Faith and Reason: God works only possible miracles: Our series on miracles is continued by Rabbi David J. Goldberg, Senior Rabbi at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. Next week, Clive Calver of the Evangelical Alliance.

'IT'S a miracle.' How often, and how carelessly, we use that phrase. We all know, more or less, what we mean by it; that something out-of- the-ordinary has happened, an event which does not accord with what are generally held to be the natural laws of cause and effect.

On closer examination, we could probably find some rational explanation, without losing totally that sense of 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' By calling them 'miracles', we are acknowledging an unusually favourable, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime combination of circumstances that have happened at the right time, in the right place, to bring about an astonishing result. Had we been Children of Israel in Biblical times, we would have called it 'Divine Providence'; had we been ancient Greeks, we would have called it 'Fortune' or 'Destiny'.

In the Five Books of Moses, miracles, if not 10 a penny, are pretty frequent occurences, due to the direct intervention of an all-

powerful God. For example, Abraham is told that his wife Sarah, aged 90, will give birth to a child. When she laughs at the thought, she is rebuked with the words 'Is anything too hard for the Lord?' The Hebrew word translated as 'hard' is yippale, from a root meaning 'separation', that is, something extraordinary, totally apart from normal human experience.

What our unknown author of the Sarah episode is saying, and this is an assumption shared by all other Biblical writers, is that God can do anything He chooses, nothing is too marvellous for Him. The 10 plagues, dividing the Red Sea, the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, manna in the wilderness - is anything too hard for the all- powerful Lord?

It was the influence of Greek philosophy that forced medieval Jewish thinkers to explore, with great subtlety, the scope of all in the phrase all-powerful. Is it really true to say that God can do anything He chooses? Can He, for example, create a stone which even He cannot lift up? Can He create another God? Can He will Himself out of existence? The answer to all these questions will surely be in the negative, but is that not then a denial, or limiting qualification, of God's omnipotence?

Joseph Albo, a 15th-century Spanish philosopher, considers this problem in his Sefer Ikkarim, 'The Book of First Principles'. He defines two kinds of impossibility, one of which is beyond even God's power to alter.

For instance, the whole is greater than a part of it, and the diagonal of a square is greater than one of its sides. We cannot imagine that even God can make a part equal to the whole, or the diagonal of a square equal to one of its sides, or two contradictory propositions valid at the same time.

By the same token, we find it impossible to imagine that God can create another being like Himself in every respect, because that would require one of them to be the cause and the other the effect, which would mean they were not similar in every respect.

But, says Albo, there is another kind of impossibility, one which contradicts a law of nature; for example, the resurrection of the dead. Since our minds can imagine this, God can do it.

What Albo appears to be arguing here is that a physical impossibility is possible for God, but not a logical impossibility. The same thought was expressed 200 years earlier by Thomas Aquinas, when he wrote: 'Nothing that implies a contradiction falls under the scope of God's omnipotence.' In other words, a nonsense statement does not make sense simply because the word 'God' is tagged on to it. Saadia Gaon, 500 years before Albo, had pointed out the absurdity of asking God to make five into ten without adding anything to the former, or to bring back the day gone by in its original condition. To make five into ten means adding to the former, and to bring back the day gone by means that it is no longer in its original condition.

Both the Biblical and the medieval outlook were dealt a seemingly devastating blow by Newtonian science on the one hand, and by David Hume and empirical philosophy on the other. The Newtonian universe operates by an inexorable mechanical system. Any so-called 'miracle' would jeopardise these workings of nature's laws. And for David Hume the question was not whether miracles can happen on a priori grounds, but whether they did in fact happen at all; a question of objective evidence.

But modern science, interestingly, gives more plausibility to the notion of miracles than would have been likely even 50 years ago. Modern science, like modern theology or philosophy, is relativist rather than absolutist in its assertions. Quantum physics and chaos theory, in particular, have revealed that chance and indeterminacy are real aspects of the fundamental nature of things.

Such science is attractive to theologians because it removes the requirement for God to have produced a major disruption of the natural order every time a miracle is credited to Him. It was not God, but a strong east wind, arriving at just the right moment over the Sea of Reeds, which enabled the Israelites to cross but submerged the Egyptians.

The subjective response of the Biblical writer was to praise God for a miracle. The objective response of someone reading the text 2,000 years later, and aware of the proximate causalities of modern science, should be to seek some correlation and underlying harmony between two constant factors; the divine will, which is consistent not arbitrary, and the orderly workings of the universe.

Nowadays, with all the data of quantum physics, psychosomatic medicine and parapsychology, it is certainly possible to give consideration to the notion of 'miracles'. But reports of a miracle should still be studied with careful scepticism, for moral reasons: without some concept of a natural world that proceeds according to broadly observable principles, and a moral world that proceeds according to the general premise that actions have consequences, life would be too random, contingent and hazardous to have any discernible meaning or purpose.

Therefore, I would still answer 'No', were I asked whether it was possible for 90-year-old Sarah to have a child]