Good to hear from you!

Martin

I’d suffered several major back injuries when I was younger and, while shifting suitcases, had re-injured a troublesome vertebrae that had once been fractured. As a result, I was in a great deal of pain, finding it difficult to get in and out of bed - let alone a car - and walking with a cane.

We went into the church, looked around and went into the small room cum shrine at the back. Then we returned to the main sanctuary and sat in one of the pews.

When I got up to leave, the back pain was gone and complete mobility had returned. I haven’t used the cane since.

Irrational? Don’t ask me. All I know is that, after 36 years of on and off back pain, periods of immobility and the threat of corrective surgery, I haven’t experienced any further back problems since that day at Chimayo. And if that’s a miracle, then I’m all for them whether they’re irrational or not.

Interested in what you’re reaching for, as I’m writing a treatise on similar issues.
The way I see it, at the point of the Big Bang, nothing (or no-thing) begat time, the “laws of physics” and nearly infinite energy. Almost instantly a plethora of various short-lived subatomic strings/particles came into existence which eventually interacted to form the basic particles and elements of matter as we know them. Over billions of years this matter coalesced into various molecules and large masses such as stars, galaxies and in some cases, planets.
On some (or at least one) of these planets, some carbon based molecules were transformed by unique conditions into a form we call life. Do we hypothesize that all the above steps–energy/strings/particles/atoms/ elements/molecules/stars/planets were part of a “purposeful” “evolving” or that until the moment that life came into being, everything that had been going on (and still goes on) was “purposeless?”
It seems to me that there has been a seeking of greater persistence of existence at work here, and life is one of the strategies that is being tried out. The fact that the life strategy has in earth’s case led to creatures who can perceive and seek to actually understand the 15 billion year old process at work–and even the “nothing” that lies behind it–may or may not be part of the “purpose.” It all depends, I guess, on whether one attributes a “purposefulness” to the origin of the Big Bang event or sees it as a random event (or one of an infinite number of such) emanating from a “purposeless” “place where there’s no space or time.”