Eighteenth-century Scottish skeptic David Hume based his argument against miracles on the premise that “a wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence,” a principle known as the evidentialist canon. Since Hume believes the evidence against miracles outweighs the evidence for miracles, he concludes the wise man should not believe in them.
Hume puts forward several arguments as evidence against miracles (see sidebars), the coverage of which goes beyond the scope of this article. For brevity’s sake, let’s look at only two key arguments: the general argument from uniform experience and the specific argument from the laws of nature. (The quote in the previous paragraph and all subsequent Hume quotes are from section X of his treatise An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding).
Putting on the uniform
Hume’s argument from uniform experience is based on the understanding that miracles are exceedingly rare and don’t conform to repeatable experience. To use Hume’s example, the sudden death of a man who is in good health is unusual, but it’s not a miracle, because it has been more than occasionally observed.
“But it is a miracle,” Hume argues, “that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or country.” It is this contrariety to uniform experience that Hume sees as the proof against miracles: “And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle.”
This argument is based on what some have call the “repeatability principle”—evidence for what occurs over and over (the regular) always outweighs evidence that does not (the rare). For Hume, when faced with two sides of a debate, the wise man “considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments” and fixes his judgment on the side that is “found to overbalance the other and to produce a degree of evidence proportioned to the superiority.”
Since miracles are rare and do not conform to uniform experience, uniform experience will always outweigh the evidence for miracles. Therefore, Hume concludes, the wise man should never believe testimonies about the miraculous.
Don’t break the law
Hume’s second major argument is based on the understanding that 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.”
Notice that the argument presupposes the laws of nature are necessary and thus cannot be violated. And since a miracle necessarily involves a violation of a law of nature, says Hume, no reasonable person should ever believe in them.
Do these arguments have the persuasive force that Hume thinks they have? Hume flattered himself in thinking that he had discovered an argument “of a like nature 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.” Unfortunately for Hume, these arguments do not have the persuasive force he thought they had.
You don’t always have to wear the uniform
Hume was right when he argued a wise man should base his belief on the weight of evidence. However, he was wrong in thinking that evidence for uniform experience always outweighs evidence for what is singular and rare. There are several reasons to think this.
First, if Hume’s principle concerning uniform experience were correct, one would have to deny many things that are held as true. For example, the Big Bang was a singular event that does not repeat in our experience. Have you experienced any Big Bangs lately? I would guess the answer is no. I would also venture to say you have not watched anybody walk on the moon lately—or ever.
Now, if we held to Hume’s principle, it would be irrational to believe the scientific account of the Big Bang and the historical fact that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, since these occurrences contradict our uniform experience. But the Big Bang is one of the most rigorously established theories in all of science, and all who are not conspiracy theorists believe Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon is a historical fact. The bottom line is that if we base our beliefs on what usually happens given our sphere of firsthand knowledge, we will cut ourselves off from a whole lot of truth.
Moreover, Hume’s principle nullifies science itself. Science presupposes the possibility of discovering new things that may contradict uniform experience. Scientific laws are revised all the time based on new evidence. But, according to the repeatability principle, scientists would never have good grounds to consider the contrary evidence in the first place, thus ruling out revision of scientific laws altogether.
It’s not hard to see that to hold to such a position would negate all intellectual credibility. If Hume holds to his repeatability principle when it comes to miracles, then, to be consistent, he must apply it to science as well. If he does not, he is applying a double standard.
A third reason why Hume’s argument from uniform experience fails is because it begs the question—in other words, it’s a logical fallacy where a conclusion is assumed true without evidence other than the statement itself. According to Hume’s view, every miracle is disqualified from the start because every miracle is a rare event. But rarity belongs to the essence of a miracle. A miracle, by definition, is an unusual event—something contrary to the ordinary course of things. So Hume and skeptics that follow suit cannot reasonably reject a miracle because of its rarity.
Finally, Hume’s argument fails also because it confuses adding evidence with weighing evidence. Consider the resurrection of Jesus. Hume’s principle stipulates that we simply add up the evidence of all occasions where people died and did not rise and use it to overwhelm the claim that Jesus rose. But all this shows is that people normally stay dead when they die and thus that resurrection is improbable. This is not a point of contention. Someone rising from the dead is highly improbable.
What Hume and skeptics like him seem to overlook is that a reasonable person does not base his beliefs merely on odds but on facts. So the question must be, “Is there sufficient evidence to justify belief in Jesus’ resurrection?” If the evidence is trustworthy—if the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection meet the criteria historians use to determine the historicity of ancient literature (e.g., multiple attestation, early testimony, eyewitness testimony, coherence, embarrassment, etc.)—then belief in Jesus’ resurrection is reasonable even though resurrections are highly improbable. The same line of reasoning applies to any other alleged miracle.
So while the rarity of miracles may be a reason for critical investigation, it’s not a reason to reject them before considering the evidence.
It’s not a violation of law
The response to Hume’s argument that miracles violate the laws of nature is twofold. First, Hume incorrectly views miracles as a violation of the laws of nature, as if they some how prove such laws are false.
Laws of nature are not mere descriptions of causal regularities (e.g., When A, then B) that a miracle would disprove. The laws of nature describe what things can produce given the powers they have by nature.
So, for example, the law of nature that tells us water freezes at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit is simply a description of the nature of water having the disposition to freeze at that temperature. The law of nature that tells us fire burns is a description of the inherent power fire possesses.
The laws of nature, therefore, describe laws of natures—essences with inherent properties that manifest themselves when certain conditions are met. One could say the phrase “laws of nature” is shorthand for speaking about causal powers inherent in things.
It is this understanding that allows us to see how miracles are not really violations of the laws of nature (that is, proving them to be false). Instead, miracles are extraordinary sensible effects that surpass the power and causal order of created nature—because their cause is God.
For example, the natural forces in a human body cannot cause it to return to living health after it has died. But God can produce such an effect by directly giving life to a dead body. When he does this, as he did in the case of Jesus, it does not disprove the law of nature that states dead bodies stay dead. It remains true that dead bodies have no inherent power to come back to life. But God’s supernatural power surpasses the body’s natural powers or lack thereof.
Likewise, God can suspend an inherent natural power without disproving a law of nature. Consider the miracle involving Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. The intense fire into which they were thrown did not burn them. Did this disprove the law of nature that states fire burns? No. God simply willed that the inherent power of fire not manifest itself in that situation.
God has the power not only to surpass or suspend inherent natural powers but also to give an object a power it doesn’t have by nature. Jesus’ miracle of walking on water is an example of this (Matt. 14:22-23). Water in its liquid form does not have power within its nature to allow a human being to walk on it. But Jesus, being God, can give water such a property. This doesn’t disprove the law of nature that states you will sink if you try to walk on water. You can easily prove this yourself in the nearest lake or pool.
Miracles do not violate the natural order—they are not contrary to nature but above or beyond nature.
The ‘bare necessities’
The second response is that Hume confuses hypothetical necessity with absolute necessity. Hume assumes the laws of nature are absolutely necessary—that is to say, the phenomena they describe must always occur no matter what. Just as God cannot make a square-circle or make a triangle with four sides, so the argument goes, God, even if he exists, cannot suspend the laws of nature.
But we see that this is simply not true. The laws of nature have what philosophers call hypothetical necessity, which means the laws of nature will hold on condition no external cause intervenes. The law of gravity states a rock will fall to the ground every time someone drops it. But it is not an intrinsic contradiction to imagine someone quickly catching the rock before it hits the ground. The law of gravity will hold provided nothing else happens. As Christian apologist William Lane Craig writes:
Natural laws are assumed to have implicit in them the assumption “all things being equal.” The law states what is the case under the assumption that no other natural factors are interfering (Reasonable Faith, 263).
As it is for the law of gravity, all laws of nature are hypothetically necessary and not absolutely necessary. They are not inviolable in the sense that their “violation”—or, more properly speaking, their “suspension”—implies an intrinsic contradiction.
Since the laws of nature are merely hypothetical, it follows that the laws of nature cannot prevent God’s causal activity in miracles. Any denial of miracles based on the laws of nature, therefore, is unjustified.
Credibility versus credulity
The wise man desires intellectual credibility and despises credulity. As such, if asked to abandon science to embrace miracles, he will opt for science. If asked to believe his uniform experience or something that goes against it, he will be inclined to believe the uniform experience. David Hume thinks these are things the wise man is being asked to do when he is asked to believe in miracles.
But, as was shown above, the choice between science and miracles is a false dichotomy. With regard to believing something contrary to uniform experience, the wise man should make his judgments based on where the evidence leads, no matter how extraordinary and improbable it is, and not on some a priori principle of assumed uniformity.
It’s ironic that the arguments Hume thought eviscerated belief in miracles, when measured by the canon of reason, turn out to be the actual delusion.