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learn of the natural world, and obtain the “knowledge of the great material design of which the Supreme Master-Worker has made us a constituent part”. Not only that, but a considerable proportion of the money given towards the museum’s construction budget came out of profits made by the Oxford University Press from its success in printing Bibles!
    As I reflected on this afterwards I realized that there was a wonderful irony here. (I wish I had thought of it at the time, but such is the brilliance of hindsight!) Dawkins was supposed to be presenting the case that science has buried God — in a building constructed specifically to show that science showed the glory of God; and in his opening statement he identified me as an Oxford mathematician who believed in miracles! I should have thought that this might reasonably be taken as evidence that science has not buried God.
    Dawkins was mocking me for believing what he considers to be ridiculous, but his mockery is hollow. Mockery is not an argument. It is an attitude, and it does no credit to the person who employs it in this connection. If there is a God who created the universe, then surely there is no difficulty in believing that he could do special things. Of course, whether he has actually done so on a specific occasion is a different matter. Francis Collins, who does believe in the miracles of Jesus, remarks wisely:
It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand. 4
     
    For that reason I shall concentrate on the miracles recorded in the New Testament.
    There is an important distinction to be made between miracles and supernatural events. Miracles (genuine miracles, that is) are supernatural events; but not all supernatural events are miracles in the strict sense. For instance, the origin of the universe and its laws, though a supernatural event, should probably not be subsumed under the rubric of miracle. Strictly speaking, miracles concern events that are exceptions to recognized laws. As such they clearly presuppose the existence of the normal course of things. It follows, then, that it does not really make sense to think of the creation of the normal course of things as a miracle.
    We note here that Richard Dawkins confesses he does not know what caused the origin of the universe; but he believes (yes, his faith is shining out once more) that one day there will be a naturalistic explanation of it. As he said in our Oxford debate, he does not need to resort to magic to explain the universe. However, in the press conference after the debate, he responded to a question from Melanie Phillips, a journalist and author, by saying that he believed the universe could have just appeared from nothing. “Magic,” she said. Presently she reported that Dawkins had told her afterwards that an explanation for the universe in terms of LGM (little green men) made more sense than postulating a Creator. Anything but God, it would seem.
    The Christian gospel is based squarely on a miracle. It was the miracle of the resurrection of Christ that started it going, and that same miracle is its central message. Indeed, the basic qualification of a Christian apostle was to be an eyewitness of the resurrection. 5 C. S. Lewis expresses the situation precisely: “The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. If they had died without making anyone else believe this ‘gospel’, no Gospels would ever have been written.” 6 According to the early Christians, then, without the resurrection there simply is no Christian message. Paul writes: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching