Miracles: A Preliminary Study: No. 12 (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis)

Do miracles really happen? Are miracles logically impossible? How do you prove that miracles exist? Everyone has an opinionated response but if you’re a sceptic then no historical evidence is likely to convince you.

In Miracles, C.S. Lewis challenges the rationalists and cynics who are mired in their lack of imagination and provides a poetic and joyous affirmation that miracles really do occur in everyday lives. He presents the idea that miracles are not compatible with nature and thus introduces evidence of a supernatural world. Lewis defines a miracle as “an interference with nature by supernatural power” and concludes they are not statistical anomalies because “miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.”

Lewis encourages readers to not only trust personal experiences as a basis of understanding miracles because one’s perception cannot be the concluding basis, and we must define miracles to fully understand them.

This is a book for C. S. Lewis fans and readers interested in Christians philosophy. Lewis says, “This book is intended as a preliminary to historical inquiry. I am not a trained historian and I shall not examine the historical evidence for the Christian miracles. My effort is to put my readers in a position to do so.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics in The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.