Maurice Wiles

Maurice Frank Wiles (17 October 1923 – 3 June 2005) was an Anglican priest and academic. He was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford for 21 years, from 1970 to 1991.

Wiles was educated at the Tonbridge School in Kent, and worked at Bletchley Park during World War II. He then studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and Ridley Hall. After ordination he spent two years as curate at St George's, , but then returned to Ridley Hall as chaplain. From 1955 to 1959 he was a lecturer in New Testament Studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He again returned to Cambridge as dean of Clare College and university lecturer in early Christian doctrine.

In his work God's Action in the World, he discusses the notion of a world that is consistent with Christian theology and the laws of nature. In doing so Wiles rejects the possibility that God directly intervenes in the world and therefore rejects the existence of miracles.

Wiles accepts God as the sole creator of the world, yet believes he does not intervene in the world for a number of reasons. He believed we should not see God as playing an 'active role' but instead hold the belief that God created the world as he wanted in its entirety:

"the world as a whole [is] a single act of God."

Therefore, God would not undermine the natural laws that he created by intervening in the world. Wiles also argued that an omnibenevolent God would not perform such trivial miracles as those which are normally observed:

"...even so it would seem strange that no miraculous intervention prevented Auschwitz or Hiroshima, while the purposes apparently forwarded by some of the miracles acclaimed in traditional Christian faith seem trivial by comparison."

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