THE ISSUE OF MIRACLES

Science and theology have always been faced with a question mark about "miracles."

Albert Einstein, that great universal mystical scientist, humanist, visionary said, in summary, that science is about what is, and not what should be, which is the attribute of religion. That is, science discovers the facts of the external world, while the ethical and spiritual man creates the values of the internal world and he ends by saying that: "Natural science without religion is lame - religion without science is blind".

And this statement is true - knowing only objective facts amounts to cold light, warmthless light, and powerlessness - yet wanting to create subjective, moral, and ethical religious values, without proper knowledge of facts, amounts to running blindly. Light without force creates Luciferlike intelligence - heat without force generates fanatical wills.

The difference between science and religion, in this view, consists of the following: science is the effort to gather, through analytical thinking, the perceptible phenomena of the world, in a complete way and according to the analytical ability of the thinker; but it will never discover God in a test tube! And religion, that of liberating humanity from the bondage of egocentric longings, desires and fears, contributing to a religious spiritualization of life’s comprehension. Only the reciprocal association between science and religion can transform the vision of man aiming at a better world.

Of course, there are mysterious forces in the universe that are beyond our reach and that under certain circumstances act in favour of people who can tune the vibrations of their organism to the vibrations of the Cosmic Constitution’s organism. And this attunement is carried out, often, in the area of our subconscious, or during sleep, or at another unknown moment. The presence of a powerful focus of attunement to cosmic powers, like that of Jesus and other great masters, greatly facilitates the attunement of the vibrations of the human body with these powers.

“Can you believe that I can do this to you?” - this is the invariable question that Jesus addresses to the patient who implored him to heal, and only after the patient tunes his vibrations to the vibrations of the Master, does the “miracle” happen: “Yes, I believe, Lord!”, “Then be done with you as you believe”.

The pilgrimages to Lourdes, for example, are a permanent refutation of the materialist conception of the Universe. It is scientifically undeniable that, behind the perceptible phenomena of the Universe, there is a Reality imperceptible to the senses, which is the source and cause of these phenomena. It is scientifically impossible to identify the reality of the world with its perceptibility. We cannot establish the empirical and childlike equation: that reality is equal to perceptibility; we have to modify the equation as follows: that reality is greater than perceptibility. Materialism is too primitive, naive, one-sided, fragmentary, relative, unjust; it does not satisfy any man who can reason logically.

Today's natural science is unanimous in recognizing that phenomena of a physical nature are but a kind of shadows or secondary reflections of a much larger, primary reality, which is behind these phenomena.

Thus, for example, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, an English astronomer, physicist, mathematician and also philosopher of science and popularizer of science, in his book, The Nature of the Physical World, wrote: “The clear knowledge that physical science is about a shadow world represents one of the most significant advances. In the physical world, we witness a drama of silhouettes of shadows (shadowgraph) or images formed by the shadow of an object on a surface. Everything is symbolic ... The external world has ended in a shadowy world ... If we want to remove our illusions, we have to remove the material substance, as we find that this substance is one of our greatest illusions.”

Sir James Hopwood Jeans, English physicist, astronomer and mathematician, in his book, The Mysterious Universe, wrote: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine”.

Einstein's two revolutionary books on Relativity and Unified Field Theory, the latter published shortly before his death, mathematically confirm the same truth: that, behind the material and visible phenomena lies an immaterial and invisible reality, and all the more real and less accessible to our primitive sensory and intellectual organs.

It is certainly in this direction that future humanity, more advanced in the spiritual realm, more intuitive than the present will unravel the ultimate secret of the so-called "miracle."

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In mid-May 1938, Professor Huberto Rohden travelled with other church officials on a visit to the sanctuary of Lourdes, France. Alongside this group was a young man whose tuberculosis had destroyed one of his lungs, as shown by the radiographs taken at the Office of Findings (Bureau des Constatations) maintained by the medical science of that city. The young man prayed in front of the cave and nothing happened. But during the following night, the sick lung was completely restored, as shown by new radiographs.

Alexis Carrel, a famous French scientist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1912, after experiencing the sudden cures of illnesses (in particular of Marie Bailly in Lourdes, 1902), published articles refuting the medical opinions of the time about miracles. Due to anti-clericalism at the University, he taught, he received criticism and, thinking that he could no longer freely pursue his research in France, he moved to Canada. He was later invited to work at the University of Chicago and the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Studies.