Wiles

• Maurice Wiles 


  Rejects the idea of any interventions by God into the created universe. He does not reject them on the grounds of logic or science and in fact he does not see anything logically wrong with the idea that God could choose if he wanted to, to create miracles. He rejected them from a moral perspective
• Wiles takes an anti-realist approach to miracles - they are to be interpreted as symbols
• The only miracle was creation - God's creation was good so therefore was no need for further intervention. God put the laws of nature into place, which meant that miraculous events would have to be rare as otherwise humans could not rely on those laws
• According to Wiles, the interventionist understanding of God is unacceptable. It implies a selective God who choses to help some and not others. This issue is seen by the fact that so many reported miracles seem trivial, for example the Wedding in Cana, but not the Gas chambers in Auschwitz. That would not be a God worthy of Worship and makes the problem of evil unsolvable
• Wiles also argued that it is impossible to know what actually happened in relation to the miracles recorded of Jesus - the strength of the tradition suggests that he was a powerful exorcist and healer. His refusal to perform signs to prove his status suggests that whatever he did was in the nature of a sign of God's kingdom and victory over Satan. The Biblical accounts are to be taken as myths to point to the nature of God and importance of obedience
• The significance of Wiles' views in relation to religious belief

  Wiles' view makes the challenges of Hume irrelevant. In his writings, Wiles gives a more holistic view of God's activity as opposed to a view that limits him to occasional intervention. This is closer to Aquinas' view
• The significance of Wiles' views in relation to religious belief

  Wiles' claim that the act of creation was the sole miracle has lead to many believing he was a deist rather than an theist
• The significance of Wiles' views in relation to religious belief

  Against this, Wiles claimed that God was at work in the world, actively sustaining it
• Wiles

  Theist, Anti-realist: miracles are symbols, His starting point is within Christian theism and avoids the interventionist approach