Maurice Frank Wiles, FBA (17 October 1923 – 3 June 2005) was an Anglican priest and academic.
After ordination in 1950 he spent two years as curate at St George's, Stockport, but then returned to Ridley Hall as chaplain.
He again returned to Cambridge as dean of Clare College and university lecturer in early Christian doctrine.
Wiles also argued that an omnibenevolent God would not perform such trivial miracles as those which are normally observed:[3] 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.Wiles concluded that either God acts arbitrarily (and is therefore not worthy of worship) or that he does not intervene at all.
Instead it should be a way of enabling a group or individual to connect with God's will:[3] [prayer] is the capacity to attain, however incompletely, some awareness of that intention.Likewise, the miracles of the Bible need not be rejected.
His father was Sir Harold Herbert Wiles, Deputy Secretary of the Ministry of Labour and National Service.
He was the father of the mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles, who is also a Regius Professor at the University of Oxford, of Mathematics.