Atheism and Theism 5111 Miracles
The discussion in section 9 on the argument from religious experience led on
naturally to a brief discussion of Pascal’s Wager and James’s ‘Will to Believe’.
It should also lead on to a discussion of miracles, in so far as if one did wit-
ness a miracle, this would surely count as having a religious experience. Still
if there really are miracles, perception of them would usually be by the usual
organs of perception, eyes, ears and so on. So ‘experience’ here would not refer
to a special mode of acquiring knowledge, though the knowledge acquired (if
itwas acquired) would be of something naturalistically inexplicable. Discus-
sion of the reality of miracles, and of if or how we could be assured that a
miracle really occurred, usually concerns itself with the reliability of witnesses
and this will lead on in section 12 to some remarks on the New Testament.
One type of alleged miracle is that of ‘conversion experience’, as in the case
of St Paul already mentioned. These, as William James remarked, certainly
occur.^89 On the other hand a sceptic will put the experience down to natural
causes, and so while agreeing that the experience existed will deny that any
supernatural cause of it existed or that putative perceptions involved were
veridical. Conversion experiences are inevitably subjective, and our attitude to
reports of them will depend on our views about the argument from religious
experience. The sceptic may agree that the experience is in fact had but will
doubt that it constitutes a perception of anything external. On the other hand
there are claimed to be inter-subjectively observable miracles, for example the
feeding of the five thousand or the appearance of angels at the battle of
Mons, to take two very different examples.
Such a miracle as the feeding of the five thousand clearly involves a viola-
tion of the laws of nature. Some philosophers have contended that this makes
the notion of a miracle a self-contradictory one, on the grounds that an
exception to a putative law of nature would show that the putative law was
not really a law and that laws are universal regularities. This objection can be
got over by supposing a clause in the statement of any law of nature ‘except
when there is divine intervention’. Or to put it otherwise, the laws of nature
tell us how the universe regularly works, even though there can be miraculous
exceptions. A theist might say that the laws of nature are imposed by God on
the universe as a whole by one comprehensive creative act, whereas miracles
would be exceptional events imposed by God for particular reasons at particu-
lar locations in space–time. Such a notion is not obviously contradictory
though I sense a problem of whether a truly omnipotent and omniscient God
would not be able to create a universe in which the laws of nature would be
such that the desired exceptional events occurred without breaking a suitably
chosen set of laws, and whether God, for aesthetic reasons if for no other,