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I am hoping to write a detailed accounting of the major points that C.S. Lewis brings up in this book so that I can satisfy myself that I understand what he is saying. There are many metaphysical stands that he takes that are well-reasoned but contentious and I would like to examine these especially carefully. I will treat each chapter separately and each will be labeled for cross reference with the original text.

I. The Scope of this Book

Lewis uses this chapter to set the stage, as the title indicates. He explains that he is setting out to investigate the philosophical question of whether miracles can ever occur. He clears out of the way the idea that we can answer this question by means of investigating any particular experiences or the historical record of such experiences without first deciding “whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are.” (pg. 11) If you start with a philosophy that precludes the possibility of miracles—or one that holds they are so intrinsically improbable as to never occur—then you have begged the question and no event will ever qualify as a miracle. If miracles are held to be merely highly improbable, without being impossible, then proof of their existence will depend on statistically significant evidence. But history never provides this kind of evidence, nor do individual events provide enough data for statistical analysis. So we must decide what philosophical standpoint we are going to take, before we begin to look at the evidence.

I can think of no better example of what happens when a scholar skips over answering the philosophical questions and begins with historical analysis than Lewis's.

In a popular commentary on the Bible you will find a discussion of the date at which the Fourth Gospel was written. The author says it must have been written after the execution of St. Peter, because, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ is represented as predicting the execution of St. Peter. ‘A book’, thinks the author, ‘cannot be written before events which it refers to’. Of course it cannot—unless real predictions ever occur. If they do, then this argument for the date is in ruins. And the author has not discussed at all whether real predictions are possible. He takes it for granted (perhaps unconsciously) that they are not. Perhaps he is right: but if he is, he has not discovered this principle by histrorical inquiry. He has brought his disbelief in predictions to his historical work, so to speak, ready made. Unless he had done so his historical conclusion about the date of the Fourth Gospel could not have been reached at all. His work is therefor quite useless to a person who wants to know whether predictions occur. The author gets to work only after he has already answered that question in the negative, and on ground which he never communicates to us.

And so it is clear that the philosophical questions about miracles must be addressed before an inquiry is made into whether particular events are miracles. This point seems uncontentious to me.