Brewster, E. T.

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AN ESSAY ON NON-AIIRACLESBY E. T. BREWSTERNOT all people who believe that miracles occur, will agree asto v.'liat a miracle is. Still less will they agree as to thenature of non-miracle. Nevertheless, everybody seems to takeit for granted that "non-miraculous" events are completely un-derstood. All we have to do is to accounts for events of the othersort which we call "miraculous." But the problem is by nomeans so simple.One point, however, everybody seems agreed on. A miracleis always "a violation of Natural Law," or else it is a case of a"higher Natural Law" "interfering with" or "setting aside" a"lower." L>ut a non-miracle is thought to occur "by the opera-tion of Nacural Laws" and so does not have to be discussed at all.It all sounds very sim])le—until one reflects that "natural law"is itself a highly ambiguous term, that has at least three distinctmeanings. If one confuses these meanings, still more if one jumpsback and lorth rapidly from one meaning to another, one canspin out a long argument either for or against "miracles," accord-ing to the side he happens to choose. So the whole problem reallyturns on what one really means when he says "law of nature."He may ha\e in mind—though commonly he docs not—anold pre-scientific folk sense, an epigramatic summing up of folkex])erience : All men are mortal; water seeks its level; a straightline is the shortest distance between two points ; honesty is thebest i)olicy. All these statements are true as a matter of generalcommonplace observation. But nobody maintains that they arein any wise universally or absolutely true, so that, for example,dishonesty might not prove efficient under some conditions anda straight line take on unexpected properties in non-Euclideanspace.This is the sense of "law of nature" in Hume's Essay on Miracles.And of course, there goes with it the corresponding sense of "mir-AN ESSAY ON NON-MIRACLES 485acle." It has always been a simple matter to refute "St. David" bypretending that he is using the two words in some other of theirvarious meanings. But "law of nature," in this sense has neitherscientific nor philosophical nor theological standing. It simply is aformulatioti of folk experience ; the perfectly naive interpretationof things as they appear. Such laws of nature arc necessarily "vio-lated" whenever anything unusual happens.In sharp contrast to this meaning is another, which like a goodmany of oui important ideas we owe chiefly to Roman stoicism.The universe, for the Stoic, is an original and self-existent chaos,which, at least in part, has been subdued to order by the divinelogos. In other words, God orders the aflr'airs of the cosmos verymuch as the Roman emj^eror orders the affairs of the civilized world.The Emperor issues edicts, and men obey. God lays down "laws"which "govern" the operations of nature. So far. then, as natureis rational and orderly it obeys these specific regulations of thedivine reason.But this idea of "law" as something imposed upon "matter" bythe word of God, is evidently a very long step beyond the folk mean-ing of the same word. This says merely: things commonly hap-pen thus and so. Probably they will happen the same way again.But maybe they will not. Who knows? As Hume put it, in efl:'ect,things have happened thus and so, with so few exceptions, if any,that it becomes the safer bet that people who think they happenotherwise are mistaken. But there is nowhere any idea of neces-sity or compulsion or any will of God to make anything happen oneway or another. But the Stoic idea makes the whole affair muchmore serious. God has laid down the "law." The universe obeys.Only he who made the law can alter it. This is a noble idea ; butlike the other, it is quite pre-scientific.It has persisted unchanged all down through the Christian agesto the present time. St. Augustine, for example, has "God themaker of all natures . . . from whom is all the law and numberand order of nature." Spinoza especially played up the idea. Kep-ler is quoted as saying of his three Laws of Planetary Motion, "Ithink God's thoughts after him." Kepler was pre-Xewtonian, andhaving virtually no idea at all of what we now call "mechanicalcausation." thought that the planets are carried round the sun byangels. His three famous laws, therefore, were literally verbalorders issued to the angels of the moon and earth and planets toact precisely so and so, until further notice.486 THE OPEN COURTOne sees the same idea daily in all sorts of forms. "The lawsof nature presuppose a Law-Giver." "God cannot be bound by hisown laws.'' "The reign of Natural Law." Or as an eminent Mod-ernist preacher puts it—he does not believe in miracles, but he hasthe pre-scientific idea of "law"— "I cannot believe that the laws ofnature were ever violated ; for the simple reason that God himselfhas taught me, as he is teaching all our sons and daughters in everymodern university of the western world today that these laws areimmutable throughout eternity. . . ."The fallacy is, of course, obvious. Nobody has any possible wayof finding out whether 'these laws" in the scientific sense of "laiv"are or are not "immutable throughout eternity." The oldest ofthem has been checked up for only al)OUt three hundred years, whichis a long wsy short of eternity. No law of science is known to holdexactly, and not a few of them have had to be abandoned becausethey have proved not to work at all. The trouble is that our eminentdivine, like many another of his fellows, uses "law of nature" in theold Stoic sense ; and then transfers this idea to scientific people, asif they use "law" in this Stoic sense— as they never do.For the scientific meaning of "law of nature" ties u]j with thefolk meaning of the word, not with the Stoic. A law of science, inthe modern sense, is a formula, usually in mathematical terms, bymeans of which we can ])redict, often with a high degree of accuracy,what is mrst likely to happen in the future. "The entire task ofscience," writes the great chemist Ostwald, "is to establish suchrelations between measurable quantities that, some of these quanti-ties being given, the others may be deduced." The laws of scienceare the technical de\-ices. continually being expanded and improved,by which this end is more and more completely attained. Or as anuncommonly clear-headed theologian, puts it, "Where as law wasonce thought of as a restraint imposed upon the universe fromwithout and wielding an absolute power over nature, it is nowthought of simply as our description of the behavior of phenomena."See, then, what nonsense it makes when one attributes to scien-tific people the theological meaning of "natural law," and then inter-prets their language as if they really did ever use the term in thatsense ! Thi. divine quoted above, having occasion to rebuke hisbishop for his ignorance of modern ideas, went on to point out theimpossibility that a human body which "weighed, let us say, onehundred and fifty pounds," could promenade the surface of theSea of Galilee, "in utter defiance of the law of gravitation."AN ESSAY OX XOX-MIRACLES 487But the only "law of qravitation" that science knows anythingabout is the algebraic formula F = -—7^— . The great Sir Isaacfirst wrote this out, and it proves most convenient for reckoning thetime of the next eclipse, and the dates of Easter, and the weight ofdistant binary stars, and various other things that various personswant to know. But it does not cause eclipses nor Easter Sundaysnor make the stars spin round. Therefore nobody can "defy" it.In fact, one does not "defy" anything algebraic. One defies bishops.Besides, the Relativists think the law of gravitation isn't true any-way !A\'liat the Doctor of Divinitv really means is that everybody, asa matter of folk experience, has to reckon with the force of gravity.Nobodv really knows in the least why a human body which weighs,"let us say. a hundred and fifty pounds"—or even two hundredand fifty, for that matter—commonly sinks when it tries to walkon water, nor whv it commonly does not sink when it walks on ice.But there is the general experience of the force of gravity. Newtonanalyzed, mathematically, our primitive folk idea of force. He setforth his highly important theory of Universal Gravitation, whichhas proved to fit a considerable number of facts, is part of conven-tional science, and may very well be true. He also formulated andtested his laze of Gravitation, for the convenience of people whowant to predict eclipses, date Easter Sunday, and the rest. But the"Law of Gravitation" has nothing to do with anybody's sinking inwater. That misfortune can be accurately described in terms ofgravity and Archimedes' Law and Pascal's Law. and various otherscientific technicalities, none of which have the slightest bearing onthe practical question. One simply sinks. Nobody knows why. Allthe "laws" do is to enable scientific people to tell without trying justwhat will sink and what will not, and how fast and how far. Noneof them have any "control" over anything. Our Modernist divinemerely dragged in his Law of Gravitation by the ears, to make him-self sound scientific, and to add another zest to the popular but cruelsport of bishop bating.Aliracles. in short, are "violations of natural law" only in theStoic and theological sense of "natural law." The "laws of science"have no bearing on the matter at all. Questions of "force" in thescientific sense, may be involved. So also may questions of "mat-ter." also in the scientific sense. We are continually discoveringnew properties of "matter" and we are continually gaining new con-488 THE OPEN COURTtrol over "force." So one has always to use his judgment whenconfronted with a story of a new scientific achievement or an oldmiracle. But "law" in the scientific sense, is never involved in thecredibility of any alleged "miracle" but only "law" in the theologi-cal sense.Many a time, then, has the scientific world wished it had takensome other word than "law" for its predictive formulas, and let theclergy have the term to themselves. But the harm being done, thebest we can make of a bad matter is to confine "natural law" and"law of nature" to the old Stoic compulsory sense, and to say "lawof science" whenever we mean any one of the two or three hundredbrief summaries of the facts of observation which we see in the sci-entific reference books.In other words, this whole problem of miracles and non-miraclesis entirely factitious. Events simply are. Nobody knows why.I sit down to my typewriter and think "A." Forthwith, theproper finger hits the "A" key. But has anybody the remotest ideahow a mental state operates to alter the position of bodies in theouter world? A recent discussion proposes to call this performanced miracle. Well, of course it is, in the sense that it is "a materialchange dictated by mind" and nobody knows how the trick is done.That is a perfectly good definition of "miracle"—only, where shallone look for a non-miracle ?But when I hit the "A" key, the "force"—whatever that maymean—sets in operation sundry springs and levers, until the letterprints. But no mortal know's why one body moves another, anymore than he knows how- an idea in his thought stream moves abody. The finger goes through the air ; and it does not go throughthe key. The key is a rigid bar that is deformed inappreciably ; andthe ink ribbon is flexible and buckles under a like stress. These, Iunderstand, are not miracles. But why not? Nobody has any ideawhatever, why air and steel and silk do not behave alike.All events, in short, are alike incomprehensible. Doubtless it isremarkable that the twig of a pair tree grafted on an apple, shouldstill bear pears and not apples. But it is equally remarkable thattrees growing out of the ground should bear either apples or pearsinstead of stones. Doubtless it is amazing that staves, cast from thehands of Pharaoh's magicians should alter instantly into serpents.But it is e(|ually amazing that serpents eggs, let alone, should comeslowly to a like end. It is all a cjuestion of what one is used to see-ing and what one can prove to have happened.AN ESSAY ON NON-MIRACLES 489Events, in other words, difler in frequency and in predictability.There is not the least evidence that they differ in their ultimatecause.Rut now comes along the theologian and wants to put in a purelyartificial division of events into miraculous and non-miraculous.Having done this, quite wantonly, he then finds himself needingdeliverance cut of six troubles, because he has to define his two cate-gories, discover some difference between them, and explain theirrelation. If only he had not made the division in the first place,then the resulting difficulties would not be plaguing him now.Xot satisfied with making himself all this quite useless trouble,the theologian persists in adding to it by dragging in "the laws ofscience," w'hich have nothing Avhatever to do with the matter. Hav-ing by this device manufactured a fresh set of factitious difficulties,he adds these on to—rather he multiplies these by— whatever dif-ficulties arise from his own quite different meaning of the term.But why drag in "the laws of science" at all? If anybodv thinksthat God, as an all-wise being, will not lay down a "law" in thefirst place and then alter it, that is a purely theological question, onwhich natural science has absoutely nothing whatever to say oneither side. And if anybody thinks that God, as all-powerful, canalways do as he likes with his universe and "is not bound by hisown laws," that is also a purely theological question, on which, oncemore, natural science has absolutely nothing to say on either side.It is, therefore, most absurd to say, as is so often said in allsorts of forms, by people who ought to know better, that "Sciencedenies the possibility of miracle." What scientific people deny—wliat scientific people must always deny— is the possibility of non-miracle.That is to say, if one insists on thinking of a commonplace and pre-sumably non-miraculous event as caused by "the operation of nat-ural law"—or however else one chooses to express this widelyprevalent idea—and if, in addition, one attaches to the term "law"the meaning that it has in every scientific textbook, then every sci-entific person in the world must of necessity make one reply: Anynon-miraculous event, as so defined, is not only impossible, butunthinkable.There are no non-miracles. A\'hether there are miracles, turnsentirely on how one defines the word.

An Essay on Non-Miracles.

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An Essay on Non-Miracles.

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