Oxford, 6/11/08

Don June 11th, 2008

Today I spent two hours on what may be Lewis’s finest non-fiction work, Miracles.  We laid the groundwork for it by looking at three general reasons why modern people find miracles inconceivable.  First is the assumption of naturalism; second the belief that science has shown the universe to be the kind of place where miracles don’t happen; third, even some believers don’t think miracles the kind of thing God would do: if he designed nature so badly that he has to keep breaking his own laws, he wouldn’t be very intelligent, would he? 

We then looked specifically at David Hume’s argument against belief in miracles.  A miracle is a violation of a natural law.  But natural laws are based on uniform human experience.  Therefore, it is always more rational to believe that someone who reports a miracle is either deceived or deceiving than it is to believe he is telling the truth.

Lewis brilliantly designed his defense of miracles to deal with all of these arguments.  One thing they have in common is that they all define a miracle as a “violation” of a natural law.  Lewis cuts the ground out from under all of them in one fell swoop with his definition of miracle: an “interference” with nature by a supernatural power.  The word choice is significant.  How God works his miracles we do not know; it might involve breaking natural laws.  But if that is not essential to the definition, then the skeptics’ arguments become mostly irrelevant.  Lewis uses the example of a billiards table.  The laws of physics tell you where the eight-ball will go if the q-ball strikes it with such and such a force at such and such an angle, etc.: into the side pocket.  But if someone reaches his hand in and deflects the ball so that it goes into the corner pocket instead of the side, have any laws of physics been broken?  No.  Those laws are still followed perfectly.  It’s just that the original calculation did not take one of the forces that was going to be applied into account.  God might reach his hand into Nature, as it were, without necessarily even breaking any of his own rules.

But Lewis is not content just to make miracles possible; he will not stop until he had made naturalism impossible.  If naturalism is true, then all our thoughts are just arrangements of atoms in our heads produced by the chance operations of the laws of physics and chemistry.  But how can one arrangement of atoms be “true” about something and another one be false?  And who (or what) is to judge between these two arrangements?  Another arrangement of atoms equally produced, not by reason, but by the impersonal and inevitable outcome of the Big Bang.  This gets us nowhere.  Naturalism is a philosophy that makes thought invalid.  Therefore, as soon as a naturalist says that naturalism is true, he contradicts himself.  No view which by implication denies the validity of thought can be allowed to use thought to establish itself; no system that makes truth meaningless can be allowed to claim it is true. 

If naturalism is impossible but miracles are possible, then how do we decide which miracles to believe in?  Lewis spends much of the book noticing that the biblical miracles are not just arbitrary shows of power.  Instead, they are acts of revelation that show us the character of the God we worship.  Especially the Grand Miracle, the Resurrection of Christ, fulfills the pattern of incarnation, death, and rebirth that God stamped on nature itself and on pagan myth because it is central to who he is: the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.  So the book is not only a brilliant defense of miracles in a skeptical age, it is also a profound meditation on the meaning and significance of the biblical miracles.  It is a book to be read slowly and many times.

Dr. Bauman finished our lecture time by introducing The Four Loves.  Then it was off to lunch in hall at New College where we are visiting scholars, and from there to the library and other pursuits.  All too soon our time will be gone and we will look back to Oxford like the Fellowship looked back on their time in Loth Lorien.

From the Dreaming Spires,

Don

Donald T. Williams, PhD, Co-Director
Summit Oxford Summer Studies Program

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