Miracles: A Preliminary Study

“Those who assume that miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by looking into the texts; we know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question.”

In this quote, C. S. Lewis accuses the critics of miracles of committing the philosophical fallacy of begging the question, because their a priori assumptions have already ruled out any other possible conclusion. He will return to this argument throughout the book, highlighting the numerous ways in which objections to supernaturalism rely on unproven assumptions.

“Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true. It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight.”

This is part of Lewis’s argument from reason, in which he argues that the naturalistic position is self-contradictory: If human thought is merely the result of chemical processes in the brain, as naturalism suggests, then there is no reason to trust its conclusions.

“If our argument has been sound, acts of reasoning are not interlocked with the total interlocking system of Nature as all its other items are interlocked with one another.”

Here, Lewis continues the argument begun in the quote above. If our powers of reason give us confidence that they are trustworthy, over against the naturalist position, then Lewis believes they must be rooted in something beyond the non-rational processes of nature, as a partial participation in the eternal reason of God.