語言

Franciscan at Home

Forming those who form others

Can We Believe in Miracles?

The New Testament reports Jesus and the apostles performing many miracles of healing and exercising extraordinary powers over nature. There are similar claims about healing made by Christians today. What can an apologetics regarding miracles look like?
Things in the natural world behave in general in regular and predictable ways. If you throw a book out of a window it will fall to the ground; if you set light to a tree, and it burns away, it will become black and charred; if a man's heart stops beating for a few hours and he is by other normal criteria dead, he will not suddenly come to life again. And so on. For the last five hundred years, scientists have expressed this evident truth by saying that the world is governed by laws of nature which determine how things in it behave.

The Christian believes that the laws of nature operate because God makes them operate. (The reasons for believing this will be discussed later in the series). God has good reasons for making things behave like this, in regular and predictable ways. He is generous and wishes us to have substantial control of our own destiny, and substantial control over the natural world, to make it the way we want. Only if things behave in accord with natural laws can we make a difference to the world at other times and places by moving our bodies at this time and place. And only if laws operate in simple enough ways for us to understand can we utilize their operation.

For example, it is because natural laws make planted seeds grow into vegetables that we can grow vegetables by planting seeds, and so choose whether or not to grow vegetables. If the world was chaotic or operated on principles too difficult for us to understand, we could not control it.

The rest of this online article is available for current Guild members.

Join the Guild today!

Richard Swinburne is Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. He is also a Fellow of the British Academy. His interest as a philosopher is particularly in the meaning and justification of the central claims of Christianity.

This article is from The Sower and may be copied for catechetical purposes only. It may not be reprinted in another published work without the permission of Maryvale Institute. Contact [email protected]

Categorized Under
Issue: 

Articles from the Most Recent Issue

Editor's Reflections— The Eucharistic Congress and the Missionary Year

Catholics in the United States have a long history of hosting both national and international Eucharistic congresses. The first of these was in Washington, DC, in 1895, and the last was in Philadelphia in 1976. If your ancestors were Catholic and lived in North America, they may have participated in one of these congresses—in St. Louis (1901), or New York... Read more

Missionary Worship

There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs in nearly every culture across history: man ritualizes worship. All over the world the similarities are astounding—animal sacrifices, burnt offerings, gifts of grain, the joy of ecstatic praise. It points to a universal sense within man that not only recognizes that there is a God but also knows that man is called to... Read more

Ask, Seek, Knock: The Pitfalls and Potential of Catholic Door-to-Door Evangelization

“He’s just too small,” sobbed a woman we had just met. It was a sunny summer day, and the pastor, transitional deacon, and I were out knocking on doors within our parish boundaries. This woman’s door was within eyesight of the rectory, and it happened to be the first one we had visited. The conversation had started off just as... Read more
Designed & Developed by On Fire Media, Inc.