3. Probability of Miracles.
A. We acknowledge that, so long as we confine our attention to nature, there is a presumption against miracles. Experience testifies to the uniformity of natural law. A general uniformity is needful, in order to make possible a rational calculation of the future, and a proper ordering of life.
See Butler, Analogy, part ii, chap. ii; F. W. Farrar, Witness of History to Christ, 3-45; Modern Scepticism, 1:179-227; Chalmers, Christian Revelation, 1:47. G. D. B. Pepper: “Where there is no law, no settled order, there can be no miracle. The miracle presupposes the law, and the importance assigned to miracles is the recognition of the reign of law. But the making and launching of a ship may be governed by law, no less than the sailing of the ship after it is launched. So the introduction of a higher spiritual order into a merely natural order constitutes a new and unique event.” Some Christian apologists have erred in affirming that the miracle was antecedently as probable as any other event, whereas only its antecedent improbability gives it value as a proof of revelation. Horace: “Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus Inciderit.”
B. But we deny that this uniformity of nature is absolute and universal. (a) It is not a truth of reason that can have no exceptions, like the axiom that a whole is greater than its parts. (b) Experience could not warrant a belief in absolute and universal uniformity, unless experience were identical with absolute and universal knowledge. (c) We know, on the contrary, from geology, that there have been breaks in this uniformity, such as the introduction of vegetable, animal and human life, which cannot be accounted for, except by the manifestation in nature of a supernatural power.
(a) Compare the probability that the sun will rise to-morrow morning with the certainty that two and two make four. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 158, indignantly denies that there is any “must” about the uniformity of nature: “No one is entitled to say a priorithat any given so-called miraculous event is impossible.” Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:84—“There is no evidence for the statement that the mass of the universe is a definite and unchangeable quantity”; 108, 109—“Why so confidently assume that a rigid and monotonous uniformity is the only, or the highest, indication of order, the order of an ever living Spirit, above all? How is it that we depreciate machine-made articles, and prefer those in which the artistic impulse, or the fitness of the individual case, is free to shape and to make what is literally manufactured, hand-made?... Dangerous as teleological arguments in general may be, we may at least safely say the world was not designed to make science easy.... To call the verses of a poet, the politics of a statesman, or the award of a judge mechanical, implies, as Lotze has pointed out, marked disparagement, although it implies, too, precisely those characteristics—exactness and invariability—in which Maxwell would have us see a token of the divine.” Surely then we must not insist that divine wisdom must always run in a rut, must ever repeat itself, must never exhibit itself in unique acts like incarnation and resurrection. See Edward Hitchcock, in Bib. Sac., 20:489-561, on “The Law of Nature's Constancy Subordinate to the Higher Law of Change”; Jevons, Principles of Science, 2:430-438; Mozley, Miracles, 26.
(b) S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 18 December, 1831—“The light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern of the ship, which shines only on the waves behind us.” Hobbes: “Experience concludeth nothing universally.” Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 131—“Evidence can tell us only what has happened, and it can never assure us that the future must be like the past; 132—Proof that all nature is mechanical would not be inconsistent with the belief that everything in nature is immediately sustained by Providence, and that my volition counts for something in determining the course of events.” Royce, World and Individual, 2:204—“Uniformity is not absolute. Nature is a vaster realm of life and meaning, of which we men form a part, and of which the final unity is in God's life. The rhythm of the heart-beat has its normal regularity, yet its limited persistence. Nature may be merely the habits of free will. Every region of this universally conscious world may be a centre whence issues new [pg 125]conscious life for communication to all the worlds.” Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is Spirit.” We prefer to say: “Nature is the manifestation of spirit, the regularities of freedom.”
(c) Other breaks in the uniformity of nature are the coming of Christ and the regeneration of a human soul. Harnack, What is Christianity, 18, holds that though there are no interruptions to the working of natural law, natural law is not yet fully known. While there are no miracles, there is plenty of the miraculous. The power of mind over matter is beyond our present conceptions. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 210—The effects are no more consequences of the laws than the laws are consequences of the effects = both laws and effects are exercises of divine will. King, Reconstruction in Theology, 56—We must hold, not to the uniformity of law, but to the universality of law; for evolution has successive stages with new laws coming in and becoming dominant that had not before appeared. The new and higher stage is practically a miracle from the point of view of the lower. See British Quarterly Review, Oct. 1881:154; Martineau, Study, 2:200, 203, 209.
C. Since the inworking of the moral law into the constitution and course of nature shows that nature exists, not for itself, but for the contemplation and use of moral beings, it is probable that the God of nature will produce effects aside from those of natural law, whenever there are sufficiently important moral ends to be served thereby.
Beneath the expectation of uniformity is the intuition of final cause; the former may therefore give way to the latter. See Porter, Human Intellect, 592-615—Efficient causes and final causes may conflict, and then the efficient give place to the final. This is miracle. See Hutton, in Nineteenth Century, Aug. 1885, and Channing, Evidences of Revealed Religion, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:534, 535—“The order of the universe is a means, not an end, and like all other means must give way when the end can be best promoted without it. It is the mark of a weak mind to make an idol of order and method; to cling to established forms of business when they clog instead of advancing it.” Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 357—“The stability of the heavens is in the sight of God of less importance than the moral growth of the human spirit.” This is proved by the Incarnation. The Christian sees in this little earth the scene of God's greatest revelation. The superiority of the spiritual to the physical helps us to see our true dignity in the creation, to rule our bodies, to overcome our sins. Christ's suffering shows us that God is no indifferent spectator of human pain. He subjects himself to our conditions, or rather in this subjection reveals to us God's own eternal suffering for sin. The atonement enables us to solve the problem of sin.