April 2013 - Science and Miracles Go Together

In rejecting the idea of miracles or supernatural intervention from the realm of possibility, C.S. Lewis argues that some scientists have mistaken a partial system of reality, Nature, for the whole of all that exists.  He writes,
      "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 . . . . 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 in
      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 had 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.  For if the natural situation by itself, and the natural situation plus something
      else, yielded only the same result, it would be then that we should be faced with a lawless
      and unsystematic universe. . . . this perhaps helps to make a little clearer what the laws of
      Nature really are . . . .They produce no events: they state the pattern to which every event
      . . . . must conform, just as the rules of arithmetic state the pattern to which all transactions
      with money must conform. . . . The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the
      pattern to which events conform but by feeding new events into that pattern  . . . .The
      reason (some) find it intolerable is that they start by taking Nature to be the whole of
      reality.  and they are sure that all reality must be interrelated and consistent.  I agree with
      them.  But I think they have mistaken a partial system within reality, namely Nature, for
      the whole. . . .The great complex event called Nature, and the new particular event introduced
      into it by the miracle, are related by their common origin in God. . . .By definition, miracles
      must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature; but if they are real they must, in the
      very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at
      some deeper level."

An example of Lewis's logic is the miraculous conception of Jesus in the virgin, Mary, and the natural nine-month pregnancy which followed.  Both had their origin in God.  God's natural laws and His miracles go hand in hand.

                                    "Seek the LORD and his strength; seek his presence continually!
                                    Remember the wondrous works that he has done, his miracles."
                                                                   I Chronicles 16:11-23 (ESV)