A thought occurred to me while brushing my teeth: that the universe as we know it exhibits order/structure and causality may be the greatest miracle of all.
Let me back up. Just before that, I was thinking about God, especially how God, being transcendent, couldn't be contained in a finite, historical time (say, from the birth of Jesus) or a single, finite institution (e.g., the Catholic Church). God transcends time, history, causality, so God is anywhere and everywhere, and nowhere at all.
When we look around, we see a causally deterministic world. God is said to be omnipotent, yet we perceive a world where things follow physical laws. Anything can happen, yet only certain things do. Miracles, things which tend to defy scientific explanation, seem few and far between, which got me thinking that maybe God doesn't work in the ways we sometimes assume. Events appear to require causes, so perhaps miracles are simply events with causes that we're unable to perceive, God being the mechanism of all causal relationships.
We're not just puppets within a pre-deterministic world, though. Or at least that's not how it seems to us. We intend. We make choices and experience the results of those choices. We exhibit self-agency. Somehow God's omniscience allows for this.
And then I got to thinking, maybe God is the totality of the infinite number of possibilities that exist in the quantum world. From God's point of view, all possibilities are. But paradoxically, when all possibilities are, nothing effectively is—there'd be no order, no continuity, no being as we know it. Yet out of God, this infinite, chaotic all, comes a casually deterministic world where both order and intention can play out and unfold, from the Big Bang (creation out of nothing and everything) to the ever-present now.
With this act of creation and self-limitation, much like in the Kabbalistic doctrine of tsimtsum, God is able to create the only world in which history is possible, one in which we're able to evolve and grow and help complete and perfect the world through acts of charity and loving-kindness. God isn't a cause separate from its effect, nor is God some kind of celestial tyrant; God is more like Paul Tillich's "ground of being manifest in existence."
That I am here, now, writing this, seems almost like an impossibility, making this moment quite possibly the most amazing miracle of all.
Bravo!
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