Can’t all miracles be ascribed to natural causes?
Thank you Hare Krishna question from Saurabh Prabhu can't all miracles be explained through natural reasoning it could be said that deity in say in the Gopinath past deity was moved by someone or by a devotee or that a dream happened which was taken too seriously the Gopinath dream which was taken too seriously or in this way how do we decide which are actual miracles should we approach miracles rationally or sentimentally answer certainly miracles should be approached rationally but we don't but we shouldn't let ourselves be restricted to material conceptions of rationality there is sometimes people think of religious or spiritual as irrational and material or atheistic as rational no there is a spiritual rationality which is there in the spiritual realm also so there is a rationality which is inherently inherently and incorrigibly skeptical of anything spiritual that sort of rationality will erode our faith and will deprive us of spiritual experiences, spiritual realization, it will actually reject all spiritual life itself so that kind of rationality where we are inherently skeptical that is undesirable but in scriptures there is rationality where if some things are purported to miracles they are evaluated objectively so that rationality is based on scripture analysis so for example Chaitanya Mahaprabhu when he was told in Vrindavan that Krishna is coming and dancing and Kaliya in Yamuna and he said Krishna doesn't come in Kali Yuga and then he used scripture analysis and then he complemented that with supplemented that with the information given by others that actually he was a fisherman so here we see there is a healthy skepticism that is there and that is certainly desirable now however the healthy skepticism can become an unhealthy skepticism when we reject even the possibility of miracles now as far as the Madhavendra Puri pastime is concerned there are several factors to be considered which do not in and of themselves have rational explanations if we consider only mundane rationality so the deities had been lost for many many centuries for a long long time but it was a long time and then Madhavendra Puri just visited that place in a very short while and there was no way he just came the previous day and stayed there and there was no way that he could have found during his very brief stay over there a deity which the local residents had not found at all and which was so deep into the thickets in the forest that later on when Madhavendra Puri had to go there or he wanted to take the villagers there he told them that all of you take axes and other tools by which we will be able to cut a way through it so there was neither, there was no way Madhavendra Puri could have known it and there was no way to reach that place also where the deity was there so how did Madhavendra Puri come to know about it? It was through a dream so if the dream had nothing, no spiritual or revelational element to it, if the dream was not miraculous at all, there was no normal way by which Madhavendra Puri could have come to know about this particular, the location of the deity now so like that we can look at various incidents and we can infer that, so first of all this is told in the narrative by the saints itself so we have Guru Sadhu Shastra Krishna's Guru Raj Goswami is a great saint and he tells this, and Madhavendra Puri himself is also a great saint so when certain miracles are claimed if they are broadly in harmony with scripture principles and they are talked about by great saints and they are vindicated by other great saints and Guru Sadhu Shastra are talking about it in a positive light then there is no need for us to be skeptically reject all miracles, so being sentimental doesn't necessarily mean that being sentimental actually means that we accept miracles not just in unscientific way but also in unscriptural way, we don't consider Guru Sadhu Shastra and we just accept anything and everything as miracle that is sentimental from the spiritual rational point of view and similarly we are not just rational in the sense of rejecting all miracles without considering even the possibility of miracles, now we understand very clearly that there are natural laws but at the same time Krishna is above the natural laws now the attempt to reduce Krishna's extraordinary pastimes, superhuman pastimes to the mundane levels is actually an attempt to strip Krishna of his divinity, so some people try to explain that Krishna did not lift up a Govardhan hill, he actually just went inside a cave and when the cave was collapsing because of the storm, he just held up a small part of the cave and people thought that oh Krishna lifted up the whole mountain now this is a speculation which is anti-scripture because Guru Sadhu Shastra also said that Krishna lifted the Govardhan and it's also clearly mentioned that in scripture that Krishna is God, so he certainly has the potency to do such miraculous things, so it is somebody asked how did Krishna find the center of gravity under Govardhan to put his finger over there to balance the mountain Krishna doesn't have to find the center of gravity because he is the source of gravity and he can suspend the laws of nature whenever he wants material nature works under his supervision, so I have given a full class which is there on the website are miracles compatible with science where I talk about how they can be scientifically compatible but essentially the point for us is that we should not go into extreme skepticism nor we go into extreme sentimentality and the balanced approach is to go not just according to mundane rationality but according to spiritual rationality that is based on Guru Sadhu Shastra and then evaluate the authenticity of miracles, thank you Hare Krishna.