“If I put six pennies into a drawer on Monday and six more on Tuesday, the laws decree that—other things being equal—I shall find twelve pennies there on Wednesday. But if the drawer has been robbed I may in fact find only two. Something will have been broken (the lock of the drawer or the laws of England) but the laws of arithmetic will not have been broken.”
— C.S. Lewis, Miracles, Chapter 8, p. 60.
I came across this argument yesterday in a video of John Lennox discussing how miracles are a disruption of what we call natural law. Lennox clarified “natural law” as the manmade observations of the ways nature appears to consistently act where mathematical laws are absolute. They must be obeyed.
Lennox said that if we were to have people raised from the dead on a regular basis, human resurrection would not be seen as miraculous. It would be an everyday occurrence and seen as normal. So miracles aren’t necessarily the breaking of a law like 2+2=5, it is simply an odd occurrence, something we haven’t seen before.
In the early 1960s, there was a TV show called The Magic Land of Allakazam (1960–1964). At the end of one of the episodes, magician, Mike Wilson, said he would show everyone something no one had ever seen before. He would then make it disappear so that it would never be seen again. What was it? He produced a peanut still in the shell. He broke it open to show us the peanut inside then ate it and we never saw it again.
What Mike Wilson was doing was demonstrating that we define our words incorrectly sometimes. What sounded like the prediction of a miracle was of something very commonplace. Like Lewis’s example, it wasn’t the breaking of the laws of nature because it was an everyday occurrence.
So, when the Bible speaks of Jesus rising from the dead, it is only seen as a miracle because few had seen a resurrection before. But, God can do whatever He wishes with the universe He created. In fact raising people from the dead: the son of the widow of Nain, Lazarus, wasn’t unique, just rare.
One of my favorite quotes of Pastor Chuck Smith of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa is: “If you can accept the first verse of the Bible, the rest is easy.” What he was saying was, “If we have a God Who acts, we should expect acts of God.”
If God exists as the Creator of the universe, then He has authority over His creation. The laws of nature describe how the physical world ordinarily operates; they do not establish limits on what its Creator can do. If God created life, restoring life is not beyond His power. So, the mere existence of God justifies miracles.
The most important biblical miracle, of course, is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The apostle Paul identifies it as central to Christianity. The early proclamation that Jesus had risen, the testimony of individuals and groups who claimed to have seen Him, and the rapid growth of the early Christian movement provide historical evidence that must be addressed. Although historians debate how best to explain these events, the resurrection remains the foundation of the Christian claim that God has acted supernaturally (outside the norm) in history.
1 Cor. 15:3-8 (ESV) 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
Why is this important?
At its foundation, Believers Armed and Dangerous is an apologetics-based blog, a blog about defending the faith. Some of the posts are certainly “how should we then live” or “how can we then live,” but at its core this is a blog about apologetics.
Many non-believers depend on the general lack of understanding of Christians to press us into a corner, to ask questions we are unprepared to answer. BAAD is here to help answer some of these challenges. The problem of miracles is one of those.
