Why did God harden Pharaoh's heart?
Ramban writes that the Ten Plagues served to demonstrate God’s Might to the Egyptians. (Ramban, Shemos 10:1). God could have easily redeemed B’nai Yisrael from Egypt with a single plague. Pharaoh himself would have quickly acquiesced after the Nile turned to blood had God not hardened his heart. Who would keep slaves at such high a cost? However, a single plague would not sufficiently engrave God’s Power onto the Egyptian mind. God compelled Pharaoh’s obstinance, prolonging the suffering of Egypt and the Glory of God.
By “God’s Might,” Ramban means that God enjoys complete control over all events and circumstances. This cashes out by denying that there exists a distinct and useful category of events called “miracles'' (Rambam, Shemos 13:16). A miracle, popularly understood, is an instance of God violating a law of nature. However, in Ramban’s reading, the Ten Plagues demonstrate that God himself created the laws of nature in the first place; to speak of a “violation” falsely attributes some sort of normativity or permanence to these laws. Instead, God orchestrates predictable events (neis nistar) and unpredictable events (neis nigleh). To distinguish the latter as “miracles” would be to suggest that God is somehow less involved in the orchestration of predictable events than He is in unpredictable events. This is not so.
More recently, the philosopher Alvin Plantinga in Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, reiterated this same idea using the tools of analytic philosophy and modern science. Plantinga claims that speaking of God “violating a law of nature” is a contradiction in terms. Plantinga defines a law of nature as a description of events which take place in a causally closed universe (i.e. where God, or anything else, is not acting in a specialized manner). (Plantinga, p. 80). For example, in a causally closed universe, the law of gravity would dictate (or, more accurately, indicate) that if I drop a ball, it will fall to the ground. However, because laws of nature only presume to describe a causally closed universe (i.e. where God is not acting in a specialized manner), to speak of God violating such a law would be a contradiction. Once God acts in a specialized manner, the laws of nature do not presume to apply.
Moreover, on the theory of quantum mechanics (QM), there are no laws of nature in this strict sense. Instead, there exist probabilities for future events. To use our previous example, on QM, if I drop a ball, there is a high probability it will fall to the ground. There is also a (much lower) probability it will fly. (Plantinga, 94-97)1. The splitting of the sea, for example, is just a matter of probability. God acts in the same way whether the sea splits or does not split. God’s intervention, then, is constant.
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While events like parting the sea, having a ball fly instead of fall, etc., are all compatible with QM, Plantinga notes that it is a matter of controversy whether QM allows for events like raising the dead, changing water into blood, etc.↩︎