Today someone wrote a letter to the editor in the mX newspaper, claiming that Harry Potter and similar movies are more believable than the Bible. "A man walking on water? Come on", they wrote.

This immediately made me think of C.S Lewis essay called Dogma And The Universe, which I read last night. In it, he suggests that the mere existence of the universe is a miracle. So I texted in a response:

If you really think about it, the existence of the universe is an unexplainable miracle. So why denounce the beliefs of those who believe in a few more miracles than you do?

Hopefully I get into mX as I've got a good success rate of getting published on those rare occasions when I do message or email in.

So is this correct? Is the existence of the universe a miracle? It would appear so. After all, what is a miracle? I had some thoughts about this after reading C.S Lewis' essay, and I agreed with Lewis in that there were a couple of key points that I thought would make something a miracle: Something unexplainable, and something that doesn't ascribe to any natural laws we know of. Under this definition, the existence of the universe fits the definition. Science can describe the natural world for us, but it cannot tell us why these natural laws exist and not others. We do not know how something can come from literally nothing, and no known laws could make it so (in fact I'd argue it's metaphysically impossible). And if the universe is eternal instead (which opposes the current dominant scientific hypothesis, which suggests that the universe has a finite past) we know of no real reason why this should or shouldn't be the case. We just have to take it as a kind of brute fact.

I googled "miracle" and the definitions agreed with the definitions I'd been pondering, for example:

This website: An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of God

Now, the part about God isn't important to my argument. Whether or not someone holds something inexplicable to be supernatural or an Act of God is really an act of faith. And that's the whole point, isn't it? We have this something called existence which we can't really explain, making it very much miraculous. And that brings me back to the original point: We all believe in miraculous things, whether we want to or not. So why berate those who believe in a few more miraculous things than you do?

Furthermore, I believe the existence of a necessary being is the best explanation for existence itself and the universe. But that's another topic for another day!