u/Gunlord500

https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20260720

Lewis’ monograph, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (found free online at https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150616/html.php, all subsequent quotes come from this source) aimed to establish that miracles, defined as supernatural interventions by God into the natural order, are logically and conceptually possible. Lewis uses several analogies, such as counted coins disappearing from a register, deviations from hexameter in Latin poetry, and seeming inconsistencies in a master’s painting technique to demonstrate that apparent deviations from laws of arithmetic, poetry, or art often count as adherencies to those laws when exotic factors have been brought in. Thus, rather than violations of the natural law, which the theist claims God Himself has established, miracles represent adherences to a higher divine law or rationale we mere humans simply cannot comprehend, and are therefore *not* logically impossible or subversive of human reason. 

In this essay, I argue that the analogies he chose to demonstrate his point actually undermine it, and instead demonstrate that miracles conceptually, not just empirically, undermine the possibility of reason at all, which Lewis previously used to establish the existence of God and thus the possibility of miracles. Variations in natural laws, as opposed to artistic convention, undermine reason itself as opposed to mere taste, and positing the existence of “super-laws” above the ones we encounter vitiates our ability to draw conclusions from the more mundane laws, and thus vitiates our powers of ordinary, everyday reason, which is what Lewis was trying to uphold in the first place.

Lewis first attempts to establish the existence of God using the argument from reason:

>“‘Since I am presented with colours, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behaviour appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic’...All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning…But Naturalism [commonly holds that] The mind, like every other particular thing or event, is supposed to be simply the product of the Total System. It is supposed to be that and nothing more, to have no power whatever of ‘going on of its own accord’. And the Total System is not supposed to be rational...[therefore] rational thought or Reason is not interlocked with the great interlocking system of irrational events which we call Nature...[therefore] if any thought is valid, such a Reason must exist and must be the source of my own imperfect and intermittent rationality. Human minds, then, are not the only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each is an offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature.” (26-37)

I should note that this argument is widely held to have failed—the famous philosopher Anscombe (a devout Catholic, mind you) pointed out its flaws (https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=cslewisjournal). From what I understand he revised it in the second edition of his book, which I haven’t yet read, so until then we can leave that aside for now and concede it to Lewis as a courtesy. The rest of the book was unchanged, however, and later on, he notes that this argument convinced even other theists that God, as the maintainer of human reason, would therefore *not* carry out miracles, precisely because such acts would be unreasonable. According to Lewis:

>“[I]t will still be felt (and justly) that miracles interrupt the orderly march of events, the steady development of Nature according to her own inherent genius or character. That regular march seems to such critics as I have in mind more impressive than any miracle. Looking up (like Lucifer in Meredith’s sonnet) at the night sky, they feel it almost impious to suppose that God should sometimes unsay what He has once said with such magnificence.” (115-116)

How does Lewis respond to that? By making an analogy first to thefts or other forms of subterfuge:

>“If the laws of Nature are necessary truths, no miracle can break them: but then no miracle needs to break them. It is with them as with the laws of arithmetic. If I put six pennies into a drawer on Monday and six more on Tuesday, the laws decree that—other things being equal—I shall find twelve pennies there on Wednesday. But if the drawer has been robbed I may in fact find only two. Something will have been broken (the lock of the drawer or the laws of England) but the laws of arithmetic will not have been broken. The new situation created by the thief will illustrate the laws of arithmetic just as well as the original situation. But if God comes to work miracles, He comes ‘like a thief in the night’. Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist had not reckoned on.He calculates what will happen, or what must have happened on a past occasion, in the belief that the situation, at that point of space and time, is or was A. But if supernatural force has been added, then the situation really is or was AB. And no one knows better than the scientist that AB cannot yield the same result as A. The necessary truth of the laws, far from making it impossible that miracles should occur makes it certain that if the Supernatural is operating they must occur. ” (71)

And then to the arts:

>“When schoolboys begin to be taught to make Latin verses at school they are very properly forbidden to have what is technically called ‘a spondee in the fifth foot’. It is a good rule for boys because the normal hexameter does not have a spondee there: if boys were allowed to use this abnormal form they would be constantly doing it for convenience and might never get the typical music of the hexameter into their heads at all. But when the boys come to read Virgil they find that Virgil does the very thing they have been forbidden to do—not very often, but not so very rarely either...In other words, there are rules behind the rules, and a unity which is deeper than uniformity. A supreme workman will never break by one note or one syllable or one stroke of the brush the living and inward law of the work he is producing. But he will break without scruple any number of those superficial regularities and orthodoxies which little, unimaginative critics mistake for its laws. The extent to which one can distinguish a just ‘license’ from a mere botch or failure of unity depends on the extent to which one has grasped the real and inward significance of the work as a whole. If we had grasped as a whole the innermost spirit of that ‘work which God worketh from the beginning to the end’, and of which Nature is only a part and perhaps a small part, we should be in a position to decide whether miraculous interruptions of Nature’s history were mere improprieties unworthy of the Great Workman or expressions of the truest and deepest unity in His total work. In fact, of course, we are in no such position. The gap between God’s mind and ours must, on any view, be incalculably greater than the gap between Shakespeare’s mind and that of the most peddling critics of the old French school.” (115-117)

Bluntly stated, both of these are terrible analogies.

1: The Importance of Laws of Nature as opposed to Artistic Conventions

Allow me the indulgence of looking at the second one first. Natural laws are not remotely like literary or artistic convention. They undergird our reason, and any lapse in them necessarily undermines our reason. Artistic conventions, on the other hand, have no pragmatic or rationally compelling force outside of poetry or song or whatever narrow aesthetic field they belong to. Violating a Roman or Elizabethan-era poetic convention doesn’t affect our ability to understand the world around us, or how we behave generally, or in fact even how we understand or appreciate poetry itself. Look again at Lewis’ earlier statement:

>“‘Since I am presented with colours, sounds, shapes, pleasures and pains which I cannot perfectly predict or control, and since the more I investigate them the more regular their behaviour appears, therefore there must exist something other than myself and it must be systematic’.”

What Lewis seems to implicitly admit here is that the regularity of the behavior of colours, sounds, shapes, etc. is what allow us to conclude that the outside world, “something other than [ourselves],” exists and is “systematic.” The regularity of Latin hexameter does not do that. The only thing that rule tells us is that the Greeks and the Romans liked it that way. Thus, whatever reasons Virgil might have had for departing from, or “suspending” those conventions, they do not undermine the rational process through which he arrived at those reasons.

However, if God regularly, or even occasionally, “cheats” the natural laws (not mere aesthetic conventions), He would be undermining the source of human reason He is supposed to have been upholding. To continue with Lewis’s above quote, if I’m presented with colours and sounds that appear in predictable fashion, I’m justified in believing they operate under a sensible, systematic law. But the validity of my reasoning flows from the fact that they’re not merely reliable, but *invariably* reliable—they cannot be cheated or tampered with, yet again in Lewis’s own words. If God “cheats” them, even only once in a while, how is that assumption still justified? If source A produces color or sound *a* regularly, but God “cheats,” or causes a miracle, so that it produces result *b* or *c* or nothing at all, why should I assume it will produce *a* tomorrow as opposed to God “cheating” yet again?

This is the issue with Lewis’ first analogy back on page 71. The operation of our daily reason relies on God, or angels, or demons, or any other supernatural entity being absent, and any seeming mysteries we encounter in our daily lives ultimately having mundane, physical explanation. If we put six pennies in the counter one day and six pennies the next, we expect to have twelve pennies the day after. If we do not, we conclude either theft, carelessness, or some other physical cause of our sums not turning out as expected. If we have too few pennies, we might look for the thief or examine the counter thoroughly to see if the coins slipped through a hole or crack. If we have too many, we could wonder if we miscounted them originally, or if one of our coworkers made a sale they didn’t record. But what if God–not even some demon or angel–”annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter” (72)? Then it’s possible any discrepancy I find would be God creating a few pennies or annihilating a few, according to whatever His incomprehensible will might be. Needless to say, society couldn’t really function if, every time we found something missing where it should be (or something present where it shouldn’t be), we spent even a bit of time entertaining “Maybe God’s Creating or Destroying Things :3” as an explanation. 

2: The Imperfection of Human Artists compared to Divine Craft

Even ignoring that, Lewis’s anthropomorphic examples ought to deepen rather than assuage the concerns of the pious interlocutor of his second example. Why could Virgil or Shakespeare break the conventions of hexameter? Because, as mentioned above, said conventions were created by fallible, imperfect humans (the Greek or Roman cultures in which they developed). It’s hardly impossible for a man smarter than his fellows (as Shakespeare and Virgil assumedly were) to put his own spin on what the humdrum masses initially came up with and produce something better. But the laws of nature were written by God Himself, not fallible man. Why, precisely, would God need to “tamper with” the natural laws He Himself created? Did He not do a good enough job the first time? That surely can’t be. After all, He is not at all like the fallible Greek or Roman cultures, made up of common people who were very not omniscient or perfect, and thus who could very easily be outdone by their successors.

Lewis might insist that miracles are not actually deviations, much less violations, of natural law. They are rather adherences to an overarching law that we’re simply not familiar with:

“Let us suppose a race of people whose peculiar mental limitation compels them to regard a painting as something made up of little coloured dots which have been put together like a mosaic. Studying the brushwork of a great painting, through their magnifying glasses, they discover more and more complicated relations between the dots, and sort these relations out, with great toil, into certain regularities. Their labour will not be in vain. These regularities will in fact ‘work’; they will cover most of the facts. But if they go on to conclude that any departure from them would be unworthy of the painter, and an arbitrary breaking of his own rules, they will be far astray. For the regularities they have observed never were the rule the painter was following. What they painfully reconstruct from a million dots, arranged in an agonising complexity, he really produced with a single lightning-quick turn of the wrist, his eye meanwhile taking in the canvas as a whole and his mind obeying laws of composition which the observers, counting their dots, have not yet come within sight of, and perhaps never will.”

But this falls into the traps I described in my first point. The quotidian laws of nature are not like the molecules of pigment which make up a painting. They are the ground on which reason itself stands. It’s not a matter of any departure from such laws being “unworthy” of their legislator, but that departure from such laws undermine our ability to draw conclusions from them entirely. For instance: Let’s say the law that the sun rises in the east is actually not a full law in and of itself but part of some larger law that dictates it may rise in the west occasionally, and *that* larger law is one we can never even comprehend, per Lewis. We cannot then be justified in our belief it will rise in the east tomorrow, because it could very well rise in the west, which would simply be the result of the “greater law” we cannot comprehend, or even make predictions based off of. So we end up with something not far off from radical skepticism, which Lewis at least isn’t especially fond of.

3: Further Divine Laws Weaken the Ordinary Ones

Thirdly, our ignorance of what God’s will might be, which Lewis himself conceded in his painting analogy, utterly vitiates our ability to discern what might actually be a “license” from the rule as opposed to anything else. Consider his argument there in conjunction with what he said in his poetry analogy: How can we tell that Virgil’s deviations from meter actually were intentional rather than mistakes? We know quite a lot about Virgil’s psychology and goals—even if he was a “great” man, he was still a man like us, so it’s hardly difficult to discern what an artist would be aiming for and whether said deviations would help attain his objectives or hinder them (as they would in the case of, say, typographical errors). But God? God is, again by Lewis’s own admission, wholly and utterly alien to us, far more so than even “greats” like Virgil or Shakespeare may be, so there’s no way to discern what His goals might be—and thus, no way to discern whether anything that seems like a miracle actually serves said goals.

Another way this argument undermines itself is the implication that a miracle is following some sort of divine law rather than a natural law, but still a law, in the sense of an invariable regularity. But the fact that miracles are so rare combined with the fact that we have no way of testing *super*natural laws means we have no way of telling what such divine laws might be and thus interpreting the meaning and provenance of any miracle. Going back to Lewis’s example: In the normal course of things, process A leads to outcome a. However, in the case of a miracle, it’s actually process AB, which of course must lead to a different special outcome, ab, with the B there being God’s divine activity. However, the reason we think A leads to *a* is because we see it doing so on a regular basis. Miracles, on the other hand, by definition are exceptional events. We see what Lewis describes as AB very rarely, or only once in the universe’s history, and certainly not under controlled conditions. So there’s no way to predict or suppose that process AB, if B is understood as supernatural intervention, would necessarily lead to result *ab*. In fact, there’s no way to say under what circumstances it would happen, or if it would happen again. For instance, why should we believe that Christ was the *only* time God, through divine power, put a sperm into a virgin womb? What about AB, contrasted with A, determines that AB can occur once and only once? How can we be sure that, for instance, Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be Christ’s brother (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping\_Rebellion), was lying?

Thus, the concern of the pious folk Lewis describes, those who “feel it almost impious to suppose that God should sometimes unsay what He has once said with such magnificence” is not at all “founded on an error.” The poet, artist, or craftsman does not actually work via rules or laws in a strict sense, he works on mere convention. Some verses in poetry, brushstrokes in art, or methods in construction generally work better than others, but can be departed from because the legibility of poetry (or art, or workmanship, etc.) itself does not rely on invariable adherence to those rules. The natural world, on the other hand, is not a poem or a painting. Its legibility depends on its regularity. There is no reason to anthropomorphize God as the supreme Poet, Artist, or whatever bit of sentimentality the apologist thinks will make his position more appealing.

You will note, however, that I have not derided the hypothetical pious interlocutor for his (or her) piety itself. I hope I have demonstrated how unlikely, if not impossible, miracles ought to be if we wish to maintain our reliance on reason. But have I disproved theism as a whole? That was not my intent in this essay, and at the moment, it is not necessary at all, actually. Again, for the moment, I could happily concede this statement from Lewis:

>“If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the bye-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. It can be trusted only if quite a different Metaphysic is true. If the deepest thing in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves—if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It—then indeed our conviction can be trusted.” (127)

Yet even if I concede this, I am not at all required to concede this Rational Spirit has any involvement with us *aside from* lending us Its Rationality. Even if we are required to concede the existence of a Being capable of producing miracles, we are not at all required to concede It would ever actually carry one out. We are pefectly justified, if necessary, in believing in Aristotle’s God: “Thought Thinking Itself,” or, as Edward Feser admits (himself a Catholic), wholly uninterested in human affairs. Thus, I aver, the burden of proof is shifted towards not the theist, perhaps, but the “miracle-ist.” It is up to Flynn, and Muse, and Feser, and Aquinas, and Garrigou-Lagrange, and all the other Catholics (and not only them, but more than a few Muslims and Protestants who also base their arguments on the “miracle” of the Koran or Barbara Snyder or whoever) to demonstrate why we should entertain the possibility of miracles when all we “metaphysically” need is the existence of some Mind. The Aristotelian theist or deist can simply dismiss the miracles of Fatima or Lanciano or Muhammad splitting the moon as unworthy of the Supreme Watchmaker (not Artist) or the Great Thought Thinking Itself. It is up to the miracle-monger to demonstrate why he’s wrong, and I don’t think they’ve done that yet.

https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20260713

Hey guys! Ive been playing some Nightreign recently and I've put 30 hours into it. I've seen the Undertaker a few times but literally not once have I seen anyone else playing the Scholar. Is he the least popular character? D: