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We Believe in Miracles—Just Not on Film

Movies old and new have wrestled with how to depict the supernatural.

“If we open such books as Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Italian epics, we find ourselves in a world of miracles so diverse they can hardly be classified. […] Some people cannot stand this kind of story, others find it fun. But the least suspicion that it was true would turn the fun into nightmare.” – C. S. Lewis, Miracles: How God Intervenes in Nature and Human Affairs.

The belief in miracles is so deeply embedded in our art, literature, and theology that it is somewhat surprising that our films don’t really know how to represent them.
Or maybe it isn’t. Film is a medium that developed in the 20th century, at a time when post-Enlightenment, naturalist philosophy had fundamentally changed broader cultural assumptions about what miracles are and whether they are real. In the film Miracles from Heaven, we are told that a miracle is something not explicable by natural and scientific laws. The film depicts the struggles of the Beam family, especially Christy (Jennifer Garner) to reconcile their faith with their daughter’s incurable and terminal medical condition.

The film’s coda may not include the word “currently” in between “not” and “explicable,” but I would argue its presence can be assumed. The American science-fiction author Isaac Asimov popularized the notion that technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. As our understanding and manipulations of the physical universe have increased, even many Christians have come to wonder whether the miracles of the past were supernatural suspensions of natural laws or simply manipulations of them that human science could not yet emulate.

The creation …

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