Accommodating Miracles
A reader asked me about the Deist argument against miracles.
The first argument, best elucidated by Thomas Paine in his unintentionally oxymoronically-titled AGE OF REASON, says that God, being an omnipotent and omniscient creator, has made the machinery of the universe with all the chains of cause and effect in place as neatly as clockwork, with no need for further direct intervention. Direct intervention supposes the Creator either to lack the foresight (hence not omniscient) or lack the power (hence not omnipotent) to foresee and forestall all possible exigencies otherwise requiring intervention via natural chains of cause and effect laid from before the dawn of creation.
To suppose the Creator to lack the necessary foresight or power to avoid the use of miracles is to insult the dignity of His deity.
The second argument comes from Hume: In nature, every effect proceeds from a sufficient cause so that nothing comes from nothing; no matter nor momentum is ever created or ever destroyed. Supernatural events, such as miracles, divine intervention, or granted prayers, on the other hand, proceeds by the will and fiat of God, without any intermediary mechanism. Ergo for Providence to grant prayers or perform miracles by definition intrudes a supernatural break or lapse in an otherwise solid chain of natural cause and effect. Since no events occur aside from cause and effect, ergo miracles do not happen.
Or, to put both arguments more succinctly, if God needs to break the laws of nature by interrupting with miracles, He those laws were made imperfectly, which is impossible: therefore miracles do not happen.
A third argument one from time to time encounters in writers of less skill than Paine or Hume is to say it offends the dignity of the Creator to propose he has need either to answer prayers or grant miracles or otherwise interfere with any of the workings of the clockwork cosmos, for the same reason a skilled watchmaker need not push the hands on the clockface with his finger to see the time is correctly kept.
Hence a correctly organized Providence would unfold events to carry out the will of Providence from the outset without any further need for impromptu corrections or adjustments, just as a correctly made clock keeps time without continuous intervention by the watchmaker fixing, tinkering, fiddling, correcting, re-calibrating, repairing, and puttering.
Hume’s argument is easy to dismiss: it is a circular argument. It assumes that it is impossible for events to arise aside from mechanical causes, and concludes that nothing aside from events arising from mechanical causes is possible.
As for Paine’s more thoughtful argument I submit it is a category error based on the same error which radical materialists make when they say the mind must be a machine on the grounds that nothing but machinery exists.
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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.