Miracles - Lewis

>Why men believe in the uniformity of Nature:
In the first place we are creatures of habit. We expect new situations to resemble old ones. It is a tendency which we share with animals; one can see it working, often to very comic results, in dogs and cats. In the second place, when we plan our actions, we have to leave out of account the critical possibility that Nature might not behave as usual tomorrow, because we can do nothing about it. It is not worth bothering about because no action can be taken to meet it. And what we habitually put out of our minds we soon forget. The picture of uniformity thus comes to dominate our minds without rival and we believe it.
Both these causes are irrational and would be just as effective and building up a false belief as in building up a true one. But I'm convinced that these is a there is a third cause. Said the late Sir Arthur Eddington:"In science, we sometimes have convictions which we cherish but cannot justify; we are influenced by some inmate sense of the fitness of things." This may sound a perilously subjective and aesthetic criterion; but can one doubt that it is a principal source of our believe in uniformity?A universe in which unprecedented and unpredictable events were at every moment flung into Nature would not merely be inconvenient to us: it would be profoundly repugnant. We will not accept such a universe on any terms whatever. It is utterly detestable to us. It shocks our "sense of the fitness of things".

>We are in the habit of talking as if laws of Nature caused events to happen; but they have never cause any event at all. Thus in one sense the laws of Nature cover the whole field of space and time; in another, what they leave out is precisely the whole real universe - the incessant torrent of actual events which makes up true history. That must come from somewhere else. To think the laws can produce it is like think that you can create real money by simply doing sums.

>The fact which is one respect the most obvious and primary fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten - forgotten not because it is so remote and abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the supernatural has been forgotten.

>On prayer: The Christian is not to ask whether this or that event happened because of a prayer. He is rather to believe that all events without exception are answers to prayer in the sense that whether they are grantings or refusals the prayers of all concerned and their needs have been taken into account. All prayers are heard, though not all prayers are granted. We must not picture destiny as a film unrolling for the most part on its own, but in which our prayers are sometimes allowed to insert additional items. On the contrary; what the film displays to us as it unrolls already contains the result of our prayers and all our other acts.
There is no question whether an evet has happened because of your prayer. When the events you prayed for occurs your prayers has always contributed to it. When the opposite events occurs your prayer has never been ignored; it has been considered and refused, for your ultimate good and the good of whole universe. But this is, and must remain, a matter of faith.