Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Lewis moves on to consider popular but misguided arguments against miracles. Among these common misconceptions is the view that miracles cannot happen because miracles break the laws of nature, and earlier generations of people believed in miracles only because they didn’t know about natural laws. Both of these points are incorrect in Lewis’s view. Most ancient people knew the basic principles of natural causation very well. If they did not, the idea of a miracle would have been meaningless to them, since a miracle, by definition, means that something out of the ordinary is happening. Lewis argues that miracles do not “break” the laws of nature. Rather, miracles are an interruption introduced from outside the system, to which the laws of nature quite naturally adjust, responding according to their established patterns. “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” (72).

A second red herring is the widespread argument that belief in miracles comes from unenlightened eras of history in which humanity believed it stood at the center of the universe (and thus, the center of God’s affections), but that scientific discoveries regarding the scope of the universe have since demonstrated human insignificance. Lewis finds this argument unpersuasive, not least because it reveals a prejudice against previous historical eras which does not hold up to the light of careful inspection. Further, it is simply not the case that Christian theology ever argued that God graced humanity with miracles because humans were important; it rather argued that God’s miracles were an example of incredible grace, because humans were so undeserving of God’s favor. The relative size of human beings when compared to the universe is no sign of importance or unimportance. If size was a mark of importance, then we would count a person more important for being taller, or less important for being shorter; the fact that we do not shows that this common perception is, as Lewis suggests, a red herring.

Lewis clarifies the terminology of “laws of nature,” suggesting there are several different possibilities for what the laws actually are: either brute facts of nature, statistical averages indicating what usually happens, or necessary truths (like those in mathematics). In any of the above views of the laws of nature, Lewis argues, miracles are possible: Miracles are not an instance of the laws being broken, but rather of something from outside the system being added in, with which natural laws quite naturally comply, and follow from that addition as their ordered procedures dictate. The three possible views of the laws of nature all express a reality which holds when all other things are equal, but in the case of miracles, all other things are not equal—something more is being interposed from the outside—and so while no laws are broken by miracles, they must adjust themselves to the new reality which the miracle has created. The laws of nature are not themselves the active agents which make anything happen; they simply govern the motions of those things which are already happening, and so if something new is added from outside the system, the laws of nature will simply take over the operations of the new addition from the point that it was interposed. “[A miracle’s] cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural Law” (95). In this way, rather than representing an aberration in natural systems, miracles actually highlight the harmonious balance of natural processes, which can take even divine interpositions and weave them into the orderly dance of matter and energy.

In this chapter, Lewis addresses a concern which was a major stumbling block in his own journey of considering supernaturalism, but which he admits might not be a consideration for others. Nevertheless, he includes it here, in part to point out the error of assuming that nature itself is the absolute reality, rather than merely a contingent being. One of the things that made supernaturalism distasteful to him in the past was the Christian idea that nature was ordered and arranged by an intelligence, rather than existing entirely on its own. To Lewis, the disappointment engendered by this idea was like the letdown of seeing a remarkable piece of natural beauty but then learning that it was actually a landscape that had been tinkered with behind the scenes to evoke a particular reaction; the difference between seeing a spontaneous event and watching a puppet show. Nature seemed to lose something of its wildness.

Later, however, Lewis discerned that the supernaturalist view of nature not only preserved a sense of nature’s wildness but even expanded upon it. To the Christian, nature’s beauty certainly does reflect the order and majesty of its divine designer, but nature, as a creature of God, is also endowed with its own sort of personality, just as any other creature would be. Like any particular thing (rather than a vague generalized reality, as many naturalists conceive of nature), nature in the Christian view has its own character, much as the different languages of the world all come with their own particular flair and temperament. “Everything becomes different when we recognize that Nature is a creature, a created thing, with its own particular tang and flavor” (102). Lewis now found nature not only wild, but knowable in a rather personal way, one that had not been open to him when he was a naturalist.