The effect of science, however, is not limited to the
present and future, but its action is equally retrospective, and
phenomena which were once ignorantly isolated from the sequence of
natural cause and effect are now restored to their place in the unbroken
order. Ignorance and superstition created miracles; knowledge has for
ever annihilated them.
To justify miracles, two assumptions are made: first, an Infinite
Personal God; and second, a Divine design of Revelation, the execution
of which necessarily involves supernatural action. Miracles, it is
argued, are not contrary to nature, or effects produced without adequate
causes, but on the contrary are caused by the intervention of this
Infinite Personal God for the purpose of attesting and carrying out the
Divine design. Neither of the assumptions, however, can be reasonably
maintained.
The assumption of an Infinite Personal God: a Being at once limited and
unlimited, is a use of language to which no mode of human thought can
possibly attach itself. Moreover, the assumption of a God working
miracles is emphatically excluded by universal experience of the order
of nature. The allegation of a specific Divine cause of miracles is
further inadequate from the fact that the power of working miracles is
avowedly not limited to a Personal God, but is also ascribed to other
spiritual Beings, and it must, consequently, always be impossible to
prove that the supposed miraculous phenomena originate with one and not
with the other.
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