Miracles : parthenogenesis and resurrection : (some side-lights on theological subjects) / by J. Foster Palmer.

  • Palmer, J. Foster (James Foster)
Date:
[1914]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Miracles : parthenogenesis and resurrection : (some side-lights on theological subjects) / by J. Foster Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    in action, can we, with any confidence, say that it lias never deviated since ? If it lias not, why has it not ? Because such deviation has not come within our experience. No other answer can be given. Reason there is none. Professor Sunday divides miracles into two kinds Those which are super naturam, and those which are contra naturam. The latter would comprise contradictions, which Duns Scotus said were beyond the power even of the Deity. The distinction is a valuable one, but I have a suspicion that different minds draw the line in different places, and that this accounts, practically, for all the difference of opinion on the subject. That two and two make five, that two straight lines can enclose a space, all would agree to be contra natu/rain. But this does not apply to all phenomena. To me it would be contra naturam for one body to be in two places at the same time, but I am not so sure that it would be contra naturam for two bodies of a different nature to occupy the same space. I cannot tell why. Dr. .Sunday, I believe, draws the line at the Virgin Birth and the physical resurrec- tion. These, as I understand, he considers to be contra naturam. Well! are they ? There seems to be no necessary contradiction about them, and, as I hope to point out, they are not altogether without parallels, or analogies, in nature. Their acceptance appears to be a question of historical evidence. If it is proved that certain verses, essential to a belief in these doctrines, were interpolated, and have no historical value, that is purely a matter of higher criticism, in which Dr. Sunday is an expert, and about which I know nothing. But if he says that these statements will not stand, not because they lack evidence, but because they are contra naturam, that is a matter of physiology, in which I may claim to have had, at any rate, a rudimentary training. If this is taken as a ground of rejection, it is presumably, because they are inconceivable. But are we to go back to the scholastic teaching of Abelard, and make conceivability the test of cred\]ity ? Is it not the fact that different minds have different powers of conception ? To me, at any rate, and, I think, to many others, these phenomena are not altogether inconceivable; not, at least, in the sense of a mathematical impossibility. They are contrary to our ordinary experience. That is all that can be said against them. But is not that the case with many things which have been proved to be true after all ? Tt was said, more than 40 years ago, by an old and far-seeing physician, that in the future we should be able to see into the interior of the living body, heart, lungs, etc. “ Oh ! no,” it was said. “ He is in his dotage. Miracles don’t happen. We cannot see through opaque bodies. The laws of light and of optics are constant. It is impossible.” Is it ? I have lived to see the heart beat through