It has been almost a half century since C.S. Lewis published his last theological work entitled Miracles. Much as occurred in philosophy since then and to my knowledge no one has written another treatise on the topic of miracles. It is not my thesis to argue against C.S. Lewis but to reexamine the concept of miracles through the “glass” of modern philosophy. Some may view this work as just another work in the debate between philosophy, theology, and science. Well, I will not hide the fact that this work does fit that mantra. The debate between philosophy, theology, and science has been raging for centuries and by no means will this work settle this debate; however, I hope to shed new light upon the issue of miracles because given the advances in modern philosophical analyses and theories.
The very concept of a miracle runs in the face of science. Miracles are breaches of the natural order for the physical world. According to the natural order, people cannot walk on liquid water, and yet the Bible claims that Jesus and the Apostle Peter did so. According to the natural order, shadows do not cure people’s diseases and yet it said in the Bible that whenever the Apostle Paul walked past the sick and his shadow touched them, they were healed of the their diseases. Down through the ages there have been reports of miracles taking place but now in our modern age miracles have been all but ‘explained away’ by modern medicine and science. Under no circumstance do I hold modern medicine and science in ill-repute; such fields are essential but I believe that there are some events in this world that neither modern medicine nor science can explain. Am I setting modern medicine/science on a collision course with Christianity? No; the lack to provide an explanation for absolutely every event that occurs in the world (and the universe for that matter) is not a failing of modern medicine or science. The lack is due to two things; first, human reasoning is finite, and secondly, there are some things in this world that we just cannot understand. I tend to think of science and Christianity in the following way: Christian picks up where science leaves off. This is blasphemous to any hardcore science-minded individual but science cannot provide substantive answers to some of life’s most important questions as much as it would be like to think that it can. Science cannot provide us with an ethical theory which objectively tells us what is ethical, unethical, right, wrong, etc., and many scientists have bitten the bullet on this.
Miracle simply fall outside the purview of science as does ethics, and other existential questions. But, why is it that science holds the concept of a miracle in such ill-reputed? It could be any number of things really but I think the most fundamental is that miracles stand outside human comprehension; it is not that we cannot comprehend what a miracle is, but whenever we read or hear about accounts of Paul’s shadow healing ailments we cannot, in our own rational self, really come to grips with what exactly that entails. Miracles defy human reasoning and even the imagination (at times).
From a scientific standpoint, the universe and thus the Earth is a completely causally closed system; the only causes in the universe are contained within it, and we may label this account as inner causation for only causes inside the system cause anything. In contrast is the Christian perspective which believe in inner causation as well as outer causation; outer causation, as I call it, is the account which states that there are causes which can influence the universe (including the Earth) which lay outside the assumed locked causal structure of the universe. Christians do not deny the causal structure of the universe; in fact, Christians affirm it because without the causal structure the very concept of a miracle would be empty. Miracles defy the causal structure of the universe; no causal structure, no miracles for how can miracles defy a non-existence causal structure? In a universe without a causal structure miracles would be the norm, or that universe would not exist at all. (Who knows, philosophers can come up with some really wacky thought-experiments and possible worlds when they are allowed to set their creativity to work, such as Robert Stalnaker’s impossible world where contradictions are true, which in itself is paradoxical because how can the impossible world be a possible world?) Science utterly rejects outer causation because it threatens the nice little theory (or theories) they have constructed about how the universe operates. If somehow outer causation could be empirically proven, most (if not all) modern science theories would have to go back to the drawing board.
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