Miracles

Note: Last Updated 3/26/2025.

E. B. White:

     “Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider’s web?” asked Mrs. Arable nervously.

     “Yes,” replied the doctor.

     “Well, do you understand it?” asked Mrs. Arable.

     “Understand what?”

     “Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”

     “Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”

     “What’s miraculous about a spider’s web?” said Mrs. Arable. “I don’t see why you say a web is a miracle—it’s just a web.”

     “Ever try to spin one?” asked Dr. Dorian.

(E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, [New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999], pp. 108-109.)

C. S. Lewis:

     There is also an objection to Hume which leads us deeper into our problem. The whole idea of Probability (as Hume understands it) depends on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of Nature? A moment’s thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. But of course all the observations that men have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are not watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything. And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, “Each fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmed”; for that argument works only on the assumption that the future will resemble the past—which is simply the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption which you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable.

     The odd thing is that no man knew this better than Hume. His Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more radical, and honourable, scepticism of his main work.

     The question, “Do miracles occur?” and the question, “Is the course of Nature absolutely uniform?” are the same question asked in two different ways. Hume, by sleight of hand, treats them as two different questions. He first answers “Yes,” to the question whether Nature is absolutely uniform: and then uses this “Yes” as a ground for answering, “No,” to the question, “Do miracles occur?” The single real question which he set out to answer is never discussed at all. He gets the answer to one form of the question by assuming the answer to another form of the same question.

     Probabilities of the kind that Hume is concerned with hold inside the framework of an assumed Uniformity of Nature. When the question of miracles is raised we are asking about the validity or perfection of the frame itself. No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated. Granted a school time-table with French on Tuesday morning at ten o’clock, it is really probable that Jones, who always skimps his French preparation, will be in trouble next Tuesday, and that he was in trouble on any previous Tuesday. But what does this tell us about the probability of the time-table’s being altered? To find that out you must eavesdrop in the masters’ common-room. It is no use studying the time-table.

(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [New York: Touchstone, 1996], XIII: On Probability, pp. 135-136.)

C. S. Lewis:

     It is therefore inaccurate to define a miracle as something that breaks the laws of Nature. It doesn’t. If I knock out my pipe I alter the position of a great many atoms: in the long run, and to an infinitesimal degree, of all the atoms there are. Nature digests or assimilates this event with perfect ease and harmonises it in a twinkling with all other events. It is one more bit of raw material for the laws to apply to, and they apply. I have simply thrown one event into the general cataract of events and it finds itself at home there and conforms to all other events. If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all Nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take it over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born. We see every day that physical nature is not in the least incommoded by the daily inrush of events from biological nature or from psychological nature. If events ever come from beyond Nature altogether, she will be no more incommoded by them. Be sure she will rush to the point where she is invaded, as the defensive forces rush to a cut in our finger, and there hasten to accommodate the newcomer. The moment it enters her realm it obeys all her laws. Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. 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. It does not violate the law’s proviso, ‘If A, then B’: it says, ‘But this time instead of A, A2,’ and Nature, speaking through all her laws, replies Then ‘Then B2’ and naturalises the immigrant, as she well knows how. She is an accomplished hostess.

(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002], pp. 94-95.)

C. S. Lewis:

     The second assumption which Professor Price attributes to the scientific method is ‘that laws can only be discovered by the study of publicly observable regularities.’ Of course they can. This does not seem to me to be an assumption so much as a self-evident proposition. But what is it to the purpose? If a miracle occurs it is by definition an interruption of regularity. To discover a regularity is by definition not to discover its interruptions, even if they occur. You cannot discover a railway accident from studying Bradshaw: only by being there when it happens or hearing about it afterwards from someone who was. You cannot discover extra half-holidays by studying a school timetable: you must wait till they are announced. But surely this does not mean that a student of Bradshaw is logically forced to deny the possibility of railway accidents. This point of scientific method merely shows (what no one to my knowledge ever denied) that if miracles did occur, science, as science, could not prove, or disprove, their occurrence. What cannot be trusted to recur is not material for science: that is why history is not one of the sciences. You cannot find out what Napoleon did at the battle of Austerlitz by asking him to come and fight it again in a laboratory with the same combatants, the same terrain, the same weather, and in the same age. You have to go to the records. We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.

(C. S. Lewis, “Religion Without Dogma?” In: C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, [Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1970], p. 134.)

Charles Babbage:

…if independent witnesses can be found, who speak truth more frequently than falsehood, it is ALWAYS possible to assign a number of independent witnesses, the improbability of the falsehood of whose concurring testimonies shall be greater than that of the improbability of the miracle itself.

(Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise: A Fragment: Second Edition, [London: John Murray, 1838], “Appendix E,” p. 202.)

Thomas Sherlock:

     Suppose you saw a man publicly executed, his body afterward wounded by the executioner, and carried and laid in the grave; that after this you should be told that the man came to life again; what would you suspect in this case? Not that the man had never been dead, for that you saw yourself; but you would suspect whether he was now alive. But would you say, this case excluded all human testimony, and that men could not possibly discern whether one with whom they conversed familiarly was alive or not? On what ground could you say this? A man rising from the grave is an object of sense and can give the same evidence of his being alive as any other man in the world can give. So that a resurrection considered only as a fact to be proved by evidence is a plain case; it requires no greater ability in the witnesses than that they are able to distinguish between a man dead and a man alive; a point in which I believe every man living thinks himself a judge.

     I do allow that this case and others of like nature require more evidence to give them credit than ordinary cases do. You may therefore require more evidence in these than in other cases, but it is absurd to say that such cases admit no evidence when the things in question are manifestly objects of sense.

(Thomas Sherlock, The Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Christ, [New York: Lane & Scott, 1849], pp. 65-66.)

John Chrysostom:

For if He did not rise again, but remains dead, how did the Apostles perform miracles in His name? But they did not, say you, perform miracles? How then was our religion instituted? …For this would be the greatest of miracles, that without any miracles, the whole world should have eagerly come to be taken in the nets of twelve poor and illiterate men.

(John Chrysostom, A Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 1; trans. NPNF1, 11:5.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria