Miracles - Basic income

1 MiraclesA Preliminary StudyC. S. LewisTo Cecil and Daphne HarwoodAmong the hills a meteoriteLies huge; and moss has overgrown,And wind and rain with touches lightMade soft, the contours of the easily can Earth digestA cinder of sidereal fire,And make her translunary guestThe native of an English is it strange these wanderersFind in her lap their fitting place,For every particle that s hersCame at the first from outer that is Earth has once been sky;Down from the sun of old she came,Or from some star that travelled byToo close to his entangling , if belated drops yet fallFrom heaven, on these her plastic powerStill works as once it worked on allThe glad rush of the golden Reprinted by permission of Time andTideContentsEpigraph1 The Scope of This Book2 The Naturalist and the Supernaturalist3 The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism4 Nature and Supernature5 A Further Difficulty in Naturalism6 Answers to Misgivings7 A Chapter of Red Herrings8 Miracles and the Laws of Nature9 A Chapter not Strictly Necessary10 Horrid Red Things 11 Christianity and Religion 12 The Propriety of Miracles13 On Probability14 The Grand Miracle15 Miracles of the Old Creation16 Miracles of the New Creation17 EpilogueAppendix A: On the Words Spirit and Spiritual Appendix B: On Special Providences About the AuthorOther Books by C.

2 S. LewisCreditsCopyrightAbout the Publisher1 THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOKT hose who wish to succeed must ask the rightpreliminary , Metaphysics, II, (III), all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen aghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that persondisbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and stilldisbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must havebeen an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may beright. Seeing is not this reason, the question whether Miracles occur can neverbe answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim tobe a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses,something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our sensesare not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened,we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion.

3 If wehold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what wealways shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kindof philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appealto experience before we have settled, as well as we can, thephilosophical immediate experience cannot prove or disprove themiraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one candecide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining theevidence according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry . But theordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whethermiracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are. For if theyare impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convinceus. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then onlymathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us: and sincehistory never provides that degree of evidence for any event, historycan never convince us that a miracle occurred.

4 If, on the other hand, Miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidencewill be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of Miracles haveoccurred. The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on thephilosophical views which we have been holding before we evenbegan to look at the evidence. This philosophical question musttherefore come is an example of the sort of thing that happens if we omitthe preliminary philosophical task, and rush on to the historical. In apopular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion of the dateat which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must havebeen written after the execution of St Peter, because, in the FourthGospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St Peter. A book , thinks the author, cannot be written before events which itrefers to . Of course it cannot unless real predictions ever occur.

5 Ifthey do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author hasnot discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes itfor granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he isright: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by historicalinquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historicalwork, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historicalconclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have beenreached at all. His work is therefore quite useless to a person whowants to know whether predictions occur. The author gets to work onlyafter he has already answered that question in the negative, and ongrounds which he never communicates to book is intended as a preliminary to historical inquiry. I amnot a trained historian and I shall not examine the historical evidencefor the Christian Miracles . My effort is to put my readers in a positionto do so.

6 It is no use going to the texts until we have some idea aboutthe possibility or probability of the miraculous. Those who assumethat Miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by lookinginto the texts: we know in advance what results they will find for theyhave begun by begging the NATURALIST AND THESUPERNATURALIST Gracious! exclaimed Mrs Snip, and is there aplace where people venture to live above ground? I never heard of people living under ground, replied Tim, before I came to Giant-Land . Cameto Giant-Land! cried Mrs Snip, why, isn teverywhere Giant-Land? ROLAND QUIZZ, Giant-Land, chap use the word miracle to mean an interference with Nature bysupernatural Unless there exists, in addition to Nature,something else which we may call the supernatural, there can be nomiracles. Some people believe that nothing exists except Nature; Icall these people Naturalists.

7 Others think that, besides Nature, thereexists something else: I call them Supernaturalists. Our first question,therefore, is whether the Naturalists or the Supernaturalists are here comes our first the Naturalist and the Supernaturalist can begin todiscuss their difference of opinion, they must surely have an agreeddefinition both of Nature and of Supernature. But unfortunately it isalmost impossible to get such a definition. Just because theNaturalist thinks that nothing but Nature exists, the word Naturemeans to him merely everything or the whole show or whateverthere is . And if that is what we mean by Nature, then of coursenothing else exists. The real question between him and theSupernaturalist has evaded us. Some philosophers have definedNature as What we perceive with our five senses . But this also isunsatisfactory; for we do not perceive our own emotions in that way,and yet they are presumably natural events.

8 In order to avoid thisdeadlock and to discover what the Naturalist and the Supernaturalistare really differing about, we must approach our problem in a moreroundabout begin by considering the following sentences (I) Are those hisnatural teeth or a set? (2) The dog in his natural state is covered withfleas. (3) I love to get away from tilled lands and metalled roads andbe alone with Nature. (4) Do be natural. Why are you so affected? (5)It may have been wrong to kiss her but it was very common thread of meaning in all these usages can easily bediscovered. The natural teeth are those which grow in the mouth; wedo not have to design them, make them, or fit them. The dog s naturalstate is the one he will be in if no one takes soap and water andprevents it. The countryside where Nature reigns supreme is the onewhere soil, weather and vegetation produce their results unhelpedand unimpeded by man.

9 Natural behaviour is the behaviour whichpeople would exhibit if they were not at pains to alter it. The naturalkiss is the kiss which will be given if moral or prudentialconsiderations do not intervene. In all the examples Nature meanswhat happens of itself or of its own accord : what you do not need tolabour for; what you will get if you take no measures to stop it. TheGreek word for Nature (Physis) is connected with the Greek verb for to grow ; Latin Natura, with the verb to be born . The Natural is whatsprings up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord:the given, what is there already: the spontaneous, the unintended, the Naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thingyou can t go behind, is a vast process in space and time which isgoing on of its own accord. Inside that total system every particularevent (such as your sitting reading this book) happens because someother event has happened; in the long run, because the Total Event ishappening.

10 Each particular thing (such as this page) is what it isbecause other things are what they are; and so, eventually, becausethe whole system is what it is. All the things and events are socompletely interlocked that no one of them can claim the slightestindependence from the whole show . None of them exists on its own or goes on of its own accord except in the sense that it exhibits, atsome particular place and time, that general existence on its own or behaviour of its own accord which belongs to Nature (the great totalinterlocked event) as a whole. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalistbelieves in free will: for free will would mean that human beings havethe power of independent action, the power of doing something moreor other than what was involved by the total series of events. And anysuch separate power of originating events is what the Naturalistdenies.