A very unconvincing bit of theosophy, definitely not Lewis's best work. ( )

"This is a book about the possibility of God's intervention in Nature and human affairs. In Miracle: A Preliminary Stury, C.S. Lewis' logic is seemingly effortless, his illustration are shrewd, and he open-mindedly leaves the historical evidence for miracles to the reader to discover for himself." From the back of the book.

This book, as its subtitle implies, is a study preliminary to any historical inquiry into the actual occurrence of miracles. With most historians the decision against the probability of miracles is made almost unconsciously before the historical work begins. The purpose of this book is to shift the question of probability from the unconscious to the conscious plane, and its main argument is directed to embattling the 18th and 19th century assumption against the miraculous.

One of his more popular works, but not very read of his most popular works. Very insightful book that spends so much time leading up to the disucssion of miracles that by the time you get there you feel the argument has already been won.

I enjoyed this book; Lewis does a reasonable job of presenting his arguments as to why theism is reasonable, why miracles are reasonable, and what criteria can be used for judging miracle. My main annoyance with the book is that Lewis tends to reason along the lines of "A or B, we don't like A, therefore B". For example, he makes a good case that either (a) there must be some sort of supernatural being representative of truth or (b) everything we believe to be true is just a vastly convenient fiction. He then goes on the claim the former as being the true solution even though the later is equally likely, just less comforting.

Lewis also has a tendency to define terms to suit his needs. He defines Naturalism as, amongst other things, being deterministic. Thus, he can appeal to our sense of the fitness of things to argue for theism; for example, at one point he says something like "if Naturalism is true, you are only reading this book and I am only writing it because of some inevitable chain of events". At another time, he claims that quantum mechanics cannot really be part of nature because it admits nondeterminism. Another way to interpret these limitations of his definition is to wonder, as I did, whether his definition of Naturalism might not just be pure rhetorical BS. Lewis does better in the later parts of the books when he switches to arguments that are just as rational as before but drops the claim to be proving anything.