Miracles and the Laws of Nature

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Summary

Lewis offers his working definition of a miracle: an interference with Nature by a supernatural power. He is careful to distinguish this from the common but mistaken idea that a miracle 'breaks' or 'suspends' the laws of nature, as though natural law were a fragile set of rules that occasionally fail. Instead, Lewis argues, natural laws describe how nature's stock of events will regularly interact given whatever total set of events actually exists at any moment; they do not forbid a new event from being introduced into that stock from beyond nature altogether.

His example is the miracle at Cana: once water becomes wine by a supernatural act, every ordinary law of chemistry and biology continues to apply to that wine exactly as it would to any other wine — it can be drunk, it will intoxicate, it will be digested according to perfectly normal processes. The laws of nature are not suspended for a single instant; rather, a new fact has been fed into nature's system, after which the laws immediately resume their normal jurisdiction over it. A miracle interrupts the sequence of events nature would otherwise have produced on her own, but it does not for one moment interrupt the laws that govern how any event, however it got there, subsequently behaves.

This picture, Lewis argues, actually protects the coherence of Nature rather than threatening it: the scientist's work of discovering how events regularly relate to each other is completely undisturbed by the possibility that some event, on rare occasions, was fed into the system from outside rather than being wholly generated within it. Miracle and natural law, properly understood, are not in competition; miracle supplies new content, and law describes how any content whatever, once present, will behave.

Key points

• A miracle should be defined as an interference with Nature by a supernatural power, not as a 'suspension' or 'breaking' of natural law.
• Natural laws describe how events will interact given whatever total content actually exists; they do not forbid new content from being introduced from beyond Nature.
• In the miracle at Cana, the wine that results is fully, immediately, and permanently governed by ordinary chemistry and biology — nothing about the laws themselves is ever suspended.
• Miracle and natural law are therefore not rivals: miracle supplies new events, and law describes how any event, however it entered nature, will subsequently behave — which is why scientific study of nature is untouched by the possibility of miracle.

Illustrations & analogies

• The turning of water into wine at Cana is examined in careful detail: the new wine is shown to obey ordinary chemistry and biology completely and immediately, which is Lewis's proof that no law was ever suspended, only a new event introduced.

Related Scripture

• John 2:1-11

For reflection and discussion

1. Does Lewis's distinction between 'introducing a new event' and 'breaking a law' change how you think about what a miracle actually involves?
2. If the laws of nature are never actually suspended, even during a miracle, does that make miracles more or less remarkable to you?