Miracles, by C. S. Lewis, is a study of the likelihood of the Miracles of the Christian tradition.#

The Scope of this Book#

Lewis mentions that it is not sufficient to experience a Miracle to believe in them, and thus it is not sufficient to hear of another's experience.

The question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question. [p. 11]

The Naturalist and the Supernaturalist#

Lewis divides people into two categories: Those who believe Nature is "all there is" and those who believe that there is something more. On this line he makes some interesting comments:

Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that human beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, action 'on its own', is a privilege reserved for 'the whole show', which he calls Nature. [p. 17]

The difference between Naturalism and Supernaturalism is not exactly the same as the difference between belief in a God and disbelief. Naturalism, without ceasing to be itself, could admit a certain kind of God. The great interlocking event called Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling 'God' arising from the whole process as human mind arises (according to the Naturalists) from human organisms. A Naturalist would not object to that sort of God. [...] What Naturalism cannot accept is the idea of a God who stands outside Nature and made it. [p. 19]

The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist#

Lewis claims that the Naturalist contradicts himself if he believes in rational thinking and truth in such thoughts:

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. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound--a proof that there are no such things as proofs--which is nonsense. [p. 26]

But Naturalism, as commonly held, is precisely a theory of this sort. The mind, like every other particular thing or event, is supposed to be simply the product of the Total System. It is supposed to be that and nothing more, to have no power whatever of 'going on of its own accord'. And the Total System is not supposed to be rational. All thoughts whatever are therefore the results of irrational causes, and nothing more than that. [p. 28]

Nature and Supernature#

I think this is an interesting warning in controlling the influence of our priors:

Bacon warned us long ago that 'the human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles' (Novum Organum, I. 45). I think Bacon was right. Science itself has already made reality appear less homogeneous than we expected it to be: Newtonian atomism was much more the sort of thing we expected (and desired) than Quantum physics. [p. 35]

Lewis makes the point that because our rational mind disappear and reappear without action of their own, for example, when we sleep, something else must causes them to do so:

Humans minds, then, are not the only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each is an offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature. [p. 37]

A Further Difficulty in Naturalism#

Answers to Misgivings#

Lewis talks about the Supernatural as a layer greater than the Natural that adds to our understanding, but is not absolutely necessary:

The various and complex conditions under which Reason and Morality appear are the twists and turns of the frontier between Nature and Supernature. That is why, if you wish, you can always ignore Supernature and treat the phenomena purely from the Natural side; just as a man studying on a map the boundaries of Cornwall and Devonshire can always say, 'What you call a bulge in Devonshire is really a dent in Cornwall'. And in a sense you can't refute him. What we call a bulge in Devonshire always is a dent in Cornwall. What we call rational thought in a man always involves a state of the brain, in the long run a relation of atoms. But Devonshire is none the less something more than 'where Cornwall ends', and Reason is something more than cerebral bio-chemistry. [p. 50]

I am reminded of page 27 of The Problem of Pain.

 

He discusses the possible configurations of moral guidings in a society:

A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death. [p. 53]

 

At this point, Lewis states the question of Miracles again:

Our question could, if you liked, be put in the form, 'Does Supernature ever produce particular results in space and time except through the instrumentality of human brains acting on human nerves and muscles'.

I have said 'particular results' because, on our view, Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural: God created her. God pierces her wherever there is a human mind. God presumably maintains her in existence. The question is whether He ever does anything else to her. Does He, besides all this, ever introduce into her events of which it would not be true to say, 'This is simply the working out of the general character which He gave to Nature as a whole in creating her'? Such events are what are popularly called Miracles: and it will be in this sense only that the word Miracle will be used for the rest of the book. [p. 54]

A Chapter of Red Herrings#

One red-herring Lewis mentions is that primitive people who witnessed miracles did not understand the Laws of Nature, and thus cannot be trusted, but:

All records of miracles teach the same thing. In such stories the miracles excite fear and wonder (that is what the very word miracle implies) among the spectators, and are taken as evidence of supernatural power. If they were not known to be contrary to the laws of nature how could they suggest the presence of the supernatural? How could they be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are known? If there ever were men who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. [p. 57]

Another red-herring is that early Christians did not understand that Man was inconsequential in the universe, as we understand now with modern science. But why should the size of the Earth or its location in the universe matter to God?

If it is maintained that anything so small as the Earth must, in any event, be too unimportant to merit the love of the Creator, we reply that no Christian ever supposed we did merit it. Christ did not die for men because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because He is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely. And what, after all, does the size of a world or a creature tell us about its 'importance' or value? [p. 63]

Miracles and the Laws of Nature#

The divine art of miracles is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. [p. 72]

A Chapter Not Strictly Necessary#

In this chapter, Lewis mentions that as an atheist he was depressed about the thought of a planned Nature:

To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the wind and the grass were only a sort of scenery, only backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one with a moral--what flatness, what an anticlimax, what an unendurable bore! [p. 78]

'Horrid Red Things'#

Lewis builds the following principles for looking at the accounts of Miracles and Miracles in general:

We have now three guiding principles before us. (1) That thought is distinct from the imagination which accompanies it. (2) That thought may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones. (3) That anyone who talks about things that cannot be seen, or touched, or heard, or the like, must inevitably talk as if they could be seen or touched or heard (e.g. must talk of 'complexes' and 'repressions' as if desires could really be tied up in bundles or shoved back; of 'growth' and 'development' as if institution could really grow like trees or unfold like flowers; of energy being 'released' as if it where an animal let out of a cage). [p. 89]

Christianity and 'Religion'#

On understanding God and his nature:

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, 'organised and minutely articulated.' He is unspeakable not by being indefinite but by being too definite for the unavoidable vagueness of language. The words incorporeal and impersonal are misleading, because they suggest that He lacks some reality which we posses. It would be safer to call Him trans-corporeal, trans-personal. [p. 110-111]

The Propriety of Miracles#

If the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God, opaque by the very fulness of His blinding actuality, then He might do things. He might work miracles. But would He? Many people of sincere piety feel that He would not. They think it unworthy of Him. It is petty and capricious tyrants who break their own laws: good and wise kinds obey them. Only an incompetent workman will produce work which needs to be interfered with. [...] [I believe this feeling to be] founded on an error. [p. 115]

One reason this is erroneous is that we could be wrong in perceiving the principles of God and judging God based on laws that he never intended to be followed and recognized.

Related to this idea is that Life is a grand story of which God is the author and that Miracles are not exception to the world of the story, but what the story is about, and this may be difficult for us to understand:

To be sure, God might be expected to make a better story than my friend. But it is a very long story, with a complicated plot; and we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers. [p. 120]

On Probability#

In this chapter, Lewis makes a comment about what Science owes to Christian thought:

Men became scientific because they expect Law in Nature, and they expected Law in Nature because they believed in a Legislator. [p. 128]

The Grand Miracle#

Whether the thing really happened is a historical question. But when you turn to history, you will not demand for it that kind and degree which you demand for something which, if accepted, illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die, and which at one stroke covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected. [p. 158]

Miracles of the Old Creation#

Miracles of the New Creation#

In this chapter, Lewis discusses Heaven, among other things, and the abstinence in Heaven. I thought this comment was clever:

I think our present outlook might be like that of a small boy who, on being told that the sexual act was the highest bodily pleasure should immediately ask whether you ate chocolates at the same time. On receiving the answer 'No', he might regard absence of chocolates as the chief characteristic of sexuality. In vain would you tell him that the reason why lovers in their carnal raptures don't bother about chocolates is that they have something better to think of. The boy knows chocolate: he does not know the positive thing that excludes it. We are in the same position. We know the sexual life; we do not know, except in glimpses, the other thing which, in Heaven, will leave no room for it. [p. 190-191]

Epilogue#