C. S. Lewis: Miracles. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001 [1947].
If I see something I take to be miraculous, my seeing doesn’t prove that it’s a miracle. “Seeing is not believing,” Lewis writes, inasmuch as “our senses are not infallible.” “What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience”—’philosophy’ here meaning ‘assumptions.’ Lewis uses the word ‘philosophy’ because he wants to interrogate not ordinary beliefs or ‘common sense’ but the kinds of philosophy, especially modern philosophies of naturalism, that preclude the miraculous a priori.
A miracle is “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” Philosophic naturalism maintains that Being is nothing but nature, while supernaturalism maintains that Being is not limited to nature. By the natural, Lewis means “what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord, the given, what is there already: the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited.” He also implies, but does not exactly state, that natural causation is ‘deterministic,’ that nature cannot include free will, that naturalism holds human beings to have no “power of doing more or other than what was involved by the total series of events.” According to naturalism as Lewis defines it, no “such separate power of originating events” can exist.
This obviously depends on what nature’s nature is. Aristotle, for example, is unquestionably a ‘naturalist,’ but he also upholds the human capacity to reason and to make choices founded upon reasoning. Was Aristotle mistaken, or perhaps prevaricating? Lewis does not ask, and so does not answer. By ‘naturalism’ he evidently means most especially modern naturalism, although he may deny naturalism’s claim to comprehensive validity in all its forms.
Both naturalists and supernaturalists agree that “there must be something that exists in its own right, “some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations.” The controverted point is, what or who this Fact is. Eternal nature or eternal God? This Fact is “the one basic Thing [that] has caused all the other things to be”; “they exist because it exists.” More, “If it ceases to maintain them in existence, they will cease to exist,” and if it is altered, they too will be altered. This is not necessarily true, however. If a First Cause ceases to exist, what it has caused might continue, if the First Cause endowed them with the capacity to endure; a child may survive the deaths of his parents. Only if, say, the energies that generated the things produced by the First Cause also perpetuate those things will they cease to be, or change, if the First Cause disappears.
Lewis further maintains that naturalism “gives us a democratic” picture of reality, supernatural a “monarchical” one. Possibly, although either might also provide an aristocratic view, as in philosophic pluralism or a theology of polytheism. But Lewis is thinking here not so much of metaphysics as of dismissals of metaphysics on political grounds: If naturalists charge that supernaturalism merely reflects assumptions congenial to monarchic regimes, supernaturalists can as easily charge that naturalism tends to appeal to democrats. And neither claim speaks logically to the question of whether the ‘democratic’ or ‘monarchic’ metaphysic itself is true.
Lewis cautions that the distinction between naturalism and supernatural “is not exactly” the distinction between atheism and theism. “Nature might be such as to produce at some stage a great cosmic consciousness, an indwelling ‘God’ arising from the whole process”—the doctrine of pantheism. “Such a God would not stand outside Nature or the total system, would not be existing ‘on his own.'” It would not be a Creator-God. It might be Spinoza’s ‘God’ or Hegel’s ‘Absolute Spirit.’ Conversely, a supernaturalist can admit that the One Cause might not have generated only one nature; it (or He, or She) might have caused other natures not spatially or temporally related to the one we know. Nor does supernaturalism imply that miracles occur; “God (the primary thing) may never in fact interfere with the natural system He has created”—the claim of Deism. Supernaturalism admits the possibility of miracles, whereas naturalism rules them out altogether.
“Our first choice, then, must be between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.” True, although naturalism may amount to more than Lewis, evidently following the definition provided by modern philosophers, is said to be. Lewis remarks that if there is a thing that cannot be explained in general within a naturalist system, then the system itself must be flawed. “If any one thing exists which is of such a kind that we see in advance the impossibility of even giving it that kind of explanation,” as distinguished from making an adjustment to the system itself, then that kind of explanation cannot be comprehensive of Being.
Following Aristotle and Aquinas, Lewis begins his explanation of explanations by observing that everything we know beyond our immediate sensation we infer from those sensations. “Since I am presented with colors, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behavior appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic.” The “therefore” thought I have is an inference, an act of reasoning or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. The inference I draw from my sensations, that there is a world out there, does not contradict itself. I proceed accordingly, albeit with caution, testing my evident knowledge of what’s out there against my sensations, or more accurately against my interpretations of my sensations. A given interpretation may prove illogical, and therefore false. But “unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true,” inasmuch as ‘science’ means knowledge.
More, “no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight”; any theory that denied this “would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished.” Lewis then makes his crucial claim: that naturalism “involve[s] the same difficulty” because it “discredits our processes of reasoning or at least reduces their credit to such humble level that it can no longer support Naturalism itself.” To show this, he distinguishes two types of logic; cause-effect logic and ground-consequent logic. His example of cause-effect logic is, ‘X is ill because he ate Y.’ His example of ground-consequent logic is, ‘X must be ill because he is behaving out of character.’ Ground-consequent logic appeals to evidence of X’s condition; cause-effect logic identifies the cause of that condition.
The question of causation’s relation to logic is unavoidable for Lewis because he wants to show that some causes can be miracles, supernatural.
His next point is that one cannot get to cause-effect logic without first ascertaining the accuracy of our ground-consequent logic. Before saying what caused X’s illness one must first establish that X is ill. Otherwise, my cause-effect syllogism will be based on a false premise. Once I have established a reasonable ground-consequent observation, one free of contradiction, I can then perform a different logical exercise, namely, discovering the cause of the effect I have established. “To be caused is not to be proved.” That is, my thought may be caused by any number of things: “wishful thinkings, prejudices, and the delusions of madness.” These are caused but “they are ungrounded”; I wishfully (perhaps in this case maliciously), prejudicially, or crazily suppose that you are ill. Naturalism supposes that “causes fully account for a belief” (emphasis added), that “the belief would have had to arise whether it had grounds or not.”
The problem with this ironclad naturalistic determinism, Lewis argues, is that while acts of thinking are events, “they are a very special sort of events.” Most events “are not ‘about’ anything and cannot be true or false.” To say that an event alleged to have happened never did happen is to say the allegation is false. ‘Fake news’ is a false account of an event. Acts of inference are indeed “subjective events, items in somebody’s psychological history,” but they are also “insights into, or knowings of, something other than themselves.” It is one thing to say, “B followed A in my thoughts,” quite another to say “B follows from A.” We cannot infer the latter, logical inference from the former subjective event “without discrediting all human knowledge, including the knowledge-claim that our subjective sensations do not open us to knowledge of anything beyond ourselves. To say, instead, that our inferences from our sensations do open us to knowledge about things beyond ourselves is to say that the content of our knowledge is to some important degree determined by those things, that world. If knowledge of the world were determined in no way by the world itself, “it would cease to be knowledge.”
“Any thing which professes to explain our reasoning fully without introducing an act of knowing thus solely determined by what is known, is really a theory that there is no reasoning.” What Lewis calls naturalism does exactly that, offering “what professes to be a full account of our mental behavior” as entirely determined by non-rational causes, “leav[ing] no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends.” No matter how our sensations were improved, they would never be “anything more than responses,” never insights or even perceptions. ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ but only “when you have discovered what smoke is” can you make a genuine logical inference, basing your causal claim on your knowledge of what smoke is, and what fire is—have a true thought about cause and effect. When Thomas Jefferson, following John Locke, infers equal natural right from the equal humanity of all human beings, that all men are created equal, he isn’t basing the latter claim on the fact that he’s never seen a person ‘morph’ into an owl. He is “see[ing] that it ‘must’ be so,” as a matter of logic. The ground of his logical consequence is an observation about the nature of human beings; it can be falsified only if someone could show that human beings do not exist. It must be said that this leaves open the meaning of “created” in the sentence.
Modern naturalism entails evolutionism. It offers “an account, in Cause and Effect terms, of how people came to think the way they do.” This doesn’t answer “the quite different question of how they could possibly be justified in so thinking.” How can human beings, the effect of a series of causes, attain the power of logical insight? If you can’t prove that there are no proofs, then neither can you prove that there are proofs. “Reason is our starting point”; treated as “a mere phenomenon,” it makes every ‘phenomenology,’ including naturalism, evaporate.
A theist entangles himself in no such dilemma. If God is the Creator of nature, and God is rational, then reason is older than nature. For a theist, “the human mind in the act of knowing is illuminated by the Divine nature,” free “in the measure required” for arriving at truths, “from the huge nexus of non-rational causation.” The human act of knowing “must break sufficiently free from that universal chain” of natural causation “in order to be determined by what it knows.” Our very “concept of Nature” depends upon reasoning. We find ‘reasons for,’ causes that have effects, by virtue of reasoning about those causes, initially by ascertaining effects registered by our sensations. “This is the prime reality, on which the attribution of reality to anything else rests.”
“Knowledge of a thing is not one of the thing’s parts. In this sense [emphasis added] something beyond Nature operates whenever we reason.” Fair enough, but what is nature operating in some other sense? Reasoning appears to be a natural capacity of human beings. It may have been caused by forces other natural entities, but the thoughts it generates are caused by itself and experienced as an ineluctable way of understanding entities and events outside of myself. That understanding must be tolerably accurate; if it were not, I would not survive for very long—just as sensory handicaps (blindness, deafness) reduce my chances of survival. Although Lewis maintains that nature is powerless to produce natural thought, that is true only if nature is either entirely irrational or irrational but capable of producing, by some chance combination of its elements, including its energies, of producing a being that can perceive it by reasoning about it. It is of course true to say that divine Creation more readily explains this capacity than evolution or some other natural process does, but that is true of everything. Child: “Mother, why is the sky blue?” Mother: “Because God made it that way.”
Moreover, while (according to naturalists) nature may be irrational in the sense that reason has not produced it (although of course the Bible says that Logos has done exactly that, but I am following the naturalist premise, here), it cannot be shown to be irrational in itself. That is, if human reason is indeed ‘about’ nature, and it finds that nature and the objects and forces that form its parts or aspects are definable in accordance with the principle of non-contradiction—that black is not white, round is not square—then there must be some connection between human knowledge and the things it knows. If nature were entirely chaotic, then there could be no knowledge of that, and human beings, beings that know by reasoning, could not exist.
Lewis does address something along these lines by considering philosophic claims of an “emergent” God, a “cosmic consciousness” not present at the origin of nature but which somehow develops over time. Hegelian historicism exemplifies this sort of doctrine. Lewis replies that “the cosmic mind will help us only if we put it at the beginning, if we suppose it to be, not the product of the total system, but the basic, self-originating Fact which exists in its own right.” Having already denied immanentist doctrines, Lewis therefore rejects cosmic consciousness as a product of nature rather than its origin. “Reason saves and strengthens the whole system,” even as God not only creates but saves His creation, “whereas the whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason and itself.” It is surely true that an utterly irrational cosmos would not be a cosmos at all but a chaos. But again, is to what extent is ‘the irrational’ thoroughly irrational? [1]
For example, anger is irrational in one sense. If sufficiently powerful in a human soul, it will result in the rage of Achilles, destroying others and finally careening to its own demise—Achilles being only half-superhuman, with a human mother by nature incapable of dipping him into immortalizing water without gripping his body and preventing the water from touching his heel. But human reason can nonetheless see that anger has a definable nature. Anger is tumultuous; tumult is the opposite of calm; a soul cannot be at the same time in tumult and calm. The human soul obeys the law of noncontradiction even when it is ruled by irrational passion. It is part of a system that, by being rationally discernible, its parts partaking of rational order even if they themselves do not think. One might claim that human reason is illusory, that it imagines order where there is none, but that cannot be the case, for the reasons Lewis has already given. As Lewis writes, “Nature, though not apparently intelligent, is intelligible,” apparently obeying “the laws of rational thought,” in particular the law of non-contradiction.
In this, and following from all his preceding arguments, Lewis finds evidence for God, a reasoning being Who, unlike His merely human creations, can and has created nature. “I do not maintain that God’s creation of Nature can be proved as rigorously as God’s existence, but it seems to me overwhelmingly probable.” And the Biblical story of creation, even if told in the manner of a folk tale (as St. Jerome said), makes a lot more sense than the “delightful absurdities” of competing ‘creation narratives’ in other religions. No argument, there!
Turning to moral arguments, Lewis admits that “you can if you wish regard all human ideals as illusions and all human loves as biological by-products” without “running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense.” Lewis does doubt that many people really believe that that is so. “I believe that the primary moral principles on which others depend are rationally conceived.” But naturalists (in theory if not in practice) take moral judgments to be “statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else.” Practice—there’s the rub. No one can get by without making choices about what is better or worse to do. No one is entirely impulsive. If my apparently reasonable choices are driven by passions, they can, will, and must be judged by myself and by others, however ‘non-judgmental’ I or they claim to be. (And the adjuration thou-shalt-not-judge itself implies a moral judgment about good and bad.) And again, generally, “Reason is something more than cerebral biochemistry,” and once one understands that to think that it is, is to engage in that is not a “merely natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists,” one acknowledges the existence of the Supernatural.” “The Supernatural,” therefore, “is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter of daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing.” This must be so, if “Nature” means only the collection of such physical phenomena as biochemical reactions. Lewis avers, on the contrary, that “Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural; God created her.” And if so, He might well be able to intervene in His Creation, performing acts that are miraculous, that is, not in conformity with the usual run of the Laws of Nature He established.
Can nature be known “to be of such a kind that supernatural interferences with her are impossible”? Lewis lists three definitions of natural law: natural laws “are mere brute facts, known only by observation, with no discoverable rhyme or reason about them”; natural laws are “applications of the law of averages”; natural laws are similar to “the truths of mathematics”—logically necessary. Neither the first nor the second definition precludes the possibility of miracles. (For example, as some rabbis teach, God does indeed play dice with the universe, but the dice are ‘loaded’.) The third definition would seem to convict the believer in miracles of self-contradiction. But this charge assumes that no interferences can occur between cause A and effect B. If so (and it is obviously so in the physical world), the only question “is whether Supernatural power might be one of the new factors.” The Bible clearly teaches that it does: God comes like a thief in the night, Lewis quotes. “If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not break any laws. The laws at once take over,” as pregnancy and childbirth follow. “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” and by so doing indicating “the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level,” a reality that as it were frames nature but also intervenes in it.
This raises the question of why, if God does indeed intervene in the ordinary course of events, He does not do so more often, alleviating the sometimes-horrendous suffering of His creatures. Or indeed, why has He permitted nature to feature suffering in the first place? Lewis replies that “Nature is a creature, a created thing,” a being “partly good and partly evil,” as indeed are such fascinating creatures as ourselves. “It is no more baffling that the creature called Nature should be both fair and cruel than that the first man you meet in the train should be a dishonest grocer and a kind husband.” Nature isn’t God. “She is herself. Offer her neither worship nor contempt. Meet her and know her.” Like humanity, someday she will be redeemed, but in God’s own time, not ours.
Lewis next invites us not only to meet nature but to meet the Bible, and on its own terms. He recapitulates three “guiding principles”: thought is distinct from “the imagination which accompanies it”; a thought “may be in the main sound even when the false images that accompany it are mistaken by the thinker for true ones”; to speak about things that cannot be perceived sensually “must inevitably talk as if they could be” so perceived. By this latter claim he means that even abstract language has sensual content, as when one speaks of the ‘growth’ of institutions. Turning to the Bible, one finds many images, “crude mental pictures which so horrify the skeptic,” as when Christ is described as the “Son” of the “Father.” Those who seek to rid religion of such anthropomorphic images, however, “merely succeed in substituting images of some other kinds”—talking, for example of “spiritual force,” thereby invoking images of “winds and tides and electricity and gravitation,” or, rejecting the idea of a personal God, tells us of one all-pervading Being, thereby “exchang[ing] the image of a fatherly and royal-looking man for the image of some widely extended gas or fluid.” And so, in considering the Trinity, Lewis reminds his readers that the “Son” is also called the Logos, meaning reason and word, eternally with God and indeed being God. “He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion of cohesion whereby the universe holds together. All things, and specially Life, arose within Him, and within Him all things will reach their conclusion.” That, Lewis says, is it means to call Christ the “Son” of the Father God. “The reason why the modern literalist is puzzled is that he is trying to get out of the old writers something which is not there,” namely, the strict separation of literal and metaphorical meanings. “The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science.” One might intervene, quite unmiraculously, to question Lewis’s selection of the term “even” in that sentence, but the point is nonetheless well taken. The Bible describes the “uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be” by means of “the doctrine of the Trinity,” showing that “this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce,” bring about “a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality.”
Returning to the political dispute among theologians concerning monarchy and democracy, “with Hegel” pantheism, a democratic notion of God, “became almost the agreed philosophy of highly educated people.” Pantheism in some form “is in fact the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” Only “Platonism and Judaism, and Christianity (which has incorporated both) have proved…capable of resisting it.” The Monarch who brings Himself to our attention in the Bible says, in contradiction to pantheism, not only that He is but that He is the LORD (the capital letters used in the written version of His Word being quite appropriate to His status). Democratic man thinks what the college freshman said out loud: “The problem with God in Paradise Lost is that He’s got this holier-than-thou attitude.” Here is where revelation puts its limit on reasoning. If you restrict your reasoning to nature, you will find yourself tending toward pantheism, even in your most exalted moments, as when a Disney cartoon character croons his invitation to wish upon a star, rather than praying to God. Pantheists have hated the traditional imagery of the living God not “because it pictured Him as man but because it pictured Him as king or even as warrior,” whereas “the Pantheist’s God does nothing, demands nothing,” being “there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf.” But “if the ultimate Fact is not an abstraction but the living God,” He “might do things,” work miracles in order to realize His own thoughts, not ours. God’s mind is not the human mind; it may plan miracles that register “the highest consistency,” but not the one to which we are accustomed, or to which we desire to conform. This notwithstanding, Christian theology “offers you a working arrangement which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian free to continue his prayers.”
Lewis next presents “the three central miracles of the Christian faith”—the Incarnation, the Immaculate Conception, and the Resurrection—in light of what he calls human beings’ “innate sense of the fitness of things,” exemplified by our expectation of order rather than chaos in the world around us.
With his claim that reasoning is distinct from nature, he can assert that “our own composite existence is not the sheer anomaly it might seem to be, but a faint image of the Divine Incarnation.” The Biblical God being “not a nature-God but the God of Nature,” and given the charity, the agapic love, of the Biblical God, surely that God’s power can effect His own incarnation in a human body, and surely His love for his once good, now fallen, creation, makes the Incarnation quite reasonable, however initially stunning to our sensibilities. Just as “a brain does not become less a brain by being used for rational thought” (although one might well say that an unreasoning human brain is indeed ‘less’ a brain, failing to perform to its best nature), so a man is no less a man for being used by the divine Logos. In this sense, Jesus in His incarnate form was fully God, fully Man, engaged in the rational purpose of bringing human beings at least part of the way back to their intended rational nature. “The whole Miracle” of the Incarnation, “far from denying what we already know of reality, writes the comment which makes that crabbed text plain: or rather, proves itself to be the text on which Nature was only the commentary.”
The miracle of the Immaculate Conception equally points to the character of God’s interventions. Unlike the stories told by Ovid and the brothers Grimm, where metamorphosis is catastrophic to the nature of the person metamorphosed, the God of nature changes existing, defective nature for the better. He alters to perfect, “com[ing] to Nature in no anti-Natural spirit.” Lewis contrasts Jesus’ multiplication of one loaf of bread into many loaves, for the purpose of feeding the many who have gathered to his refusal of Satan’s challenge to turn a stone into a loaf of bread. In the Incarnation, God “was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew,” the perfect Man. “The whole soiled and weary universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature,” a “foretaste of a Nature that is still in the future,” when Jesus will return to create a new Heaven and a new Earth.
“The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts”—that is, the supreme act for Christians to know. It showed the many witnesses to it the possibility of life after death and provided them with “a picture of a new human nature, and a new Nature in general.” It is the opposite of a magical act, which “arises from the spirit’s longing to get that power” without paying the ‘wage of sin,’ which is death. Left to itself, nature as it exists now is indeed entropic; only a miracle can reverse its course. The Resurrection confirms the possibility of the Christian promise, that one can be ‘born again.’ The spirituality of Christianity does not simply mean ‘not-bodily,’ immaterial, since “immaterial things may, like material things, be good or bad or indifferent.” Rather, spirituality means “the life which arises in such rational beings [i.e., human beings] when they voluntarily surrender to Divine grace and become sons of the Heavenly Father in Christ.” In “this sense alone…the ‘spiritual’ is always good.”
These final chapters show Lewis at his strongest, probably the most able defender of Christian faith in the English language since Chesterton.
Note
- For a ‘professional’ philosopher’s commentary on Lewis’s argument, see Elizabeth Anscombe: “C. S. Lewis’s Rewrite of Chapter III of Miracles,” lecture delivered at Oxford University, 1985.
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