Once again, while browsing the internet, I stumbled upon the phrase "science denies the Immaculate Conception..." - and it was expressed by a well-educated person. Well, as Kozma Prutkov said, some things are not understandable to us not because our concepts are weak, but because these things are beyond our understanding.

Let's try to understand this. How does science relate to the Immaculate Conception - and miracles in general? To do this, we need to remember what science and miracles are.

What is science? (let's specify that we are talking about natural sciences) It is a way of knowledge characterized by its method, and if we try to characterize it with one word, that word would be "reproducibility". Science deals with repeatable observations and reproducible experiments.

Any experiment with its results must be reproducible - any scientist in any country in the world should be able to conduct the same experiment and obtain the same results.

Methodological naturalism is associated with reproducibility. These words may sound unclear, so let's clarify what is meant. Naturalism is a representation of nature as a closed system of causal relationships governed by impersonal and immutable laws. Any event within this system is determined by its previous states and immutable laws of nature.

For example, in the eyes of a scientist, a solar eclipse is caused not by the sun swallowing (and then spitting out) a dragon, but by the moon being between the earth and the sun - and we can accurately predict when this will happen, based on laws of nature that are well known and described in mathematical terms.

Methodological is related to the scientific method. A scientist does not know if there is any other reality outside of nature - he simply, within the framework of his method, deals only with nature. Scientists can say a lot of interesting, important, and useful things about how nature is organized, how matter develops, and what its laws are. But, within the framework of their method, they have nothing to do with anything outside of nature.

And a miracle does not mean that nature is not as scientists see it, or that there is no stable order in nature. A miracle does not even mean a violation of the laws of nature. For example, if you left a 32 kg weight on the floor at your summer house, and then returned to find it on the shelf, you would hardly say that the law of universal gravity was violated. You would say that someone must have moved it. In the same way, a miracle can be understood as an event that is inexplicable by natural causes, but which does not necessarily violate the laws of nature.