Miracles of Creation: A Thoughtful Exploration

Here is something you may have never thought of before. I want to present an amazing and unusual thought experiment.

Without getting into all of the particulars, I will simply lay this idea onto the table for consideration, and maybe some discussion. (This is a concept that Dr. Gerald Aardsma presented in the mid 1990’s, and, I hope by the end of the article you will agree, one that certainly deserves a place at the table of discussion.)

If you are a Christian, then you have no difficulty believing in “creation-type” miracles. These are miracles performed by God, Who, out of nothing, brings something into existence.

The most obvious creation miracle would be the creation of the world itself. But in this article I want to discuss a simpler example of a creation-type miracle. Of course, no miracle should be classified as “simple,” but by this term I mean something that is not on such a grand scale. Something smaller and more digestible.

Literally.

There are a few accounts in the New Testament where we see Jesus performing what we would call creation-type miracles. One example is in the feeding of the five thousand, when Jesus, who has been teaching on a hillside in Israel, takes a very small amount of bread and fish, multiplies it, and feeds the thousands who had gathered to hear him. The account even informs us that there were twelve baskets of food left over, enough bread and fish for each of the disciples to take home and show to others.

In this account, Jesus was performing a creation miracle.

Envision yourself walking around that hillside in Israel when this event took place. You walk to one of the baskets of leftover fish and bread, you reach in and pick up a piece of the fish. You inspect the fish, pulling it apart, smelling it, tasting it. It is real fish. It is cooked fish. It was a once living and swimming (or was it?), now dead, seasoned and cooked fish. If you had the tools you could examine its cells and its genetics. It is not a fake fish, and it is impossible to differentiate from any other fish for sale down at the market.

So, who caught this real fish and brought it to Jesus? Who sliced opened the flesh of this fish after it was caught, and cleaned it out? Who cooked the fish over a fire? Who smelled it cooking? Of course, we understand from the account that nobody actually did any of these things with these particular fish. Out of nothing, Jesus brought caught, cleaned, and cooked fish, into existence in that moment—a creation miracle.

If someone had walked up on the scene not knowing the miracle that had transpired, they never would have imagined that someone had not caught, cleaned and cooked the fish. Nothing would have given them any clue that the fish had, in fact, just come into existence.

Also, nobody would have remarked, “Oh my, look at all of this brand new fish.” (What exactly would “brand new fish” look like?)

So, I submit that there would have been a history behind the newly created fish. When Jesus created the fish, it was created with a history. As Dr. Aardsma points out, this is the nature of creation-type miracles. How could it be otherwise? If you think about it, would this not be the situation of any newly created thing? How could something be brand new, with no history at all behind it? (The answer is, it can’t.) A seed has a history. An embryo has a history. Nothing is ever truly “brand new.”

Something existing in space and time will naturally have a history projected out behind it, even if the thing just appeared (which, most certainly, doesn’t normally happen, at least not that we are aware of; we are most unfamiliar with creation miracles in our every day lives). The fish came into existence moments before it was handed out, yet evidence existed within the created fish that it had been birthed months/years before, caught some days before, cooked hours before—and anyone studying the fish would say so. Some of the fish likely would have had less meat on the bones due to the fact that they were younger when caught, while others were older with more meat on them. Yet, all of the fish had, in actuality, appeared in the world just moments before. 

So, the newly created fish had a history behind it.

This is a fundamental and necessary principle in all creation-type miracles. If you took any newly created thing apart, what would you find? What would it look like?

We are in God’s story. Every story has a “back-story.” The story begins wherever the author chooses for it to begin. Yet, there is an inherent history within the story—one that took place long before, and up to, the point where the author begins.

When we think about the creation of a newly-made world, created in six days, approximately seven thousand years ago, what could this understanding of creation miracles possibly help us to perceive? 

In our upcoming (December, 2023) podcast, Jennifer and I are going to delve into this question a bit. I hope you will plan to join us as we discuss the topic of the “age of the earth.” We are going to put some thoughts on the table of discussion that you may have never heard before.

In the meantime, I encourage you to perform your own thought experiments about creation miracles and the story in which we live.