In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, famous 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume inquired about the nature and the epistemological validity of miracles. Coming from an empiricist tradition, Hume analyzed the phenomenon of miracles and asserted its inconsistency with the sensory experience. But his skepticism about the world and our knowledge of it undermines his rebuke of miracles.
According to Oxford Living Dictionaries, a miracle is “an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency.”¹ All of the major empiricists of the Modern period of philosophy agreed with this definition. John Locke thought
[T]here is one case wherein the strangeness of the fact lessens not the assent to a fair testimony given of it. For where such supernatural events are suitable to ends aimed at by him, who has the power to change the course of nature, there, under such circumstances, they may be the fitter to procure belief, by how much the more they are beyond, or contrary to, ordinary observation. This is the proper case of miracles, which, well attested, do not only find credit themselves, but give it also to other truths, which need such confirmation.²
George Berkeley asserted that
“[i]t may indeed on some Occasions be necessary, that the Author of Nature display his overruling Power in producing some Appearance out of the ordinary Series of things. Such Exceptions from the general Rules of Nature are proper to surprise and awe Men into an Acknowledgment of the Divine Being.”³
David Hume acknowledged that “the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.”⁴ But Hume’s account of miracles differs from Lockean and Berkelian. He thinks there is no rational, natural explanation of miracles possible at all. While both Locke and Berkeley believe that testimonies from reliable witnesses should be trusted, Hume does not see any reason to even assume the credibility of those accounts, without a leap of faith which “subverts all the principles of … understanding.”⁵
David Hume discusses the issue of miracles in the Section X of his Enquiry. His argument against them is a skeptical one: a person should not fully trust his/her senses because they can deceive, but even more he/she should not be trusting the senses of other humans. According to Hume, all people have a passion which encourages them to believe in the “extraordinary” even though it violates all of their previous experiences. Therefore, Hume claims that a leap of faith (including a religious one) is a part of human nature, and he puts this leap and reason against each other.
In this section Hume also makes an important distinction between two different variations of miracles: religious and natural. For him only the religious ones can be truly called “miracles,” since they “can never be proven.” The natural ones, while also being “violations of the usual course of nature,”⁶ have a natural cause, and therefore, they violate not the laws of nature but our understanding of them. In my opinion, according to Hume’s own doctrine, this distinction is not defendable. To be fully in compliance with Humean epistemology, one should claim that all of human experiences are miracles.
One of Hume’s main innovations in modern philosophy is his attack on causality. He thought that “… no objects have any discoverable connection together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction.”⁷ Therefore, for Hume, causality is a subjective notion that humans add to their experiences. But if causality does not exist objectively, we cannot know fully why a particular event/action happened and we cannot formulate and claim to know the laws of nature. Since causal relationships are subjective, the laws of nature (that describe the relationships between objects and events) are also subjective. If the laws are subjective and do not have any objective grounding (there are no necessary and objective relationships), they are not laws: they are assertions. Hence if the laws of nature are only assertions, people cannot know what violates reality, and thus cannot know if miracles violate it. Furthermore, because they are subjective assertions, no one can know what does not violate reality; no one can even claim to know what is really real. Thus, since all knowledge is based on sense experience, all of the events at first will seem to a person that fully subscribes to Humean epistemology to be miracles. And because there are no necessary natural connections, no objective causal relationships, one cannot find “the causes whence [an event] might be derived”⁸ and show that the experience of that “miracle” actually doesn’t violate the (subjective) “laws” of nature. To do that such a person will need to make a leap of faith, and claim that the succession of experiences has some sort of objective validity.
Therefore, I think that Hume’s attack of causality undermined his rebuke of miracles. To show the impossibility of miracles, one needs to assert first the objective existence of reality, law of identity, law of excluded middle, law of non-contradiction, law of causality, the validity of the evidence of the senses and the ability of reason to objectively analyze that evidence.
Footnotes
- Oxford Living Dictionaries, s.v. “miracle,” accessed Oct. 7, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/miracle
- Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 510.
- Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, 53.
- Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 145.
- Ibid., 145.
- Ibid., 141.
- Ibid., 123.
- Ibid., 141.
Bibliography
- Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977
- Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: And Selections from A Treatise of Human Nature. With Hume’s Autobiography and a Letter from Adam Smith, 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1996.
- Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Whitefriars, 1825. https://ia801406.us.archive.org/15/items/humanunderstandi00lockuoft/humanunderstandi00lockuoft_bw.pdf
- Oxford Living Dictionaries, s.v. “miracle,” accessed Oct. 7, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/.
