David Hume: Miracle Is An Illusion

The question: what is a miracle, is itself a philosophical question. Philosophers have asked many questions about the criteria needed to regard a situation as a miraculous one. What we term miracle is sometimes a shift in nature or something that is contrary to natural law. The question is what determines a miracle? Are miracles accidental or determined by divine agents?

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If someone matches a brake and died instantly, though this looks abnormal, but we don’t call it miracle. We simply say it is mysterious. If there was a car crash and the car cannot be identified easily but the driver who drove the car survived without a single injury, we call such event a miracle. If we chatted with someone few hours ago and we heard the person slept but never wake up, we call such incident a mystery. What makes the former a mystery and the latter a miracle?

Perhaps, it is natural for someone to die in such car crash because the material body in which the man occupied (the car) was crushed but the man survives without any injury which is against natural law. Also, a child falling from a storey building can die from such incident not to talk 10 storey building.

Philosophers concern is what makes these events mysterious or miraculous. A miracle is just a violation of the natural law. If someone has a turmoil for instance and it disappeared, such is termed a miracle. Now are miracles divine occurrences or mere spontaneous lapse in the natural order?

The problem of miracle is also an epistemological one in the sense that these are personal experiences. In the case of religious people, when an incident is considered a miracle, it means something ‘un-explainable’ occurred which the congregation can see. In this case, a testimony is often followed to show that un-explainable event happened. Perhaps, I should use another word that is different from ‘un-explainable’ because the person that experienced it often explains what happened. 

The philosophical problem here is can this testimony be enough reason to accept that such an incident occurred and it if it did occur, is it purely divine? 

What is Miracle?

St. Augustine maintains that a miracle is not contrary to nature, but only to our knowledge of nature; miracles are made possible by hidden potentialities in nature that are placed there by God.

David Hume, in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, defined 'miracle' as a violation of natural law. It is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent".

Hume argued that there are criteria that an event must satisfy in order to qualify as a miracle: It must be a violation of natural law, but this by itself is not enough; a miracle must also be an expression of the divine will. This means that a miracle must express divine agency; if we have no reason to think that an event is something done by God, we will have no reason to call it a miracle.

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David Hume’s Argument against Miracle

Hume argued that for us to believe in a ‘system of religion’, such system must be validated by the occurrence of miracles. Hume maintains that we cannot rely on an account of miracle merely because someone testifies to it. The believe in miracle, he argues, is premissed mainly on faith and not reason.

Some have argued from ‘testimony’ and maintain that if reliable and well respected individuals can testify to observing miracle, then such should be granted as true. For Hume, no such testify can adequately explain what makes an incident a miraculous one.

As pointed out above, miracle is something that is contrary to laws of nature.  To buttress this, let’s look at the scenario below:

Suppose that it is a matter of natural law that a human being cannot walk on the surface of water while it is in its liquid state; this supposition is based on the weight of an enormous body of experience gained from our familiarity with what happens in seas, lakes, kitchen sinks, and bathtubs. Given that experience, we always have the best possible evidence that in any particular case, an object with a sufficiently great average density, having been placed onto the surface of a body of water, will sink. 

According to Hume, the evidence in favor of a miracle, even when that is provided by the strongest possible testimony, will always be outweighed by the evidence for the law of nature which is supposed to have been violated.

Hume’s point is that what we term miracle is nothing but a negation to what we have observed as natural. If you look at the analysis above, you will notice that it was from experience that we knew that a human being cannot walk on liquid water. If such happens, we know that something contrary to natural law has occurred and it is on this premiss we call such event a miracle. For Hume, if such event occurred, irrespective of the witness or testimony to justify such event, we know from experience that it is false. 

Accordingly Hume "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 endeavors to establish." Source.

From Hume’s submission above, it is evident that accounts of miracles are themselves miraculous. It is also evident from the above that no matter the testimony presented before us, such testimony is false because It would be against natural law. Also, nothing says that a ‘miraculous event’ must have divine intervention. It might just be spontaneous.

Objections to Hume's philosophy on miracle are welcomed. Kindly drop your comments below.

Thanks for reading my blog. Your boy @smyle the philosopher.

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