A Little Lewis For You Concerning Nature vs. Supernature

Interest in evidence in order to obtain knowledge about a certain topic or fact must take the student a bit deeper than the evidence itself.  All "evidence" is interpreted by the one observing it.  To state it another way, all facts are interpreted by an underlying philosophy or deep-seated commitments.  Some call these presuppositions.  They are the lens through which one views and interprets the world around her.

C.S. Lewis describes this well in his book Miracles.  He says, "The question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience.  Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted.  And our senses are not infallible.  If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been victims of an illusion.  If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.  What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.  It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question."

He goes on to speak about determining whether or not miracles happened in the past on the basis of evidence: "The result of our historical enquiries thus depends on the philosophical views which we have been holding before we even began to look at the evidence.  The philosophical question must therefore come first."

Lewis begins the chapter by giving an example of a lady who has seen a ghost.  However, because of her presuppositions that supernature does not exist, the concludes that she must be hallucinating.  In other words, even if God did come down, even if He worked wonders in our day, many who exclude super nature in their basic philosophy would conclude that there must be a natural explanation for it, and would spend their lives in search for such an explanation.