Arguments against Hume

Hume’s arguments have been subjected to a great deal of comment and criticism:

Hume suggests that we must base conclusions on a balance of evidence; thus we proportion our views to the evidence, and this implies that evidence for a miracle would have to outweigh the counter evidence for the miracle to be deemed credible. This contradicts the idea that a miracle is an exception in some kind; Hume suggests that a miracle is in fact a ‘violation’ of natural laws. Theological insight might suggests that miracles are in some sense a revelatory disclosure of something of the true nature of reality, and that the miracle is not a challenge to a natural law in the way that Hume suggests. The principle in Hume’s view would appear to be that anything that challenges the accepted view, the established view, is to be ruled out on the grounds that the weight of prior evidence will be against it. This would cause all scientific innovations to be deemed miracles and thus illegitimate!

Richard Swinburne1 has a number of objections to Hume’s reasoning. First of all, he questions the Humean assumption that is most reasonable to base conclusions on the evidence of scientific investigation, based on the view that the laws of nature, discovered via science are the most compelling explanatory theories that we have. Against this Swinburne points out that science and our sense of the laws of nature are based on three forms of knowledge that are equally those upon which we would rely if we were to say that certain matters were explicable only as miracles. These are:

• Our apparent memories
• The testimony of others
• The physical traces left by the event or phenomenon.


Richard Swinburne (b. 1934), Emeritus Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, University of Oxford.

Swinburne’s conclusion is that in principle we cannot use the same forms of knowledge to rule the laws of science in and the possibility of miracles out; if the evidence for one is good then it should be good for the other too. So if we reason that we can trust the evidence of those who can explain phenomena via natural science, then we should also be prepared to trust explanations of phenomena via the category of miracle.

Swinburne suggests that in principle no good reason against miracles can be given. If we suppose that miracles occur what could be conclude from this? Swinburne thinks that we can argue by analogy; if events of type A are the result of intentional human action, then we deduce that humans intentionally caused them. Thus if a person’s fever disappears overnight and the disappearance is traced to the agency of doctors who prescribed a certain regime of therapy, we explain matters via their human agency. If events of type B are analogous to type A insofar as effects are observed, but no human agency is observed as the cause, then it is reasonable to infer the existence of non-material agency as the cause. Thus if a person’s illness disappears as a result of an intervention, but no physical human agency appears to be involved, then a non-physical, spiritual and miraculous cause becomes plausible.

‘Miracle revisited’: A Third Sense of Miracle

However, a further sense of ‘miracle’ needs to be brought into the review.

Since the later 18th Century, the New Testament has been subjected to a great deal of careful and critical scholarship. Textual, literary, source form, redaction and narrative styles of criticism have all had an influence on the way in which we can now read and analyse the literature of the New (and Old) Testament. We can’t detail the history of this development here, but some key conclusions shared in New Testament theology should be set out:

1. The New Testament writers tend – some more than others to live in a mind-set infused by certain historically conditioned givens.

2. They assume that ‘this world’ is a created reality that stands between a divine power and hope on the one hand, and an underworld where evil spirits and forces reside and where some kind of eternal punishment is being made ready of those who do not make it through what is to come.

3. It is assumed that evil spirits can percolate up from the underworld to tempt or afflict people, and that God can raise up for himself prophets and true sons of God to proclaim the message of God’s faith, mercy and love – which is, as a rule, offered to those who, variously, fear the Lord, repent, have faith and/or live so that they ‘Welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, feed the hungry’1 and so on.

4. What is to come, if it hasn’t in some sense already come, is, drawn from traditions of Jewish apocalyptic and doubtless from the teaching of Jesus, the kingdom of God.

5. The early Christian writers seem to be broadly agreed that the kingdom has been revealed through the teaching and ministry of Jesus who they proclaim as Messiah/Christ, but the inaugurated kingdom – which is viewed as a spiritual rule of God’s will in the hearts and mind of his people, will be, it is hoped, confirmed though an eschatological ‘Second Coming’ of the Lord.

6. The New Testament writings are historic but not histories; the Gospels are not biographies, nor are they chronologies. They are kerygmatic documents of faith, proclaiming the ‘good news’ – the Greek term Euangelion – et. ‘gospel’ – of the kingdom and of salvation won via Jesus the Messiah/Christ.

7. Jesus of Nazareth died about 32 CE; Paul’s letters (written for contemporary church communities, not for posterity) come from the later 40s to the early 60s. Paul, Peter and other prominent church leaders die in the persecutions mounted by Nero (60-70 CE) and the Gospels (Mk 70. Mtt & Lk 8-85 Jn 90-110) are written on the basis of oral traditions and earlier written traditions within and for particular early Christian communities, most of whom would not, as it happens, recognise or answer to the term ‘Christian’.

8. In the context of these ideas miracle stories have a generally specific range of functions. They link to notions of faith – we must not think of miracles as tricks or events that ‘just happen’. Some show a sacramental view of reality as being essentially God-given. Some deal with these themes within the setting of the mind-set that envisages a cosmic battle between love and death, good and evil, God and the evil spirits.

9. In many healing miracles, the true miracle is expressed through the radical surprise of a man’s actions in overcoming the ritual inhibitions of a religious tradition within Judaism that puts ritual law observance way above compassion. The real, if very socially relative miracle, about a lot of Jesus’ healings as reported in the Gospel traditions, is found in the following narrative:

A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter. Mark 1:40-45

Here we need to know the following:

• In the 1st century all skin diseases, rashes or allergies could be called ‘leprosy’.
• According to ritual law, a leper was unclean and could not be touched.
• To touch a leper was to break the law and become unclean – a grievous sin for a ritually-orientated follower of Judaism.
• Faith, reciprocal faith, lies deep in the ‘healing’ as a ‘making clean’. The affliction is believed to be a consequence of sin; the implicit cure is a making whole again in terms of a right relation to God.

In later stories in Mark – he develops the explanations very deliberately in his narrative – faith is a key to healings.

• How does this help us in Philosophy of Religion?
• We can be better informed than Hume over what a miracle is.
• We can suggest more constructive arguments and interpretations.
• We can show more philosophical insight in how to interpret and read traditions and debates.

The Moral Problem of Miracles

One major line of criticism against miracles as often understood within Christianity – i.e. as supernatural interventions by God – comes from the liberal theologian Maurice Wiles (1929-2005).

Wiles sets out his ideas in a number of works but we can follow his reasoning from his book The Remaking of Christian Doctrine.

In this book Wiles takes the view that God must be regarded as the sole Creator of the world that we make sense of through the laws of nature. So God must be seen as acting in a fashion that is consistent with his creation. This means that God would not act to intervene in the world in a fashion that would suspend or run counter to the laws of nature. Miracles as defined as supernatural acts that transcend the laws of nature are not, Wiles argues, a part of Christian thought or faith.

Wiles rejects the notion of a God who acts so as to intervene in the world via a miraculous transgression of the normal and created laws for the following reasons:

• God is sole creator of the world as whole and so his action will be consistent with the creation and not be counter to it.
• If God is wholly good – or omni-benevolent, then he would not act in a select number of cases to save or heal some and leave so many others to their fate. If God did act arbitrarily to save some but not most, then this would not be what we mean by ‘God’ and such a God would not be worthy of worship.

For example, if God acts to save one person here or then, why does he not act to save the millions who died in the Gulags, the holocaust, or in the various other major genocides that have occurred throughout history?  It is, Wiles thinks, more coherent and theologically more consistent to say that God does not perform or act ‘miraculously’ in the manner defined by some religious believes and of course, by Hume.

Wiles thinks that the importance of miracle stories is that they show what happens if people have faith in and act in accordance with God’s will or intention; miracles understood in this sense then testify to God’s saving and transforming power and this is wholly consistent with his creative and sustaining power.

We can summarise Wiles’ view as follows:

• Christians do not need to agree with miracles and they have good reasons to not affirm them
• Intervention via miracle would show an arbitrary will of God – a problem for Wiles & he thinks, for Christians.
• Wiles thinks God can act in relation to his creation as a whole, so this implies he is denying God the freedom to act without causal restraint.

This does not limit or depersonalise God because creation as a whole is the act of God
Why would he intervene with his own creation? Wiles thinks that the idea of an interventionist God is “both implausible and full of difficulty for a reasoned faith”.

Wiles & Incarnation

For orthodox Christians the key miracles are those of incarnation and resurrection. ‘The word became flesh, and dwelt amongst us full of grace and truth.’ (Jn 1)

Wiles was a contributor to the contentious volume The Myth of God Incarnate edited by John Hick in 1977 and before and after this he wrote extensively on the issues of faith, the mystery of God and the problems and challenges of theological language – including incarnational language. Wiles – in short – argues that there must be a way to explain the doctrine of the incarnation and resurrection which does not involve a breach of nature in general or of human nature in particular. Thus incarnation is not a special or unique act of God; it is the ‘perfection’ of the ‘human response to God’. The full humanity of Jesus is central to Wiles’ Christology. Jesus freely and fully responded totally to God’s grace and in doing so, incarnated or revealed God’s will and purpose in the world.

Wiles refers to Hans Kung for support:

“…the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the law of nature…. Not a supernatural intervention which can be located in space and time” (Hans Kung, On Being a Christian)

Wiles concludes:

‘It seems to me no clearer theologically than historically that this final coping stone, faith in the vindication of Jesus and the conviction that Jesus lives in the presence of God, could only have derived from some special action of God in the form of supernaturally given appearances of Jesus.’

Implications:

• The idea of miracles as direct actions of God must be abandoned.
• Belief in petitionary prayer causing God to act would be rejected.
• Status of Christ – no longer God – fully human who responds perfectly to God.

The options are thus that Christians must either accept Wiles’ views or accept the selective / arbitrary acts of a God who is this morally responsible for not stopping evil by direct action and so not worthy of worship.