Does human Will ever suspend a Law of Nature?
I am standing, we will suppose, under a tree in autumn. If a leaf
flutters down and rests upon my head, the Law of gravitation is no more
suspended by my Will, than if it rests upon some intercepting bough. The
result of the Law is modified; downward motion is replaced by downward
pressure: but the Law itself is not suspended.
But if, upon the command of a man, the leaf were arrested in mid air and
remained immovable for an hour together, and if I were led to the
conclusion that this was effected by no force which I could conceive as
being consistent with the ordinary course of Nature and with the
limitations of human power, then I should be obliged to say that the Law
of gravitation, in this particular instance, did not work. Using a
metaphor, I might say that the Law was “suspended,” and the phenomenon
itself I should call a miracle.
In reality the true explanation might be quite different. It is
conceivable that an extraordinary man, once in a thousand or once in ten
thousand years, might be endowed with the power of arresting the motion
of a stone in the air, without the intervention of the body and by the
mere exercise of Will; and this might be done by him as easily, as
regularly, and (for him) as naturally, as we ordinary men stop a stone
in the air by the exercise of Will acting upon our bodily machinery. In
that case gravitation would still act, pressing the stone, so to speak,
upon an invisible hand: and the explanation would be, not that the Law
was suspended, but that the results of the Law were uniquely modified by
the peculiar action of a unique human nature, in the same way in which
they are commonly modified by the regular action of an ordinary human
nature. This, I say, is conceivable. Yet if we find (1) in past history,
a general tendency to believe in miracles on very slight evidence; (2)
in the present time, a general and, as many think, a universal
refutation of the evidence on which miracles have been accepted; (3) an
increasing power of explaining many so-called miracles in accordance
with natural Laws—it becomes our obvious duty to regard miraculous
narratives with a very strong suspicion until cogent evidence has been
produced for their truth.