Miracles. C. S. Lewis

      C. S. Lewis

      Miracles

      A Preliminary Study

       Copyright

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      First published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1947

      Copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd 1947

      Cover design and illustration by Kimberly Glyder

      The right of C. S. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780007461257

      Ebook Edition © September 2011 ISBN: 9780007332298

      Version: 2015-11-24

       Dedication

      To

       Cecil and Daphne Harwood

       Epigraph

      Among the hills a meteorite

      Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,

      And wind and rain with touches light

      Made soft, the contours of the stone.

      Thus easily can Earth digest

      A cinder of sidereal fire,

      And make her translunary guest

      The native of an English shire.

      Nor is it strange these wanderers

      Find in her lap their fitting place,

      For every particle that’s hers

      Came at the first from outer space.

      All that is Earth has once been sky;

      Down from the sun of old she came,

      Or from some star that travelled by

      Too close to his entangling flame.

      Hence, if belated drops yet fall

      From heaven, on these her plastic power

      Still works as once it worked on all

      The glad rush of the golden shower.

      C.S.L.

      Reprinted by permission of Time and Tide

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1 The Scope of this Book

2 The Naturalist and the Supernaturalist

3 The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism

4 Nature and Supernature

5 A Further Difficulty in Naturalism

6 Answers to Misgivings

7 A Chapter of Red Herrings

      8 Miracles and the Laws of Nature

      9 A Chapter not Strictly Necessary

      10 ‘Horrid Red Things’

      11 Christianity and ‘Religion’

      12 The Propriety of Miracles

      13 On Probability

      14 The Grand Miracle

      15 Miracles of the Old Creation

      16 Miracles of the New Creation

      17 Epilogue

      Appendix A: On the Words ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’

      Appendix B: On ‘special Providences’

      About the Author

      Other Books by C. S. Lewis

       About the Publisher

       1

       THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

      Those who wish to succeed must ask the right preliminary questions.

      ARISTOTLE, Metaphysics, II, (III), I.

      In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing.

      For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are 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. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

      If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence ‘according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry’. But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how