Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Creation, Part 15.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

We saw last time that the 19th century collapse of the belief in miracles among biblical scholars had its roots in the 18th

century and even earlier. And today we want to begin some assessment of those reasons and arguments

that led to skepticism concerning the occurrence and identification of miracles.

First, the Newtonian World Machine.

You'll remember that according to these Newtonian thinkers,

a miracle could only be regarded as a violation of the laws of nature.

But God had established these immutable laws of nature,

and so if a miracle occurred, it would have to be a violation of those laws,

which they held to be impossible.

Now, many contemporary defenders of miracles have said that the advent of modern physics subverts this picture of the Newtonian world machine.

We no longer live in the sort of deterministic universe that was

described by Newtonian physics. Indeed, in quantum physics, there is an element of

indeterminacy in nature. That is to say, there is an indeterminacy that is inherent and ineliminable

from nature. We cannot, for example, know the exact position and momentum of any particle

in the universe. And therefore, contrary to Laplace's boast, it is in principle impossible

to predict the exact state of the universe at any time in the past or future based upon

a knowledge of nature's laws and the knowledge of the present condition of the universe. The universe has this inherent indeterminacy built into it.

Some have suggested that because the picture of a deterministic world is now gone from contemporary

physics, this allows room for miracles on God's part.

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