Miracles can be filtered out of our sense of reality

No way through - unless we avoid whatever is blocking our perspective

C.S. Lewis opens his book Miracles with the following words: "In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves" [1]. 

That reaction might have arisen from an application of Occam's razor (see my previous post) but it also points to the fact that each of us form filters over time affecting our appreciation of truth and reality. This is part of our rational life that complicates decision-making. In this example, if the woman who saw the ghost had been open to all possibilities, she would have first taken the view that the extraordinary sighting seemed to indicate that there is a spiritual dimension to life, rather that assuming her brain had had a malfunction though it had been working correctly by normal measures before and after her experience.

I want to briefly explore this matter, excerpting from a blog I came across while researching my recent field of interest, the topic of truth and reality and Christian belief. The blog states:

This story [that Lewis relates] clearly illustrates how an individual’s Plausibility Structure (PS)* can affect belief formation concerning that which we believe to be reasonable or unreasonable, potentially true or surely false. A PS can simply be understood as a mental apparatus that operates as a filter to filter out beliefs that should not be considered as plausible.

Every belief that we entertain will first pass through our PS informing us of its possibility or likelihood and does not allow us to hold to beliefs that are inconsistent with the experiences or evidence that we are privy to. So, in the case of the woman in Lewis’s story, since she disbelieved in the existence of immortal souls (or, in other words, her PS did not allow for the existence of immortal souls), even after a seeming encounter with a ghost, she must find an alternative explanation (an explanation that fits in her PS) for what she experienced (i.e. an illusion or a trick).

...if [a person's] PS only allows for a naturalistic, materialistic reality, the supernatural will never be entertained as plausible. Regardless of the arguments that may be given for the existence of God, the possibility of miracles, and the reliability of Scripture, since [that person's] PS is closed off to supernatural explanations, these arguments will fall on deaf ears. In other words, [the person's] naturalistic framework limits his range of plausible explanations.

The church has enough self-awareness to be wary of filter that religious fervour creates, and so it has a body of regulations ensuring a thorough investigation into "the historical and scientific truth of the alleged miracles. Just as it is necessary for the legal checks to be complete, convergent and reliable, it is also necessary that their study be performed with serenity, objectivity and sure competence by highly specialised medical experts." 

The hope is that those imbued with solely a sense of the material world can open their hearts and minds - we are a mind-body phenomenon - to the spiritual/supernatural realm.

See also:

*Plausibility Structure [here] is not to be strictly identified with Peter Berger’s Plausibility Structure derived from his sociological theory of religion.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 1.