CHAPTER XVIII

MIRACLES

WITH the passing of the credulous acceptance of Bible legends and the blind trust in Bible texts, the miraculous element in Christian belief has tended steadily to diminish. Many of the leaders of Christian thought now reject miracles in toto; and others who are not ready to abandon them altogether have ceased to use them as supports for their faith. We will first note the reasons for this waning of belief in miracles, and then consider how far, if at all, they can serve as foundations or aids for our theology.

What considerations have weakened the belief in miracles? Judging by its etymology, the word "miracle" means simply a marvelous event, one which excites our wonder.1 In this broadest sense we speak of the sunrise or the coming of spring as a miracle, and may, indeed, find the whole pageant of nature miraculous. "This green, flowery, rockbuilt earth... that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead. What is it? Ay what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. . . . It is by not thinking that we cease to wonder at it. . . . This world after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.”2 More particularly, a miracle is a wonderful event in which God is revealed, or which works for man's salvation; the

1 So the Latin miraculum, the Greek Oavμáotov, and the German Wunder.

2 Carlyle, Heroes and Hero-Worship, chap. I.

greatest of miracles is the conversion that takes place in a sinner's heart, the power of the indwelling God to regenerate a life. In this sense there can be no objection to the use of the term; it in so far implies no violation of natural law, no break in the regular sequence of cause and effect. And since the very idea of natural law is a recent one, the conception of miracles can hardly be said to have generally implied such a break in a fixed natural order. But the conception has usually implied something abnormal, an intrusion into the ordinary and expected course of events; and the modern technical sense of the word, as a break in the natural chain of cause and effect due to supernatural intervention, scarcely more than makes explicit and precise what was vaguely meant. Taking the term in this sense, then, what grounds have we for mistrusting the existence of miracles?

(1) In the first place, there has been in the past century or two a rapid accumulation of evidence pointing to the invariable regularity of natural processes—what is called the reign of natural law. The more closely we analyze events in any field of study, the more clearly we see that their apparent confusion is the result of an extremely complex tissue of underlying uniformities. Things do happen in exactly the same way if exactly the same circumstances are repeated; the enormous development of science has been possible only because of that fact. Whenever an experiment has been properly made, it holds good for all time; for the way things behaved yesterday is the way they will behave to-morrow. There are indeed many groups of phenomena too intricate for us as yet to unravel; particularly is this true of mental phenomena. But the field of observed uniformity is constantly being extended. Even mental and social facts are suggesting underlying laws to investigators; and if concrete mental and social events are too complex and include too many disturbing factors for these underlying laws to be any

thing but tendencies, the results of statistical study, where these disturbing factors counterbalance one another, exhibit a regularity often very striking. Altogether, it looks more and more as if the whole world were, from the analytic point of view, an enormously elaborate mechanism; and this increasingly insistent look of things constitutes a very great presumption against the existence of those alleged irregular events that we call miracles.

We must, indeed, beware of falling into a scientific dogmatism upon the matter. After all, the universality of natural law is no more than a very big generalization resting upon a long series of observations; if any facts to the contrary can be surely established, the generalization is thereby disproved. We have no a priori certainty of this “reign of law." It rests upon just such an unbroken induction as the generalization that "all swans are white," which was utterly smashed by the discovery of one black swan. Let but one miracle be proved, and we must revise this conception of the universal life as an unbroken web of uniformities. Our science will be rendered in so far more precarious; we shall have to recognize the possibility of exceptions to the laws which we have come most confidently to rely upon. But whether this be the case or not we cannot determine a priori; we must simply sharpen our observation, keep our eyes open for evidence. Hume, in a famous argument, declared the evidence for the universality of natural law to be so vast that the falsity of any amount of evidence for a miracle was more supposable than a break in law. But the universality of natural law is by no means so firmly established; in some fields we have as yet hardly a few glimpses of law; and, on the other hand, we have a great deal of human testimony offered in support of alleged breaches of law. The most that we can say is, that in view of the very remarkable recent extensions of the realm of ascertained law

into regions that once seemed hopelessly lawless, it should require much more certain evidence to convince us of a miracle than we should ask in support of any fact against which there is no such antecedent presumption.1

In recent years the deterministic conception of the universe -the conception that whatever happens is absolutely determined by antecedent causes, and, therefore, theoretically predictable has been sharply questioned. We have, for example, Driesch's Vitalism, and Bergson's Creative Evolution - theories that postulate certain variable and indeterminate factors at definite points in the universal life; uncaused causes, that veer events this way or that to an extent and in a direction unforeseeable even by omniscience. As yet none of these anti-deterministic theories is anywhere near being proved; and the arguments offered in support of them have been pretty severely handled. In spite of the lure of these conceptions of a more fluid and plastic worldlife, the weight of scientific opinion seems to incline toward the belief in the universality of law. But, after all, the slight veerings from mechanically determined effects in the human brain, or in the conduct of a bit of protoplasm, cannot be conceived to produce such effects as the turning of water into wine or the restoration of a corpse to life. That is to say, the concrete instances where we are asked to believe in a miracle are such as to come within the field of law in any

1 Huxley has a good illustration of this principle in his book David Hume (p. 132): "If a man tells me he saw a piebald horse in Piccadilly, I believe him without hesitation. The thing itself is likely enough, and there is no imaginable motive for his deceiving me. But if the same person tells me he observed a zebra there, I might hesitate a little about accepting his testimony, unless I were well satisfied, not only as to his previous acquaintance with zebras, but as to his powers and opportunities of observation in the present case. If, however, my informant assured me that he beheld a centaur trotting down that famous thoroughfare, I should emphatically decline to credit his statement; and this even if he were the saintliest of men and ready to suffer martyrdom in support of his belief."

case; and the difference between the differing world views we have mentioned is not such as to affect the question of miracles in any appreciable degree.

Nor need this other suggestion detain us, that the alleged miraculous events may be true and yet not contrary to law, since the law may really be more complex than we had supposed, and, in its adequate formulation, such as to cover the given case. Certain supposed miracles, such as the healingacts of Jesus, and of present-day Christian Scientists, or the abrupt conversions made by evangelists, may thus be ultimately explicable in terms of law, and so not miracles at all. But that the laws of chemistry are in need of such drastic amendment as to include the case of water turning into wine at a word, that the laws of astronomy are so far from adequate as to need inclusion of the possibility of the sun's standing still upon occasion, is too grotesque a supposition to entertain. Most of the miracles that men argue for are of this type; they so flatly contradict well-ascertained uniformities as to present a clear alternative. Either our most certain natural laws are really broken now and then, or else the supposed evidence for these breaks is untrustworthy, and the alleged events never happened.

(2) What, then, is the strength of the evidence for miracles? It must be confessed that while the evidence for natural laws has been growing steadily greater, the evidence for miracles has been growing as steadily less. Remote and credulous times are full of miracles; we hear of them but rarely, if at all, to-day. They flourish in the dark and vanish with the light of day, with the growth of the habit of accurate observation and recording of observations. They seem to have an affinity for uncultivated minds and superstitious habits of thought; we do not find them entering into the

1 For a clear exposition of this suggested possibility, see Rice, pp. 329-36.