Miracles and Revelation Revision Notes

I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for A222 Exploring Philosophy, Book 2, Acts of God by Timothy Chappell.

I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.

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Hume on Induction Revision Notes

I produced a number of revision documents for my degree course, and maybe someone will find them useful. This is for A222 Exploring Philosophy, Book 4, Knowledge by Cristina Chimisso.

I printed these revision notes on card as an aide-memoire to the issues I needed to touch on in an exam question on the subject; most exam questions require an exposition of the ground to be covered before any actual philosophy can be done (ie, the question answered!). Having these, almost bullet, points burned into my memory allowed me to write this background stuff whilst planning my answer.

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Knowledge, Testimony and Reductionism

Does reductionism - the notion that testimonial evidence simply reduces to facts derived from memory and experience - succeed in explaining how we can know things on the basis of testimony?

I shall consider two problems in reductionism that Jennifer Lackey highlights to show that reductionism does not succeed in explaining how we can know things on the basis of testimony.

Parameters

To ‘know things’ I take to mean that we have a true belief that is justified in some way. That justification is what reductionism and its alternatives look to provide. For brevity’s sake I will concentrate on one-to-one testimony, although there are many types of testimony (what Lackey calls ‘epistemic heterogeneity’, 2006, p.441). I shall focus on a global reductionist account:

... a hearer must have non-testimonially based positive reasons for believing that testimony is generally reliable. (p.440)

Testimony

We are told things as children and adults that we rarely investigate. Our parents tell us our name is x and we were born in y. The rule we follow is something like:

If the speaker S asserts that p to the hearer H, then, under normal conditions, it is correct for H to accept (believe) S's assertion, unless H has special reason to object. (Adler, 2015)

Jonathan Adler calls this the default rule (DR) and it plausibly describes our everyday behaviour. But the question is: does simply telling someone something, rather than, for example, showing them, confer knowledge?

Reductionism

Reductionism is commonly identified with David Hume (1711-1776). In Of Miracles he writes:

[O]ur assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses.

..and:

Were not the memory tenacious to a certain degree; had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood: Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be qualities, inherent in human nature, we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony. (Hume, 1777, p.174)

Hume is claiming that a reasonable person ‘reduces’ testimonial evidence to facts derived from their memory and experience – it is not justifiably knowledge otherwise.

Contrast this with the non-reductionist view from Hume’s contemporary Thomas Reid (1710-1796). He claims there is a principle of veracity (PV), that people tend to tell the truth, and a corresponding principle of credulity, that people tend to believe what they are told. The principle of veracity stems from the connection between thoughts and language; the very purpose of language is to communicate the truth of one’s thoughts, and while some may lie occasionally, even liars tell the truth more than they lie. From this principle we can reasonably assume the truth of testimony in and of itself, unless we are given reason to doubt it.

Reid’s PV doesn’t seem very different from Hume’s appeal to people’s truthfulness (‘had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity’, p.174). But to establish knowledge from testimony a priori Reid needs a justification that is a priori; that is, justified without appealing to evidence, such as the notion that 1+1=2. Hume justifies the truth of testimony a posteriori, by appealing to experience.

Problems with Reductionism

Reid makes some trenchant criticisms of reductionism. In a reductionist world he notes that ‘[s]uch distrust and incredulity would deprive us of the greatest benefits of society’ (Reid, 1764, p.177). But if believing testimony is beneficial to us as social animals it does not follow that it is necessarily knowledge-imparting. A parent could tell their children that there are dragons in the wood across the busy main road nearby, to deter them from crossing the road. This would benefit the children by preventing them from risking their lives on the road, but it does not impart any knowledge to them. The alternative, truthful, method of telling the children of the perils of the road might be less effective. This breaks the a priori connection between thoughts and language to which Reid appeals.

But if we must find reasons in our background knowledge, from perception, memory and inference, for justifiably believing testimony, we need to establish the general rule of testimony’s reliability, and, as Lackey points out (p.440), two issues arise:

1. It’s not clear we can be confident that we have received enough reports to establish the general rule that testimony is reliable (TR).
2. It’s not clear we have sufficient access to the facts of the world to judge a testimony’s truthfulness (TT).

Consider the first instance of testimony a child receives from her parent – say, her mother introduces a man and says, this is your uncle; the child believes it (what else can she do?).

On TR, she has only one record in her testimonial database, so she has nothing to judge her mother’s testimonial reliability by.

On TT, charitably she will know a few facts about the world; teddy bears are warm and fluffy, spoons are cold and hard, for example. But no child can investigate her uncle’s provenance, so, per reductionism, on TR and TT grounds, that the man is her uncle is not knowledge. Nonetheless this belief will be stored as a fact.

Later, the mother introduces another child as her uncle’s son, calling him the child’s cousin. By now, perhaps, the child has a larger testimonial database showing 90% reliability for her mother’s testimony, so the TR issue is somewhat mitigated. But, still, the child only has data for her mother and perhaps a few close family and friends, which can hardly be projected to establish testimony’s general reliability. One might at this stage appeal to a local reductionist approach, that ‘the justification of each particular report or instance of testimony reduces to the justification of instances of sense perception, memory, and inductive inference’ (Lackey, p.440). But this introduces problems of chains of testimony that are insoluble, I think, without an appeal to testimony’s general reliability.

On TT, the child might observe facts about her cousin – that he lives with her uncle, for example – that could give her good empirical evidence that he is her cousin. If we ignore the TR problem above, reductionism then suggests that she knows who her cousin is. But this fact itself is based on a background ‘fact’ that is not knowledge, per reductionism – that her cousin’s father is her uncle. Basing facts on non-facts looks fatal to reductionism as a coherent account of knowledge acquisition.

A reductionist might counter that by extrapolation from our limited datasets we can be justified in our beliefs on both TR and TT grounds; maybe we could confirm background beliefs retrospectively as experience increases. But we are then left with the problem of keeping track of our beliefs and their status. I’m not aware anyone does this; I’m really only aware of background beliefs, not background confirmed facts and unconfirmed ‘facts’.

A couple of anti-reductionist suggestions point to some more issues that an enlightened reductionist account should address.

Testimony to be trusted?

Paul Faulkner draws a distinction between practical testimony, such as the ‘dragons’ example, and epistemological testimony. Echoing Reid’s ‘distrust’ objection, he says that reductionism ignores ‘...the practical dimension of testimony. It misses out on the reasons that trust provides’ (The Open University, 2014, 2:23). Faulkner’s ‘assurance view’ (ibid, 4:22) suggests that by trusting testifiers we can take what they say as knowledge. There does seem to be a trust component to testimony; when that trust is broken, we take it very seriously. One of the ten commandments is not to lie; if journalists are found out telling falsehoods it can end their career; and likewise for scientists who falsify evidence in scientific papers.

But this doesn’t seem to help at all in the ‘dragons’ testimony case; children nearly always trust their mother’s testimony and they are rarely let down. But the mother’s testimony is split between the practical and the epistemological, so there has to be an account that distinguishes the knowledge-imparting from the pragmatic, and trust doesn’t seem to provide it. The children are right to trust their mother, but not because she is imparting knowledge. From a reductionist viewpoint, there can be plentiful evidence available to trust someone, but how could the trust be established in the first place given the problems of TR and TT above?

Testimony as a practice?

Alan Millar says:

...telling is a move in a practice. The practice may be conceived as that of informing through telling, but it should be understood that the practice embraces both informing through telling, understanding acts of telling, and adopting a stance towards what one is being told. (Millar, 2010, p.177-178)

So the testimony must be what Millar calls ‘felicitous’ (p.178). Testimony can be deliberately deceptive, in which case it is not felicitous. This allows us to distinguish the ‘dragons’ testimony from knowledge-imparting testimony; the mother is perhaps engaging in the practice of ‘safeguarding through telling’ rather than ‘informing through telling’.

Millar’s anti-reductionist account appeals to a perceptual-recognition account of knowledge acquisition that stands apart from a perceptual evidence account. He writes:

The crucial point though is that we account for the acquisition of knowledge in these cases in terms of the exercise of an ability to recognize a phenomenon as having a certain significance. It is the ability that is in the driving seat and its possession does not turn on independent support for any generalization that informs it. (p.187)

Generalisations form a large part of our knowledge acquisition skills, but Millar suggests that we can acquire knowledge by recognition; so we can recognise from tracks on a path that deer have been there. While a certain amount of the background knowledge to this judgement is plainly observational, there is, he claims, a recognitional skill that has been learnt that cannot be reduced to perception, memory and inference – ‘...we should also take seriously the idea that our knowledge that p from someone's telling us that p is recognitional as well’ (ibid).

This seems plausible, but would mean that those who haven’t acquired certain recognitional skills are simply incapable of acquiring knowledge. And it’s clear that many children, and I daresay adults, might suffer in this regard. Children who believe that dragons live in the woods nearby and that Santa delivers their Christmas presents are clearly underdeveloped in the perceptual-recognition stakes. But then how are any of their testimonial beliefs knowledge? Millar recognises this problem when he writes:

If early learning is to be conceived as the acquisition of knowledge through being told, as in the straightforward cases, then the knowledge will not meet the conditions I have laid down. (p.192)

And he offers an approach to the acquisition of such knowledge which is reductionist. He says that knowing that Hobart is the capital of Tasmania ‘consists in an ability to recall a publicly available, known fact, which has been gained from repeated encounters with reliable sources of information’ (p.192).

Millar’s non-reductionist suggestion addresses something like Adler’s DR; how we are correct in normal circumstances to accept someone’s testimony, absent reasons not to believe it. But he still posits reductionism for early learning, which leaves his account vulnerable to the same problem for background beliefs of reductionism simpliciter; facts relying on non-facts.

Conclusion

While the two alternatives to a reductionist explanation discussed here don’t work, they highlight some issues that reductionism misses. The assurance view recognises the importance of trust in testimony; perhaps a reductionist account of trust could be worked up to fully integrate this into reductionism. Millar’s approach observes that we learn skills that give us knowledge that resists reduction, and applies this principle to testimony. So, on the issues discussed here, since testimony has not been successfully excluded from a rigorous account of knowledge acquisition, I don’t think reductionism so far succeeds in explaining how we can know things on the basis of testimony.

Bibliography:
Adler, J. (2015) ‘Epistemological Problems of Testimony’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Hume, D. (1777) ‘Hume on testimony and experience’ in Price, C. and Chimisso, C. (eds) (2014) Knowledge and Reason (A333 Book 5) , Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Lackey, J. (2006) ‘Knowing from testimony’, Philosophy Compass, vol. 1, no. 5, pp. 432–48.
Millar, A. (2010) ‘Knowing from being told’, in Haddock, A., Millar, A. and Pritchard, D. (eds) Social Epistemology, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Price, C. and Chimisso, C. (2014) Knowledge and Reason (A333 Book 5) , Milton Keynes, The Open University.
Reid, T. (1764) ‘Reid on veracity and credulity’ in Price, C. and Chimisso, C. (eds) (2014) Knowledge and Reason (A333 Book 5) , Milton Keynes, The Open University.
The Open University (2014) ‘Faulkner on testimony (Part 2)’ [Audio clip], A333: Key questions in philosophy. 

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Hume on Miracles

Many people take David Hume's argument against miracles as discounting the possibility of miracles, or somehow loading the dice against theism. Consider Craig Keener in his 1248 page magnum opus Miracles:

[Hume] argues, based on “experience,” that miracles do not happen, yet dismisses credible eyewitness testimony for miracles (i.e., others’ experience) on his assumption that miracles do not happen. (Kindle Locations 4325-4326)

and:

I will argue that to succeed logically [Hume's] approach must presuppose atheism or deism. (Kindle Location 4320)

and:

Thus, on the usual reading of Hume, he manages to define away any possibility of a miracle occurring, by defining “miracle” as a violation of natural law, yet defining “natural law” as principles that cannot be violated. (Kindle Locations 4680-4682)

I cannot see that Hume assumes miracles do not happen, nor that he requires a presupposition of atheism or deism, nor that he defines natural law as principles that cannot be violated; the conclusion of his argument is simply that a rational person would not believe a miracle claim. This, though, is based on his view of knowledge acquisition; the argument itself looks valid to me (see below), if I'm reading him right, so to attack Hume one would have to attack the premises of his argument and show it to be unsound. The argument does not, in fact, rule out miracles a priori, but if someone agrees with his account of knowledge acquisition (which account does not exclude theists, though they might not consider it exhaustive) he shows that they would not believe miracle claims, if they were being rational.

Has a miracle occurred? Just to consider this question is to allow that miracles are not ruled out a priori. If, for example, a miracle is defined as a supernatural event, as it commonly is, and a person thinks the supernatural is impossible, they would conclude that miracles are impossible. This ‘hard naturalist’ argument goes something like:

Premise 1  Miracles are violations of natural law
Premise 2 Natural law is eternally inviolable
Conclusion Miracles never occur

Natural law has developed over the centuries and seems likely to continue to develop, so the problem is: we don’t know what the natural laws are precisely, so when an event violates the natural laws as we understand them, we do not know if this is because we have the natural laws wrong or because the event is genuinely supernatural. The hard naturalist above would counter that this is just an epistemological problem; in principle, there are inviolable natural laws, so in principle supernatural events are impossible. But a posteriori we have not confirmed their inviolability, so this is just an assertion. A believer in miracles could simply assert in response that natural law is just very rarely violated.

Hume takes a more subtle approach. Only our experience guides us in ‘matters of fact’, he writes in ‘Of Miracles’. Bear in mind his famous 'fork':

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic ... [which are] discoverable by the mere operation of thought ... Matters of fact, which are the second object of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing.

The distinction between 'relations of ideas' and 'matters of fact' is similar to the a priori/a posteriori distinction, and is commonly made by philosophers; Descartes drew a similar distinction in his method of doubt, for example. So we take into account all our (sometimes competing) experiences and draw conclusions about the world from them in proportion to the evidence they supply. If our conclusions are based on ‘an infallible experience’ we consider this a full proof for the future; if not, we proceed as cautiously as our past experience dictates. Hume is describing here how people generally behave, and perhaps should behave; by weighing the available evidence; that weighing is surely the source of the word rational, with its ‘ratio’ root.

Hume discusses human testimony, and agrees that there is a ‘useful conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses’. Experience tells us that memory is ‘tenacious’, people are usually truthful and being caught lying is shameful. Testimony can be false, but very well attested reports are a ‘proof or a probability’ that an event has occurred. If that most unusual event, a miracle, occurs, and the testimony is so good that it would normally be considered a proof, we have a ‘proof against proof’.

Hume's argument, then, does not rely on a premise that testimony is unreliable per se, although this is often mentioned when he is brought up; consider theologian Randal Rauser here, in response to a miracle sceptic:

Mike is apparently invoking an epistemic principle like this:
Testimony skepticism principle (TSP): Carefully documented testimonial evidence has negligible evidential value because testimony has been shown to be unreliable.

While testimony can be unreliable (and that is an important part of Hume's argument - see P4 below) this does not mean it has 'negligible evidential value'; in fact, Hume specifically says well attested reports can be a 'proof' that an event has occurred:

And as the evidence, derived from witnesses and human testimony, is founded on past experience, so it varies with the experience, and is regarded either as a proof or a probability, according as the conjunction between any particular kind of report and any kind of object has been found to be constant or variable.

But since Hume defines a miracle as ‘a violation of the laws of nature’, which have been established by our ‘firm and unalterable experience’, there can be no better argument from experience than the one that supports the laws of nature . Hume invites us to weigh two arguments from experience; this is not an a priori matter, but an empirical one. A rational person must agree, then, that the chances of the natural laws being wrong are less than the chances that the best imaginable testimony could be wrong. So Hume’s argument is more like this:

Premise 1 The evidence for matters of fact are established by empirical enquiry
Premise 2 Both natural law and testimony are matters of fact
Conclusion 1 The evidence for natural law and testimony is established by empirical enquiry
Premise 3 Empirical enquiry records those things that occur reliably, without violation, as natural law
Premise 4 Empirical enquiry shows that testimony is often reliable, but not without violation
Premise 5 A rational person believes matters of fact in proportion to the evidence gathered by empirical enquiry.
Conclusion 2 A rational person believes a violation in testimony is more probable than a violation of natural law
Premise 6 Miracles are a violation of natural law
Conclusion A rational person always believes a violation in testimony before she believes a miracle has occurred

A note on P6; other definitions are available. Some say that divine intervention, while supernatural, does not necessarily violate natural law. But without the unusual stamp of a violation, any other divine event would appear to fall more properly under the notion of divine providence, covering the orderly conduct of the cosmos. Although in a footnote Hume says:

Sometimes an event may not, in itself, seem to be contrary to the laws of nature, and yet, if it were real, it might, by reason of some circumstances, be denominated a miracle; because, in fact, it is contrary to these laws. Thus if a person, claiming a divine authority, should command a sick person to be well, a healthful man to fall down dead, the clouds to pour rain, the winds to blow, in short, should order many natural events, which immediately follow upon his command; these might justly be esteemed miracles, because they are really, in this case, contrary to the laws of nature.

...which suggests that any divine intervention is miraculous. Even if an event does not seem contrary to natural law, it could still be. P3 derives from this famous sentence:

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.

Keener surely agrees with P3 when he says:

Natural law is, after all, merely our construct of how nature functions. (Kindle Locations 4675-4676 - my emphasis)

...but then says:

If one chooses to define natural law in such a way as to make variation from it impossible, one has simply redefined words about reality rather than made an argument, and someone else could counter by redefining “miracle” as part of that reality. (Kindle Locations 4676-4677) 

But Hume clearly doesn't define natural law to make variation impossible; he defines it as Keener does. It should hopefully be clear by now that Hume is not defining natural law as uniform and inviolable; he is saying what we experience as uniform and inviolable we call natural law (it is 'our construct', to use Keener's words) - an important difference because it means natural laws can be violated - we can be wrong about the uniform and inviolable.

Keener cites many critics objecting to Hume's definition of miracle in P6. That is fine, but theists seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place; either miracles are part of the natural world, in which case their effects can be monitored like every other natural event, and evidence accumulated in favour or against, or they're not, and Hume's definition appears closer to anything they might offer. A miracle needs to be an exception, not prosaic, and this definition communicates this well, so I will use it for the purposes of this discussion.

The argument looks perfectly valid to me, with no hidden assumption of atheism; it simply states what Hume takes to be how humans acquire knowledge, be they theist or atheist. There is no premise that states that miracles do not happen. They may happen, in fact, but, the argument says, a rational person could not accept any report of them happening.

P1 Hume draws from his ‘fork’, which, as we've seen, distinguishes between abstract reasoning, like mathematics, and matters of fact – the a priori and a posteriori. Hume is firmly setting miracles in the domain of a posteriori arguments, and would reject the hard naturalist argument presented further up, since it is not an a posteriori argument. The premise can be attacked on the grounds that there are ‘other ways of knowing’; in particular, revelation, intuition and religious experience. If there is justification other than empirical enquiry for belief in matters of fact, the argument would be unsound, and to some there is a certainty to some matters of fact that does not submit to empirical proof. Consider these quotes from William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience from theists:

I don't think I ever doubted the existence of God, or had him drop out of my consciousness.

What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed communication with God.  

The suggestion is that there are supernatural things we know a priori and not a posteriori, so the fork should be a trident. It’s conceivable too that we know natural things a priori, but that is not important in this scenario; what is important is the claim that supernatural facts are not discovered empirically. This objection can be addressed by tightening the argument; we replace ‘matters of fact’ in P1, P2 and P5 with ‘matters of natural fact’. This is stretching Hume’s words a little, but it is still a pretty close reflection of Hume’s argument. This still rules out believing miracle testimony since, if the premises are correct, the communication of any miracle claim is natural (testimony is communicated naturally), so its reliability is tested empirically, and empirically it must be less reliable than natural law. The only defeater here would be to establish non-natural testimony, which leads us to the second objection.

The original argument might be attacked on the grounds that empirical enquiry reveals supernatural facts among the natural facts. Hume asks us to reject the greater miracle, and the ironic title of J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism hints at something. Mackie writes:

...I hope to show that [religion’s] continuing hold on the minds of many reasonable people is surprising enough to count as a miracle in at least the original sense. (p.12)

The ‘original sense’ here is ‘something surprising or marvellous’ (p.11), but the very survival of churches to the present day, the faith professed by the ‘many reasonable people’ down the centuries, and the wisdom and miracles recorded in holy books could amount to a testimony which is a miracle in itself. So, the argument goes, a reasonable person should consider it a greater miracle that this ‘testimony’ be wrong than that the laws of nature are violated. Is it not a more parsimonious explanation of this long history that some supernatural agency does intervene in unusual ways occasionally, and testifies through the Bible or the Quran, for example, and delivers revelations and experiences to people whose testimony survives, supernaturally?

This is possible, and the history does call for an explanation. The objection attacks P3, suggesting that empirical enquiry does not just record regularities as natural law, but also records irregularities from the natural law as, at least, marvels, and at best, miracles. Keener raises a similar objection, saying Hume's argument is:

...a circular argument that excludes the evidence of the claim supposedly under consideration and other claims like it. (Kindle Locations 4387-4388)

The point is, I think, that P3 excludes the violations which are under debate, automatically disallowing miracles. But, as discussed, Hume's argument simply states what humans do: we call regularities 'natural laws'. There is no circularity, just a description of the processes involved, and an observation of the respective evidences. In any case, it's easy to adjust Hume's premise to account for some irregularities and completely sidestep the objection:

Empirical enquiry records those things that occur reliably, almost without violation, as natural law

After all, even well-established natural laws such as Newton's continue to be used as natural laws even though we know that the movement of Mercury, for example, does not conform to them (and with Einstein we obviously have a new more accurate understanding of natural laws). Science accepts we have an incomplete and tentative understanding of the natural laws, and this is very much in keeping with Hume's epistemology, which is a sceptical approach to enquiry that falls short of Descartes' extreme approach to knowledge - the method of doubt. Nevertheless there is still a large asymmetry between the evidence for the regularities (the physical sciences) and the evidence for the irregularities (historical enquiry and theology), and that asymmetry is increasing, so the objection is unconvincing. There is less and less space left for miracles.

The ‘miracle of theism’ claim also falls foul of Hume’s further objections to miracles. To employ these in Hume’s order: firstly, despite the claims of supernatural intervention there does seem to be an available natural explanation for even the most successful religion. Great intelligence is no barrier to deception nor indeed to self-deception, and ardency can be a sign of an ulterior motive or that reason is no longer being applied to a person’s beliefs. To prefer any natural explanation does imply that natural explanations must be more likely than miracles, but given miracles’ status as exceptional events evoking wonder and awe, compared to providence, this is not an unreasonable assumption.

Secondly, humans derive a great sense of ‘surprise and wonder’ from miraculous reports and this feeling pre-disposes us towards believing them and repeating them.

Thirdly, many miracle reports date from pre-industrial times, reported and written down by people who were ignorant of many natural facts about the world. Their credulity is excusable, and perfectly natural.

Fourthly, there is such a diversity of religious belief in time and space that any miracles used in the service of any religion are outweighed by the miracles used in the service of all the others. The maths seems inescapable; the resurrection of Jesus testifies that Christ is the son of God, but many believe that the prophet Mohammed mounting a flying horse testifies against Jesus’ divinity. Miracles are also used in the service of Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and more. So even if the supernatural is allowed, the evidence for any subset of miracles is outweighed by the evidence for the remainder. If miracles are supposed to testify to something vaguer than a religion’s specific claims, the less power it has to persuade. The less a miracle is attributable to a particular religion, the less pertinent it is to that particular religion’s claims.

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There are, no doubt, other objections to Hume’s logic, but simply detailing hundreds of miracle claims does not cut the mustard, unless the weight of all that evidence outweighed our 'firm and unalterable experience' of the natural law. Needless to say even a book of 1248 pages does not come close to that; the theist would have to surmount all the evidence of all the physical sciences. This is really unlikely, so theists should save their breath and attack the premises of Hume's actual argument instead. Stories of 'miraculous' recoveries from illness, for example, while heart warming, will simply never outweigh the evidence for the natural laws.

One further twist: what if one experienced an event that looked miraculous? If our senses are natural, our own ‘testimony’ is subject to the same objection Hume presents – a rational person would believe the weight of evidence that our senses are more likely to be wrong than the natural laws, as currently understood. I confess I wonder if I could dismiss such an experience, if it is particularly convincing! After all, many have been  hoodwinked by charlatans and I'm just as susceptible to a vivid experience as the next man. Ultimately, though, unless there is some unambiguous way to distinguish natural from supernatural events, one should dismiss miracle claims and even miracle experiences.

This has obvious ramifications for many theistic claims. Consider the resurrection; many theists have made great efforts to establish the historicity of the resurrection. At this remove, Hume's argument would suggest that this is impossible on empirical grounds, and it's hard not to disagree. Note that theists are not obliged then to not believe in the resurrection; if they think they have non-empirical grounds, or a method to distinguish natural from supernatural experience, this is open to them. But unless theists can remove testimony from the realm of the a posteriori, miracle testimony should never be used as the justification for miracle belief, even by them.

Bibliography:

Chappell, T. (2011) The Philosophy of Religion , Milton Keynes, The Open University.

Cottingham, J. (ed.) (2008) Western Philosophy: An Anthology, Oxford, Blackwell Pub..

Keener, Craig S.. Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Mackie, J.L. (1982) The Miracle of Theism, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

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