Christian Apologist Vincent Torley Says I've "rendered a service to philosophy"

We've been discussing private miracles. [See tag below]. I’ve argued private miracles must pass the same tests that third parties require. People—I didn’t say children—who claim to have experienced a private miracle—I didn’t say a mere extraordinary event—can only say it was real after rigorously verifying it, by asking a whole slew of honest questions. They need a sufficient amount of third party independent corroborative objective evidence for them. This is what reasonable adults should require when it comes to a miracle of the private kind, just as they should require with a miracle claimed by a multitude of people—which happens never.

Torley is arguing that there are private miracles people should believe despite the requirement for sufficient objective third-party evidence. In the course of this debate Torley rewards me with a backhanded slap instead of praise when saying I've "rendered a service to philosophy". He wrote about an Indian Prince who experienced frost for the first time:
There's a famous passage in Hume's Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777) where he writes:
The Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly; and it naturally required very strong testimony to engage his assent to facts, that arose from a state of nature, with which he was unacquainted, and which bore so little analogy to those events, of which he had had constant and uniform experience. (Section X, Part I.)
Hume was willing to "bite the bullet" and acknowledge that people following his epistemic principles would sometimes reject as absurd things that later turned out to be genuine - nevertheless, he insisted, they "reasoned justly." Perhaps John is willing to "bite the bullet," or perhaps he wishes to reconsider his views. But what he has done, albeit inadvertently, is show that Humean skepticism, when taken to its logical conclusion (for that's where John's epistemology is derived from) leads to a reductio ad absurdum. And for that, I thank him: he has rendered a service to philosophy. Cheers.
Torley says this in order to escape the requirement for sufficient objective evidence with regard to the testimony of a virgin birthed god by mother Mary and fiancĂ©e Joseph (who swore under oath he “did not have sex with that woman”), or a burning bush that didn't burn up, or a snake which swallowed up others, or a hand that turned leprous and back again, or an axe head that floated, or a snake and donkey spoke Hebrew.

Now I might be wrong—I doubt it—and there might be cases in which what I said doesn’t apply. So I’m interested in this debate/discussion.

Regarding the Indian Prince story, Hume wrote further about it in footnote 21, claiming it would still be within the realm of nature and not a miracle, even if such a prodigy could not be reasonably explained to the Indian Prince:
No Indian, it is evident, could have experience that water did not freeze in cold climates. This is placing nature in a situation quite unknown to him; and it is impossible for him to tell a priori what will result from it. It is making a new experiment, the consequence of which is always uncertain. One may sometimes conjecture from analogy what will follow; but still this is but conjecture. And it must be confessed, that, in the present case of freezing, the event follows contrary to the rules of analogy, and is such as a rational Indian would not look for. The operations of cold upon water are not gradual, according to the degrees of cold; but whenever it comes to the freezing point, the water passes in a moment, from the utmost liquidity to perfect hardness. Such an event, therefore, may be denominated extraordinary, and requires a pretty strong testimony, to render it credible to people in a warm climate: But still it is not miraculous, nor contrary to uniform experience of the course of nature in cases where all the circumstances are the same. The inhabitants of Sumatra have always seen water fluid in their own climate, and the freezing of their rivers ought to be deemed a prodigy: But they never saw water in Muscovy during the winter; and therefore they cannot reasonably be positive what would there be the consequence.
Hume discusses ordinary claims, extraordinary claims, then miraculous claims, in sequential order in the first part of his miracle chapter. In the case of the Indian prince he demotes the frozen water event from miraculous to extraordinary based on better knowledge of the world. After all, Part 2 of his chapter he says miracles are usually believed by ignorant peoples!

When faced with a prodigy like the Indian Prince did, one thing it isn’t, is an example of a miracle. So we must suspend judgment as Hume argued, and wait for the advancement of science to explain it, if it can be explained at all. According to Hume’s arguments our choices are to suspend judgment on the matter or revise what we think a law of nature is due to the advancement of science, which has given us the laws of nature. Hume was clear on this.

The Indian Prince story reveals a problem. Sometimes the evidence might seem too strong that a miracle occurred due to the lack of a good natural or scientific explanation. Sometimes this is where the probabilities lead. Sometimes we’ll conclude something did not happen when thinking according to the reasonable requirement for sufficient objective evidence commensurate with the type of claim being made. This is the bullet we must bite lest we end up believing in a plethora of false and bizarre claims. Aliens might have abducted someone, and yet there might be no reason to think they did. If believers don’t like this, that’s too bad. It’s the nature of the beast. If their god had understood this about evidential-reasoning he would have performed miracles under such conditions as to convince people who understand this. What apologists like Torley attempt to do is lower the evidential requirement so low that believing a virgin gave birth to a god, etcetera, etcetera.

In any case, if we think exclusively in terms of the probabilities then to the degree we conclude we’re up against a law of nature, then to that same degree we can conclude there was no violation of nature, and hence no miracle. Conversely, to the degree we conclude we’re not up against a law of nature, then to that same degree we still cannot conclude there was a violation of nature, and hence no miracle, but that we failed to understand how nature works. Apologists like Torley might cry foul here, since it looks like a case of heads I win and tails he loses. But not so fast. The evidence for a miracle must be so overwhelming that it overcomes the massive evidence from the regularity of nature (i.e., doesn’t merely equal it, per Hume). This evidence is so massive we've developed laws of nature based on that evidence. Until that's overcome, and not before, Torley has no complaint. This is the case. Accept it.

Given the modern scientific revolution and the overwhelming consensus among scientists on a whole range of scientific topics we are surer today than ever about what can and cannot happen. Newton's laws of motion were not overthrown by Einstein. Relativity theory merely completed Newton. We can still calculate how far a bullet will travel before falling to the ground, if we know how high above ground the gun is when it fires the bullet, the mass of the bullet and the force of the gunpowder propelling the bullet. Newton's laws break down near the speed of light, and we know this due to E=mc2. And as far as anyone knows, no laboratory experiment under the exact same conditions ever contradicted a previous one. So as science advances there will be fewer and fewer Indian Prince stories. Those that remain will be about someone's ignorance.

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