Questions of Miracle

Daniel M. Kolos is president of Benben Books, a company publishing
scholarly works.

This collection of essays illustrates the philosophical diversity
surrounding the topic of miracles. The preface provides a useful, brief
history of writings on miracles, from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis. Much
of what follows focuses on Hume’s statement that miracles are not
possible by nature and on the claim that oral history that tells of
miracles is unreliable. In Chapter 3, Larmer defines “miracle” and
“law of nature,” but not “God,” who, he says, “could alter the
stuff of nature.” Neil MacGill begins the process of defining God in
Chapter 6, and Christine Overall completes it in Chapter 15, with the
clever twist that if miracles exist, then God does not.

Neurological researchers have addressed the miracle in terms of the
split-brain theory, the alleged separation of emotion/intuition from
intellect/imagination, unwittingly begun by the Greek philosophers.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his book A Crack in the Cosmic Egg, places the
miraculous in a context not only of religious faith but also of cultural
expectation. From this perspective, miracles are a consequence of a
shared belief and a mythopoeic mind. This book demonstrates that the
debate over the existence of miracles belongs in the scientific arena,
which continues to expand our knowledge of the laws of nature.