A test of a contemporary person's view of miracles and associated acts of supernatural power would be to judge which of the following now seem plausible to the person.

1. Trial by ordeal: an early medieval method for determining guilt or innocence. It included holding a hot poker in the palm until it burned the skin. If the skin healed without serious infection, that was a sign from God of the person's innocence.

2. Relics to repel invaders: from the 6th to the 15th centuries the dead body of an important sait, or some part like the bones or a hand, would draw the power of the saint to the area to give protection against invaders. (Relics were used for many purposes.)

3. Blessed church bell power over storms: large church bells, because they had been blessed by a priest with holy water, could drive away thunder and lightning. Popular during the 12th to 16th centuries.

4. Succubi and Incubi: a demon would take on form as a human woman, seduce a man to get his semen (demons did not have their own), then change into male form and materialize in a woman's bed at night to make her pregnant. There were numerous such pregnancies up to the 16-17th centuries.

5. Comets and lightning as signs sent by God: through the 17th century such heavenly events were considered divine messages. (Comets foretold a change in rulers.)

6. Disease, insanity, and afflictions of livestock caused by demons or witches. A frequent belief up to the 18th century, when the last witches were burned or hanged, and when modern medical attitudes slowly began to grow.

7. King's touch: the kings of France and England could cure certain diseases by the touch of their hands. God gave such power to those God appointed to rule over others.

8. Earthquakes, volcanoes, flood, disease, [AIDS?] etc. as punishments from God: the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was the classic biblical instance.

9. The appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary to children at Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje (in a Croatian section of Bosnia).

The first 7 items on this list are no longer part of ordinary belief. Most people think of these ideas as superstitions. The last 2 on the list, however, are part of some contemporary religious belief. There has been a gradual shift since ancient times away from many forms of belief in supernatural interventions, but not a total abandonment of such beliefs by everyone. The shift has largely come about because of the acceptance of certain standards of rationality or of naturalism, especially through the development of science. But it is not always easy to see why some beliefs should fall while others still stand. The material of this chapter will at least make the issue clearer by laying out some relevant ideas, in particular those connected to the interplay between science and religion.

MODERN BELIEF IN MIRACLES

Most religious people today trust that miracles happen. Here are some categories of current beliefs:

1. Christian belief in biblical miracles.
Includes belief that God intervened somehow to guide the writing of Christian scriptures ("New Testament"), as well as the Hebrew scriptures ("Old Testament"). It includes also the specific miracles of the bible, from the flood of Noah's time down to the resurrection of Jesus.

2. Christian belief in present day unpredictable miracles.
To heal a person, give supernatural gifts of speaking in tongues or prophesying, help someone escape an accident, give a sign like an image in the sky, divert a storm from a community, give testimony to the sanctity of someone who has died, cure an incurable disease, etc.

3. Institutionalized miracles.
Supernatural acts which God perform in the proper institutional setting. Thus the Christian sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist may be seen as miraculous acts of God. The Catholic and Mormon Churches both expect special divine inspiration or guidance for their leaders under certain circumstances.

4. Spiritualisms. [preternatural]
Any set of belief that spirit is radically distinct from material nature, and that spirit-beings have and use the power to do things outside of the normal course of material nature. Swedenborgians, Christian Scientists, and Theosophists are examples; to some extent so is the New Age belief in channeling — having one’s body taken over by a spirit of someone long dead. Some versions of popular Christian belief in the activities of saints may also belong in this category.

This list could be longer. These positions suppose that events occurring in the world around us are not due only to the pattern of natural causes but to some intervening activities of invisible beings. Much evidently depends partly on a person's overall sense of the universe. Belief in miracles is easier for a person whose general model of nature makes nature loose in its order, with room for interventions. In any case belief in miracles continues to be strong.


MIRACLES AND INTELLIGIBILITY

Miracles in the strict sense (definition #4 on the handout) block the search to understand the processes and patterns in the universe. The project of science to understand things is abruptly halted at any event where a divine or supernatural being is doing something different from what the otherwise intelligible forces of nature would have produced if left on their own. The scientist looks at an event, wonders what caused it, and hopes to be able to discover that cause. When we know the causes of things, we understand much about why they happened as they did. The more we can know about why things happen as they do, the more likely we will be able to control, predict, or respond in advance in a way that is beneficial to ourselves and others. We cure diseases, create new clothing, provide computer aids for learning, all because we have discovered regular and reliable causes that we are able to understand.

Religious believers are usually happy to believe that in addition to the forces of nature the hand of God is also at work. It is often hard for religious people to understand why anyone should object to this belief. Many things, after all, are beyond human understanding. It should be counted a blessing, perhaps, that some events are the special work of a loving and attentive God, giving a sign of encouragement, healing the sick, saving lives, watching over people. If people cannot understand fully or predict what miracles God will perform, perhaps the best thing to do is to accept that fact rather than obstinately or arrogantly demand that all events become intelligible to limited human minds, as some scientists seem to do. Naturalism is a fine working assumption for scientists, but is it not at least possible that some specific events have causes from beyond nature.

The issue, however, is more complicated than that. We can see this by looking again at some positions of the past. Arguments about the issue are at least as old as Christianity. In the earliest days of Christianity philosophers complained about the Christian God who interfered in human affairs and acted contrary to the laws of nature which this same God had supposedly set up in the first place. To educated Romans and Greeks, Christianity at first appeared to be what today we would call a cult. It was not a legitimate traditional religion like Judaism, it seemed, but rather a recently invented variation of Judaism. People then looked at new variations of old religions with the same suspicion that people now look at current revisions of Christianity like the Unification Church ("Moonies"). A similar problem for the credibility of Christianity was that the people who wrote the Christian scriptures were apparently not very well educated because they wrote in simple, even crude, Greek. Then as now, the beliefs of uneducated people are not always very informed or critical ones.

To the well-educated of the Roman world, Christians seemed to have beliefs of the kind popular among superstitious people, in particular about a wonder-working leader who, apparently miraculously, was raised from the dead.. When philosophers heard the claim that God raised Jesus back to life, that sounded to them like a cult's superstitious belief in an anthropomorphic god like the old Zeus, zipping in and out of earthly activities

The philosophically trained Romans and Greeks had different beliefs. Epicureans thought the universe was unguided and unplanned, that things just happened according to the random working of the regular forces of nature. The randomness = “chance.” The regular forces of nature = “necessity.” So chance and necessity accounted for all events in the world. Some Epicureans believed that the gods did exist, but that they were much like humans, part of the natural order and under the control of the forces of nature, ruled by chance and necessity like all other beings in the universe. In any case these gods did not get involved in human affairs at all, according to the Epicureans.

The Stoics rejected chance. They claimed that the Logos, the divine principle of rational order ruled everything. They sometimes called it "Zeus," but this was no longer the anthropomorphic god of old; the old name was attached to a new idea. The Logos was not above nature but was within it as the main divine aspect of it. The old gods had to follow the rational order of nature just as people did. No one could escape the laws of nature. This philosophy was science, as they knew it: the attempt to rationally understand nature. .
In the 2nd century a Christian named Minucius Felix addressed the philosophers' complaints. He wrote a dialogue called the Octavius. To set the stage for his Christian ideas, he gave the first words in this heated exchange to a philosopher who mocked Christian beliefs:

"What monstrous absurdities these Christians invent about this God of theirs . . . that he searches diligently into the ways and deeds of all men, yea even their words and hidden thoughts, hurrying to and fro, ubiquitously; they make him out a troublesome, restless, shameless and interfering being, who has a hand in everything that is done, interlopes at every turn . . . . Further, they threaten the whole world and the universe and its stars with destruction by fire, as though the eternal order of nature established by laws divine could be put to confusion, or as thought the bonds of all the elements could be broken, the framework of heaven be split in twain, and the containing and surrounding mass be brought down in ruin."

As is evident from Felix's words, the Stoics rejected the idea of a God who intervenes in the world, as well as the Christian apocalyptic belief that this rational world-order would be torn apart before long. In response, Minucius Felix promoted belief in God precisely on the basis of the order of nature in an early version of the argument from design (we will see more about this in the chapter on the cosmos). But Felix’s Christian beliefs demanded also that he accept divine intervention in history and nature. His final answer to the philosophers was that all unbelievers deserved the fires of hell.

The Stoics' complaint was not that Christians believed in invisible beings or an invisible Being. It was the interruption of the rationality (logos) of things by God, that was objectionable. The the same God who the Christians claimed created the order of nature, then turned around and violated the laws of that same nature. This God was apparently inconsistent, operating against his own original intention in setting up reliable laws. (The Stoics, like the Christians and Jews, treated God as "he.")

This charge was taken seriously by Christians. Christian writers for the next few centuries would carefully respond. As a result Christians defined more precisely what a miracle was. They also had to face over and over again the question of whether Christianity stood in the way of a rational understanding of nature because of its belief in a God who interrupted the order of nature, who might do what nature would never do on its own.

Not all Christians thought they had to try to live up to the rational standards of the philosophers. Irenaeus, 2nd century bishop of Lyons, used arguments borrowed from the Skeptics of those days, another philosophical school. He cited the inability of "physicists" to know things like the location of the home of migrating birds or of the storehouse of hail and snow or of the origin of the Nile, to know why the moon waxes and wanes or just what the difference were among various fluids, metals, and stones. People may speculate, said Irenaeus, but only God has the answers. "On all these points we may indeed say a great deal while we search into their causes, but God alone who made them can declare the truth regarding them." Scripture could teach people all they needed to know here in this world; in the next life God will teach the rest. Irenaeus thus devalues the human role as scientific inquirer.

AUGUSTINE

Augustine (364-430), bishop of Hippo, is one of the most influential Christian theologians of all time. (Recall that over all 1,000 years later Galileo appealed to Augustine’s ideas to defend Copernicanism.) He had a variety of ideas about miracles. He knew that God had worked miracles because the Bible was full of miracle stories. For a while he speculated that maybe God had worked miracles only in biblical times, but not later. Perhaps the philosophers’ objections to them carried some weight with Augustine. But Augustine then accepted the common Christian belief that God worked miracles in his own time in association with the shrines of the martyrs, Christians who had given their lives rather than give up their faith. Augustine was nonetheless not entirely sure how to explain them or even how to define them consistently. He ended up with perhaps four different theories about miracles, some of which appear on the pages with six definitions of miracles (38-39).

Augustine sometimes speaks as though nature does not have its own reliable order of causality (“secondary” causality). Every event is due to God’s action (“primary” causality). [p. 38: Definition 1] The sun rises each day because before dawn each day God turns to the sun and says “All right, get up and do it again.” Each time it rains it is because God has decided to make it rain. Every plant that flowers is being told to flower by God. Here all things are miracles in the sense of resulting from specific divine acts. But only some of them evoke wonder; only some count as “miracula” (wonders). Here is one of Augustine’s most famous passage to this effect:

While man plants and waters, who draws up the moisture through the roots of the vine except God who gives the growth? But when water was changed into wine with unaccustomed swiftness at the Lord's command the divine power was revealed, as even fools acknowledge.

In these ideas of Augustine's the distinction between the ordinary and extraordinary events in nature blurs; all of them are God's direct work. (This is the dominant view of God’s activities in Muslim tradition also.)

In other places Augustine speaks of miracles in a way the Stoics would approve. [Definition #2.] These miracles are seemingly wondrous events resulting from sequences of natural causes, sequences that God had planned and planted in seminal form at the beginning of creation, to blossom forth for the edification of observers at a later date. They are called either “causal reasons” or seminal reasons.” While such wondrous events startle people, they are nonetheless the result of sequences of causes and effect that God had planned from the very beginning as part of nature's own (“secondary”) causality. If this were the only way Augustine spoke of miracles, this would involve only the single primordial miracle of a carefully planned creation.

Between the first and second way of defining miracles is a carefully reasoned third way, which allows God to plan an orderly universe and then also intervene in it. [Definition # 4] Here the world "miracle" has its more modern sense, of specific and direct divine interventions into the order of natural secondary causality to accomplish what the natural order could not have accomplished on its own without these interventions. Augustine's partial concession to a Stoic-style rationality is to say with Origin that even such miracles are not truly contrary to nature but only in excess of what nature alone can do. In his work De Genesi ad Litteram (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis) he declares that:

God, however, did not place all causes in the original creation but kept some in his own will . . . . Nevertheless those which he kept in his own will cannot be contrary to those which he predetermined by His own will; for God's will cannot contradict itself. He established them, therefore, in such a way that they would contain the possibility, not the necessity, of causing the effect which would proceed from them."

The order of nature, therefore, did not produce events by the steady flow of natural causes alone, which the Epicureans called “necessity” at work (laws of nature). The sequence of cause and effect was left deliberately loose by God so it would be possible for God to intervene in it rather easily without overthrowing it. God could cooperate with the flow of nature, or could get nature to cooperate with him. Later in life, in The City of God, Augustine similarly argues that it is not in fact contrary to nature for nature to act contrary to its own usual patterns. Indeed the immutable heavens themselves have shown change as when the planet Venus once altered color, according to reliable observers. So it is not impossible that God, who created all natures according to God's own pleasure from the first, would "change these natures of his own creation into whatever he pleases, and thus spread abroad a multitude of those marvels which are called monsters, portents, prodigies, phenomena . . . ."

Augustine in effect argues that nature was made flexible by God, slack enough in its order to contain many possibilities in it that exceed nonetheless nature's own normal causal laws.
A fourth category of “miracles” for Augustine are those wonders performed not by God's genuinely supernatural power, power truly above and beyond the limits of nature, but by what later would be called "preternatural" power, a non-divine spiritual power alongside nature's regular order, but nonetheless part of creation. [Definition #3] These are the work of souls, angels, or the gods (Augustine thinks of them as demons) acting upon matter.

This fourth category, as well as the earlier mention of monsters and portents, alerts a contemporary reader to a contrast between Augustine's reasoned conclusion and what would fit with a thorough-going search for rational intelligibility. Augustine speaks of a divine Agent whose purposes and plans are not humanly knowable. The search for intelligibility must end at this point. Augustine is quite explicit about this: the skeptics say about Christian miracles "If you wish us to believe these things, satisfy our reason about each one of them . . . ." Augustine replies: "We should confess we could not, because the final comprehension of man cannot master these and such-like wonders of God's workings . . . ."

Augustine's rational defense of miracles places many of the events of nature and history beyond human inquiry and place it in the hands, or more accurately in the free and unpredictable choices, of invisible beings, especially God. Like others of his time, Augustine is not being unreasonable in his model of the universe. There was no good evidence against belief in such invisible active beings. Various philosophical speculations about the universe included this possibility, including the fairly well accepted Neoplatonist model of the universe. But even though his model of the universe might seem reasonable in his time and context, the effect of his thought was nonetheless to subordinate rational inquiry to a silent or prayerful humility and ignorance.

Given this approach, it is not surprising that Augustine did not find it important to include knowledge of the physical world in his systematic understanding of things. Like Irenaeus he is willing to leave aside knowledge of "physics:"

Wherefore, when it is asked what we ought to believe in matters of religion, the answer is not to be sought in the exploration of the nature of things, after the manner of those whom the Greeks call "physicists." Nor should we be dismayed if Christians are ignorant about the property and the number of the basic elements of nature, or about the motion, order, and deviations of the stars, the map of the heavens, the kinds and nature of animals, plants, stones, springs, rivers, and mountains; about the divisions of space and time, about the signs of impending storms, and the myriad other things which these "physicists" have come to understand or think they have. For even these men, gifted with such superior insight, with their ardor in study and their abundant leisure, exploring some of these matters by human conjecture and others through historical inquiry, have not yet learned everything there is to know. For that matter, many of the things they are so proud to have discovered are more often matters of opinion than of verified knowledge.

Augustine's observations about the limits of science or physics are legitimate. The claims of the physicists were often conjecture or opinion and even just plain wrong. In fairness it should be said also that Augustine is speaking not about a general human need for knowledge but about the need specifically in religion for knowledge of the universe. In a work of his mature years, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Augustine goes to impressive lengths to consider a vast range of scientific information and relate it to the creation narrative in Genesis. But where the philosophical physicists were still eager to affirm the rational intelligibility of all of nature, Augustine was content to let it much of it slip by.
Augustine’s position raises the issue of the intelligibility of nature. On the one hand he seemed to suppose that nature is usually regular and reliable and therefore intelligible. The patterns of causality can be used to explain why certain things happen and even to predict what will happen. But by keeping the door open to divine interventions, Augustine also kept the door open to all sorts of beliefs that now strike us as quite odd — monsters and portents and such. The centuries after his death were rife with belief in miracles. We also call these the dark ages.

THE ABSOLUTE AND ORDAINED POWERS OF GOD
      The dark ages — early medieval times — gradually came to an end about the eleventh century. This marks the beginning of late medieval times, the “high” middle ages. By the 12th century major universities were founded in various cities. By the 13th century scholars were working furiously to create revive the ancient sciences of Aristotle and others. The degree of nature's reliability continued to be a significant issue in late medieval times. In fact, the main issue concerning God's power was not just miracles but the larger one of whether God could do absolutely anything God chose. The problem was partly a logical-theoretical one. If God was perfect goodness and perfect power then it would seem necessary for God to make as perfectly good a universe as possible. Thus given God's choice to make any universe at all (a puzzle in itself), this single universe that exists is the one that God had to make, "the best of all possible worlds" to use the phrase later inspired by Leibniz's thought.

Here the conclusion of theoretical thinking challenged traditional belief in divine freedom. Theorizing minds sought a full rationality to nature. But traditional believers did not want God's power subjected to the demands of rationality. The conflict was exacerbated by the impact of Aristotle's thought which had entered European intellectual life through the influence of Islamic philosophy. Aristotle's writing had first taught Muslim and now Christian philosophers to seek out in their reflections those conclusions that seemed to be rationally or logically necessary. So many philosophical theologians speculated on how God logically had to use the divine power.

A striking instance is an argument over whether God can restore a fallen virgin. In the 4th century, Jerome, speaking in praise of virginity, had declared that not even God can restore a virgin to her original virginity. Peter Damien, in the late 11th century disagreed vehemently. He declared that God can do anything God chooses, without any limit of any kind. God can even change the past by wiping out the entire universe and then creating it anew but with whatever changes God wants. No amount of rational theorizing can ever determine how events must take place, whether there has to be a reliable and therefore intelligible order to things. God can do as God pleases, regardless of arrogant attempts by philosopohers to place limits on God, said Peter Damien.

The answer that satisfied many theologians was used in the 13th century by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas as though it had already become commonplace. That is the distinction between God's absolute power and God's ordained power. The absolute power has no limit. The ordained power is the way in which God decided from all eternity to use the divine power--what God "ordained" to be so. What God has ordained is now necessarily the case but only because God freely chose to act in that way, not because God had to act in that way. God chose to create a universe of usually reliable secondary causes, thereby freely choosing to limit the application of God's own absolute power. In using this distinction Aquinas walked the middle road, rejecting Damien's flat denial of any limit in God's use of power, but also rejecting the insistence of Aristotelian philosophers who claimed that this world is the sole way a universe could exist.

After 1277, when 219 philosophical and largely Aristotelian propositions were condemned by the archbishop of Paris, among them even a few of Aquinas's, there was great care to preserve God's freedom and power from the constraints that Aristotelian philosophers placed on them. Nonetheless the inclination of rationally-minded theologians was to emphasize the regular reliability of nature's laws and natural events. This is what made rational knowledge of nature possible. These theologians gave way to the nonrational only reluctantly. Miracles had to be allowed, but given only as much room as was necessary.

The thirteenth century philosophical movement known as nominalism was a major part of the continuing dispute over God's power. Nominalism stressed the distinction between God's absolute power and God's ordained power in order to stress the freedom God had in making this world, to the point where the order of this world was portrayed as only one of a potentially infinite number of different worlds that God might have made out of God's infinite power. A result was to suggest that the regular patterns of this world were rather arbitrary, or at least certainly not necessary. The world was ruled not by "laws of nature but merely customs of God." (This belief in an infinity of universes is now a significant element in current arguments between scientists and theologians, as we will see.)

The order of this universe was therefore so dependent on God's utter freedom, that no amount of deduction could determine what it was like. Only taking a careful look could determine what in fact God had chosen to do. The intelligibility in things can be discovered only empirically rather than being deducible from first principles. The nominalists left open the possibility that God might have made this (or some) universe so tightly run by reliably regular secondary causes that there was no room for miracles. Nominalism argued for a need to investigate empirically to discover just what sort of order this universe does have.
It has turned out that the degree of orderliness in the universe discovered by modern empirical science is so great that miracles have become less plausible. The irony, therefore, is that the notion of God's sovereign freedom that first preserved space for God to work miracles ended up making necessary the empirical method which has cast doubt upon miracles.

DEISM AND MIRACLES

This long history of ideas about miracles in the west culminated in a rather striking movement in the 17th and 18th centuries known as “deism.” One way to identify it is to list four kinds of possible universes (we will see up to 11 kinds in the next chapter, so this list is not exhaustive). Most deists staked out their position at #3 below, although there were a few who maintained some version of position #2, as we will see.

TYPES OF RELIGION ACCORDING TO HOW GOD ACTS IN TIME AND SPACE

1. Strong supernaturalism (as in medieval Christianity and many religions in the world). This includes belief in a God who intervenes frequently in history and nature--i.e., performs many miracles, gives many signs, delivers messages through prophets. It also includes belief in constant activity by spirit-beings such as angels, saints, and demons. These beings are the cause of disease, insanity, strange weather, victory in war, odd natural occurrences (except where God is directly the cause). Pentecostals and charismatics are close to this.

2. Occasionalist supernaturalism (as in much of contemporary Christianity) where the supernatural does occur but only occasionally. It includes belief in God, as well as in angels, saints, and demons perhaps. But the work of God appears mostly in inner guidance and comfort and in the beauties of nature. The exceptions are regular miracles like the transubstantiation of the bread and wine in the Catholic mass, or irregular miracles like the healing of a sick person.

3. Naturalistic religion (perhaps with a cosmic God), which says that there are no miracles but that there is a God, Planner and Creator of the world. In this perspective God has made the world and given it over to human minds and hands to care for. In one version of this spirit is part of matter. In a more traditional Western version, the universe is material, but human beings are both material and spiritual. Their immortal souls will be judged by God after this life is over.

4. Naturalistic unreligion, which says that the natural universe is all that there is, as far as we can tell. There is therefore no good reason to believe in any supernatural or "spiritual" realities, neither God nor the soul, and certainly no miracles. Our powers of thought and choice are natural (i.e., part of nature, not part of a supernatural-spiritual form of being). This may be agnosticism, which is a claim that there is inadequate evidence to know whether there is a God. Or it may be atheism – a metaphysical naturalism – which claims there is no supernatural reality of any kind, including God.

Item #3 on this list was a crucial turning point in modern centuries. It broke with centuries of belief in the intervention in this natural world order by supernatural beings not bound by the laws of nature. Where previous generations had seen many signs of God and the supernatural interrupting the regular order of the world, deists saw only the regular order.

Evidently, there are different notions of just how God acts. A traditional distinction sometimes made is between the general action of God and the special action of God. Divine miracles, including a miraculous revelation of truth, are special actions of God that take place on the stage of history. But the Western religions also believe that God is the creator of everything, and that everything was planned by God from the very beginning. That means that all events in nature and history are manifestations of the general creative power of God and of the divine plans. Nature and history, then, have also been called a "general revelation" of God because they are part of the single creation by God. Miraculous revelation by contrast, including any notion of God acting to specially inspire certain writers, is then called "special revelation."

Deism was a name given to those 17th and 18th century thinkers who said true religion was rational religion. They proposed that the general revelation of creation was knowable to all rational people everywhere. They believed that their new sciences were uncovering the secrets of this “revelation.” Tired of the vicious wars of religion (1618-1648 was the Thirty Years' War), many sought a way to rise above bloody fights over religious doctrines and allegiance. The power of reason, they believed, was a common human heritage. Surely God wanted people to follow their God-given reason as the single and unifying guide, rather than follow the conflicting mass of religious traditions over which people were enthusiastically killing each other.

The major beliefs deists claimed could be known by all reasonable people and therefore should be common to all were articulated by Lord Herbert of Cherbury as early as 1645:
1. There is a God, whose supreme intelligence planned and created the marvelous order of nature which science was uncovering.
2. This God ought to be worshiped.
3. True worship of this God was awe and admiration of the divine handiwork and a dedication to live virtuously in accord with the rational order which God had made.
4. A person should repent of all failures to worship and live virtuously
5. God will reward and punish people in accord with how they live, in this life or the next.

Belief in miracles did not fit well with the world that science was uncovering. Some deists allowed a few miracles. In 1696 John Toland's "Christianity not Mysterious" only partially rejected miracles. Toland allowed that God did supernaturally reveal some things, but all of them are also knowable by reason. Toland rejected what he called absurdities such as "transubstantiation and other ridiculous fables." The Irish parliament banned Toland's book in spite of its intended support of Christianity, because it revised Christian beliefs to fit the test of reasonableness. Samuel Clarke in his Boyle lectures published in 1742 still reserved room for the revelatory activity of God, who selected some people as his teaching instruments, as well as for miracles in biblical times done by God or Jesus to confirm the validity of revelation.

Other deists, in keeping with their rationalist approach, sought a way around all miracle stories. Descartes responded to those who saw God's hand moving the clouds by saying that he would explain the nature of clouds through natural causes and remove any reason to marvel at them. Thomas Woolston, in his Discourse on Miracles (1728-1729) addressed the controversy over Jesus's miracles and proclaimed the stories to be allegories. To accept them as literally true, Woolston argued, would be to accept absurdities, improbabilities, and incredibilities. Matthew Tindall in his Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730) challenged earlier works of Clarke in support of revelation, by arguing that no external revelation could really be needed, because only reason could select which of the many purported revelations of the world's religions were true, and reason could do this only by first knowing through rational inquiry which beliefs are true. The 17th and 18th centuries saw many specific arguments against belief in any miracles at all. (Thomas Jefferson eliminated miracles from his version of the bible.)

The method of the argument was as important as the conclusions. Descartes argued mostly on the basis of logical analysis. Even if our sense experience (evidence) did not confirm that God made the world to operate with complete regularity, as it seemed to, we would still know from reason that as God is immutable God would not act differently at some times and places but rather would continue to sustain the same laws of nature always and everywhere. Boyle similarly offered the argument that God was powerful and intelligent enough to get things right the first time around, without later miraculous tinkering with it.

Deists' method of argument did not rest on logic alone, however; the place of evidence increased in importance. Hume spoke for many over a century later when he cast doubt on miracles through an appeal to consistent evidence. Hume argued that the most highly probable knowledge we have is of the patterns or laws of nature. A miracle, by definition an exception to those laws, is therefore a highly improbable event. Especially good evidence is needed to believe something improbable. Given the unreliability of second hand testimony, given the fact that religions which we consider to be false also make claims of miracles, given the need to balance even our own first hand experience of what may be a miracle against the possibility of trickery, mistake, or illusion, there is altogether good reason to be skeptical of any miracle. In 1872 Francis Galton even used statistical analyses to refute the belief that prayers evoked miracles. His studies showed that in spite of their prayers, the clergy lived no longer than physicians or lawyers; that ships with missionaries sank as often as others; and that religious lands had their full share of evil. (A statistical approach has been used recently to determine people get better more quickly if they are prayed for.)
Of all the English texts from the Enlightenment, the one most often quoted today on the topic of miracles is chapter X in David Hume's book, An Inquiry into Human Understanding. Its basic argument is summarized just above here. Hume thought that miracles were highly dubious. (In class we will look at both Hume and a response to Hume.)

THE ABANDONMENT OF MIRACLES BY SOME MODERN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIANS

In spite of many modern defenses of belief in miracles, this belief has diminished in recent centuries, as we have seen. Not everyone would follow Hume's exact reasoning, or have defined miracles in just the way that he did. But his argument can stand as an illustration of a general tendency to substitute belief in a natural order of causality in place of supernatural interventions. As natural philosophers (scientists) pursued explanations through reliably regular patterns of nature, they were successful enough to encourage an expansion of their basic hope, that the events of nature would indeed prove to be intelligible in this way.
William Gilbert (1544-1603) thought that the movement of a compass was part of the natural power of magnetism. The activity of the heart and blood was to William Harvey (1578-1657) not something done by a supernatural force but by a natural "spirit." The appearance of a comet to Edmund Halley (1656-1742) was not a special sign sent by God but part of an orbit that could be explained by natural causes. A lightning bolt was to Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) a manifestation of a natural fluid to be called electricity, not a warning from God. The irregularities in the speeds of Saturn and Jupiter was to Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Laplace (1749-1827), a natural oscillation, not a sign that the universe needed divine tending to keep it running smoothly as Newton had once supposed.

Perhaps it was in reaction to all this intellectual skepticism about miracles that there was a resurgence of popular belief in the miraculous. The historian Keith Thomas claims that in the 16th and 17th centuries belief in healings and prophecies increased enormously. Witch hunts represented a widespread belief in active preternatural beings and in the reality of pacts with real demons. Nonetheless the supernatural was being squeezed out of many things. God was becoming "the God of the gaps," to use a 20th century expression. Where there was still a gap in human knowledge of natural causes, there God was said to act.

There was also the disconcerting evidence of the primitive tribes of the world, knowledge which continued to increase with the expansion of colonization. These tribes, whose ignorance seemed enormous to the self-satisfied Europeans, believed in many spirits and much magic, of kinds not too different from traditional Christian beliefs in saints, demons, and the powers of holy or cursed objects. This same evidence moved deists to be skeptical of magic and miracle alike as primitive beliefs. It also produced atheists, who identified all religion, even deism, with superstition. By the end of the 18th century, In many educated circles, the universities in particular, there existed a good proportion of what a theologian named Schleiermacher would call the "cultured despisers of religion."

SCHLEIERMACHER AND LIBERAL THEOLOGY
      Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) addressed the “cultured despisers” of religion, in his great work of 1799, On Religion. Schleiermacher defined religion as an intuition of the reality of God; and he defined God as the source of all unity. Whenever a person had a sense of the ultimate fundamental oneness of all things, said Schleiermacher, this was”God-consciousness.” This position about God was quite traditionally theistic in one aspect. What distinguishes theism from polytheism is the belief that ultimately there are not many powers at work in the universe but only One, the belief that behind the multiplicity of forms and events is a single Power with a single Plan and Purpose.

Facing what to him was the awkward fact that most ordinary Christians had beliefs much like those of the primitive tribes of the world about supernatural agents at work, Schleiermacher declared that this was not true religion, neither in primitive cultures nor even in any European ones. His analysis of religion rejected miracles, calling them antithetical to true religion.

Schleiermacher argued the person who first had at least an implicit feeling for the oneness of nature that flowed from God would then be inclined to become more scientific. Science expected to find a oneness to nature, in the sense that it expected to find that all of nature's patterns formed a reliable and intelligible unity, that it all fit together, as we might say. So science, he claimed, was built on a prior implicit religiousness awareness of ultimate oneness..

Belief in miracles, however, represented a feeling about reality directly contrary to belief in God, said Schleiermacher, perhaps unconsciously echoing the ancient Stoics. Belief in miracles implied there was no ultimate unity but only a bits-and-pieces universe in which supernatural acts of God mingled with natural events without final coherence. Belief in miracles was a belief that God, whose truest nature was to be the source of unity, would supposedly go against that unity. Every belief in the interruption of nature's patterns by a supernatural power was even an anti-religious belief, as Schleiermacher defined true religion:

"Where . . . a conception of miracles is commonly found, namely, in conditions where there is least knowledge of nature, there, too, the fundamental feeling [of God-consciousness] appears to be weakest and most ineffectual. . . . It follows from this that the most perfect representation of omnipotence would be a view of the world which made no use of such an idea."

Schleiermacher did not consider the response Augustine might give, that the ultimate unity rests in God’s providential plan for the universe. God could include both the natural regularities and divine intervention in one single plan. So Schleiermacher’s rejection of miracles is probably as much an acquiescence to skepticism of his times as it was an entirely coherent position.

Schleiermacher applied his rejection of miracles to basic Christian doctrines and reinterpreted them in non-miraculous ways. The incarnation of God in Jesus was not the descent of a supernatural being into human history. The doctrine should instead be understood as an expression of belief that of all people Jesus had the greatest God-consciousness, and was therefore the one in whom the creation of the human reached perfection. Because of this Jesus is the one who should be accepted as the truest guide to full and genuine religiousness. Similarly belief in a life after death should be thought of as a symbol of human confidence that the meaning of our lives is somehow ultimately vindicated, rather than as the continued existence of a spiritual soul after death.

TWENTIETH CENTURY LIBERAL THOUGHT
      The reinterpretation of Christian doctrines to eliminate any miraculous element came to be called "liberal theology." By the beginning of the twentieth century there was a theological combination known as Neo-orthodoxy, stemming from the writings of Karl Barth. Barth's ideas often seemed to be traditionally supernaturalistic in that he asserted the centuries-old doctrine that true faith was the product of God's grace, that God gave this grace to those whom God chose. Yet his way of stating these and other traditional doctrines was rather Schleiermachian. His belief in “eternal life,” for example, does not quite affirm traditional belief in an individual life beyond the grave:

What is the meaning of the Christian hope . . . ? A life after death? An event apart from death? A tiny soul which, like a butterfly, flutters away above the grave and is still preserved somewhere, in order to live on immortally? That was how the heathen looked on the life after death. But that is not the Christian hope. . . . Resurrection means not the continuation of this life, but life's completion.

Similarly, in the late 1930's the German scripture scholar and theologian Rudolph Bultmann gave wide currency to the expression "demythologize," something that he thought Christians needed to do. If there is a story in the bible that tells of a miraculous act in which the laws of nature are suspended or exceeded by some divine activity, the contemporary Christian is to understand that this is only a mythological way of speaking that was appropriate for people of long ago. Contemporary people are supposed to know better.

The word "demythologize" stands for any attempt to reinterpret religious tradition in such a way as to exclude divine interruptions of the lawful course of nature. The ancient Stoics were demythologizing when they declared that “Zeus” was just a name for the everlastingly reliable divine Logos within the universe. Similarly the deists who wished to do without miracles were all engaged in demythologizing religious beliefs. The overall result of the development of science in the last few centuries is represented by the way an Anglican chaplain can try to popularize religion without miracles:

An outmoded theology which smuggles God into the system to interfere with the laws of nature is much less sophisticated than a scientific account which sees all the emergent richness of life as the true glory of chemistry. The scientific account has the touch of true mystery.

The presence of God is found implicit within the bounds of nature, here in its chemistry, not in any miraculous exceptions to the natural order.

There are many liberal theologians in the 20th century. They have transformed traditional beliefs in the miraculous intervention of God into human modes of expressing a general faith that there is a deep-down presence of God in everything, everyone, and every event. This God is not such as to be a busybody, as Minucius Felix long ago put it, but the incomprehensible Ultimate about which the human person can say only enough to affirm generally that this God is the grounds for human confidence that life is ultimately meaningful.

Whether religion without miracles is adequate for people is another question. There is reason to think that liberal religion has little appeal for most people, precisely because it deprives people of a sense that there is a God who is actively present in a person’s life, able to intervene at least in some even secret way, to offer help and strength and more. In the chapter on evolution (ch. 6) we will look at some of the criticisms of evolution which are motivated precisely by a desire to save the idea that God intervenes in nature.

When the movement known as “fundamentalism” first took form in the early 20th century in the U.S. it defined itself precisely as opponents of various kinds of liberal theology. Where Schleiermacher and others demythologized the Bible, the fundamentalists took the Bible literally. The Bible said that Jesus worked miracles, so liberal theology is wrong. The Bible says God raised Jesus from the dead, so liberal theology is wrong.

[As a side point, it is easy to think that all Christians took the Bible as strictly literal history until modern science began to question things. That is not true. An example of this is Augustine’s interpretation of the chapter 1 of Genesis. The best Greek science of Augustine’s time conflicted with aspects of the story of creation there. In fact, the story of creation in 6 days has what might be internal contradictions if taken literally. (How does one get night and day and then not get sun, moon, and stars until three days later?) Augustine insisted on paying exact attention to the precise words of Genesis. But he argued that this would show God was using figurative language or poetic language, not historical language, with layers of meaning which God placed there to guide to be discerned by educated people of later generations.]

MIRACLES: Partial Bibliography [These titles are fairly self-explanatory.]
Burns, R. M., The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1981.
Fridrichsen, Anton Johnson, The Problem of Miracle in Primitive Christianity. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972.
Geisler, Norman, Miracles and the Modern Mind: A Defense of Biblical Miracles. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1992.
Kee, Howard Clark, Medicine, Miracle, and Magic in New Testament Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Kee, Howard Clark, Miracle in the Early Christian World: A Study in Sociohistorical Method. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
Larmer, Robert A., ed. Questions of Miracle. McGill Queen’s University Press, 1996. Brief?
McInerny, Ralph M., Miracles, A Catholic View. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1986.
Tracy, Thomas F., ed., The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations. Univ.Park, Pa: Penn State UP, 1994.
Ward, Benedicta, Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record, and Event. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 1982.