On Miracles (PoAC)

[velvetpage]

A couple of days ago, I was browsing my bookshelf for reading material and discovered there a copy of "God in the Dock," a collection of essays by the greatest of the Christian apologists and thinkers of the twentieth century, C.S. Lewis. The first essay in it is about miracles, and it has clarified my thinking somewhat. I find Lewis often does that for me, though on rare occasions I find I disagree with him - usually not his conclusions so much as the applications of them. But I digress.

I have railed before against the popular use of the word "miracle" in our society. A twelve-car pileup kills nine people and injures five more, but leaves the infant in his seat totally unharmed - it's a miracle. A patient comes through a difficult surgery and survives - it's a miracle. Someone gets hit by lightning, but his friend standing right next to him is fine - it's a miracle. These examples and similar ones make me cringe, but I was never able to coherently explain why.

Now I can.

A miracle, in order to be a miracle, must go against the natural laws as we know them, or in the case of Christ, must speed up those natural laws, doing in a moment what usually takes much longer, or doing now what will be possible when our natural laws have come to an end. (More on these in a different post.) The examples above don't fit those definitions. They are examples of probability. The infant's survival is dependent on the technology of the car and his seat, and the interaction of those with the physics involved in the crash. It's possible that a little more spin on the car, or a little less, might have had a very different outcome for him. He beat the odds, but the odds themselves are a function of natural laws and are therefore, if not predictable, at least comprehensible. The patient who comes through a difficult surgery, again, was given long odds - perhaps forty percent survival, perhaps less. But the outcome fell within the range of probability. If it didn't, the surgeon wouldn't have operated to begin with, because there would have been no point.

To call such events "miracles" is first of all to misunderstand the nature of miracles. Second, it's to misunderstand the nature of probability and mathematics, and the science of the events in question. Third, and this is the one I rant about, it's to trivialize the events that resulted from not beating the odds. That miracle baby who survived the car crash is now an orphan because his parents died in it. The boy whose friend was hit by lightning may have survived - but the friend didn't. How many patients died during a similar operation to the one the patient survived? And why, exactly, would God have made an exception to the rules of nature and protected those particular people and not the others affected by the same event? The answer is, he didn't - it wasn't a miracle. He let nature take its course, and the results, though not predicted, still resulted from that.

Comments

[melstra.livejournal.com]

Very good points! Interesting post, I never thought about that distinction before. I rarely use the term anyway, but I do agree with the difference.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this - I've had the same difficulty with this use of the term, and it's good to see clarification for how it can be perceived differently (and, imo, more accurately).

[summerfields.livejournal.com]

Craig accidentally stole that book from our Christmas Appointment...I will bring it with us on summer to read (if I can find it amongst the boxes!).

Time to go become a 2nd year - chat soon!
:)

[asqmh.livejournal.com]

For the most part, I like Lewis. But he is a bit of a hierarchal misogynist in his own right.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. There's an element of "product of his times" in that, though. The bulk of the feminist movement came after the bulk of his work.

[asqmh.livejournal.com]

Yes, but his treatise on why women shouldn't be priests never fails to piss me off. ^_~

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've ever read it. My dad never pointed it out to me - probably because my mother was ordained. :)

[gracevlikevrain.livejournal.com]

Question to show that I'm out of it...what does POAC stand for?

There's an interview towards the beginning of the book that really liked...he's really good at answering common questions about Christianity in a practical way.

I think my favorite essay in there is "On The Reading Of Old Books."

I must admit...I have a shameless crush on Lewis. =)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Post of Actual Content. The term was stolen from a friend no longer on my list, to denote posts that are more important than just the minutae of daily life. They're almost always public, and I mark them so I can find them easier if/when I want to link to them somewhere.

[neosis.livejournal.com]

I have to agree on all the points. I think there's a certain urge on the part of some people to call things a miracle because it implies that God is there and actively changing the results of events and thus they use that assertion as proof that their faith is correct.

It's a cycle of self-reinforcement that they find comforting. It's the whole "everything happens for a reason" conceit. That God is there personally sheparding the speaker through the world and by implication overriding the wills of countless people to ensure that events happen "as they should". I'm always amazed by the number of people who believe that the actions of pretty much everyone but them are somehow directed by God to create the events that govern their lives. As if somehow anyone you don't personally know isn't really a peson at all.

It's under this worldview that probability doesn't actually matter, because God picks who lives and who dies and therefore it's always a miracle when someone beats the odds and the credit goes not the doctors who performed the difficult surgery but to the pious church devotees who prayed for the patient.

[kianir.livejournal.com]

I hear things like that a lot at work. It's "a miracle" and "a blessing" when I help someone make a print from some old photograph, and it's ready in less than a minute. Or "Oh, Jesus is looking out for me!" when I help find a CD. These things are said without the slightest hint of irony.

No .. it's applied science and a little bit of good customer service. Saying things like that is, essentially, saying that without the old white bearded man in the sky, I couldn't have thumbed through a stack of albums you were too lazy to go through yourself. Cheapens my job (and trust me, it's already pretty cheap) and also cheapens the dozens of people who came together to make a 12-second photographic copy possible.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

It also cheapens God, who is more than a Cosmic Personal Assistant.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I should point out that true Christian theology doesn't work like that. Lewis is toeing the line on Christian doctrine, in fact quite literally wrote the book on much of it.

[neosis.livejournal.com]

I know, it's the "new" Christianity that all about "you". There was a short description of a "New Christianity" ceremony from California, essentially it was a rock concert where people bribed God for good fortune. I'm not really a Christian in any sense of the world, but that sickens even me.

I mean did the people running this even get to the end of the new testament? Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that pretty much the modern equivalent of the money changers in the temple that Jesus flipped out on?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, yes. The applicable quote from Jesus himself is, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me." That doesn't fit into the cosmic personal assistant that they've turned God into.