  All of this, of course, might seem to simply put greater pressure on  the second horn of Leibniz’s dilemma. For it might seem that it is  open to Descartes’s defenders to maintain that the laws of motion are the result of God’s direct decree, and that consequently they do not  – as Leibniz seems to assume – follow from the nature of  body as such. (Indeed, Descartes himself implies that the laws of  motion follow inexorably not from the nature of matter, but rather  from the nature of God (AT VIIIA 61–62/CSM 1:240).) For Leibniz,  however, such a view is equivalent to conceding that the laws of  nature hold by dint of divine miracle since “properly speaking, God performs a miracle when he does something that surpasses the  forces he has given to creatures and conserves in them” (Letter to Arnauld, 30 April 1687, G II 93/AG 83). Thus, for Leibniz, a  miracle occurs when a creature performs an action that does not flow  from its own natural powers, and so bodies could obey laws of motion  not grounded in their own natural powers only through the advent of a perpetual miracle. If Leibniz’s understanding of miracles is granted, his second horn is thus much harder to resist than one might have  otherwise supposed. 