Science and Miracles: Do I Have to Turn My Brain Off?

The assumption is that faith and reason sit on opposite sides of a wall. Science deals with evidence. Religion deals with feelings. To believe in miracles, you have to ignore what you know about how the world works. To be a serious thinker, you have to leave God behind.

I don't experience it that way. When I actually looked at the people who built science, and at what science can and can't answer, the wall didn't hold up.

The People Who Started This

Newton. Galileo. Kepler. Faraday. Pasteur. Pascal. These aren't fringe figures. They're the foundation of the scientific method. And they were believers. Not reluctantly, not privately — many of them explicitly said their faith drove their inquiry. They studied the natural world because they believed a rational God had built a rational universe worth understanding.

That doesn't prove Christianity is true. But it makes the "smart people don't believe" narrative hard to hold. The people who invented the framework we use to question faith didn't see the contradiction we assume is there.

The "faith vs. science" framing is newer than most people realize. For most of history, the people pushing the boundaries of human knowledge saw no conflict between studying how the universe works and believing in the One who made it. The wall between faith and reason is a modern construction, not an ancient reality.

What Science Actually Does

Science is a method for studying the natural world through observation, hypothesis, and testing. It's extraordinarily good at what it does. How gravity works, how cells divide, how light travels — science is unmatched.

But science can't answer every kind of question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" "What gives life meaning?" "Is there purpose behind the design?" These aren't scientific questions. Not because they're less important, but because the scientific method wasn't designed to reach them. It studies how things work. The question of why they exist at all is a different category.

I don't think acknowledging that makes anyone less rational. "How" and "why" are different questions, and pretending one tool handles both doesn't expand your thinking. It narrows your toolkit.

The Design Problem

Here's where it gets interesting for someone who builds things.

The universe is fine-tuned to a degree that's genuinely difficult to comprehend. The gravitational constant, the strong nuclear force, the cosmological constant — dozens of physical parameters that, if altered by fractions so small they're almost immeasurable, would make life impossible. Not just human life. Any life. Any chemistry. Any stars.

This isn't a religious claim. It's a physics observation that physicists openly wrestle with. The two standard responses: (1) a multiverse — infinite universes exist and we happen to be in the lucky one, or (2) design — someone set the numbers intentionally.

What's worth noting is that both of these require a kind of faith. The multiverse is unfalsifiable — you can never observe or test another universe. It's a philosophical commitment dressed in scientific language. Design is also unfalsifiable in the traditional sense. Both are inferences from the same data.

So the honest position isn't "science says there's no God." Science presents data that demands an explanation, and the two leading explanations both require you to believe something you can't prove. The question is which inference you find more compelling.

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." — Psalm 19:1

"For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." — Romans 1:20

The claim: look at what's been made and you'll see the maker. The deeper physics goes, the harder it gets to dismiss that.

Things Worth Sitting With

This isn't the foundation of my belief, but it's something I keep coming back to.

"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." — Job 26:7

The earth hanging on nothing. Written roughly 3,500 years ago, when every other culture believed the earth sat on the back of an animal or was held up by a god.

"He stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain." — Isaiah 40:22

The expansion of the universe — "stretching out" the heavens. Millennia before Hubble observed it.

"I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works." — Psalm 139:14

The deeper we go into human biology — DNA, cellular machinery, neural networks — the more this sounds like an understatement.

I'm not building a proof on these. But when authors with no telescopes, no understanding of cosmology, no knowledge of molecular biology write things that align with what we've discovered thousands of years later — that's a genuine question about how they knew. Either these people were more advanced than we gave them credit for, or something else is going on. Either way, it's still a marvel.

Miracles

This is the part where most people draw the line. The resurrection. Walking on water. Healing the blind. Do you have to accept things that violate everything we know about how the world works?

Here's how I think about it.

If there is no God, miracles are impossible. The laws of nature are all there is, and nothing overrides them. That's a coherent position.

But if there IS a God — if a being exists who designed the laws of nature — then a miracle isn't a violation. It's the designer intervening in His own system. The person who wrote the code can change the code. That's not a contradiction. That's authority.

So the question of whether miracles are possible is really the question of whether God exists. If He does, miracles are almost expected. If He doesn't, nothing else in these pages matters anyway. The real conversation was never about miracles. It's about whether the evidence points to a creator at all.

The resurrection specifically is worth its own investigation. If Jesus actually rose from the dead, everything He claimed is validated. If He didn't, the whole thing collapses. Paul said this himself — "if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain" (1 Corinthians 15:17). Christianity doesn't hide from that standard. It invites it.

The historical evidence — the empty tomb, post-resurrection appearances to hundreds of people, the transformation of the disciples from hiding to dying for their testimony, the explosive growth of a movement with every reason to die in its first generation — is stronger than I expected when I first looked. I'd encourage anyone to investigate it on its own terms rather than dismissing it because the conclusion feels uncomfortable.

Where I Landed

I didn't turn my brain off. If anything, I had to follow patterns further than I was comfortable with. Because the data didn't stop where I expected it to.

Science tells me how the universe works. Faith addresses why it exists. The how is extraordinary. The why is what changed my life.

The universe is fine-tuned in a way that demands explanation. The people who built science saw no conflict with belief. Ancient authors described physical realities they had no way of knowing. And if a God exists who made the system, operating outside that system isn't a contradiction — it's what you'd expect.

I'm not asking anyone to stop thinking. I'm asking them to keep going. To follow the evidence past the point where it gets uncomfortable. I did, and what I found on the other side wasn't less rational. It was more complete.

I hold this with open hands.

Trent Jackson

Trenton Jackson builds and writes at the intersection of human systems, business architecture, and design.