Why Are There No Miracles Anymore?

If God sent miracles before, why do we not see them now?

Why no sea splitting? No staff becoming a serpent? No dead being raised?

Islam’s first answer is straightforward: prophethood ended with Muhammad ﷺ.

But there is another pattern worth noticing.

Perhaps miracles were not random spectacles. Perhaps they confronted civilisations in the language of their greatest confidence.

Moses (alayhis salaam) confronted magic.

Jesus (alayhis salaam) confronted healing.

Muhammad ﷺ confronted language.

Our civilization trusts science.

The telescope. The microscope. The equation. The genome. The particle accelerator.

Perhaps our age is not primarily being asked to watch nature break.

Perhaps it is being asked to read nature more deeply.

Moses: Magic Meets Its Limit

Pharaoh summons his magicians. They throw their ropes and staffs and, the Qur’an says, they appear to move:

يُخَيَّلُ إِلَيْهِ — yukhayyalu ilayhi

They are made to seem as though they move. Qur’an 20:66⁠

Then Moses casts his staff. It consumes what they produced, and the magicians themselves fall in prostration. Qur’an 20:69–70⁠

The experts recognise the boundary of their expertise.

The sign enters their strongest domain—and exceeds it.

Jesus: Medicine Meets Its Limit

Jesus, peace be upon him, receives a different cluster of signs:

“I heal the blind and the leper, and I bring the dead to life—by Allah’s permission.”

The Qur’an repeats the crucial qualification “by My permission” when recounting these miracles. Qur’an 5:110⁠

A longstanding Muslim interpretation connects Jesus’ signs with the prominence of medicine and healing in Israel in his age. Today’s Israeli medical landscape is also booming.  Hopefully after reading these articles, they will also develop a stronger moral compass and a more stringent ethical framework. The Qur’an does not itself state that historical theory, so it should remain an interpretation.

But its logic is compelling.

Jesus heals what medicine cannot.

Again, the sign appears at the boundary of human capability.

Muhammad ﷺ: Language Becomes the Sign

Arabia’s great cultural technology was language.

Poetry transmitted memory, genealogy, honour, political power and social prestige.

Into that civilization came the Qur’an.

Its challenge was itself linguistic:

“If mankind and jinn gathered to produce the like of this Qur’an, they could not produce its like.”

The enduring sign was not an isolated spectacle.

It was revelation: sound, rhythm, meaning, law, narrative, prayer and semantic compression transmitted as language.

The Prophet ﷺ himself said that previous prophets were given signs through which people believed, while what he had been given was revelation. Sahih al-Bukhari 4981⁠

Moses’ staff cannot be inspected today.

The sign became informational.

Āyah: Sign, Verse, Vector

Here the Arabic becomes crucial.

The Qur’an calls one of its verses an āyah.

But āyah also means a sign, indication or evidence.

A Qur’anic sentence is an āyah.

Something in creation can also be an āyah.

That does not mean every scientific discovery is a supernatural miracle.

It means reality can be read for what it indicates.

Smoke points toward fire.

A footprint points toward presence.

A biomarker points toward physiology.

Think of an āyah as analogous to a vector.

A vector has magnitude, but also direction.

One arrow proves little.

Many independent arrows can show convergence.

“We will show them Our signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth.”

The Arabic names two domains:

Al-Āfāq........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)