Miracles, Pt. 1

Where else would I start on my question about miracles but C.S. Lewis' Miracles?

Miracles always seemed to me like the kind of thing Christians would abandon quite readily in the face of any real questioning for fear of sounding dogmatic, inept or plagued by lunacy. Take the exchange in Bill Maher's Religulous, where the blundering store-owner who claims miracles have changed his life (but is apparently unable to think of any) is dismissed right out with Maher's laughing retort that miracles are only miracles if you call them that, otherwise they are coincidences or happy predictions or less.

The problem lies in being able to say something miraculous happened without being the hapless strawman the naturalist wants you to be so that he might draw his sword and valiantly and condescendingly lay waste to your foolish conclusions.

What C.S. Lewis does is to start from scratch. First and foremost, "The question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience... 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" (p. 7, emphasis mine).

Kant began his Critique of Pure Reason noting that while all knowledge begins with experience, it does not therefore necessarily arise from it. It is possible, and indeed a necessary condition that certain knowledge comes before certain experience. One need not see a specific object fall to know that all unsupported objects fall. The general rule is learned perhaps by experience, but the truth of a specific instance can be known a priori, necessarily. It is to say, then, that where the empiricist would deny miracles on the grounds of experience only, there is a fundamental ignorance of the nature of knowledge. For this reason, Lewis dismisses the dismissal of the possibility of miracles in terms of experience alone. A proper philosophy must first be constructed to deal with the problem squarely.

Furthermore, one cannot begin with history, says Lewis, "For if [miracles] are impossible, then no amount of historical evidence will convince us... history can never convince us that a miracle occurred" (p. 8). Again, to write miracles off as impossible beforehand makes any other proof or likelihood categorically impossible.

Reading Biblical accounts of miracles is insufficient outside of the philosophical or logical possibility of miracles. So then, "It is no use going to the texts until we have some idea about the possibility or probability of the miraculous. Those who assume that miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by looking into the texts; we know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question" (p. 9).