Maurice Wiles

• Maurice Wiles

  • Professor of Christian Doctrine at King's College London
  • Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford
  • Anglican priest
• Wiles approves of Tillich's view that miracles are sign events
• God has been thought to interfere in the laws of cause and event to perform miracles, or to guide humans along the best path
• Wiles says it would be immoral if God were to intervene or guide someone's path
• Wiles is suggesting that God would be selecting who is to be healed and who is not, this suggests an unloving God
• If God did selectively intervene, the problem of evil would be unsolvable
• There'd be no reason why God couldn't intervene all the time
• To avoid the problem of evil- God should not intervene at all
• Wiles seeks to shift the argument of miracles away from Hume's questions about the evidence for whether an event can be explained in natural terms
• Wiles wants to change the debate to be about what an event reveals concerning God's intentions for the world
• The healing ministry of Jesus is firmly set within the context of a conflict with evil
• Deus ex machina- a God from the machine
• Wiles argues that Jesus refused Satan's trap of trying to use miracles as evidence of divine power
• Wiles says that God does not intervene 'from above' to perform miracles
• Miracles are not factual descriptions
• Miracles tell us something about God; Jesus's refusal to provide an overwhelmingly convincing miracle illustrates how mistaken it is to try and use accounts of miracles as proof of God's power
• Wiles says that there is one exception: creation itself is a miracle