The problem of presuppositions will be treated in a later chapter, but it is important to note that if one presupposes that miracles do not occur, then even a great deal of evidence to the contrary can be dismissed, since people are not apt to give serious consideration to things that do not fit into their own particular world view.
The problem is compounded for those who take for granted that God does not exist. If God does not exist, then there is no way to account for miracles. What could cause them? Yet, for such people, the wonder should be that there is any order in the universe at all.
If there are laws of nature, where did they come from? If there are rules to the universe, who made them? And if God had the power to make them, does He also have the power to violate them if He so chooses?
Naturalism, or the system of thought according to which miracles are impossible, had one of its ablest critics in C. S. Lewis, who wrote of it:
When it takes the final step and we attempt a naturalistic account of thought itself, suddenly the whole thing unravels. The last fatal step has invalidated all the preceding ones: for they were all reasonings and reason itself has been discredited. . . . By thinking at all we have claimed that our thoughts are more than mere natural events.1
This argument is fully developed in his book, Miracles, chapter 3, which was rewritten for the 1960 edition and entitled, "The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism."2
According to C. S. Lewis, reason itself cannot be explained purely in terms of naturalism. If the reasoning process is a purely naturalistic phenomenon, then its results cannot be trusted, and it becomes highly questionable whether there is any possibility of arriving at truth through it.
1 C. S. Lewis, God In the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), p. 138.
2 C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1960), pp. 12-24.
