One of the atheists' favorite complaints is that miracles are impossible. So, things like Jesus walking on water or people being miraculously healed of some disease, like say, cancer, are clearly impossible. In fact, they say all the miracles found in the Bible are impossible, so they say that the Bible is simply a book of fairy-tales. But then they've missed an important result from modern physics. Using a result from modern physics it is easy to see how God does (really, how God did) miracles in our world.

One thing I am not going to talk about is how you can get that miracle that you've been praying for. That is another issue altogether and you need to consult the Bible or a Bible expert on when and why God does miracles. However, what I am going to talk about can reassure you that miracles are really possible and the Bible is not a collection of fairy-tales.

It is hard to show where this new result from modern physics comes from starting with the science. But we can skip that hard part and move straight to the result. (For the science, see: Science Points to the Blockworld) Describing the final result itself is easy. It is easy to understand what is going on. Still, it ends up being hard to believe. It is hard to really accept because we are so used to thinking about the world in an entirely different way. First, I will talk about the science. Then I will talk about how the science agrees with the Bible. Then, next time, I'll show you how miracles are actually done.

To start, let's take a look at a little 20 second long video I made on a beach in Puerto Rico. At the end of the video I am going to ask you what you saw.

Well, what did you see? You're probably going to say you saw one palm tree with leaves bending in the breeze. But that was a video. What you really saw were 435 images of the tree. Well, that's a video. Now suppose you were there on the beach and you were looking at the palm tree. Would you be seeing a whole series of images just like in a video? Or would you be seeing just one tree where the leaves are moving around in the breeze? Of course, we always ASSUME that we see things moving around. But is that assumption right? Maybe, when we are looking at the world, we really are seeing a whole series of different, unique images, just like when we are watching a video. So, is there a way to tell if things are moving around or we're just watching a sort of video? It turns out this was settled in 1908.

This issue was settled by a physicist and mathematician named Hermann Minkowski although often people say Einstein gets the credit because it is used in his theories of special and general relativity. Special and general relativity have been verified over and over for over 100 years. But hardly anyone knows about ALL the consequences of relativity. It is only in the last 20 years or so that more people in physics and philosophy have been paying attention to one strange and little-known consequence. The answer is that we ARE viewing one image after another, after another. The universe is just like a video that we are watching, except it is a 3D video and each "image" in the video is huge. Each 3D image is a snapshot of the entire universe at a given moment in time! Now, in a video, as you start to watch it, everything you're going to see in the future is already out there for you to see. Then, when you finish watching the video, the whole video is still there. Physicists found that the universe is like that. The universe is a really of huge block of everything that was, is now, and will be in the future. They usually call it the "block universe". So they say that the past, present and future are all equally real. The past, present and future are all there at once, just as all the images in a video are all there at once. There is absolutely nothing that makes the present moment of time special except that it is what we see NOW.

One way to help to understand what is going on is to look at the science fiction time travel movies. One of the classics is the movie, Back to the Future. The crazy scientist has a car that lets him travel back to the past. He takes Marty McFly back in time to see his parents. In the movie, they assumed the past was still there and like I said, science says it still is. Or there was the classic H. G. Wells novel, The Time Machine that has been made into a couple of movies. Here, the main character travels into Earth's distant future. In the book and the movies they assumed the future was already there and science says it really is. Now this block universe idea is real science, not science fiction.

Next, is this new idea in physics found in the Bible? Here are some quotes. First, one of the neatest quotes comes from psalm 139:16 where we have David saying:

So God SAW David as an adult before David was born. God saw the future that was already there. Of course, God made that future. It wasn't just David's life that was set before he was born, everyone's life was fixed before we were born, even long before we were born.

Then, from the prophet Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 1:4-5 it says:

Here in Psalm 148:5-6 it mentions how everything that came into being will last forever:

So things aren't going away, they are permanent, just like what you see in a video is permanent.

Here, in Revelation 13:8, in Young's literal translation, (and many other translations) there is this phrase where it speaks of Christ as:

Or, in other words, when the world was made, Christ's crucifixion was already present.

Then, here is something really surprising. The block universe gives us a new way to interpret God's creation in Genesis chapter 1. Over in Genesis chapter 2, from verses 1 and 2 we have:

During those 6 so-called "days" of creation, God MUST have created a block universe because that is what we actually have. And He's finished. So, for instance, all those miracles that Jesus was going to do when He shows up on Earth, MUST already be there. They were there "before" Adam and Eve sinned. If the miracles were not there, God would have to go back to work to do them. There is just no indication in the Bible that God has gone back to work. He is still in his seventh "day" of rest. You can find statements to this effect in Hebrews Chapter 4, verses 1 to 11. Here is just a portion of what it says, from verses 3 and 4:

Here on Earth, we will probably never be able to travel back and forth in time. Of course, in Heaven, God will be able to show us everything that happened in the past because it is all still "out there". Which Bible stories would you most like to see?