Jesus on Thin Ice

The news has been aflutter this week with the story of an oceanographer who came up with a hypothesis for how Jesus could have walked on water.

Doron Nof, a professor of oceanography, said a rare combination of water and atmospheric conditions in the Sea of Galilee 2000 years ago may offer a scientific explanation for one of the miracles recounted in the Bible. Nof said a patch of ice floating in the Sea of Galilee — which is actually a freshwater lake — would have been difficult to distinguish from unfrozen water surrounding it.
--USA Today

I really don’t understand why some people feel the need to try to justify Biblical miracles scientifically. Either you believe in miracles or you don’t; there’s just no point in trying to come up with some hypothetical freak circumstance that would make the miracle into a plausible natural event. Such hypotheses generally just diminish the event into something inconsequential, anyway.

In another example, a preacher told my youth group years ago that there’s a place in the Sea of Reeds where if a strong wind blows in the right direction, it will literally part the waters and make a dry path across. If the Biblical translation were a bit off – the Red Sea was really the Sea of Reeds – Moses’ parting of the waters would actually have been possible. The rub, of course, is that the water is never more than a few inches deep in that spot to begin with. Talk about a pointless miracle.

Any attempt to scientifically justify a miracle is pretty much doomed to failure. You could probably find ways to simulate any given miracle with a modern illusionist’s tricks or a wildly improbable set of natural circumstances, but that’s totally missing the point of the story, a waste of a scientist’s time, and an effective way to offend religious sensibilities for no good reason.

Biblical miracles don’t need rational explanation. In fact, there isn’t supposed to be a rational explanation: that’s what makes it a miracle. DUH!

What science can do is evaluate modern claims that a miracle occurred. The claims of faith-healers and psychics are certainly subject to scientific study. They may claim that their abilities go beyond the realm of known science, but that’s really irrelevant. Science can determine – through double-blind clinical trials and similar experiments – whether modern psychics, faith healers, and the like can actually do what they claim to do; figuring out how it happens would then be a subject for further study.

So, Professor Nof, could you please stop pointlessly annoying Christians with unlikely rationalizations of religious stories? Save your time and credibility for useful research, eh?