When is a Miracle Not a Miracle?

This return to writing is one that I have promised for a while. After the inevitable end of my training period, the consequent hunt for a parish of my own has left me much occupied over the last 7 months. So, here we are.

A considerable while back I commented on a post making the claim that I could use Hume to defeat Hume on the issue of Miracles, and the Rat asked me to write about it. Given how rusty I was, I knew I would need to re-read some Hume… and so I did.

Who was Hume?

David Hume was a philosopher in the Scottish Enlightenment period (18th Century) and is credited as one of the founders of the Empiricist school of philosophy (a foundation block of modern Science), and is part of the Skeptical tradition also. Let’s explore this, albeit somewhat briefly and simply.

Skepticism is better known as the method of doubt. It’s key question is: how can I be certain that I know what I know? Empiricism, on the other hand, claims that all knowledge is only possible through sensory experience – i.e. our senses, and what that may lead us to deduce by what is around us, and which may be repeatedly, and consistently, observed.

However, these weren’t the only tools in Hume’s box. He was also a Deist, and this is an extremely important watershed in the history of thought.

Deism

Deism arose in the 17th and 18th Centuries and helped to pave the way for some aspects of the Enlightenment. In particular, Deists had significant issues with organised religion and its supposed authority. They also had problems with claims which would allow for miracles, the inerrancy of Scripture (in this case, the Bible), and the core Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

In many ways it was a revival and adoption of significant aspects of Classical Greek philosophy. The god which Deism was comfortable with was akin to the indivisible monad of Greek speculation, and favoured Aristotle’s concept of the Unmoved Mover (see below) rather than the Biblical picture of a God who is deeply concerned for, and involved with, all aspects of Creation.

An illustration of this would be The Jefferson Bible. In this Thomas Jefferson produced a highly expurgated version of the Gospels, removing all references to miracles, or claims to Jesus having any special favour from God, or, even, being Divine Himself.

As with most of the Leaders of the Enlightenment, Hume was firmly within this Tradition. For Hume, at the beginning God started everything off. Like a master watchmaker (deliberate analogy) who finishes the work, and winds it up to get it running, God now sits back and views the completed work in action. God, probably enjoying a well-earned cup of tea, never intervenes… even when things go wrong.

Deism held to a completely ‘closed’ Universe. A Universe governed by Newtonian physics, and which precluded any ‘interference’ by an outside Agent, even God. As Hume was to put it, miracles are a violation of Nature and its Laws. By definition, this, for Hume and his ilk, is impossible. Thus, miracles do not exist.

And yet…

Given the unacknowledged influence of Aristotle, it is a little surprising that the ‘causal chain’ is the weak point which Hume attacks. Let me explain.

Aristotle inherited from Plato the understanding that ‘the Good’ (Plato’s Ultimate Being) is totally transcendent. Unlike Plato, Aristotle did not propose a lesser being, or Demiurge, as the Creator of the Universe of matter, but he did propose the Unmoved Mover, the Primal Cause of all other Causes. In this understanding, God is the First Cause which causes all others. But this is more like a row of dominoes. God knocks the first one, and watches the rest tumble, and create the pattern which has been predetermined. Thus God, the Uncaused Cause, sets the Universe in motion. The first cause leads to an effect which becomes the cause of the next effect, and so on…

This causal chain, Hume argued, encourages us to form Habits in our thinking. We become used to seeing certain events succeeding their ‘normal’ causes, and this habituates us to always expecting certain effects following certain causes. Here Hume uses a reductio ad absurdum. His example looks at the fact that, to us, the Sun always rises in the East and sets in the West. It is something we have always seen, and so it is something which we always expect to see. But, he argues, just because we always have seen something to be the case does not mean that it always has been the case, or that it always will be the case. For Hume, there is no logical reason why we should propose that the regular pattern of the Sun’s movement should always be East-West, it could, logically, also go West-East, it is only our habituated thinking that requires us to believe that the usual pattern is ubiquitous.

As I said, it is a reductio, but it does create some interesting philosophical issues in terms of the Scientific Endeavour. Primarily, the so-called Laws of Science are, in reality, Laws of Observation – observing what has been observed to be the case, and then extrapolating to ubiquity. But, as any honest Scientist admits, the Laws can only account for what has been observed, and at any point some new data could arise which would immediately overturn the current ‘Law’ and establish a new one.

What has this to do with belief in Miracles?

Let’s briefly summarise: in Hume’s perspective, we live in a completely closed system Universe. Within this Universe, God, if there is such a Being, has set-up logically consistent rules which we are discovering, and which are inviolable. There is no causal Agent outside the confines of the closed system which ‘reaches in’ to affect a change in any way, leave alone miracles. By definition miracles are impossible as Hume has defined them as events which violate the perceived Laws of Nature.

From his Deistic heritage, Hume, alongside decrying the possibility of miracles, must now also reject some key Christian precepts: the Bible as a Revelation to Humans from God (this would necessitate God reaching into the closed system to intervene and give messages to the free agents known as humans); the Incarnation of God the Son as a human called Jesus from Nazareth; any miracle Jesus is said to have performed, and perhaps most seriously for Christianity, the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

But, let’s look at Hume’s overall points again…

1. The Universe is a closed system which God started off, but does not interfere in (influenced by Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover);
2. This Universe is governed by discoverable Laws which are inviolable. Miracles violate these Laws, therefore miracles cannot happen;
3. As miracles cannot happen, significant, and key, Christian beliefs are erroneous, most significantly, the Incarnation and the Resurrection.

Bizarrely, Hume argued in “Of Miracles” that only barbarous and ill-educated peoples believed in miracles. Given the time and place of writing, it is safe to assert that this would refer to all non-Western cultures – i.e. all those not influenced by the Enlightenment, and who live in what we now call the Developing World. I invite you to draw your own conclusions…

And yet, Hume also argued:

1. The world around us tends to take us in the direction of habituated thought – because we continually observe certain effects preceded by the causes we expect to produce those effects, we always expect to see it;
2. The Laws of Nature are not exhaustive, they can only account for what has been observed, not what hasn’t been observed. Therefore, there is the huge possibility that things happen which ‘violate’ the Laws of Nature as we currently have them.

On this line of thought it doesn’t take a great deal of research to understand how difficult it was for Einsteinian physics to be accepted, or to discover a reason for Einstein’s reaction to Quantum Mechanics – “God doesn’t play dice.” Or to look at reactions to all the research going into Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

So, taking Hume’s own perspectives it is perfectly reasonable and logical to argue that miracles do exist, simply because the Laws of Nature are not exhaustive, and do not cover every eventuality. To suggest otherwise is to be conditioned by the Habituation which Hume so decried.

The danger, here, of course, is to go down the ‘God-of-the-Gaps’ mentality that is the flaw of the Argument from Design, most famously expressed in William Paley’s illustration of the Watch and the Watchmaker. In other words, if Science can’t explain it, then it must be God – but that is a position of diminishing returns. The more Science produces explanatory models for what has been observed, the ‘smaller’ God becomes.

Miracles in Christianity

From my perspective, Christianity and miracles have a really unusual relationship.

On the one hand, the whole Christian faith rests on one (yes, one) miracle – the Resurrection of Jesus on that first Easter morning. In 1 Corinthians 15, we have the greatest defence of the Resurrection in the New Testament. At one point Paul simply says that if Jesus is not raised from the dead then Christians should be pitied as fools and people who call God a liar because they claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Conversely, miracles are not seen as proofs, and are often dismissed by the eyewitnesses within the text (e.g. Luke 16 v 31; Luke 10 v 13).

But whether one believes in the possibility of miracles, the concept of miracle that we are agreeing or disagreeing with is usually dependent on Hume’s definition and presuppositions, and not how they are understood within the Bible.

Throughout the Bible, miracles may simply be defined as “God in action”. Whether in the everyday, or the ‘extraordinary’, miracles are neither ‘natural’ nor ‘supernatural’. They simply are God doing what God does, and are usually seen as God sign-posting His existence.

In the Gospel of John, the favoured word for miracles is ‘sign’, and the major miracles are normally accompanied by a sermon/discussion to further explore their meaning. So, when Jesus heals the man born blind, it is preceded by the statement that Jesus is the light of the world, and a discussion ensues about being in spiritual darkness and having spiritual sight.

Where next?

My undergraduate lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion was a complete devotee of Hume. Hardly a lecture went by when Hume didn’t make an appearance. It really got quite repetitive. Unfortunately, my own knowledge and understanding were somewhat lacking at the time, compared to now, and so I wasn’t always able to challenge her in the ways I wanted. My years in the classroom teaching Philosophy of Religion to 11-18 year olds, including for examination purposes, sharpened my critical thinking in this area and led to my realisation of Hume’s faults. Others out there have done it much better than me, and I have since discovered their writings. Three are listed below.

I may not have convinced you about the possibility of miracles but I do hope that I have encouraged you to think about the wider issues around the definitions we work with, especially the underlying presuppositions which are taken for granted and remain unchallenged in much of our thinking.

Further Reading

Copan, Paul, When God Goes to Starbucks – a very straightforward book of Christian apologetics. Some ‘leaps’ are made, but an interesting primer from one of America’s better, theologically conservative, apologists.

Barman, John, Hume’s Abject Failure – exposes the failures in Hume’s position whilst seeking to salvage what can be salvaged from Hume’s argument. Attention should be paid to the review of this book. in the Amazon link, it is very fair.

Lewis, C. S., Miracles – whilst there are many holes one could choose to pick with this work, it is, nevertheless, a wonderful place to kick-off from in exploring whether or not one wishes to allow for the possibility of miracles in this World.