Anything but a miracle!

From C. S. Lewis's Miracles: A Preliminary Study.

“The ordinary procedure of the modern historian even if he admits the possibility of miracle, is to admit no particular instance of it until every possibility of “natural” explanation has been tried and failed. That is, he will accept the most improbable “natural” explanations rather than say that a miracle occurred. Collective hallucination, hypnotism or unconsenting spectators, widespread instantaneous conspiracy in lying by persons not otherwise known to be liars and not likely to gain by the lie — all these are known to be very improbable events: so improbable that, except for the special purpose of excluding a miracle, they are never suggested. But they are preferred to the admission of a miracle.” (C.S. Lewis, Miracles, p. 133)

The Chesteronian basis of Lewis's argument from reason

Jim Slagle, at Agent Intellect, wrote his master's thesis on the Argument from Reason for the University of Louvain, and in the process convinced me to change my mind about one aspect of the argument. At first I thought that Anscombe had shown that Lewis was misusing the term "irrational", in the first edition of Miracles, in  speaking of physical causes, but in fact Lewis was using a different, but perfectly acceptable sense of the word "irrational." Lewis in fact distinguishes the two senses of the word "irrational in The Abolition of Man."  Lewis did adopt the irrational-non-rational distinction when he revised the third chapter of Miracles, but, strictly speaking, he need not have done so.

In this post, he presents what he considers to be Chesterton's version of the AFR.

An outline of C. S. Lewis's Miracles

Written by Anne Carter.

A summary of Lewis's Miracles

A post on a passage in Lewis's third chapter of Miracles that has always seemed to me problematic

In Dangerous Idea 2