but Deemer under emphasizes. One last point here, and I think it helps Deemer's case, is that we need to realize what we're talking about when we talk about laws of nature. Laws of nature are really nothing more than statistical reports. This is what we usually see. I think we need to realize, and I think that Lewis helps here, we need to realize that there's more to the physics of running a universe than we or our science have even begun to realize. When we talk about laws of nature and all the rest, we may in fact re-relativize the wonder of creation.