Miracles: A Preliminary Study

Read David Hume’s treatise “Of Miracles” (the tenth section of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Do you find Lewis’s assessment of Hume’s work fair and persuasive? Why or why not?

In the book, Lewis addresses a wide range of what he sees as popular misconceptions about the nature of miracles, religion, and Christianity. Do any of these positions deserve a deeper consideration? Does Lewis engage in the straw man fallacy—constructing opposing arguments that are easy to knock down, rather than accurately representing the views of real people?

Lewis justifies the existence of miracles in part by arguing that they form a cohesive, grand narrative centered on God’s work in Christ. Are there other possible ways of thinking about the relationship between individual, seemingly miraculous events and larger narratives? What narratives might be supported by such events?

Lewis wrote his book at a time when a wide swath of his society, though still nominally Christian, was conditioned to think miracles did not happen, and that to believe in them was evidence of intellectual backwardness. Does a similar cultural mood prevail today? Why or why not?

Describe some of the factors in Lewis’s own life and career that made him well-positioned to write a defense of Christian miracles for a skeptical audience.

The subtitle of the book is “A Preliminary Study.” What makes this text preliminary? What would a further study of Christian miracles include?

Compare the versions of Chapter 3 of Miracles from the original 1947 edition with the same chapter from the revised 1960 edition. What did Lewis change in his argument, and what is the effect of these changes?

Consider Lewis’s argument that rationality and morality must be rooted in something beyond the nonrational substratum of natural processes, or else they are merely an illusion. What counterarguments can you propose?