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GOD or NOT 3: Miracles

The third installment of the GOD or NOT carnival, on the topic of "miracles," is now up at The Evangelical Atheist with a link to my post, "Can The New Testament Be Both Influenced By Plato and Inspired by God?". There seems to be a general concensus on two points:

• People talking about miracles should reference David Hume
• People who want to justify belief in miracles shouldn't claim that they are exceptions to "laws" of nature

I, of course, agree on both points. Now, a couple of posts react to this by suggesting that natural laws are not really "laws," per se, but merely regularities in God's governance of the world. "Christians," Tim Challies goes so far as to claim, "would do better to understand the laws of nature in terms of regularities rather than laws." (emphasis original.) Well, what are laws but inviolate regularities in the behavior of the natural world? But the "inviolate" part is what Tim is attacking. This, he thinks, is the root of the argument that the idea of "miracles" is nonsense (as, of course, a violation of an inviolate regularity is a contradiction). I, or course, disagree. These sorts of exceptions, I think, are contrary to the portrayal of God in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.

But I'm beating a dead horse: I've discussed miracles all to death on this blog over the last few months and I'm almost done (although I'm about to start writing a term paper on Leibniz's view of miracles and natural law, so there may be a few more comments on the subject in the next few weeks). For those of you who are just now tuing in, my overall view of miracles is explained in moderate rigor here.