Doctrine of Creation (Part 16): Rebutting Spinoza’s Objections to Miracles

Rebutting Spinoza’s Objections to Miracles

The last time we looked at an assessment of the Newtonian world-machine and the challenge that that posed for belief in miracles. Today I want to turn to the objections of Benedict de Spinoza.

You’ll remember that Spinoza's first objection to the occurrence of miracles was based upon the immutability of the laws of nature. It would be tempting to simply dismiss Spinoza's objection on the grounds that he was a pantheist, for whom the terms “God” and “Nature” were synonymous. He would use the expression, in Latin, Deus sive Natura, “God or Nature.” So, of course, miracles would be impossible on a pantheistic view – a violation of the laws of nature would be a violation of God's nature because they are identical. The question is not whether miracles would be possible on a pantheistic view, but whether they would be possible on a theistic view.

But such a refutation of Spinoza would be far too easy. The Tractatus where this objection is to be found is a deistic, not a pantheistic, work, and Spinoza presupposes the traditional understanding of God. In particular, his argument is based upon the classic doctrine of divine simplicity which states that God's knowledge, will, goodness, power, and so forth are all really identical and one with his essence. The question that Spinoza raises, in effect, is if God's knowledge is identical to God's will, then how can God's knowledge be necessary and his will be contingent? They cannot have different properties since they are the same.

Contrary to Spinoza, classical theology did not claim that God's knowledge is characterized by necessity. For example, God knows the truth “The universe exists.” But this knowledge is not necessary to God. God was under no obligation to create the universe. Since creation is a free act, he could have refrained from creating anything at all, and if God had not created the world then he would instead know the truth “No universe exists.” So, necessarily, whatever God knows is true; but it is not necessary that the content of God's knowledge be what it is. If God had created a different world or even no world at all, then the content of his knowledge would be different. Therefore, just as God is free to will differently than he does, he is able to have different knowledge than he does.

It follows that the laws of nature, then, are not known by God necessarily, since they depend upon God's will. Even if we hold that the laws of nature are necessary truths, God could have willed to create a different universe operating according to a different set of natural laws by creating things that have different natures from the things that he has created. By the same token, the miracles that God performs could have been willed by God just as eternally and immutably as the laws. There's just no reason to think that when God causes a naturally impossible event that God's knowledge and will somehow come into conflict.

Having said that, however, Spinoza's objection does raise one important point, though. It's very difficult to see how God's knowledge, for example, can be contingent and yet be identical with his essence, which includes necessary existence. How can God be utterly simple if he is in some respects necessary and in other respects contingent? What this calls into question, however, is not the possibility of miracles, but the doctrine of divine simplicity. This is a doctrine which is fortunately extra-biblical and is rejected as incoherent by the majority of Christian philosophers today.[1] So I do not think that an objection to miracles based upon the strong doctrine of divine simplicity is one that is very troubling.

Let's turn, secondly, to Spinoza's objection based on the insufficiency of miracles. You remember that his second objection was that miracles are insufficient to prove the existence of God. As stated, the objection is simply irrelevant, for virtually all Christian theologians used miracles, not as proofs of the existence of God, but rather as proof of God's action in the world. Miracles belong to the discipline called Christian evidences – not to natural theology, which concerns arguments for God's existence. On the basis of the arguments of natural theology (like the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments), natural theologians sought to prove that God exists. Then, on the basis of Christian evidences (such as fulfilled prophecy and miracles), they sought to show that the God whose existence had been proved by the arguments of natural theology had revealed himself decisively in Jesus Christ and that therefore Christian theism is true. Therefore, Spinoza was just attacking a straw man. Miracles were not part of natural theology. They weren't used to prove God's existence.

Nevertheless, the supporting reasoning of Spinoza's objection was, I think, relevant to the Christians’ position. You’ll remember that Spinoza's first sub-point was that a proof for God must be absolutely certain. Since we infer God's existence from the immutable laws of nature, anything that casts doubt upon those laws thereby casts doubt upon God's existence. Now, two questionable assumptions seemed to underlie Spinoza's reasoning: first, he assumes that a proof of God's existence must be demonstratively certain; and second, he presupposes that God's existence is inferred from natural laws. But the Christian apologists of Spinoza's day denied both of those assumptions. The more empirically-minded of them held that a cogent argument for God's existence need not be demonstratively certain. One thinks, for example, in this connection of William Paley's famous argument for design – his watchmaker argument (as it has sometimes been called). While not reaching absolute certainty, Paley claimed that the argument makes it more plausible to believe in God than not. I think contemporary philosophers agree that if we were justified in accepting only conclusions that were proved with demonstrative certainty, then we should know very, very little indeed. So Spinoza’s first assumption, I think, is quite unjustified – that arguments for God's existence must be demonstratively certain.

But what about that second assumption that God's existence is inferred from natural laws? Well, again, that assumption fails to take account of the fact that there are other arguments for God's existence which are not based on natural laws. For example, one of the Christian thinkers of this era, Samuel Clarke, shared Spinoza's concern for demonstrative certainty, but he nevertheless believed that the ontological and the cosmological arguments provided rational grounds for inferring God's existence. So even if natural laws were somehow rendered uncertain, for Clarke that would have no impact whatsoever upon his natural theology and would not call into question God's existence. So I don't think that either of these supporting assumptions that are underlying this first sub-point is true.

But is Spinoza's claim that admitting miracles would cast doubt on the laws of nature in fact true? He seems to think that the admission of a genuine miracle would overthrow the natural law that the miracle violates. Now, we've already seen that properly speaking miracles do not violate natural laws, and so they do not cast doubt upon their truth. The natural laws, remember, include these ceteris paribus conditions such that if those conditions don't obtain, then the law doesn't apply anymore, and therefore miracles do not violate natural laws.

Now, maybe Spinoza would insist that if it were proven that some event occurred which under our current understanding of natural law is thought to be naturally impossible, then rather than admit that a miracle has happened, we should instead revise the natural law so as to permit the natural occurrence of the event in question. Do you see the possible response here on Spinoza's part? He might say, OK. Define miracles as naturally impossible events. But if you claim that a miraculous event has occurred, what that forces you to do is just revise the natural law so as to be able to accommodate it and treat it as natural.

But I think that this response would be mistaken. The admission of a genuine miracle not need not overthrow the general regularity of nature. As Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosopher, points out, a natural law is not abandoned just because of one exception to it. The exception must occur repeatedly whenever the conditions for it are present. But if the event will not occur again under identical circumstances, then the law will not be abandoned. A natural law will not be reformulated unless a new version would yield better predictability of future events without being more complicated than the original law. But if the new law doesn't do any better in predicting the phenomena and explaining the event in question, then the event will simply remain an unexplained exception to the natural law – an anomaly. Therefore, Spinoza's fear that miracles would somehow destroy the fabric of natural law seems to be unjustified. Rather than leading us into the arms of atheism, such exceptions to the natural laws could lead us to discern the action of God in the world at that point.

Let's now look at Spinoza’s second sub-point – that miracles could not be used to prove the existence of God because perhaps a lesser being like an angel or a demon was responsible for the miraculous act. Again, this objection did not strike against most of the Christian apologists of that day because, again, they were not trying to prove the existence of God by miracles. Having proved God's existence by the arguments of natural theology or presupposing or assuming God's existence, they used miracles chiefly to show that Christian theism was true. The miracles showed God's intervention or action in the world. They weren't used to prove God's existence.

Nevertheless, the Christian apologists were very concerned about how to show in any particular case that the miracle was divine rather than demonic. I think that their answer to this question constitutes one of the most important and enduring contributions to the discussion of miracles. They held that it is the doctrinal context in which the miracle occurs that makes it evident if the miracle is truly from God. In this way they drew attention to the religio-historical context in which the miracle occurs as the key to the interpretation of that miracle. I think that this is very significant because a miracle without a context is inherently ambiguous. I think that's the problem raised by Hume’s example of the revivification of Queen Elizabeth. The event lacks any religious context and appears as a bald and unexplained anomaly. So one feels a good deal of sympathy for Hume’s skepticism about the revivification of Queen Elizabeth. But how different it is with respect to the resurrection of Jesus! It occurs in the context of and as the climax to Jesus’ own unparalleled life and teachings, and it produced so profound an effect upon his followers that they called him Lord and proclaimed salvation for all men in his name. Therefore, I think that this event ought to give us serious pause, whereas the resuscitation of Queen Elizabeth would only occasion perplexity. The religio-historical context is crucial to the interpretation of a miraculous event.

Spinoza's concern with lesser spiritual beings like angels and demons would probably not trouble very many contemporary secular thinkers. Such beings are part of the furniture, so to speak, of a wider theistic view, so no atheist today would seriously concede the historicity of the Gospel miracles and yet maintain that they were wrought by angels. It would not be, I think, unwarranted to infer that if such events are genuine miracles, then these are miracles that have been wrought by God.

Spinoza's final sub-point, that a supposed miracle may really be the effect of an unknown law of nature, isn't really an objection against the occurrence of miracles; but rather it's an objection against the identification of miracles. Granted that miracles are possible, how can we know when one has occurred? This problem has been persuasively formulated in our own day by the philosopher Antony Flew. Flew writes:

This is the very problem that someone here raised a couple of weeks ago with regard to spontaneous remissions of diseases. How do we know when a genuine miracle has occurred as opposed to a purely natural event that is the product of unknown laws of nature – unknown causes? Well, here I want to refer to Stephen Bilynskyj’s criteria for identifying some event E as a miracle. This is from Bilynskyj’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Notre Dame on “God, Nature, and the Concept of Miracle.”[3] Bilynskyj lists the following four criteria for the discernment of miracles:

Now, with regard to point (4), classical Christian apologists were quite correct in pointing to the religio-historical context as providing that justification for discerning a genuine miracle as opposed to a merely anomalous event: when the miracles occur at a momentous time (for example, a man's leprosy vanishing when Jesus speaks the words “Be clean”) and do not recur regularly in history, as they would if they were the product of natural causes, and when the miracles are numerous and various, as in the case of Jesus of Nazareth (healings, exorcisms, feeding of the five thousand, walking on the water, preternatural knowledge, and so forth), then their chance of being the result of unknown natural causes is minimal.

Furthermore, even if we leave Jesus’ miracles aside and focus our attention on his resurrection from the dead, I think that the supernatural nature of that event alone may be successfully defended. We're not asking here whether the facts of the case, such as the empty tomb or the post-mortem appearances, might be explained in a natural manner. Rather, the question is, if Jesus actually did rise from the dead, would we then be justified in inferring a supernatural cause for that event? Here I think the overwhelming majority of people would say yes. Those who argue against the resurrection try to explain the facts of the case without allowing that Jesus rose from the dead, but I know of no critic who argues that the best explanation of the facts is that Jesus rose from the dead, but his resurrection was a purely natural occurrence. That would appear to be a somewhat desperate obstinacy.

Two factors, I think, undergird this reasoning. First, the resurrection so exceeds what we know of natural causes that it seems most reasonable to attribute it to a supernatural cause. Hume himself admitted that never in the history of the world has it been heard that a truly dead man has been raised from the dead. Given the length of time that Jesus had been dead (a night, a day, and a night) it would be idle to compare his resurrection with the resuscitation of persons pronounced to be clinically dead in hospitals. But more than that: it's important to keep in mind that the resurrection was more than just the resuscitation of a corpse. It was not a return to the earthly life, but rather it was the transformation of the body to a new mode of existence, which Paul described as powerful, glorious, imperishable, and Spirit-directed (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). It is inconceivable that such an event could be the result of natural causes. Moreover, if it were the result of natural causes, then its singularity in the history of mankind would be very difficult to understand – why hasn't it happened again? Why does this not happen regularly? In the nearly two thousand years that have elapsed since that event, no natural causes have been discovered that could explain it. On the contrary, the advance of science has only served to confirm that such an event is naturally impossible.

The second point is that the supernatural explanation is given immediately, once again, in the religio-historical context in which the event occurred. Jesus’ resurrection was not merely an anomalous event occurring without a context; it came as the climax to Jesus’ own life and ministry. As the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg (who was my doctoral mentor in Munich) explains,

Thus, the religio-historical context as well as the inexplicability of the event itself furnishes us with the key to discerning the supernatural character of that event.