C.S. Lewis: His Theology and Philosophy - Lesson 18

Dr. Michael Peterson
C.S. Lewis: His Theology and Philosophy
ap530-18
Miracles (Part 6)
Lesson Transcript

I stood this whole time. I don't think of sitting down. I need to. Yeah. We left off for the break with the idea that maybe violation miracles ultimately are not the exclusive way and maybe not even the primary way of thinking about God's action in the world. The nature of divine activity may not be reducible to violation of miracles. And as we mentioned before the break. Louis, if my memory is correct, it's a little bit yet ahead of us in the book does begin to say, really, I don't see why we should call it violations. If God is the creator of nature. There's nothing alien about God to nature. And he has the power of agency. A supernatural, all powerful agent can bring about results in the field of existence we call nature, but it's hardly violating anything. My friend, keep talking about the book. I'm trying to finish with roots because we're really bearing down on it hard. And my friend Michael Ruth is fond of saying, Well, nature runs by unbroken law. Well, science has to frame methodological naturalism that way. It's method. It has to look for laws for why things happen. But Michael is also a naturalist, and he has the a priori eye and the advanced commitment. There's nothing but nature. And no wonder it runs by in broken laws. There's nothing else to, you know. So you try to kind of give a little prestige to your naturalist philosophical commitment by saying this is science. But as we were talking about earlier before the break, methodological naturalism really doesn't affirm or deny any religious claims. It just is the scientific method focusing on can we find natural causes for natural phenomena that are under investigation and can we formulate law like connections, a lawful connection between cause? And effect.

And so in the in the whole conversation about whether the word violation is even appropriate if you're a theist and I think it's a really interesting comment, it's probably not. Here's how I would. Here's how I had approached that. Lewis doesn't quite have the language for this. He's a little bit too smart to even take questions. Violation middle of the book. He's still a bit under the human spell of accepting too many definitions that HUME has. Here's how I think about it. HUME And regularity theory of causality. Says that what we call a cause and what we call in effect is regularity of occurrence. And so scientific laws, what are they really? They're economical summaries of what experience? Always reports that when see happens, it happens. Well, frankly, that's nothing stronger than a coincidence, if you think about it. That's a really anemic and inadequate view of causality. And we've got it. We've got to start there and build a conceptual framework. That causality, if you think about it, is the basis of law. And so all HUME has said is that laws are irregularity based on coincidences. And therefore, when we explain something, it's just bringing some observations under a known law. But the known law Dig deeper is nothing but a set of coincidences have been summarized in a statement called Scientific law. And this this is this is, I think is a correct hierarchy that a law picks out, cause causal activity and explanation cites at least one law, if not more. So what does it mean to explain? Bring something under a law? What's that law? A summary of causal activity of some objects or their interaction in the world. But if you have a regularity theory, you mean regularity theory? You're really saying one of two things.

And if you get into HUME enough, he's saying both in really weird ways. Number one, you can't know any more than just regularity. That's all the human mind is capable of. As a really strict empiricist, you can know the cause and effect, but then connection causality traditionally is a connection between them. I'd like to symbolize it like that, that this is a power or force here. It's just a conjunction. When this happens, that happens. So the weakness in the view of causality causes other problems. But epistemological humans for HUME, the empiricist, you can't know the empirical. That's the cause and effect, but not what binds them, not what connects them. Also, HUME denies this is harder part of him to understand. He denies that reality's glued together, the way I'm saying. Anyway, that's getting too technical. I'm going to I'm going to back off. So he's got both an ontological and epistemological reason why regularity theory is the right theory. Most people know the epistemological reason based on his his empiricism, his epistemological empiricism, the other the ontological denial that the world is glued together tightly is there but harder to find. Even a modern day human, John Mackey at Oxford, who died in the eighties early eighties, wrote the Miracle Theism. Like it's a miracle that's stupid. Few have survived this long. So miracle Theism. John Mackey wrote another book in sort of in Philosophy Science called The Cement of the Universe. And the idea is, if you're a human, you know that the universe lacks what was traditionally considered the causal cement to make it hang together. I think that's really so. Lewis goes a long way with the human kind of granting the human vocabulary and sets of distinctions that that sort of frame up the issue.

And only now, I think, with the discussion of whether violation is good vocabulary. Are we seeing Lewis be more critical of the starting points he granted early in the book, But I don't think he's ever sufficiently critical. I think if he would hear this wonderfully eloquent presentation, he would immediately, you know, agree. But because this this is so friendly to his own realism and his own fears of what I'm trying to say here, that the reason the reason we do, in fact, have regularity, you have to assume, is some force, some causal power that makes the cause produce the effect. So if you if you take this view, you get let's call these events this why HUME calls them an event called caused an event caused called an effect. That's all humans got going. But you need something else. So I'm going to call NFP, which is the nature of a particular. So a total explanation. You would need both of these things. The reason. In a context populated by certain particular objects with their own natures, powers, properties, dispositions to act and react, something that's ontologically built in to things in the world that populate the world. Once you circumscribe your situation that you're going to try to explain, you're going to give an explanatory effort to explain. The reason a cause produces this effect viewed kind of like as discrete events is because they're happening within a within a context where various particulars have certain natures. Now, for practical purposes, sometimes we emphasize one thing like the event as the cause, but sometimes we say the particular is the cause. But both together are the combined cause. If I had a glass of water here on this on the table and I the event of my hand moving would be see hand moves and strikes the the glass.

So glass falls. Then the next event is the glass breaks. And you say, Why did it do that? Why? Why? It's a request for explanation and just insight in lay it lay scientific terms. I could say it broke because it was fragile. Well, to refer to the fragility of P is part of the nature of pain. But to drop and to break. What if it was made of steel? Have a different nature. So for different practical purposes, I might refer to the nature of the objects involved, or I might refer. Well, it broke because I hit it and we accept that because in the background we say, well, then it was something that was fragile, breakable. So in practical situations, you never know what's going to be emphasized, the triggering event or the particulars involved, but they're distinct conceptual items. And what the human view of causality, which was which was imperialistic until the middle and really about the seventies was imperialistic, neglects the whole idea that there are natures of things because nature sounds metaphysical, sounds spooky. So if you if you view the universe as just populated by events and then we bridge them by connecting them with just conjunction, then you might write a book like John Mackey. So man, it needs some cement. Right. All these events, all these discrete events need some cement. But a more traditional metaphysic of science. There's going to be natural objects have natures. Those natures are the the residence of the powers, properties and dispositions. And those powers, properties and dispositions like fragility don't display all the time. They display under certain triggering events like being dropped from a sufficient height that'll trigger fragility to come out. So so we look at that way and you say, well, from a theistic point of view, how are we going to go with the question of miracles with a deeper, stronger view of scientific law? Now, laws aren't just citations of conjunction, in effect, coincidence or or mere regularities.

They now have a causal power. So in terms of regularity, you've got causal power as an alternative view of causality. So laws are going to be much strengthened in our concept of what they are. Now they're picking out causal powers. They're not summarizing regular areas of occurrence. And so explanations take on a richer character as well. So looking at a realist, you know, of purely philosophy, science, how do we kind of put the question of miracles into that whole situation? I would say something like this, that looking at laws. Scientific laws even conceived realistically realist ontology, realist, metaphysical like I'm trying to suggest things have real natures. They have an implied. Cater asparagus claws. Right. See? I'm so clever. It's mid-afternoon, and we need a little pick me up. And for me, it's always a little classical Latin. Caters, paribus. We get the word, etc., from that. Right At caterers and things. Caterers. Things. So Paribas shoot par on a golf course, shoot equal to what the norm is. So caterers, Paribas, things being equal. So this law or any given law, let's make a singular a law in a given law has an implied QS meaning it will operate and that the the natures of the things will display their powers and dispositions to act and react just as the law says. As long as all elements of their situation remain constant, a law only speaks into a caterer's paribus situation. So all things being equal, when this triggering event occurs, two things that have these natures, they will produce these effects. With me on that, there's always Keita's purpose, which means if anything happens in a defined situation where things are not equal, they don't remain constant. There's no reason to think the law holds the law ready to apply.

In other words, you get. Known caterers. It's not the case that all things are equal. And so let's take the case of a miracle. It before I do that, let me say this. If things remain equal and they in the normal causes don't produce the normal effects, that'd be weird. Means you didn't get the law right. But if you got the law right and things remain equal, the only reason that the normal effect would not occur is because some other elements, some other agent, is acting in the situation. So how do I want to put this a miracle, then? Seems to me is tampering. Not with the law. It's tampering with Carter's purpose clause. So was God going around violating laws. Okay. You know, if you want to take the human definition and impose it on the discussion, that's what HUME would like. That's what Lewis agrees to do. Beginning of the book. That's fine, but be taking a scalpel and conceptually and kind of carving this apart just a little more. It strikes me what God is doing. He's he's preventing all things from being equal. When water is left to be water, it doesn't turn into wine. Because everything everything's equal. Water doesn't have in its nature any way to do that. So something unusual, something from outside the normal situation that you can hold constant within which that cause of water being water can never produce wine out of itself. You've got another element, and I say an agent, a supernatural, a divine agent who's not violating anything. The law is a law. If things remain equal, he's just saying they're not going to be equal for this event. Because I have a purpose. Teleological explanation, deeper than mechanical explanation. I have a purpose, and I'm going to do this.

So in a way, it's not even a violation. Unexpected. Strange. I'm with you on all that. But there is a sort of technicality from philosophy of science that really, I think, keeps it from a miracle, from being a violation, has to do with the creator's purpose of making sense. Okay. Um, I'm not sure we have time for much else. But I did say in this discussion that, you know, an outside agent to the situation, to the normal situation, an outside agent might have purposes, a teleological orientation toward things to achieve some end or some goal, and for that reason, might interfere with what we would call the normal mechanics. The mechanical explanation that science would normally offer. That brings up this whole interesting idea that when we say we think something is or is not a miracle, part of it is not about whether we can verify that something happened that's a violation or an interruption of the normal. But we have interpretive frameworks, concepts that tell us about this agent's purposes. That we bring to events that could seem unusual or like miracles. And part of the of the discriminating judgment, whether we're willing to say this is a miracle or probably is a miracle, is partly based on health. It's an interpretive framework. That's where Lewis is going to get into the next part of the book, talking about how he looks at New Testament miracles, miracles of the old creation, miracles of the new creation is really pretty interesting, but nobody ever talks about it. And we want to do that next time. Because you think about do I have any obligation to listen to any religious person at all saying what they think is or is not a miracle? They performed the miracle at their church or they witnessed.

I think I had to be appropriately reserved, open, maybe, but I'm not into miracle poppers. I need a scheme, a theologically rich and nuanced set of interpretations, out of which I say, What purposes would a divine agent have in this or that? And of course, the clinical study that Louis wants to do is the New Testament. And but he's even categorizing miracles there. And so different claims to miracle, even in our day with any miracles of the old creation miracles, you know. So nothing is apart from an interpretive scheme, the somewhat teleological and something seems against God's purposes based on classical theological understanding. I'm of no you know, I'm under no obligation to just say, man, I'm intimidated by that and I'm going to agree to that. You know, So a theological skepticism may be okay, too, but he's not trying to get us to be more understanding of how he sorts all that out. When we talk about the next several chapters to finish up the book. So how's this for total professionalism? I brought this puppy right in on time. In real time. Not seminary time. It's 345, which is our listed dismissal. Seminary time, I think, is more merged to eternity, and it's more vague.