Could God perform a miracle that violates physical laws? I think that this question is based on a false notion of what a physical law is. Physical laws are summaries of all observations. If something is observed that contradicts a physical law, then the law must change to accommodate the observation.

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Prerequisites: None.

Originally Written: January 2017.

Confidence Level: Core religious belief.

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As a religious scientist, there is one question that you get asked from time to time from people with a wide variety of personal beliefs:

Could God perform a miracle that violates physical laws?

It is difficult for me to give a simple answer. I can neither answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Instead, I dispute the validity of the question.

This question relies on a false notion of what a physical law is. It assumes that physical laws are timeless truths, determined when the universe began, which constrain all subsequent events.

Let’s consider an example: the law of conservation of energy. In this paradigm, either before the universe began or immediately at the Big Bang, there was a mathematical truth: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be shifted between different forms such as kinetic energy, potential energy, thermal energy, and mass. Every event in the whole history of the universe is a priori required to obey this law.

This is the wrong way to understand physical laws. Scientists are not a modern class of priests who have the ability to decipher timeless truths. Scientists are observation makers who then try to explain what has been observed and to predict what will happen next time.

A physical law is something that has never been observed to be false.^[1]Not everything that has never been observed to be false is a physical law. To be a physical law, it also have to have some explanatory value or to be located near the foundation of a web of beliefs.

The law of conservation of energy actually states that no one has ever measured energy being created or destroyed. This statement is a posteri to the observations.

There are always people peddling perpetual motion machines. They claim to observe the creation of energy, and yet the law has not been discarded. Scientists maintain standards of evidence to ensure that the observations being made are valid. If an experiment which sufficiently upholds the standards of evidence contradicts an established physical law, then the physical law must be modified or discarded.

Conservation of energy has been modified as a result of new experiments. In the early 1900s, physicists investigating nuclear reactions realized that they had observed matter turning into energy and energy turning into matter. This violated two well-established laws, as they were understood at the time: the law of conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy. The physical laws then had to be modified. Mass is now considered to be a form of energy. The two laws have merged into a single conservation law: energy is neither created nor destroyed. Although this sounds the same, what is meant by ‘energy’ has been expanded to include mass.

Surprising new experimental results occasionally emerge which contradict known physical laws. Sometimes, people respond to them by disputing whether the observations hold up to the standards of evidence. Sometimes, people respond by declaring that physical laws have to be modified. Observations which contradict physical laws are almost never considered miracles.

Here are two examples of violations of physical laws to show how people respond:

In 1909, Ernest Rutherford’s lab made a most unusual observation. One of his collaborators, Hans Geiger, aimed a beam of high energy $\alpha$ particles, produced in a nuclear reaction, at a thin film of gold foil. The $\alpha$ particles were fast enough and the gold foil was thin enough that the $\alpha$ particles should have gone straight through the foil, with at most a slight change in direction. An undergraduate in the lab, Ernest Marsden, suggested that they check to make sure that none of the $\alpha$ particles bounced back. A few of them did. “It was quite the most incredible event that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost as incredible as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you.” (Rutherford) This result was not only surprising, it also violated a well-known physical law of that era. The only way to explain how the $\alpha$ particles bounced back involved a new model of an atom, which had all of the positive charge concentrated at the center. This violated the physical law that positive charges repel other positive charges and so wouldn’t stay together in an incredibly dense nucleus. This difficultly was eventually resolved by introducing new physical laws, governing a new force. The components of atoms did not interact just via electromagnetism; they also interacted via the nuclear force. The physical laws governing motion inside of atoms had to be changed to accommodate this new observation.

In 2011, the OPERA experiment in central Italy made an equally surprising discovery. They measured that neutrinos produced at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, were faster than the speed of light. This is weird because, according to the theory of special relativity, if we measure something going faster than the speed of light, then an observer moving close to the speed of light (but slower than it) would measure the neutrinos going backwards in time. We have good reason to believe that relativity holds because we have directly measured the weird behavior of time when objects are moving really fast. Radioactive decay takes longer when the particles are moving. GPS satellites carry clocks that are precise enough that they can also detect this relativistic time dilation. Relativity is written as a description of the geometry of space and time, so exempting neutrinos from it would overthrow the entire theory.^[2]I’ve written some blog posts about how Gravity Is Geometry, if you’re interested in learning more. Alternatively, we could keep relativity, but allow neutrinos to travel backward in time. This is even worse because it undermines the basic physical principle of causality: causes happen before effects. Since most scientists were unwilling to discard either relativity or causality, they instead argued against the experiment itself: the experiment didn’t actually measure that or the experiment wasn’t as precise as they claimed. This view was eventually validated when the OPERA experiment found that one of their many cables was not completely tightened. However, if the experiment had been able to answer its critics and the result was repeated at other locations, then we would have to figure out a way to modify either relativity or causality to make them consistent with neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light.

Sometimes, experimental results contradict the established physical laws. People either reject the results of the experiment or they try to modify the physical laws to accommodate the experiment. Science doesn’t investigate the possibility that the experiment was caused by the supernatural.

If a miracle happened which contradicts a physical law, people would respond in the same way. They would dispute the evidence. Can we really trust the records of the observations? If the evidence is overwhelming, then the physical law itself would be changed. Scientists would then work to figure out new ways of understanding reality which are consistent with the new observations.

The reason why many scientists don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is because of insufficient evidence. The testimony of four people who lived several thousand years ago is insufficient to overthrow the otherwise universal observation that things which are dead stay dead. If there were security cameras in the Holy Sepulcher and sufficiently many sensors on the body and we still had all of the data that they collected, then science’s understanding of death would be different.

Do I believe that God could violate physical laws as we currently understand them? Yes.

Most physicists believe that our current understanding of physical laws is incomplete and are hoping for some unexpected experimental results that can guide us in the correct direction. They are thinking about the discovery of supersymmetric particles, of magnetic monopoles, or of proton decay more than about what religious people would consider miracles.

Do I believe that God could violate some ultimate, eternal form of physical laws? No.

This form of physical law (if it even exists) would be a summary of everything that has ever happened. God’s miracles are part of everything that has ever happened, so they would not violate the physical laws. The miracles would have to be consistent with physical laws because the physical laws were built from data which included those miracles.

Physical laws are too malleable for God to be able to contradict them.