Can we believe in miracles?

The empiricist David Hume famously defined miracles as “a violation of a law of nature by the volition of the deity”. This begs a number of questions. What violation are we talking about? What is a “law of nature”? And what form of divine intervention might be imaginable?

I think it’s easy to get muddled up by Hume. Let’s look at each question in turn. First of all, what violation of a law do we have in mind? There are some fairly significant violations in mind in biblical accounts of miracles. For example, Joshua sees “the sun stop in the sky and fail to go down for a full day” (Joshua 10:13). No, he wasn’t in the land of the midnight sun – the implication is that the law of nature regulating the movement of the sun around the earth (yes, that’s what they believed) was suspended for 24 hours. Is this possible? 

Then there is the assertion in the Christian creed that Jesus “on the third day, rose again”. In an instant in history one man defied the law of death – that you start to rot and decay and the process is not reversible. The same happened to Lazarus “who had been in the tomb four days” (John 11:11) when Jesus raises him from the dead. According to Matthew, there is a general resurrection as Jesus comes back to life and “many tombs broke open and holy people were raised” (Matthew 27:52), which has echoes in the story of Elijah – when a dead man is thrown into Elijah’s tomb, the corpse touches the bones of the prophet and comes back to life (2 Kings 13:21). Let’s call these miracles type 1. (Click below to read more)

What does Hume say about type 1 miracles? He argues that these are “less than the truth of the senses” as they happened a long time ago; and “because a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature the proof against it is as complete as any can be from experience” – we know from experience that a lump of lead always falls, dead people always rot and fire always consumes wood, says Hume. Such miracles are not just improbable. They are impossible.

I would argue that Hume confuses us somewhat by mixing this short argument about "impossibility" a longer main theme about probability. Common sense (experience) tells us that it is impossible for dead man to rise again; it is impossible for a lead weight to fly upwards; it is impossible for fire not to burn wood. This is because no-one has ever observed a breaking of these natural laws (and no-one has made such a claim for two thousand years). If I said to you “I have just seen someone jump out of a tomb” you would reply, quite rightly “you’re crazy” or “April fool” or “that’s impossible”. These type 1 miracles are violations of the way the world is set up (however we understand the earth going round the sun or the sun going round the earth – it doesn’t matter for this argument). But what of other miracles, such as healings, where a “miracle’ may mean “despite all probability she got better and was fully cured”?

Let’s call this type of miracle type 2. Healing is not the same type of change as the alteration of the sun’s perceived movement around the earth as Joshua is supposed to have observed. Take any of the healing miracles in the Bible, such as the paralysed man of Mark chapter 2. Here is man who is lowered on stretcher through the roof. Jesus orders him to “Rise! Take up your pallet and walk”. The man duly springs up. Is this “impossible” or merely “improbable”? I think it is improbable rather than impossible. This is because the world isn’t set up so that people can never recover from “terminal”, or serious illnesses. Doctors don’t know for certain even when someone has a terminal illness how long they have to live. It is not the same as the relationship between the planets and their movements in the sky. Nor can we cite evidence of our senses. When we observe sick people, the course of their illness doesn’t follow a set pattern.

So type 2 miracles mean something entirely different to type 1. Here probability may be relevant, but the usual test of empiricism (what regularly happens after you catch a virus) cannot apply to these type 2 events. One person gets a streaming cold, the other a light cold, and the other experiences just a few sneezes (unfair though this may seem!). There is no certain regularity, just open possibilities.

Into this type of event, the possibility of divine action seems to me to be not just possible, but quite comprehensible. God works with nature to fortify our resistance. We also know that there is a metaphysical element to recovery. The state of the person’s mind, the state of their “spirit” (meaning their morale), their will to live: all these work with the natural laws within the body to do with cells and viruses to influence the path of recovery. And on this type of miracle Hume’s famous five principles for rejecting them (the primitiveness of the society, the education and character of the witnesses, the gullibility of the people to cite three) seem rather tough and unreasonable. Indeed, I think I may have seen miracles of type 2 myself, whereas I certainly haven’t seen them of type 1 (the sun standing still).

And yet we have a problem here. Christianity was established on a historical fact of a type 1 miracle – the resurrection of Jesus physically from the dead. This is clearly the strongest example of a violation of the law of nature concerning rotting corpses. Do we a. reinterpret this, as Bultmann did and call it “myth”, or b. reject it completely as a fabrication of the early church or c. assert this is quite possible if you assume that an omnipotent God can do whatever he wishes?

Is this faith position susceptible to empirical test? Is it more probable Jesus rose from the dead than that the first followers of Christ were mistaken?

Image: Jesus in the Garden © Peter Baron