About David Corner, Author of Chapter 1 in The Case Against Miracles

Dr. David Corner wrote a fantastic chapter in my book. I didn't know he died two months before it was published. I learned later. I have an email record of what he believes, and I think readers might be interested. I ask authors to tell readers something about themselves. Here is what he sent me:

David Corner received his PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He’s a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy of California State University, Sacramento. He is the author of The Philosophy of Miracles.

I asked him what he thought of my chapter 3, on Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. He said to me:

I am reading your chapter, but I have to teach tomorrow so I won't finish until at least Tuesday. Looks pretty good so far, though I'm shocked at how poor some of the arguments are that you are criticizing. I don't even read that stuff... but it's a good thing someone is. You are doing a good service.

I asked him what he believes.

Oh, just say that I am a theist who thinks Hume is right, at least in regard to miracle apologetic. No need for nuance on any of that. I am quite opposed to apologetic for a number of reasons. It's just the wrong way to do theism.

That took me by surprise, so I inquired further. He answered by saying:

"Quasi-theistic pantheistic" seems like a mouthful. "Quasi theistic pantheism of Advaita Vedanta" is a little better.

If you want to mention Advaita, I'd just say: "Corner finds the quasi-theism of Advaita Vedanta attractive." But if you want to mention pantheism you could say: "Corner finds the pantheism of Advaita Vedanta attractive." You could also just say "Corner is a pantheist."

Then he asked me a question:

Here is a fun question. Do you think you could ever be justified, on the basis of experience, in concluding that a genuine exception to some natural law had taken place?

I said:

I already know the answer to this. The probability of that is equal to the number of times experiments in the laboratory under the exact same test conditions of the exact same phenomenon have turned out to be contradictory, or the number of times Newton's Laws have failed to predict how far a bullet will travel if we know the force of the shot and the mass of the bullet, or the number of times Maxwell's equations have failed to help create images of the body using MRI scanners in hospitals; or magnetic tape, or electricity, or build computers.

Since we know of no such exceptions then it would be safe to say there have been no genuine miraculous exceptions to natural law. Since we might be wrong, all we can do is think of an extremely low possibility to allow for such a thing. But that number would exceed the numbers allowing for such events to occur. Borel's Law states that in some specific physical examples "phenomena with very low probabilities do not occur," odds below 1 in 10 to the 50 power. That!

As to nature being lawlike, I must admit on the macro level, the one we live in within this space-time experience, it's lawlike. All such claims are contextual. On a submicroscopic level the universe might be a swarm of morphing mass where anything might go, but for some reason we live where that ain't so. We must think in terms of the probabilities on our plane of existence where miracles don't occur, even if they do. If nothing else we don't need such a hypothesis. It's not to say no sound is made if a tree falls in the forest when no one is there to hear it. It's rather that we're here in the vicinity of the tree, so if it falls we will hear it.