08.08.09

Miracles and ‘Christian’ mythology about miracles

Posted in Science & Religion at 4:54 pm by nemo

Opinion: Do you believe in miracles?

The problem with this article is the way it debates only religionists, are more specifically, Christians, and the so-called Christian miracles. Second, the definition from Hume of a ‘miracle’ is problematical. A miracle can be a ‘natural’ event of a rare or non-standard process, often of the so-called ‘will’. The status of such events is obvious open to skeptical judgments, but at least they are open to one level of understanding.
Just here Christians hopelessly confuse the issues by making faith-based claims about ‘miracles’ that are in reality undocumented historical myths.
The confusion of these two issues has no resolution in its current form and leaves Christians and skeptics at loggerheads, ad infinitum.

THESE days most people think it unscientific to believe in “miracles”, and irreligious not to believe in them. But would the occurrence of miracles really violate the principles of science? And would their non-occurrence really undermine religion? David Hume and Richard Dawkins have attempted to answer these questions in their different ways, but I am not convinced by their arguments, and for me they remain open questions.

In 1748, in one of his key essays, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Scottish philosopher David Hume gave an account of the philosophy of miracles that impressed and influenced many thinkers. Hume defines a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature…a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent”.

He does not say that miracles could not or do not occur, but that we are unlikely to be able to prove that one has occurred. He argues that whenever we hear a report of a miracle, it is more probable that the reporter is deceived or deceitful than that their report is true. And he suggests that his arguments must undermine religion because they remove what adherents consider to be one of the rational grounds of religious belief.

Hume is right to argue that there is something dubious about miracles, but not quite for the reasons he suggests. The very notion of a miracle is either unintelligible or it has a meaning other than that given by Hume. And it is far from clear that Hume’s arguments have any bearing on how rational it is to accept or reject religious beliefs.

I would argue that, by definition, “laws of nature” are universal laws of the form “if A, then B”, or “all As are Bs”. Logically, they cannot be violated or transgressed, not even by God. If, even on one occasion, for whatever reason, there was an A without a B, then it would not be true to say “if A, then B”. What had been thought of as a natural law would in fact not be one.

Hume continues: “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.”

This might sound impressive but it is mere rhetoric and bluster. For example, if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, there cannot be degrees of miraculousness. In terms of his definition, something either is or is not a miracle. When Hume says it would need to be more miraculous that a report was false than that a miracle had not occurred, he is oscillating between meanings of the term – between his own specific use and the vague, undefined usage of common speech.

Moreover, we do not normally, as Hume suggests, accept or reject our theories on the basis of the number of examples cited to support a proposition (remember, just one black swan undoes the theory that all swans are white), or by trying to calculate the probability that those who report observations are telling the truth. “Laws” that appear firmly established are often overturned in science, yet we do not need to argue that a miracle must have occurred, assuming whoever reported the apparent overturning is telling the truth. Instead, the rational thing to do is to abandon the natural law or modify what we considered to be a true statement of it.

Which is where Dawkins comes in. In The God Delusion, he writes: “I suspect that alleged miracles provide the strongest reason many believers have for their faith: and miracles, by definition, violate the principles of science.” This looks at things the wrong way round. People do not believe in religion because they accept occurrences such as miracles. Surely it is because people believe in particular religions that some interpret some particular occurrences as miracles.

But believers need not mean by “miracles” what Hume and Dawkins mean by them. And belief in miracles need not be inconsistent with an acceptance of science. I have already argued that Hume’s definition of miracles violates the principles of logic rather those of science. And anyway, Hume never argued that miracles violate the principles of science.

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