When both pigs and badly crippled birds fly, the only miracle we humans chose to notice involves the pigs

One definition of God's miracles is that they must defy gravity, as with pigs that fly, or involve defying some one or other of God's ten thousand or so commandments of science.

But what if God sometime choses to follow His own scientific commandments but merely gild their lilly a bit beyond normal expectations?

What we catholics like to call miracles in the third degree.

As in the crippled bird returning to nest, or when a crippled plane successfully returns to base.

Or when the penicillium arrived to usher in a kinder gentler post-modern era just at the very moment when Manichean Modernity was really going postal.

These unnoteworthy quiet 'miracles', in the human metaphorical sense, might turn out to have been God's miracles as well...

What if Penicillin really was a miracle ?

What if we never find the mis-laid personal account from Henry Dawson, finally explaining the reasons for the other Manhattan Project, because that document never actually existed.

Because perhaps Dawson could never explain, even to himself, just why he began the project.... and why he carried it through at the cost of his own life.

Because Dr Dawson perhaps sometimes felt propelled forward by forces beyond his ken, to do what he did, regardless of the cost.

I can and I will, give my best educated guesses as to why Dawson rationally and deliberately did what he did --- but I have no proof, no proof at all.

Another reason, a very celestial reason, makes just as much sense and has just as much proof.

Or maybe a bit more - because in 1943-1946, it was very common indeed, among the devout and among the atheists alike, to speak of the "miracle" of penicillin.

As a Roman Catholic doctor* once remarked to Margaret Jennings about the atheist Howard Florey and penicillin and miracles, wouldn't Florey have been surprised, if it really had been a miracle.

But won't we all have been surprised as well, the nominally devout at least as much as the militant doubter ?

What if God did choose to come back at the height of the horrible WWII, as a blob, like none of us, just a smear on a subway wall --- or on a tenement hall.

Once again, just to help Humanity find its way home....

*************

*recalled in Trevor Williams' biography of Howard Florey

savior of wartime Lazarus was born in a BASEMENT, not a barn

Since there are all kinds of perfectly rational explanations as to why the 'miracle' (as even admittedly atheistic scientists described life-saving natural penicillin) emerged in the times of the darkest depths of Hitler and Stalin's terror, we know that God couldn't possibly be involved, because He is irrational, right ?

Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.

Gleaming white skyscrapers and ... Lovecraftian slime

For we all know that the view from the executive suite at the top of a gleaming white skyscraper was the favoured place of complacent Laplacian omniscience during Modernity, as countless art historian Powerpoint lectures have demonstrated.

So surely the mere thought of all that Lovecraftian fungal slime mysteriously oozing up on the dark dank basement walls of those same skyscrapers had to awake cosmic terrors (of which depths we can't never fully know... and still remain sane) in all those modernist minds.

For an entire secular - scientism - religion had arisen world wide, whose entire intellectual edifice rested upon the claim that the latest big and the complex at the top was always the source of all good and that the simple, small, stupid and ancient at the bottom was always the source of all evil and pestilence.

This religion - this claim - had already suffered existential doubts as the evidence of all the evils the top civilizations  were capable of piled like bodies at a death camp.

Now, in addition, to discover that the only good that had ever come out of this bad news war was coming from the lowest of the low - every sense .

It was all too much : the horror, the horror !!