Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Having addressed some of the instinctive disaffections which some in his audience will have against Christianity, Lewis now begins to assess the religious sentiments of the modern world in greater detail. In his day, many held a generalized sensibility of the supernatural as a broad, vague, all-encompassing force, rather than as a divine person. Religious people with such conceptions are comfortable to speak about God in broad, nebulous terms, as that which is good, true, and beautiful, but shy away from describing God with the particularities of an active and personal Agent. Lewis calls this religious sensibility pantheism, and suggests that rather than the aura of enlightened cultural respectability in which it has wrapped itself, it is in fact the most “primitive” form of religion one could imagine (thus Lewis turns such people’s criticisms of Christianity—as being primitive and superstitious—back on themselves).

Lewis describes the distinction between Christianity and what he calls pantheism as analogous to the distinction between quantum and Newtonian physics. The “pantheistic” view of the supernatural—as a universal spiritual presence which is there to comfort and bless us—feels intuitive and familiar to most people, like the Newtonian understanding of physical laws, in which discrete particles go through a harmonious dance of ordered motion. By contrast, the true Christian understanding of the supernatural is like quantum physics, which shocks us with a view of how things actually are: bizarre and unpredictable in ways that most people can’t quite wrap their minds around. In the same way, says Lewis, Christianity shocks us with its insistence on something more than a vague and comfortable spirituality: a universe in which a radically personal God chose to become directly involved in our world in the most undignified way imaginable. In that sense, while Christianity may not be comfortably intuitive, it has the ring of truth about it, the flavor of the counter-intuitive way that things really are.

Lewis grounds this view in the classical philosophical distinction between necessary and contingent beings (although Lewis does not use the full philosophical terminology), arguing that the particularity of contingent things in our universe necessitates the existence of a ground for their particularity. In short, there must be some uncreated thing that started it all, and it must itself be a particular thing, not merely a generalized something. “God is basic Fact or Actuality, the source of all other facthood. At all costs therefore He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. If He exists at all, He is the most concrete thing there is, the most individual […]” (145).

Here Lewis returns to address the concerns of those who think that performing miracles is unworthy of God, that it makes God a trickster or magician. Lewis compares this view to a misunderstanding of how a great artist might operate when painting. Such an artist will not break any of the “laws” which dictate the true internal purpose of the masterpiece they are creating, but they will break any number of popular conceptions or rules of thumb people may hold about artistic conventions. This is not an inconsistency, but one of the features that makes the artwork truly great; in the same way, God’s miracles are not inconsistencies or violations of some rule that ought to be kept in force, but are themselves part of the flair and vision that brings the whole work together. Lewis then transitions from the analogy of an artist to that of an author. Depending on the story one is writing, an author’s inclusion of seemingly magical events might be bad writing if one is making a realistic novel, but if one is writing a story about the magical events themselves, then the author has every right to include them, and in fact would be inconsistent if they did not.

Lewis observes that historians will tend to discount miraculous stories in favor of a naturalistic explanation for a surprising event, regardless of how wildly improbable the naturalistic explanation might be. This perspective, quite obviously, assumes that miracles must be far unlikelier than even the remotest naturalistic possibility, but Lewis challenges whether that assumption is true. He argues against the philosophy of David Hume, whose work in the 18th century set in motion much of the later Western skepticism regarding miracles. Lewis takes issue with Hume’s approach, arguing that someone in Hume’s position needs to have already decided that miracles are necessarily the most improbable events in order to reach Hume’s conclusions. In Lewis’s view, Hume confuses the observed uniformity of nature with the question of whether it is probable or improbable as to whether the frame within which that uniformity takes place can admit any interpositions. Since nature is uniform, says Hume, miracles cannot happen, but this position mistakes miracles as something that merely happen within the “frame” rather than something from beyond it, and so Hume’s assumed probabilities do not hold: “No study of probabilities within a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated” (164).

Lewis goes on to suggest that even our conviction that nature is uniform in its operations (or ought to be so) is an act of faith, one which nature itself—if naturalism is true—gives no necessary reason for believing. As a nonrational system without design, a naturalistic universe would have just as much reason to be continuously random as it would to be uniform. Lewis notes that it was only the Christian-inspired belief in a divine Legislator (God) on the part of early scientists that inspired a conviction that there must be uniform laws governing nature. And once this admission of God into the equation is grasped, then one must be open to miracles: “Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events” (169).