A True Sense of the Miraculous

Third Nephi starts with a literal bang and in my opinion, the most impressive sign God has ever given to man. For one night, after the sun goes down, the sky remains as bright as at mid-day. It’s followed by a new “star” which was visible in the night sky. The record doesn’t say how long it remained visible. My guess is it faded from sight over a period of days or maybe weeks.

From our perspective and knowledge of astrophysics, the event they saw is easily explained. In the distant past, a star exploded and in the act, emitted a powerful, focused, stream of energetic particles. They crossed the vastness of space and struck the Earth's upper atmosphere causing it to fluoresce in a massive aurora so brilliant it lit the ground like day and lasted through the night.

For me, the miracle isn’t in what happened, but in the timing of the event and the precision needed to aim the stream of particles to hit the Earth from astronomic distances. There are a couple of aspects to this which could simplify the complexity, but not enough to diminish its miraculous nature. Some might say, the wavefront could’ve been spherical in which case no aiming is needed, just timing.

The complication to this is we’ve not seen an explosion powerful enough to do that over the distances involved. To my knowledge there aren’t any known nova or supernova remnants close enough to us to account for this phenomena if it had emitted just a spherical wave. But, we have observed stellar explosions which emit two focused beams of particles which shoot off in opposite directions from the star's center.

The other miraculous aspect is the timing. I cant begin to imagine how many decimal places are needed to compute the travel time to the day to pull this off. Not only that, you need its "flight path" through space and you have to account for the effect of gravity fields of stars it passes.

Then there's the aiming. My guess is the explosion was somewhere not close but still inside our galaxy. Heavenly Father wasn't aiming from near-Earth, or interstellar but interstellar distances. That He scored a bulls-eye from so far away boggles my mind.

The Nephites and Lamanite knew none of this. For them the sky lit up without the sun for a night. The real miracle is how soon they forgot or discounted the event. But I can’t be too critical — I’ve experienced many smaller but much more personal miracles in my life. Yet I need a constant diet of them because I so quickly forget myself.