Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Lewis wrote Miracles in the latter half of the 1940s, as Europe was coming out of the devastating experience of World War II. This was a period in which European society was secularizing at a rapid pace, accelerating a cultural shift that had been in motion on a broad scale since the late 1800s. Religious adherence, which had once been a hallmark of British society, as it had across Europe more generally, was swiftly waning. This was especially true in the academic circles in which Lewis lived and worked. As a professor at Oxford University (and later at Cambridge), Lewis was surrounded by an academic milieu that assumed naturalism and atheism as the commonly accepted grounds for philosophical reasoning.

One of the main features of the growing skepticism about religion across Europe was the sense that miracle accounts were little more than fanciful stories. Miracles had acquired a bad reputation in the popular consciousness, seen as a throwback to less enlightened periods of history. To believe in miracles, it was thought, was childish and willfully ignorant of the progress of science. This bias against miracles was not just the mindset of atheists or agnostics, either—many religious believers, including quite a few Christians, had begun to feel that miracle accounts were mere fantasy, and that it was beneath God’s dignity to perform “tricks.” One of key goals of Lewis’s Miracles was to reveal this sensibility as little more than a prevailing cultural bias, and not one that rested on secure philosophical foundations.

While Lewis himself worked in the field of medieval literature, his writing has had a great impact on philosophical circles. The mid-20th century saw the relative numbers of theists (those who believe in God) fall to a dramatically low ebb in academic philosophy departments, foreshadowing the general trend toward atheism which large portions of European society would experience in the subsequent decades. From Lewis’s career onward, however, those numbers began to rebound, such that by the early 21st-century theists comprised a significant portion of academic philosophy departments across Europe and North America. Among many Christians, Lewis is remembered as an “apostle to the intellectuals,” offering a bridge by which the literary and philosophically minded could reconsider religious issues which had long been out of taste in Western academia.