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A Note on Miracles

For Philosophy of God class, New Orleans, Spring Semester 2004

Cf. The Argument from Particular Providence

• Hume’s Argument against Miracles (1^st Enquiry):
• we can never have good enough reason, on the basis of testimony, to positively believe a miracle has occurred. A miracle being an event against the laws of nature, on the one side of the scale there will be universal experience which established the law of nature as a law of nature in the first place, which Hume interprets as universal experience against such events occurring. On the other side of the scale there will be some person or people’s testimony. Even if the testimony is from impeccable sources the very best we can expect will be enough to balance the scales, leading to a suspension of judgement: maybe, maybe not.
• Hume then goes on to argue that testimony for miracles rarely meets such an impeccable standard, that in practice it is almost always more likely that the person or people giving the testimony are deluding us or themselves deluded or mistaken or otherwise misguided than that the event actually occurred as reported.
• Versus Hume:
• The main problem with Hume is that he stacks the decks in favour of his own position. Hardly anyone believes in only one miracle. Empirically determined belief and judgment as happens in believers in a miracle having occurred, happens against a web of broader experience and belief. This web or vision of life, or tradition of experience and interpretation, would include a lot of other elements apart from miracles, contributing overall to an open world view in which a loving God sometimes does operate and which makes something like miracles plausible in certain circumstances. So it’s not one alleged event against a universal pattern to the contrary but more like one overall pattern criss-crossing another.
• Another thing to be taken into account is that the definition of miracle utilized by both Hume and his 18^th Century opponents is historically and contextually determined, presuming a concept of self-contained ‘pure nature’ (versus interventionist ‘supernatural’) which came into existence only in the late middle ages and which got to be definitively embedded only in the 17^th century.
• A lot of water has gone under the bridge since that time, including advances in science and in the picture of the world projected by 20^th and 21^st versus 17^th and 18^th century sciences. It is no longer one big mechanism. But this presents another difficulty: in the aftermath of Quantum Theory and such, it may be that the ultimate laws of nature are statistical in form. The consequence of this is that the 17^th - 18^th century definition of miracles, presumed also in Christian apologetics since that time, is no longer viable. Probabilistic laws allow for the occasional exception! The notion of an event against the laws of nature in such a context would no longer make sense.
• If this is so, we may have to change our definition of miracles. However, this is not a crucial problem, in so far as the definition of miracle we have inherited is itself after all is a product of late medieval theology meshed with late 17^th century mechanistic science and the deistic world view which resulted. Let us then have a go at re-defining miracle, and see what results.
• “Miracle” = a localized shift in probabilities which fits with and is given sense by a certain theological or religious (or ‘spiritual’) story, alternatively which is given sense by a certain particular tradition of experience and interpretation. Beyond this, we may note that the presence of certain people, and apparently the presence in certain places and e.g. a total surrounding by prayer and such, does seem to shift the probabilities of certain kinds of events occurring.
• But we give up the against the laws of nature stuff: that’s late medieval two-story wedding cake (the natural and the supernatural on top of it) stuff meshed with old superceded science.
• And we also give up the notion of miracles as ‘proofs’ e.g. of revelation or whatever. They give strength to stories and legitimately re-enforce belief to people inside the story or on the verge of getting into the story; whereas with other people they may just be unexplained circumstances which sometimes happen in the course of their lives and professional engagements.
• [In accordance with the process-relational ontology to which I subscribe as a kind of default ontology whenever I don’t have anything better, all primary causality involves a shift in probabilities, not just on the quantum level: all genuine individuals have at least a bit of creativity, only aggregates of individuals are nearly deterministic. Thus, mental events for example operate by shifting the probabilities of firings of neurons in the brain. Mental events however are largely confined to the cerebral cortex as far as direct influence is concerned, and via the cerebral cortex the rest of creation. God in this conception is like a mental event or series of mental events whose direct environment is the whole universe. God does not intervene so much as interact, and this is a normal, natural part of life. Certain people and contexts enable a localized further shift in probabilities in accord with the divine lure, providing or enabling a kind of intensification or focus of the Reign of God in particular places, sometimes even having physical effects. But it’s always a shifting of probabilities. See my website for more on this process-relational stuff – but this is very much in brackets for this part of the course.]

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