Epistemic Theory of Miracles - Augustine's Account

Augustine's Account

In The City of God, Book XXI, Chapter 8, Augustine quotes Marcus Varro, Of the Race of the Roman People:

There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that, in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its colour, size, form, course, which never appeared before nor since. Adrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.

So great an author as Varro would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature.

Augustine argues that there can be no true transgression of the laws of nature, because everything that happens according to God's will happens by nature, and a transgression of the laws of nature would therefore happen contrary to God's will. A miracle therefore is not contrary to nature as it really is, but only contrary to nature as our current understanding supposes it to be (Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura).

For example, if we were to see a man walking on water, and the man really were walking on water, that would not be possible given the laws of nature as we understand them. (The surface tension of water is not great enough to support a man's weight.) But it is logically possible that our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete, and that there are special psychophysical laws, unknown to us, that allow certain human beings possessing great powers of concentration to affect by force of will alone the surface tension of water. If that were so in the case of Jesus, there would be nothing truly unnatural about his walking on water.