Abstract
This chapter gives an overview and response to a trend in philosophy that dismisses the possibility of miracles. Contrary to that trend, this chapter summarizes the countervailing position, which argues that miracles cannot be philosophically dismissed as a possibility. Indeed, the in-principle possibility of miracles is an important and interesting premise that is built upon and utilized in many religious contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
We do not have evidence of any direct communication between Hume and Bayes, but they did have a common acquaintance in the philosopher/mathematician Richard Price. See Earman, 2002.
- 2.
In the Bayesian rule given here, P(A|B) is a formulaic expression of conditional probability—i.e., the probability of A given that B obtains.
- 3.
For a more thorough explanation of this critique of Hume’s argument (and several additional critiques), see Earman (2000).
- 4.
The question of what should be done with evidence that runs contrary to theoretical prediction is a nuanced one, and will generally involve error checking and the weighing of new modified hypotheses. But such questions can be set aside for our purposes here. The important point here is that Hume’s critique, in its zeal for dismissing religious hypotheses that invoke the idea of “miracle”, also dismisses the rational consideration of any revised hypothesis whatsoever, thus eliminating the possibility of genuine empirical investigation or future theory change.
- 5.
See Carroll (2016) for an introductory summary of various philosophical understandings of laws of nature.
- 6.
In fact, Leibniz held a view along these lines: that “miracles” are actually subsumed by the complicated but unknown laws that humans will never be able to discover. The simple laws that we discover through our humble physics are violated, but that’s because they aren’t the true laws of nature.
References
Carroll, J. W. (2016). Laws of nature. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/laws-of-nature/. Accessed 2021, February 15.
Earman, J. (2000). Hume’s abject failure: The argument against miracles. Oxford University Press.
Earman, J. (2002). Bayes, Hume, Price, and miracles. In R. Swinburne (Ed.), Bayes’s theorem (pp. 91–109). Oxford University Press.
Hume, D. (2007 [1748]). In P. Millican (Ed.), An enquiry concerning human understanding. Oxford University Press.
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Zwier, K.R. (2022). Miracles in Philosophical Analysis. In: Zwier, K.R., Weddle, D.L., Knepper, T.D. (eds) Miracles: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion. Comparative Philosophy of Religion, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14865-1_12
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