Miracles: A Preliminary Study

One of most often cited arguments against the idea of miracles in Lewis’s day was the sense that miracles broke the laws of nature. Lewis notes that this objection often relied more on aesthetics than reason: The miraculous was seen as an unharmonious aberration in an otherwise well-ordered universe. Many people found the idea of miracles distasteful, and a belief in miracles was often regarded by others as the sign of weak mind, either locked into old superstitions or simply ignorant of the progress of science in illuminating heretofore unknown laws of nature. These ideas and affectations were widespread in midcentury Britain, so Lewis, as one of the main tactics in his Miracles, undertook to prove them wrong. Miracles do not violate the laws of nature, Lewis argues, because miracles are an entirely different category of event than anything else in nature. Nature may respond to miracles, but cannot, by definition, be broken by them.

Lewis supports his argument on philosophical grounds. Since nature, in his view, is a created thing and therefore a contingent being, its operations are intact unto itself but not entirely independent. That is to say, there exists something else beyond nature (i.e., God) which has the necessary power and position to influence nature as it may desire. This is no more a violation of the natural order of things than for an author to decide to take the plot of his novel in a different direction than it seemed to be heading, and to make the necessary adjustments to the narrative, or for a computer programmer to introduce a new command for the program’s code to interact with. “I do not say that the normalities of Nature are unreal. […] 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” (155). Because the cause of the event comes from beyond nature itself, it is not a violation of the natural laws, whereas it would be a violation (of a sort) if the cause for a miraculous event arose spontaneously within nature on its own accord. “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. […] Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law” (95). Natural law remains intact, that is, even when God interposes supernatural events into the natural system.

Lewis also makes several further points regarding miracles and natural law. First, he notes, miracles interact seamlessly with natural law. None of the historical miracles in Christian experience permanently rewrote the natural laws by which this universe runs. Rather, they simply introduce a new event into the narrative, and the laws of nature treat that event like anything else that happens, with results flowing naturally from there. In the miracle of the Virgin Birth, there is every reason from the accounts to believe that Jesus’s fetal development happened naturally throughout Mary’s pregnancy, as the effects of natural law followed from the introduction of the miraculous event. Lewis also notes that the awareness of miracles would not even be possible were it not for the fact that natural law kept its regular operations. Miracles are by definition an exception, and one can only recognize exceptions if one knows the rule. So by the logic of the old adage “the exception proves the rule,” the existence of miracles in fact adds something to humanity’s understanding of and appreciation for the orderliness of the natural world.