The Scope of This Book

Big idea

Summary

Lewis begins the argument proper where the Preface left off: experience alone can never settle whether miracles occur, because experience has to be interpreted, and how we interpret it depends on a philosophy we bring to it beforehand. If a strange event is reported, a reader who already believes only Nature exists will always classify it as illusion, fraud, or as-yet-unexplained natural law; a reader open to something beyond Nature may take it as a genuine breach. Neither reader is being dishonest; each is reading the same facts through a different prior conviction.

He presses the point with the example of a dead man who is reported to have come back to life. However carefully the deathbed, the burial, and the reappearance are documented, a convinced Naturalist has an escape route available at every stage: perhaps death was never quite complete, perhaps the witnesses were mistaken, perhaps there is a natural explanation not yet discovered. None of these responses is unreasonable in itself; the point is that they are always available, precisely because Naturalism has already decided the outcome before the specific evidence is examined.

Lewis is not saying historical evidence for particular miracles is worthless — he will use it later, especially for the Resurrection. He is saying it cannot do its work until the prior philosophical question has been faced honestly: does anything exist which is not simply Nature, and could that something ever act within Nature from outside it? That is the only question this book sets out to answer, and Lewis promises the reader that once it is answered, the door to weighing the actual historical evidence for particular miracles will finally be open — a task he explicitly leaves mostly to other books and to the reader's own further study.

Key points

• No amount of historical evidence can settle the miracle question by itself, because the evidence always has to be read through a prior view of what kind of universe we live in.
• A committed Naturalist can always find a non-miraculous explanation for any reported event, not because the evidence demands it but because Naturalism has ruled out the alternative in advance.
• This does not make historical evidence worthless; it means the philosophical question of whether the supernatural exists has to be settled first.
• The whole book is therefore organized to answer one question before any other: can anything other than Nature exist and act within it?

Illustrations & analogies

• A reported resurrection is used to show how a Naturalist reader will always have an escape hatch — a natural explanation, however strained — available at every stage of the story, simply because the alternative has already been ruled out.

For reflection and discussion

1. Have you ever noticed yourself explaining away evidence for something because you had already decided in advance it couldn't be true? What was it?
2. Lewis says neither the believer nor the skeptic is being dishonest when they read the same facts differently. Do you find that a fair way to describe most disagreements about miracles?