Miracles: A Preliminary Study

“Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true. It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight.”

This is part of Lewis’s argument from reason, in which he argues that the naturalistic position is self-contradictory: If human thought is merely the result of chemical processes in the brain, as naturalism suggests, then there is no reason to trust its conclusions.

“If our argument has been sound, acts of reasoning are not interlocked with the total interlocking system of Nature as all its other items are interlocked with one another.”

Here, Lewis continues the argument begun in the quote above. If our powers of reason give us confidence that they are trustworthy, over against the naturalist position, then Lewis believes they must be rooted in something beyond the non-rational processes of nature, as a partial participation in the eternal reason of God.

“In a pond whose surface was completely covered with scum and floating vegetation, there might be a few water-lilies. […] From their structure you could deduce that they had stalks underneath which went down to roots in the bottom. The Naturalist thinks that the pond (Nature—the great event in time and space) is of an infinite depth—that there is nothing but water however far you go down. My claim is that some things on the surface (i.e. in our experience) show the contrary. These things (rational minds) reveal, on inspection, that they at least are not floating but attached by stalks to the bottom. Therefore the pond has a bottom.”

This analogy illustrates the philosophical point made in the preceding quote. In the same way that the nature of lily pads leads us to believe they are tethered to something beneath them, the existence of rational minds seems to Lewis to indicate the existence of a divine ground of being to which our reason is tethered. Lewis’s use of concrete analogies to explain abstract concepts is one of the main literary features of his apologetic works.

“If the fact that men have such ideas as ought and ought not at all can be fully explained by irrational and non-moral causes, then those ideas are an illusion.”

The point outlined here is a parallel argument to Lewis’s argument from reason, and one that he employs elsewhere to great effect (most notably, in his Mere Christianity). The argument from morality observes that almost all humans admit that certain things are right and certain things are wrong, even though a purely naturalistic account of the universe offers no basis for such assertions.

“Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, [Naturalists] yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like men and like men of genius. They know far better than they think they know.”

In this quote, Lewis expresses appreciation for the fact that even those naturalists who insist (against the common sensibilities of most people) that there is no such thing as absolute morality still, when it comes down to it, live and act as if morality were absolute. While this is a philosophical inconsistency on their part, Lewis regards it as a saving grace and lauds them for the innate sensibility of their deeds.

“If we are to continue to make moral judgments […] then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of Nature. It can be valid only if it is an offshoot of some absolute moral wisdom, a moral wisdom which exists absolutely ‘on its own’ and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature.”

In the same way that Lewis argues that human reason must be tethered to a ground of existence beyond any part of contingent natural systems, so he argues that morality must be linked to something beyond nature. Here he has in view the very character of God, whose divine morality exists of its own accord, independent of contingency or natural causation.

“The rational and moral element in each human mind is a point of force from the Supernatural working its way into Nature, exploiting at each point those conditions which Nature offers […] A man’s Rational thinking is just so much of his share in eternal Reason as the state of his brain allows to become operative: it represents, so to speak, the bargain struck or the frontier fixed between Reason and Nature at that particular point.”

In this quote, Lewis addresses an objection against his case that reason and morality must be anchored in God’s supernatural reason and morality—if so, one might ask, then why do people have different aptitudes and perspectives on such matters? Lewis’s answer is that the physicality of nature is an indispensable part of the equation, and that divine reason and morality are only manifest to the degree that physical constraints and human free will allow them to be present.

“[T]he fact which is in one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten.”

Using another analogy, Lewis compares one’s perception of the supernatural to the faculty of sight or the grammar of one’s native language—things which we are constantly using but are not usually conscious of. He believes that the supernatural is much the same in our experience: it is not hard to notice because it is nonexistent or rare, but rather because it is so all-pervasive as to be unconsciously overlooked.

“Experiment finds out what regularly happens in Nature: the norm or rule to which she works. Those who believe in miracles are not denying that there is such a norm or rule: they are only saying that it can be suspended. A miracle is by definition an exception.”

This quote provides a succinct view of one of Lewis’s main points about miracles: They are not an example of natural laws being broken, but rather of interpositions on the natural system being exerted from beyond its bounds. Knowing the laws of nature may be helpful for understanding the universe we live in, but that knowledge cannot answer the question of whether exceptions to the laws might arise should outside forces step into our universe.

“When a thing professes from the very outset to be a unique invasion of Nature by something from outside, increasing knowledge of Nature can never make it either more or less credible than it was at the beginning.”

This quote continues the same argument as the previous quote, expressing once again the claim that miracles are exceptions to the norm, an exertion of forces from beyond nature’s bound. One cannot justly accuse the idea of miracles of unfairly violating natural law when the very definition of miracles consistently claims to be something not bound by the normal course of natural law.

“It is a profound mistake to imagine that Christianity ever intended to dissipate the bewilderment and even the terror, the sense of our own nothingness, which come upon us when we think about the nature of things. It comes to intensify them.”

Here Lewis defends Christianity against the argument that religious faith is a mere emotional support designed to make people feel safe in a vast and dangerous universe. On the contrary, Lewis believes that Christianity expands the sense of terror and awe in the face of an unknown immensity, and that this feeling itself is the root of religious emotion.

“Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist had not reckoned on. […] The necessary truth of the laws, far from making it impossible that miracles should occur makes it certain that if the Supernatural is operating they must occur.”

Continuing his argument against the premise that miracles violate natural law, Lewis insists that, by definition, if the supernatural exists and is active within or upon nature, then miracles have to occur. They are nothing more than the action of the supernatural upon natural systems.

“The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. […] A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law.”

Here again Lewis pushes back on the common notion that miracles are violations of natural law, asserting to the contrary that nothing about a miracle violates such laws. The event itself originates beyond nature, and the natural elements which receive that external action react to it according to the processes of natural law.

“The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.”

This is part of Lewis’s argument that nature is most fully known and understood when regarded from a supernaturalist point of view rather than from a naturalist point of view. If nature is, in fact, a creation, then only supernaturalists will see its true character, because only they will recognize its fundamental relation to its supernatural Creator.

“They think that the Supernatural would not invade: they accuse those who say that it has done so of having a childish and unworthy notion of the Supernatural. […] But you cannot [dismiss miracles] with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian.”

Lewis’s polemical targets in this book are not only thoroughgoing naturalists of the atheist variety, but also those Christians who shy away from talk of the miraculous and disparage the literal interpretation of such miracles as the Virgin Birth and the resurrection of Jesus. Lewis regards those miracle accounts as so central to the Christian story that any naturalistic Christian who would do away with them is almost practicing a different religion altogether.

“[W]hen they try to get rid of man-like, or as they are called, ‘anthropomorphic,’ images they merely succeed in substituting images of some other kind. ‘I don’t believe in God,’ says one, ‘but I do believe in a great spiritual force.’ What he has not noticed is that the word ‘force’ has let in all sorts of images about winds and tides and electricity and gravitation.”

Some people react against the pictures used in the imagination to illustrate Christian doctrines, believing that such imagery (as of God as a bearded man, for example) is unbefitting the dignity of the supernatural, and they instead opt for a more nebulous aesthetic. Lewis’s point here is that this tactic doesn’t really avoid the problematic imagery, it simply replaces one set of unspiritual images with another.

“The old atomic theory is in physics what Pantheism is in religion—the normal, instinctive guess of the human mind, not utterly wrong, but needing correction. Christian theology, and quantum physics, are both, by comparison with the first guess, hard, complex, dry and repellent. The first shock of the object’s real nature, breaking in on our spontaneous dreams of what that object ought to be, always has these characteristics.”

As he does throughout the book, Lewis uses an analogy—in this case to another academic field—to simplify a complex argument. Many of the features of Christianity are counterintuitive to those who have been raised in naturalism, as Lewis readily admits. But he suggests here that the very startling nature of Christianity’s beliefs is itself a sign of its truth, in the same way that quantum physics startles us out of the comfortable, intuitive way we have always thought about the nature of our universe.

“What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections. But in order for there to be a real universe the connections must be given something to connect; a torrent of opaque actualities must be fed into the pattern. If God created the world, then He is precisely the source of this torrent, and it alone gives our truest principles anything to be true about. But if God is the ultimate source of all concrete, individual things and events, then God Himself must be concrete, and individual in the highest degree.”

Here Lewis draws on a more philosophically oriented argument, calling on a tradition of reasoning that goes all the way back to Plato. This position holds that the characteristics of contingent objects must be rooted in a necessary object or being, something whose existence and characteristics are not contingent upon anything else. Lewis extends that principle to the idea of particularity itself: that the concreteness and specificity of the objects and beings around us cannot have their ground of being in just a general “something” out there; it must be a very particular and personal Someone.

“An ‘impersonal God’—well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall?”

This quote makes essentially the same argument as the previous quote, but in a more popular and less philosophical form. Here Lewis begins by parodying the sensibilities of those who hold to naturalistic religion, and ends with a metaphor that evokes the wonder and terror of actually encountering the personal God.

“I do not say that the normalities of Nature are unreal. The living fountain of divine energy, solidified for the purposes of this spatio-temporal Nature into bodies moving in space and time, and thence, by our abstract thought, turned into mathematical formulae, does in fact, for us, commonly fall into such and such patterns. […] But to think that a disturbance of them would constitute a breach of the living rule and organic unity whereby God, from His own point of view, works, is a mistake.”

Continuing to argue against the idea that miracles constitute a violation of natural law, Lewis uses the analogy of an artist. In this quote, he follows the portrayal of God as an artist with the conclusion of the argument: that God, as Creator, has complete authority to accomplish the divine work with the complete freedom of divine prerogative, either working within natural law (which is God’s own creation in any case) or exerting influence from beyond it.

“Men became scientific because they expected Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator.”

This quote reminds the reader that, contrary to many people’s perceptions, the scientific revolution was rooted in Christian theological assumptions about the nature of the universe. If the universe was the product of nonrational processes, one would not have any reason to expect it to be orderly and to operate by a consistent set of laws.

“The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation.”

One of Lewis’s major points in his apologetic argument for Christian miracles is the idea that miracles are not random or haphazard incursions, upsetting the balance of an otherwise orderly and predictable system. Rather, the pattern of Christian miracles is orderly, all of them cohering together into a single, grand narrative, at the center of which stands the ultimate miraculous revelation of God’s plan: the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

“The whole Miracle, far from denying what we already know about reality, writes the comment which makes the crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary. In science we have been reading the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.”

This quote, like the preceding one, emphasizes Lewis’s perception that miracles are components of the whole, cohesive narrative of God’s work in the world. This includes not only the narrative of religious events, but also the whole scope of the natural world’s progress throughout the history of the universe: The meaning of it all, for Lewis, is found in the miracle of Christ.