Abstract
Miracles play a key role in Christianity. The resurrection of Christ is miraculous as is his incarnation, as are various acts he allegedly performed over the course of his life, such as turning water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead and feeding 5,000 with a few loaves and fishes. Belief in modern day miracles may be optional for many Christians, but belief in at least some of the Biblical miracles is not. Further, the occurrence of miracles is seen by some as an argument for the existence of God and for the truth of Christianity and other religions. People believe in God because miraculous happenings can only have a divine explanation. Religious texts such as the Bible and the Koran describe how God reveals himself to mankind, and one way he does this is through performing miracles.
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Notes
- 1.
The contemporary debate concerning the epistemology of testimony revolves around the Humean, empirical account of the justification of testimonial belief. See Lackey and Sosa 2006.
- 2.
Hume, following such reasoning, sided correctly with those who thought the Ossian poems published by James Macpherson in 1760 were forgeries and not translations of ancient Gaelic texts. Boswell describes a conversation with Hume in which ‘he disbelieved [the origin of the poems] not so much for want of testimony, as from the nature of the thing, according to his apprehension. He said if 50 bare-arsed Highlanders should say that Fingal was an ancient poem, he would not believe them. He said it was not to be believed that a people who were continually concerned to keep themselves from starving or from being hanged should preserve in their memories a poem in six books’ (Boswell 2001, 193–4). See also Graham 2004, 260, 340–1, and Hume 1965; 1932, I, 328–31.
- 3.
George Campbell (1762, 30–2) and Richard Price (1768, 413–6), contemporaries of Hume, suggest that Hume’s account is in tension with the fact that we readily accept testimony concerning events that are highly improbable, events that, by Hume’s lights, we should doubt occurred. I received a text message last night telling me that Zlatan Ibrahimovic scored a bicycle kick for Sweden against England from 30 yards. The chance of anyone doing this at all, never mind in an international match, is extremely small, much smaller, it would seem, than the chance that a friend was joking or mistaken. Millican argues that Hume is sloppy in the presentation of his argument and that what he probably had in mind was this ‘Revised Humean Maxim’: ‘No testimony is sufficient to render a miracle M more probable than not, unless the testimony is of such a kind, that the occurrence of a false M report of that kind (given that M does not in fact occur) would be even less probable than M itself’ (2011, 186). If, for example, Ibrahimovic had not scored, it is not likely that such a text would have been sent, less likely, plausibly, than the event itself occurring. Not so, though, in the case of miracles. Given the psychological factors discussed in Sect. 9.2 below, it is not so unlikely that false testimony concerning miracles be given.
- 4.
Millican (2012) argues that Hume’s inductive scepticism is directed at a Lockean perceptual model of reason in which we must attempt to perceive or apprehend objective, probabilistic connexions between experiences. Inductive inference, though, cannot be justified in this way. In place of such justification, Hume offers a naturalistic explanation of how human beings can—and actually do—reason inductively and this, given the impossibility of any rational or perceptual foundations for such reasoning, provides us with all the support we require for inductive inferences: ‘in the search for ultimate foundations, we hit rock bottom with something that has a cause but no foundation. And that is the tendency, rooted in our animal nature, to infer from past to future, from experienced to not-yet-experienced…. [This] position is very far from sceptical…. Hume sees very good reason to accept our faculty of inductive inference as it is (at least when suitably disciplined by general rules etc.), and no good reason to reject it. We have, indeed, no alternative, nor any compelling reason for desiring one’ (ibid., 90).
- 5.
There is also another option here. Accepting testimony concerning the 8 days of darkness does not entail that we must believe a miracle has taken place. Instead, we could look for an explanation of the phenomena that would enable us to see the laws of nature as being maintained. There may have been darkness over the Earth for 8 days—the sun may not have risen—but this is because there was a ‘secret opposition of contrary causes’ (1772a, 8.13/87); perhaps a giant comet had blocked out the sun. Hume could be seen as suggesting this response to such testimony as he claims that we ‘ought to search for the causes whence it might be derived’ (ibid., 10.36/128); this suggests that the laws of nature had not been violated and that there may be a hidden empirical cause for this seemingly anomalous course of events.
- 6.
See 1778, 6. 494, 1.38, 2.420, 2.421, 2.492, 1.105, and 2.399.
- 7.
See R. Miller 1991.
- 8.
On contradictions in the Bible see Kitcher 2007, 135–9. Kitcher’s conclusion is that ‘the documents Christians take to be canonical were chosen as the result of political struggles among many nascent Jesus movements, in which efforts to incorporate the ideas of an itinerant teacher within the framework of Judaism lost out to a more cosmopolitan vision favored by the Rome oriented Paul. Within that cosmopolitan conception there were also variations, some of which were eliminated as heretical. Out of this come a collection of inconsistent documents, many of whose parts are evidently fictitious’ (ibid., 139).
- 9.
Hume notes problems concerning the interpretation of the Bible: ‘That sacred writ itself was involved in so much obscurity, gave rise to so many difficulties, contained so many appearing contradictions, that it was the most dangerous weapon, that could be entrusted into the hands of the ignorant and giddy multitude: That the poetical style, in which a great part of it was composed, at the same time that it occasioned uncertainty in the sense, by its multiplied tropes and figures, was sufficient to kindle the zeal of fanaticism, and thereby throw civil society into the most furious combustion: That a thousand sects must arise, which would pretend, each of them, to derive its tenets from the scripture; and would be able, by specious arguments, or even without specious arguments, to seduce silly women and ignorant mechanics, into a belief of the most monstrous principles’ (1778, 3.232).
- 10.
This is an old anti-Catholic joke. Tillotson, in his Discourse against Transubstantiation (1684), cites Averroes the Islamic philosopher as saying: ‘but so sottish [foolish] a Sect or Law I never found, as is the Sect of the Christians; because with their own teeth they devour their God whom they worship’. The entry for ‘Eucharist’ in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772) includes the reference ‘see: Cannibalism’.
- 11.
As Kemp Smith (1947, 47) points out, this was the view of the Reformed Churches in the eighteenth century. Faith is only possible with the aid of miraculously wrought divine Grace.
- 12.
Of course Humean standards are not always lived up to in common life: C. D. Broad claimed to ‘have a Scottish friend who believes all the miracles of the New Testament, but cannot be induced to believe, on the repeated evidence of my own eyes, that a small section of the main North British Railway between Dundee and Aberdeen consists of single line’ (1916–1917, 81).
- 13.
See Hume 1739, 1.3.15/173–6, ‘Rules by which to judge of causes and effects’, for a more detailed discussion of how to ‘distinguish the accidental circumstance from the efficacious causes’ (ibid., 1.3.13.11/149).
- 14.
Also see Addison: ‘I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses’ (Green 1908, xi).
- 15.
Cf. C. S. Lewis (2002, 268); he talks of naturalism as a contagion.
- 16.
Siebert (1990, 95) points to various places where Hume likens religion to a disease: ‘Religion is “a malady … almost incurable,” an “intoxicating poison,” an epidemical frenzy,” “a disease dangerous and inveterate”; even in France, most civilized of nations, during the religious civil wars “the theological rage, which had long been boiling in men’s veins, seems to have attained its last stage of virulence and ferocity” (Hume 1778, 3.366, 5.348, 6.32, 4.57)’.
- 17.
Hume’s thoughts seem rather overblown here. Religious ways of thinking rarely undermine what Hume sees as our human nature in this way. Christians, for example, still generally see the world in terms of inductive regularities and act accordingly.
- 18.
At various places in the History of England Hume notes the connection between religion and mental illness. Cromwell, for example, was ‘transported to a degree of madness by religious extasies’ (1778, 6.5).
- 19.
A phrase that Hume possibly took from Mandeville’s Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (1730). See Wright 2009, 8–9.
- 20.
Interpretations of Voltaire’s conclusion and their relation to Hume are explored in O’Brien (2010).
- 21.
Although cf. C. S. Lewis (1940, 92): ‘The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for Home.’
- 22.
Boswell comments that ‘Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention’ (1791, II.113).
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Bailey, A., O’Brien, D. (2014). Miracles. In: Hume's Critique of Religion: 'Sick Men's Dreams'. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 72. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6615-0_9
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