Chapter 22
PLACING BLOCKS
Miracles may be inputs to the system, not violations of it.
22.1 The Conflict
Science and religion have been at war—or so the story goes.
Science says: the universe operates by natural law. Every event has natural causes. The laws are universal, exceptionless, discoverable through observation and experiment.
Religion says: God acts in the world. Miracles happen. Prayers are answered. The divine intervenes in history.
These seem incompatible. If laws are exceptionless, miracles are impossible. If miracles happen, laws aren’t exceptionless. The conflict appears fundamental.
But is it?
The conflict assumes a particular model of divine action: intervention as violation. God acts by breaking the rules, suspending natural law, making exceptions.
On this model, miracles are anomalies—events that shouldn’t happen according to physics but do happen because God overrides physics. Water becomes wine. The dead rise. The sea parts.
If this is what miracles are, science and religion are indeed at war. Science can’t accommodate exceptions to its laws. Religion can’t abandon divine action. Stalemate.
But there’s another model.
22.2 The Resolution
Return to the Game of Life.
You’re watching the grid evolve. Patterns form and dissolve according to the rules. Then you intervene: you place a new live cell on the grid.
What happens?
The cell you placed now behaves exactly like every other cell. It follows the rules. It survives or dies based on its neighbors. Your intervention introduced something new, but the something new then participates in the same lawful dynamics as everything else.
From the perspective of someone watching only the grid (not watching you), the new cell is just a cell. Its subsequent behavior follows the rules. There’s no way to tell, by examining the grid’s evolution, that this particular cell was placed rather than born according to Rule 4.
The intervention was real. But it wasn’t a violation of the rules. It was an input to the system—a new initial condition that then evolved lawfully.
Now apply this to theology.
22.3 Miracle as Input
What if divine action works like placing blocks?
God doesn’t violate natural law. God introduces something into the causal flow—an event, a configuration, a nudge—that then unfolds according to natural law.
Consider some biblical miracles through this lens:
The burning bush. A bush that burns but isn’t consumed. Perhaps an unusual combustion phenomenon—rare but not physically impossible. The miracle isn’t the violation of physics; it’s the timing, the placement, the fact that Moses was there to see it and interpret it as divine communication.
The parting of the sea. Exodus mentions a strong east wind blowing all night. Perhaps an unusual meteorological event—a wind that pushed water aside at precisely the moment the Israelites needed to cross. Rare, but not a suspension of physics. The miracle is the timing.
Answered prayer. A patient recovers unexpectedly. Perhaps the immune system rallied, or the diagnosis was wrong, or some physiological process we don’t fully understand kicked in. The recovery followed biological laws. The miracle, if there is one, is that it happened when it did, in response to prayer.
On this model, miracles are not suspensions of law. They’re placements—events introduced into the causal flow that then unfold naturally. The naturalness doesn’t make them less divine; it makes them compatible with the world science studies.
22.4 What This Preserves
This model preserves several things that seem important.
Divine action. God can act in the world. The deist criticism—that God wound up the clock and walked away—doesn’t apply. God can place blocks whenever and wherever. The cosmos is not a closed system hermetically sealed against the divine.
Natural law. Science can proceed as usual. Laws are exceptionless in the sense that nothing violates them. Events may have unusual causes—placed blocks—but once placed, everything follows the rules. Science studies the rules; it doesn’t need to worry about exceptions.
The integrity of creation. The universe is not a puppet show where God pulls every string. Creation has its own dynamics, its own unfolding, its own integrity. God respects this integrity even while acting within it.
Mystery without magic. Miracles remain mysterious—we don’t know when God places blocks or why. But they’re not magical violations of reality. They’re part of reality, woven into the same fabric as everything else.
22.5 Objections and Responses
Objection 1: This isn’t what the texts describe.
The Bible describes water becoming wine instantaneously, not a natural fermentation process. It describes the dead rising, not near-death experiences. Aren’t these clear violations of natural law?
Response: The texts describe appearances, interpreted through ancient categories. The authors didn’t know about quantum mechanics or neurobiology. They described what they saw in the language they had. That a resurrection looked instantaneous doesn’t mean it violated physics—it means we don’t fully understand what happened.
This isn’t explaining away the miracles. It’s acknowledging that our categories may be inadequate. Something remarkable happened; how to describe it is a separate question.
Objection 2: This makes miracles undetectable.
If placed blocks follow the same rules as everything else, how can we tell when one has been placed? Doesn’t this make miracles unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless?
Response: Miracles are not meant to be detected by scientific instruments. They’re meant to be experienced as meaningful by persons in relationship with God. The Israelites didn’t need spectrometers to experience the sea crossing as divine deliverance. The meaningfulness is in the timing, the context, the interpretation—not in measurable anomalies.
Objection 3: This limits God.
If God can only place blocks, God can’t violate the rules. Isn’t this a limitation on divine power?
Response: It’s not a limitation imposed from outside; it’s a self-limitation—God choosing to work within the creation rather than overriding it. Just as a novelist can write anything but good novelists follow narrative logic, God can do anything but acts consistently with the nature of creation.
And the rules themselves are divine. They’re not external constraints on God; they’re expressions of the logos. God doesn’t violate them because they’re God’s own structure.
22.6 Science and Faith
The warfare model of science and religion assumes that every apparent miracle is either a genuine violation (religion wins) or a natural event mistakenly attributed to God (science wins).
The placing-blocks model offers a third option: genuine divine action within natural processes. Neither violation nor mistake. Both science and faith are honored.
Science studies the rules. It explains how the grid evolves, what patterns emerge, what regularities hold. This is legitimate and important work.
Faith recognizes that the rules have a source, that blocks may be placed, that the game has meaning. This is also legitimate and important.
They don’t conflict because they’re doing different things. Science asks how. Faith asks why. Science examines the grid. Faith asks about the player.
The grid is real. The rules are real. The patterns that emerge are real.
And the hand that places blocks is also real—even if it can’t be seen from within the grid.