Avot301

15:
The rainbow. The rainbow to which our mishnah refers is the one that was witnessed by Noah after the flood. God tells Noah that the appearance of the rainbow is a reminder of God's assurance that never again will it rain so hard as to destroy the world.

From the fact that the rainbow is included in this list of 'miraculous' events it would seem that the sages did not consider the appearance of the rainbow to be natural, but rather something so 'supernatural' (because it seems so ethereal?) that God must have planned for it to happen at that precise moment at the culmination of creation.

Or, possibly, the sages do not see every rainbow as being 'beyond nature', but only the one that was seen in the sky by Noah.

To be continued.

In Avot 297 I wrote: … we cannot help but be struck by the fact that many a time and oft God seems to interfere in the normal workings of nature, that God causes something so unusual to occur that we call this occurrence a miracle.

Tamar Dar writes:

I ask myself whether such an occurrence seems to us to be a miracle because of the limited manner in which we understand the universe. To the definition which you gave I would add: "An event that appears (to us at this stage) inexplicable by the laws of nature (as we understand them today) and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God."

I respond:

Let us be exact: I did not compose that definition; I quoted it from a respectable dictionary. I do not see what Tamar's additions to the definition achieve: as Rambam says in his Guide for the Perplexed, we can only judge nature by the (God-given) faculties that we have. In all honesty, does it seem likely to Tamar or anyone else that at some stage in the future human beings will be able to explain how a donkey talks to its rider – according to the laws of nature? POssibly what Tamar is saying is exemplified in today's shiur: the sages were not able to explain the rainbow; for them it was a miracle; we can explain the rainbow. But does that not mean that it is not really a miracle?

Tamar also writes:

It is not clear to me why the world was created in the last seconds at twilight on the sixth day. The creation of any computer programme takes a long time before it becomes usable.

I respond:

Again we must be exact. The sages do not say that the world was created at twilight on the sixth day. If that were the case what were the previous five days all about? What the sages are saying is that the "quirks" in nature that are mentioned in our mishnah were added to the programme at the last moment. The reason that they were added at the last moment is because everything that was created before that represents the world working "as it should" and as was intended by the Creator.