C. S. Lewis on "Are Miracles Possible?"

Here are some more snippets from my "Bible and C. S. Lewis" study guide. The guide addresses the nature of miracles and whether they are possible or not. As a side note, Tim Keller's book, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering has some great arguments about this topic.

Hume's Argument against the "Probability of Miracles" Summarized.

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher in the eighteenth century. His works profoundly influenced two schools of philosophy: skepticism and empiricism. His arguments against the probability of miracles still hold sway today. C. S. Lewis addressed Hume’s arguments in his book, Miracles. Norman Geisler is a respected, Christian apologist.

Hume's real argument is much more difficult to answer. It is not an argument for the impossibility of miracles but for the incredibility of miracles. It can be stated this way

1. A miracle is by definition a rare occurrence.
2. Natural law is by definition a description of a regular occurrence.
3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare.
4. A wise man always bases his belief on the greater evidence.
5. Therefore, a wise man should never believe in miracles.

Notice that on this "soft" form of the argument miracles are not rule out entirely; they are simply held to be always incredible by the very nature of the evidence. The wise man does not claim that miracles cannot occur; he simply never believes they happen, because he never has enough evidence for that belief. However, even in this "soft" interpretation of the argument, miracles are still eliminated, since by the very nature of the case no thoughtful person should ever hold that a miracle has indeed occurred. If this is so, Hume has seemingly avoided begging the question and yet has successfully eliminated the possibility of reasonable belief in miracles. Variations of these arguments are still held to be valid by some widely respected contemporary philosophers. (Norm Geisler)

C. S. Lewis on Miracles

But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, “Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.” The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid ground for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute. The Being who threatens Nature’s claim to omnipotence confirms her in her lawful occasions. Give us this hap’orth of tar and we will save the ship. The alternative is really much worse. Try to make Nature absolute and you find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. You get the deadlock, as in Hume. Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. We have also, I suggest, found what we were looking for--a criterion whereby to judge the intrinsic probability of an alleged miracle. We must judge it by our “innate sense of the fitness of things,” that same sense of fitness which led us to anticipate that the universe would be orderly. I do not mean, of course, that we are to use this sense in deciding whether miracles in general are possible: we know that they are on philosophical grounds. Nor do I mean that a sense of fitness will do instead of close inquiry into the historical evidence. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the historical evidence cannot be estimated until we have first estimated the intrinsic probability of the recorded event. It is in making that estimate as regards each story of the miraculous that our sense of fitness comes into play. (Miracles)

C. S. Lewis on the "The Grand Miracle"

One is very often asked at present whether we could not have a Christianity stripped, or, as people who asked it say, 'freed' from its miraculous elements, a Christianity with the miraculous elements suppressed. Now, it seems to me that precisely the one religion in the world, or, at least the only one I know, with which you could not do that is Christianity. In a religion like Buddhism, if you took away the miracles attributed to Gautama Buddha in some very late sources, there would be no loss; in fact, the religion would get on very much better without them because in that case the miracles largely contradict the teaching. Or even in the case of a religion like Mohammedanism, nothing essential would be altered if you took away the miracles. You could have a great prophet preaching his dogmas without bringing in any miracles; they are only in the nature of a digression, or illuminated capitals. But you cannot possibly do that with Christianity, because the Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there nothing specifically Christian left. There may be many admirable human things which Christianity shares with all other systems in the world, but there would be nothing specifically Christian. Conversely, once you have accepted that, then you will see that all other well-established Christian miracles--because, of course, there are ill-established Christian miracles; there are Christian legends just as much as there are heathen legends, or modern journalistic legends--you will see that all the well-established Christian miracles are part of it, that they all either prepare for, or exhibit, or result from the Incarnation. Just as every natural event exhibits the total character of the natural universe at a particular point and space of time; so every miracle exhibits the character of the Incarnation. Now, if one asks whether that central grand miracle in Christianity is itself probable or improbable, of course, quite clearly you cannot be applying Hume's kind of probability. You cannot mean a probability based on statistics according to which the more often a thing has happened, the more likely it is to happen again (the more often you get indigestion from eating a certain food, the more probable it is, if you eat it again, that you again have indigestion). Certainly the Incarnation cannot be probable in that sense. It is of its very nature to have happened only once. But then it is of the very nature of the history of this world to have happened only once; and if the Incarnation happened at all, it is the central chapter of that history. It is improbable in the same way in which the whole of nature is improbable, because it is only there once, and will happen only once. (God in the Dock)