Showing posts with label David Hume. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Hume. Show all posts

Of Miracles: In Defense of David Hume against Graham Oppy

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 David Hume (1711-1776) offered some good philosophical arguments against miracles that still resonate today. His arguments focused on the unreliability of human testimony on behalf of miracles. He did not live in a technological age like ours with modern forensics that include blood analysis, with tests that can determine one’s type, and detects diseases, poison, drugs and alcohol. We also have x-ray technology, DNA evidence, CAT scans, dash cams, and security cameras at convenience stores, on street intersections, and neighborhood homes. Especially noteworthy are the ubiquitous number of cell phones that give us immediate access to the police by a 911 call, cameras that can capture any event on video, and GPS tracking capability showing where we are at any given time. So Hume didn’t have the capability we do to establish miracles, or debunk them.

In our day the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) offered a one-million-dollar prize “to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event.” From 1964, when it first offered such a challenge, until 2015 when they stopped doing it, no challenger had even gotten past the preliminary test.[1] That should settle the question of miracles. If not, why not?

One might ask why we even need philosophical arguments. Why not just teach how science works and why the methods of science are the best we have to get at the truth? In a real sense we don’t need philosophical arguments, per se, including those from Hume.[2] However, given so many possible existential threats to life on our planet, we should do everything we can to reach people who value blind faith over scientific evidence.[3] So practically speaking, some believers might be attentive to listen to Hume, rather than to Darwin, Sagan, Shermer, Dawkins and others.[4]

One of the best philosophical arguments that can help believers acknowledge the value of sufficient evidence, objective evidence, scientific evidence, is found in my book, the Outsider Test for Faith. [5] It challenges them to doubt their own culturally indoctrinated childhood faith for perhaps the first time, just as if they never heard of it before. It calls on them to require of their own religious faith what they already require of the religious faith’s they reject. It forces them to rigorously demand logical consistency with their doctrines along with sufficient evidence for their faith, just as they already demand of the religions they reject.

Some comments on Hume and miracles

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Comment threads are easier to resurrect than corpses

In his re-post of February 26, 2024 (What is Hume Doing In His Essay “Of Miracles”?), John W. Loftus asks:

So let me put it to my readers. What would it take for you to believe a miracle had taken place given natural law and the fact you have never previously experienced a miracle nor anyone else you know (that is true, right?) What kind of miracle would it have to be? Let’s say one day a man’s arm was blown off and the next day it had regrown. It’s never going to happen, that’s for sure. If someone claimed it did, would you believe it was a magic trick of some kind? How about a virgin having a baby without any male sperm? How about someone telling you s/he heard god’s voice? What about YOUR hearing a god’s voice? What of someone coming back to life after being embalmed at the morgue?

The original article appeared several years ago; apparently as a result of that, the comments below the re-post article are closed. So that we may Lift Every Voice and … comment, I’m posting a reply article, which will have the welcome side effect of starting a new discussion thread.

Note that this business of miracles has been beaten to death in many books, articles, and blog posts, so it would be a miracle if anything I write is either original, comprehensive, final, or perhaps even correct. But maybe something here will be useful to someone. Just because everything’s in libraries doesn’t mean we all know all of it. And as always if you spot a goof, correct me.

The arrow of time - one of the ways to distinguish the mundane from the miraculous

Reality is kind of a One Direction concert

So, what would it take for me to believe a miracle had taken place? Two of John’s hypotheticals involve something like reversals of the arrow of time. There are many natural processes which we only ever observe moving in one direction. If you were to record such a one-way process as a motion picture, you could replay the event forwards or backwards. The backwards replay would then appear jarringly unnatural. For example, imagine someone’s arm exploding, and then un-exploding. Things sometimes explode, but they do not then un-explode. Similarly, we could record a person dying and then being embalmed by an undertaker, but we never observe that process reversing itself: a person being un-embalmed and then resurrected. Cremating the corpse would make for an even more dramatically impossible backwards replay, as that would require the widely scattered combustion products to coalesce back and un-combust themselves to reconstitute the corpse, which would then re-animate. (As an aside, the cryonics movement rests on the premise that super-duper technology of the future will be able to re-animate frozen corpses and repair whatever diseases or accidents killed them. If you’re skeptical about that you’ve got lots of company.)

Similarly, we can videorecord a baker making bread. The backwards replay would show the loaf of bread un-baking back into dough and the dough un-mixing back into the original ingredients. If we ran it farther back, we’d see the flour traveling back to the store, and then to the mill, and un-milling itself back into wheat, which would then un-grow back into carbon dioxide, water, soil nutrients, and the wheat seeds.

The arrow of time happens to be a paradox. According to the Wikipedia article:

The arrow of time paradox was originally recognized in the 1800s for gases (and other substances) as a discrepancy between microscopic and macroscopic description of thermodynamics / statistical Physics: at the microscopic level physical processes are believed to be either entirely or mostly time-symmetric: if the direction of time were to reverse, the theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. Yet at the macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is an obvious direction (or flow) of time.

Entropy as an arrow of time

Shot through the heart, and Clausius is to blame; he gave the heat death of the universe a bad name

We can think of entropy as an arrow of time. One way to think about this is in terms of probability: everything that happens is an “attempt” by the universe to push itself into a more probable (or more disordered) state. Local excursions into lower probability (higher order, lower entropy) are possible, but they must be somehow coupled to larger offsetting increases in entropy elsewhere. A classic example is the evolution of life on Earth, which represents a substantial increase in order. It was driven mostly by the much larger decrease in order in the Sun as it consumed its nuclear fuel, unleashing solar energy which was then harnessed by the mechanisms of mutation and natural section. This decrease in order manifested largely as nuclei in the Sun transmuting along the curve of binding energy. The evolution of life also depended on plate tectonics which is driven largely by the decay of heavy radionuclides inside the Earth, as they approach the same spot on that curve of binding energy from the upper end. Those heavy radionuclides in turn originated in earlier supernovae and neutron star mergers.

(And sorry if I upset fans of Rudolf Clausius and/or Bon Jovi and/or the English language with my terrible puns. Sticklers might protest that Lord Kelvin is more to blame for the heat death of the universe.)

The second law: why anything happens at all

In the Preface to his book The Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Atkins introduces the four laws of thermodynamics (emphasis mine):

The mighty handful consists of four laws, with the numbering starting inconveniently at zero and ending at three. The first two laws (the ‘zeroth’ and the ‘first’) introduce two familiar but nevertheless enigmatic properties, the temperature and the energy. The third of the four (the ‘second law’) introduces what many take to be an even more elusive property, the entropy, but which I hope to show is easier to comprehend than the seemingly more familiar properties of temperature and energy. The second law is one of the all-time great laws of science, for it illuminates why anything — anything from the cooling of hot matter to the formulation of a thought — happens at all. The fourth of the laws (the ‘third law’) has a more technical role, but rounds out the structure of the subject and both enables and foils its applications. Although the third law establishes a barrier that prevents us from reaching the absolute zero of temperature, of becoming absolutely cold, we shall see that there is a bizarre and attainable mirror world that lies below zero.

Given that the second law is why anything happens at all (as Atkins puts it), demonstrable violations of the second law might be strong candidates for miracles. No such violation has ever been reliably observed in the roughly 400 years of modern science. (The period of modern science is my focus because that’s when scientists have had an exponentially increasing capacity to detect, recognize, and record such violations of natural law, if any were to occur.) That’s how natural “laws” get to be called laws: they appear to be exceptionless. Thousands of scientists make millions of observations and nobody can demonstrate the “law” to admit exceptions. Then the engineers and industrialists join the party by stamping out millions or billions of artifacts made possible by the laws, and all of them appear to obey the laws as well. Then there is evolution, which mindlessly solved some molecular problems over a billion years ago, and the resulting genes and proteins have been “conserved” from yeast to humans. That means that at no point were the laws ever violated by enough to erase the adaptive advantages of those genes and proteins, which would have interrupted the Tree of Life. The laws of physics and chemistry that dictate the behavior of biomolecules have held sufficiently well since at least back to the last universal common ancestor.

Would you believe a miracle if you saw it?

Nobody has ever reliably demonstrated a violation of the second law, but suppose someone did. That leads to John’s thought question:

If someone claimed [that an exploded arm unexploded or grew back], would you believe it was a magic trick of some kind?

Skepticism would be my starting hypothesis. I’m aware of the history of failed attempts to violate the second law, such as with perpetual motion machines, water-fueled cars, and so on. As Hume famously pointed out in his essay Of Miracles, violations of natural law appear to be so improbable that almost any alternative explanation for our observation of a supposed miracle which does not violate natural law is more likely to be true.

I would certainly need more than someone’s claim! I would need evidence comparable in strength to the evidence that World War II happened.

We are smarter than me

I certainly wouldn’t set myself up as the final authority on what I’m seeing. For example, I’ve seen videos of close-up magic by David Blaine and others. Some of what they do looks to me like miracles, but I know they are just doing tricks that obey natural laws and fool my perceptions. Rather, I would rely on the entire community of scientists, magicians, skeptics, journalists, and so on to vet a miracle claim for me. For example, the Randi prize went unclaimed for over 50 years. If anyone had claimed it, I wouldn’t have needed to examine the claim for myself, given that the winner would probably have become a household name and probably would have started a whole new field of inquiry, with practical spin-offs galore. A real-life Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would likely spring up in no time around the trick - if it were reproducible. But as Richard Carrier and others have pointed out, if a “supernatural” phenomenon turned out to be reproducible, then it would satisfy one of the necessary conditions to be a natural phenomenon, and the result might be that it would get incorporated into the rest of science. (Reproducibility is among the foundations of the scientific method.) In the past, seemingly magical phenomena like electricity, magnetism, and radioactivity were eventually shown to be reproducible, whereupon they became part of science.

Do miracles have to be one-offs?

For a miracle to remain a miracle then, it might have to be irreproducible, and that creates all sorts of problems. One of the strongest forms of evidence for the plausibility of a phenomenon is being able to observe it or elicit it again under known conditions. If a miracle is a one-off, then we would lose the strongest argument for its plausibility. We might be left wondering if it were just some sort of a glitch, with no clear way to resolve that. We would only have the reliability of the records of that one event - and that reliability tends to decay over time, as memories fade, the original witnesses die off and can no longer be cross-examined, libraries full of documents get sacked and burned, physical books wear out, and so on.

Alleged reproducibility in the bible

Reproducibility of a sort sneaks into the bible. The books of the bible were written over a span of several centuries, and the times they purport to describe cover even more centuries. But throughout all that time, according to the bible, miracles were almost a dime a dozen. In all the bible stories involving people from Genesis to the Acts of the Apostles, it’s just one miracle after another. Reading the bible is not unlike reading the Harry Potter series with its spell-casting and wizardry and trampling of natural law underfoot. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both of these domains of fiction enjoy such enduring popularity. Reality kind of sucks, since that pesky second law constantly works against us. Few people get everything they want just handed to them. Instead we have to work hard to temporarily and locally hold back the forces of decay. Everybody wants a shortcut, a magical way to “manifest” the goodies we want. The so-called “New Thought” law of attraction is the same kind of something-for-nothing snake oil that nearly every religion has always sold to the gullible.

Presupposing naturalism; the Moses and Red Sea example

John summarizes Levine (from The Cambridge Companion to Miracles):

Part I presupposes naturalism, Levine says. Philosophers like him, who rule out the possibility of miracles “are in effect presupposing or else arguing for a thoroughgoing naturalism. Hence, Hume’s empiricism commits him to naturalism, and if that goes unrecognized, his a priori argument in Part I of his essay against the possibility of justified belief in miracles is impossible to follow.” (p. 292). All one has to admit is that “naturalism is possibly false.” Once this is admitted “miracles are possible.” (p. 292).

John then quotes Levine directly (emphasis mine):

Hume is thus constrained by his empiricism in such a way that had he been on the shore of the Red Sea with Moses, and had the Red Sea crashed to a close the moment the last Israelite was safe, Hume would still be constrained by his principles to deny that what was witnessing was a miracle (p. 298).

There’s a tricky point about “principles” here - are we talking about principles, as in a prior commitment (an axiom, a presupposition, etc.), or are we talking about prior experience (an inductive conclusion)? See for example Richard Carrier’s Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and In defense of naturalism by Gregory W. Dawes. I confess to not having read enough of Hume or Levine to know whether Hume actually made the mistake that Levine appears to charge Hume with having made, but I don’t think that matters very much unless we’re trying to get past peer review, in which case we need all those attributional ducks in a row. Carrier and Dawes warn against this very mistake. Just read Carrier and Dawes and don’t make the same mistake yourself!

As to the Red Sea example given, I think Hume was in something like the same position with regard to most of what we now understand to constitute modern science. For example, during Hume’s life, nobody had a clue about plate tectonics (and thus why there are mountains, volcanoes, and even land above sea level at all); nor did anyone have a satisfying natural explanation for biodiversity; nor did anyone know how the stars shine (that had to wait for Hans Bethe in 1938); nor what a virus was; and on and on. Everywhere that Hume looked he saw candidate miracles, as far as anyone knew at the time. Given Hume’s lack of understanding of the physical mechanisms to explain the wonders he saw, his primary fall-back seems to have been regularity. For example, he didn’t know how the stars shine, but he saw that they always shine. Therefore, the shining stars didn’t constitute a miracle for Hume, even though a satisfying natural explanation lay centuries in the future.

Further, it’s worth recalling that the Moses and Red Sea example is a pure hypothetical, given that archaeologists and historians who aren’t Christian fundamentalists have accepted that the whole Exodus account is almost certainly fictional. See for example Did Moses Exist?: The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver and The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origins of Its Sacred Texts. The Moses and Red Sea example is as likely to have actually happened as the successful spell-casting in Harry Potter.

Further reading

For more on the impossibility claims of science, see A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism: Applying Laws of Physics to Faster-Than-Light Travel, Psychic Phenomena, Telepathy, Time Travel, UFOs, and Other Pseudoscientific Claims by Milton A. Rothman. If I were King of the World, I would require the people who reject the impossibility claims of science to live without the technological goodies made possible by science. That is, I would require the science deniers to live according to their professed beliefs. Among Christians, it seems that only the Amish minority comes close to such consistency of behavior with belief.

To understand the difference between “impossible” and the merely improbable, see The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day by David J. Hand.

For more on miracles, see (of course) the anthology John W. Loftus edited after his original blog post: The Case Against Miracles.

For more on Hume, see Hume’s oeuvre. If that’s too ambitious, start with Hume: A Very Short Introduction by A. J. Ayer, himself a prominent philosopher of the 20th century.

For the prior (and rather massive) blog activity and discussion history about these topics on Debunking Christianity, follow the labels.

What is Hume Doing In His Essay “Of Miracles”?

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I'm writing a paper on David Hume so I'm republishing this. Enjoy!

Much of the scholarship having to do with Hume’s argument against miracles has to do with trying to understand it. Philosopher Michael Levine claims Part I of Hume’s essay is an "a priori" case against miracles
(The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, p. 302) based on considerations of natural law before there's a miracle claim--that the evidence of natural law outweighs any testimony to a miracle--whereas Part II is an a posteriori case against miracles, “even if miracles have occurred.” (p. 293).
About Hume’s principal argument in Part I, Levine says “it fails” (p. 296) as an “unsuccessful” (p. 292) “superfluous” (p. 302) “misadventure” (p. 292). “It is a gloss for understanding the underlying supposition that one cannot have an ‘impression’ of a supernatural event” (p. 302). This underlying empiricist supposition is a theme of Hume’s, in which he argues we don’t have empirical sense impressions of ‘cause and effect’ or any divine activity, or the self for that matter, which is nothing but a bundle of sensations. So “Given his view that divine activity is impossible to know, Hume’s argument in Part I is in a sense superfluous” (p. 302).
Part I presupposes naturalism, Levine says. Philosophers like him, who rule out the possibility of miracles “are in effect presupposing or else arguing for a thoroughgoing naturalism. Hence, Hume’s empiricism commits him to naturalism, and if that goes unrecognized, his a priori argument in Part I of his essay against the possibility of justified belief in miracles is impossible to follow.” (p. 292). All one has to admit is that “naturalism is possibly false.” Once this is admitted “miracles are possible.” (p. 292).
Hume is thus constrained by his empiricism in such a way that had he been on the shore of the Red Sea with Moses, and had the Red Sea crashed to a close the moment the last Israelite was safe, Hume would still be constrained by his principles to deny that what was witnessing was a miracle (p. 298).

Whose Abject Failure? William L. Vanderburgh Tweets On Hume and Bayesianism

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I reviewed Dr. Vanderburgh's book in defense of David Hume in the Appendix to my anthology, "The Case against Miracles." [Click on his book image to find out more.] Amazingly, Vanderburgh sums up his conclusion in one short Tweet! Tim McGrew, supposedly an "international expert" on miracles (but not my expert!), is in the dark on how to understand David Hume on miracles.

Miracles and Hume's Reasoning about Testimonial Evidence

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On his blog Dr. Bart D. Ehrman posted Michael Shermer's Foreword to my new anthology The Case Against Miracles. You can see teasers on his Facebook page (Dec. 22nd and 23rd). He has made contributor Darren Slade and myself temporary administrators, which is cool. Ehrman has three more selections to post about the book.

In the first one on his blog (not the one on Facebook) I got into a discussion with a believer, brenmcg. I think it went rather well, and helps clarify and expand on why we need objective evidence before we should believe any miracle tales. Enjoy.

Was David Hume's Argument "Of Miracles" Original? The Role of Ridicule.

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[Edited on 7/20/21] If you're here from following a link in my anthology, "The Case against Miracles", thanks so much! You now have an edition of the book that's been thoroughly checked for typographical errors. As of 7/20/21 the book is probably error free. To read updates and further discussions about the book click on the following tag: Case against Miracles.

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Previously I have justified compiling an anthology on miracles, and described Hume's towering influence over us right here. Some would say there's nothing let to say after David Hume's chapter "Of Miracles". If so, we might as well throw up our hands and complain that the ancients have stolen all of our ideas. There hasn't been a book length treatment of miracles like this written by atheists in forever, so it's long overdue. It's also a major defense of David Hume.

In the dedication to The Case against Miracles I wrote: "This volume is dedicated to the legacy of David Hume, considered to be the greatest English-speaking philosopher who ever lived." Then readers will find this quote from Hume:
I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument...which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. – “Of Miracles” by David Hume (1711-1776).
No one likes an arrogant person. No one likes to be ridiculed for what they think either. What if Hume didn't say this? What if he played nice with believers? What if he had toned down his rhetoric? What we know is that no one likes to be taunted, belittled, or called ignorant, or delusional. Yet this is what Hume did. Doing so brings believers out of their caves to debate, and debate Hume they have. It's as if what Hume said had a self-fulfilling effect to it.

John Earman viciously criticized Hume in his anthology Hume's Abject Failure, The Argument Against Miracles (2000). One of his claims is that "Hume's famous essay on miracles is set in the context of the larger debate that was taking place in the eighteenth century about the nature of miracles and the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of such events. Hume's argument against miracles is largely unoriginal..." He says, "'Of Miracles' is often treated as if it were a genuinely original piece of philosophy. But although it does contain some original insights and is cast in Hume's characteristically forceful prose, it is in fact a largely derivative work." [Chapter 1, Section 7].

While some of the arguments Hume made were, loosely speaking, floating around in his day, it hardly goes to say that his particular argument in "Of Miracles" was made by anyone else. Earman shows where John Locke had some influence on Hume, but merely suggests some others may also have influenced him, without providing any direct evidence. Hume doesn't really say he came up with his argument, anyway. He says he "discovered" it, even though it's clear he's taking ownership of it. The way a particular argument is expressed can make that argument more powerful. Sometimes it matters who makes that argument. People were forced to pay attention to Hume, known to "the wise and learned" as a great philosopher and a great historian. For he had became widely known for his massive 6 volumes series on The History of England, published from 1754 to 1762. When readers of Hume's history learned he ridiculed believers for believing in the impossible, it was his arrogance and his ridicule that most likely thrust what he argued into the spotlight like nothing else, and it still does.

Hume knew the effect of taunting believers who disagreed. At the end of his chapter on miracles he wrote:
So our over-all conclusion should be that the Christian religion not only was at first accompanied by miracles, but even now cannot be believed by any reasonable person without a miracle. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its truth; and anyone who is moved by faith to assent to it is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person—one that subverts all the principles of his understanding and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.
Then at the end of Hume's Enquiry itself, he concluded:
If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
Whew. Them's fighting words! And believers have been fighting with Hume ever since. Now I've written a lot to justify the use of ridicule. Hume used it brilliantly. He was also arrogant. He knew the effect that arrogance, inflammatory rhetoric and ridicule would have on believers, when most everyone else thought it was better to engage them with respect. Bravo to Hume!

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

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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.

Human Testimony to Miracles Is Insufficient to Believe

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A potential natural explanation for a given miracle tale in the Bible, even if below the threshold of probabilities, is still preferable to a miraculous explanation since it's a nearly impossible one given the nature of nature and the physics built on it. What we know is that the miraculous events in the Bible did not take place, per David Hume, since all we have is human testimony without sufficient objective corroboration, and human testimony alone is not enough for reasonable people to believe nature was violated. Even the very best quality of human testimony can only call for a suspension of judgment, should it ever be actually found. But what we find exclusively in the Bible is human testimony alone, ancient pre-scientific superstitious human testimony, second- third- fourth-handed human testimony, conflicting human testimony filtered by editors, redactors, and shaped by early Christian debates for decades and/or centuries.

It's not that I need to claim Balaam's ass didn't talk. It's that someone believed his story. Did an axe head float on water? A wise person, a reasonable person, should not believe nature was violated without sufficient objective corroborating evidence, and there is basically no good corroborating evidence for any miracle in the Bible. Now, true, there is evidence consistent with a biblical miracle, such as the archaeological finding of the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem where Jesus told a blind man to go and be healed. But that's not considered corroborating evidence. At best what Christians have are archaeological findings that are consistent with what they believe, in the same way as the city of Roswell confirms the existence of aliens, or as the city of Bethlehem confirms that Jesus was born of a virgin there. But this kind of evidence is negligible at best.

In Defense of David Hume Part 6, William L. Vanderburgh On "Hume’s 'Abject Failure' Vindicated"

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William L. Vanderburgh defended Hume against John Earman in a very thorough article published in 2005 in Hume Studies, titled, Of Miracles and Evidential Probability: Hume’s “Abject Failure” Vindicated [You can read the PDF right here.]. In it Vanderburgh shows David Hume probably knew of Bayes Theorem and never mentioned it for good reasons. I'm including a few of the important highlights below. I consider it an important contribution on Hume and Earman and even Bayes.

In Defense of Hume Part 5, John Earman Didn't Refute Hume, He Completed Him

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It's widely touted that in his book "Hume's Abject Failure" John Earman "refuted" Hume. Did he? Consider what Richard Carrier tells us:
Earman didn't "refute" Hume, so much as he fixed Hume. Hume wrote just a few years before Thomas Bayes solved the problem Hume was beating around the edges at in his Argument against Miracles. Earman shows that reframing Hume's argument in a Bayesian framework fixes everything wrong with the original argument as worded. Hume's mistake is subtle, and arises from the imprecision of his wording and formulation. He hadn't quite known yet of the correct logical form of what he was trying to say, but it is remarkable he came very close to the same insight his contemporary Thomas Bayes did. Earman's fix rehabilitates Hume's argument...
There are definitely some of Hume's arguments that are spot on, that on their own show miracles cannot be believed based on testimonial evidence alone, especially if one is using testimonial evidence to prove a god exists and his religion is true, when compared to the laws of nature represented by Newton's laws of motion, as I argued here. At best one should suspend judgment. But more than this, Hume is not to be considered wrong, just incomplete, and that's a huge difference.

We just need to consider scientific revolutions. Paradigm changes build on each other as science progresses. The previous paradigms aren't to be considered wrong, but rather incomplete. As science progresses we recognize that the science of yesterday was not yet complete. That's it. If you've never read much of Isaac Asimov's, read his essay called The Relativity of Wrong. It will forever change how you view science. He explains why the discredited science of the past is not to be considered wrong, but rather incomplete, by discussing the changing views of the shape of the earth, from flat to spherical to pear-shaped. The same things can be said about Newton's laws of motion as completed (not falsified) by Einstein's relativity equations. Newton's equations were not wrong, even though he didn't factor time into them, as Einstein did. They just don't work at or near the speed of light. So there's no overturned or falsified theory here! In a like manner, Hume gave us the initial paradigm to evaluate testimonies to miracles which still holds true, but now Earman and others are offering other ways to examine miracles from a more complete paradigm. So no, Hume has not been refuted. He is being completed.

In Defense of David Hume, Part 4: Hume's Arguments are Not "Mathematically Fallacious" Nor An "Abject Failure"

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Critics are saying Hume's arguments against miracles are "mathematically fallacious" per William Lane Craig, Timothy McGrew, Lydia McGrew, John Earman and some others. The point of their criticism is that Hume didn't factor God's existence into the evidence for or against miracles. But when apologists do so the low probabilities of miracles (by definition) can be brought up to being probable after all, because with God all things are possible. Okay. But this isn't a fair criticism. At all!

Let's back up. What is mathematically fallacious about saying we must proportion our beliefs according to the strength of the evidence? Hume said that. Where the evidence isn't decisive we must suspend judgment. Hume said that too. In other words, we should think exclusively according to the probabilities. How can that be fallacious, mathematically or otherwise? It's just good sound sense. The reason apologists attack Hume is because he was right and they are wrong, and that's it. For if there was good strong objective evidence that supported their miracle beliefs they would tout Hume's praises. You know it. I know it. They should know it.

Now let's go deeper. Whatever inconsistencies you might think are in Hume's essay on miracles, his main contention is this concluding maxim: "Therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion." (#98)

What Hume is aiming at throughout chapter 10 of his Enquiries is his twofold contention, not only that testimonial evidence for miracles is never sufficient enough to accept a miracle claim, but also that miracles cannot be the foundation of a religion. [Hume's targeted religion is Christianity, which requires a creator, revealer and sustainer god.] In other words, the testimonial evidence for miracles cannot show that this god exists and his religion is the true one, and by extension, other religions as well.

So Christian, just tell us where you start, other than from birth and childhood inside a largely Christian culture. If you want us to believe in your specific god and his religion then you have to present us with sufficient objective evidence for it. Where is that evidence? If you start by arguing the case for your god's existence first, then that's one thing, and Hume debunked this in his Dialogues. But if you start by arguing the case for miracles first, then that's another thing, and Hume debunked that in chapter 10 of his Enquiries. In this later case:

If you use Bayesian math to assess biblical miracles apart from god's existence, then you must do what you say you'll do by excluding god's existence from your calculations. But if you did what you say you do, god cannot factor in them to bring the low probability of a miracle up to a probability.
If your claim is that miracles provide sufficient objective evidence that your god exists and his religion is true, you cannot use your god in calculating the probability of any miracle. Furthermore, and this is very important, you cannot subsequently call Hume's arguments "mathematically fallacious" or an "Abject Failure." For if your claim is that the evidence for miracles provides sufficient objective evidence that your god exists and his religion is true, then your Bayesian calculations cannot allow god or his religion into any calculations of whether one should believe in his miracles. For the evidence on behalf of miracles is supposed to show your god exists and his religion is the true in the first place.

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In Defense of Hume, Part 3: Hume's Maxim On Human Testimony to Miracles as a Foundation for Religion

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David Hume's Maxim and its defense comes from chapter 10 of his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It's stated in these words:
"That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior." When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion. #91
Later Hume tells us the only reasonable conclusion one can draw from his maxim: "Therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion." (#98). The fact that a miracle requires extraordinary evidence over and above the fallibilites of ordinary human testimony is not an unreasonable demand on Hume's part. It's the nature of the beast. The consistent workings of the natural world preclude miracles from happening. This natural world order is known with as much assurance as anything that can be known. It's so well established that natural laws have been derived from it's regularity and used daily in our laboratories and factories. That human testimony is fallible is also known with a great deal of assurance, especially with the discovery of a great many cognitive biases. So we need more than just human testimony to accept that a miracle happened. Human testimony alone isn't enough to overcome what is known about how the world works. Given the nature of the world and the fallible nature of ordinary human testimony, we need sufficient objective evidence over and above human testimony (hence, called extraordinary evidence) to corroborate that a miracle occurred.

All you need to consider is what you'd think if someone testified that his amputated limb regenerated itself, or if a woman testified she gave birth to a baby deity as a virgin! Would you believe their testimony? What if a few others said the same thing? Here's the kicker: Human testimony, second- third- and fourth handed human testimony in the ancient pre-scientific world, where miracle claims were abundant without the means to discredit them, is all we have when it comes to the miracles we find in the Bible and the religions founded on it.

You can read Hume's Maxim in context below (#99-100). Upon doing so let's be done with the claim that Hume's argument is an a priori one that admits of no possibility of a miracle. It's one of probabilities all the way down. It's about human testimony to miracles in a world that precludes them as the foundation of a religion. And the kind of human testimony considered to be extraordinary in nature just does not exist! It could exist. That it doesn't is not Hume's fault.

The problem with Hume's argument therefore, is that miracles just don't happen. For if they did believers wouldn't object to it. It's precisely because believers want to believe that they try to find a way around it, even if it requires an intellectual sacrifice. Say it isn't so! Otherwise they would agree with Hume's reasonable demand then go on to present sufficient corroborating objective evidence showing the miracles of their religion really did take place. The fact that corroborating evidence does not exist is why believers must object to Hume's rock solid maxim. So Christians have a choice to make. Either 1) biblical miracles did not take place, so there's no reason to believe them, or 2) miracles did take place, but there's still no reason to believe them. Given that Christians only have the evidence of human testimony in the Bible, this is the choice forced upon them. So choose. In doing so, don't go nutty on us as some others do.

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

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This is the title to a chapter I'm writing for my next anthology to be called, "The Case Against Miracles." William Lane Craig asserts that the "seemingly commonsensical slogan" above, as popularized by Carl Sagan and "beloved in the free thought subculture", is "false". [Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (p. 273)]. In online videos Craig says this slogan is "demonstrably false." When it comes to accepting a highly improbable event he argues we don't need "miraculous evidence" or "lots of evidence" or even "an enormous amount of evidence."

Craig offers an often repeated nauseating analogy based in winning the lottery. He says that by showing us the winning lottery ticket a friend can convince us she overcame the staggering odds by winning it. Hence, "the evidence for the winning pick is, indeed, extraordinary", says he, even though it's not a lot of evidence, or enormous amount of evidence or miraculous evidence. [Ibid.]


But wait just a minute! Craig's analogy is plainly false on three counts. Firstly, the odds that someone will eventually win a lottery over several drawings can be calculated, and eventually someone will win it. Given that so many people have won so many lotteries it's a somewhat ordinary claim about a somewhat ordinary experience requiring only somewhat ordinary evidence. How this is analogous to an extraordinary miraculous claim about an extraordinary miraculous experience requiring an extraordinary quality of evidence for it escapes me. Odds like winning the lottery are overcome every day. To see this just read David Hand's excellent book, The Improbability Principle, with a subtitle that says it all: "Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day."

In Defense of David Hume On Miracles, Part 2

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J.L. Mackie’s argument against miracles in defense of David Hume, to be found in the first chapter of his classic book The Miracle of Theism, is stated very well:

Aron Lucas On "Hume's Maxim: How a 'Trivial Truth' is Too Strong for Christian Apologetics"

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Aron Lucas earned a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 2016, and is using his sharp legal mind to defend Hume's Maxim against apologists Michael Licona, Stephen Davis, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig and Timothy & Lydia McGrew. It's an excellent piece of counter-apologetics! David Hume's maxim is this: "That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish." John Earman faults Hume for basically stating the obvious, but Lucas shows that "if Hume is to be faulted for stating the obvious, many of today's leading Christian thinkers should be faulted all the more for failing to see the obvious." Excerpt below:

In Defense of David Hume On Miracles

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I'm researching Hume's arguments against miracles in chapter ten of his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, to be read here.

Christian apologists unanimously think Hume's argument in Part I fails. See Richard Swinburne in his books, The Existence of God, and The Concept of Miracle, along with other apologetical works by C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, Norman Geisler, and others too many to name.


What surprised me is that some significant atheist philosophers also think Hume's argument fails, like Michael Martin (Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, pp. 194-196), Michael Levine (The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, pp. 291-308), and Graham Oppy (Arguing About Gods, pp. 376-382), who strangely says "Hume's argument against belief in miracle reports fails no less surely than do the various arguments from miracle reports to the existence of an orthodoxy conceived monotheistic god" (p. 381). Agnostic/atheist John Earman thinks Hume's argument is an Abject Failure (as seen in his book by that title). And while J.L. Mackie defends Hume against some objections, even he thinks Hume's argument needs "improvement" (p. 25) by being "tidied up and restated" (p. 17) due to "inaccuracies" (p. 27), with one part he calls "very unsatisfactory" (p. 23).

I'm finding that only four atheist philosophers think Hume's argument in Part I succeeds, Antony Flew, Evan Fales, William L. Vanderburgh (forthcoming book in 2019) and Nicholas Everitt (see his chapter 6 in The Non-Existence of God). As I study this issue out, I agree with them.

Philosopher Michael Levine On Miracles

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There are basically three philosophical questions of interest about miracles. The first is whether miracles are possible. The second is whether anyone can ever be justified, epistemologically speaking, in believing that a miracle has occurred. With regard to this question it is important to note that the fact one can imagine conditions in which belief in a miracle would would be justified does absolutely nothing to show that anyone has been so justified. The third question is whether anyone is or has been so justified.[1] These questions can be answered in short order. The first two questions have sheltered philosophers from dealing with the only philosophically significant question about miracles per se -- the third question.

The first two questions lead to various questions concerning the laws of nature, and naturalism versus supernaturalism. These issues may be worth pursuing in their own right, but they are of little consequence when it comes to the important third question about miracles. Is anyone epistemologically justified in believing in a miracle--for example, on the basis of Scripture and historical evidence? The question is not the modal one of whether one could be justified, but whether anyone is (or has been) so justified. It is this third question that Hume addresses in Part II of his essay, and it is this question that was of primary concern to him...In Part II he argues straightforwardly and on the basis of ordinary reasons--the kind used all of the time to dismiss such reports--that no one is justified in believing in miracles.

Philosophical discussion about miracles frequently ignores the question (Hume's central concern) of whether there exists historical evidence, testimony--including testimony in the form of Scripture--or first-hand experience, that justifies belief in the miraculous. Those who wish to champion miracles either argue that such evidence exists or else they merely assume it. But the question of whether such evidence does exist, by itself, is the crucial question about justified belief in miracles."

[1] A fourth question might be 'what is a miracle?' I do not, however, think that there is much of philosophical interest attached to this question. Aquinas' definition suffices: "Those things are properly called miracles which are done by divine agency beyond the order commonly observed in nature" (Summa Contra Gentiles, III). Following Hume, a miracle is frequently defined as a violation of a law of nature, but technically speaking this is a mistake. Laws of nature are meant to account for or describe natural events, not supernaturally caused events. Miracles, being outside the scope of laws of nature, cannot properly be seen as violations of them.

From The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, pp. 291-294.