Recently, I read David Hume’s essay “Of Miracles.” I expected a well-reasoned, well-considered, well-thought-out critique of miraculous events throughout human history; instead, what I found was an incoherent collection of anti-religious ramblings that do not hold up to even the mildest of logical scrutiny.
Hume chooses to define a miracle as something which violates the natural laws. What are the natural laws? Natural laws are known patterns and principles that have been observed time and time again throughout human history. Throughout his piece, he says that the order of the natural laws is founded on a consistent human experience of these laws. For example, when it gets hot, ice melts quicker, or when it rains, the uncovered ground gets wet, and other things along those lines. However, Hume is quite guilty of the most obvious sin: circular logic; his reasoning asserts that miracles are impossible because they are defined as miracles. This reasoning is not intellectually sound because it fails to allow for any evidence or argument that might challenge the initial assumption that miracles cannot happen. Nevertheless, in the interest of exploration, we will dive deeper into his argument.
If we are to define the natural laws as the typical order of things, things observed countless times over thousands and thousands of years — a violation of this pattern of occurrences would be very atypical. If a man rose from the dead after being dead for three days, that would be called a miracle — however, even if thousands of people attested to the veracity of this event, Hume would say, “Not so fast!” Because so many people have died before and never risen from the dead, this event that one man did cannot be considered, no matter how many witnesses attest that that is the truth. Hume discounts miraculous events and the eyewitness testimonies of anyone who attests to these events because they run contrary to the typical course of events. Hume argues that it is far more likely that one person or even a group is under some form of deception, delusion, or lie than something that violates the natural order that actually occurred. I would contend that this is absurd, but Hume’s argument boils down to the following: “Miracles never occur because miracles can’t occur because I have decided so.” In addition to circular logic, sweeping generalizations, and (ironically) the usage of anecdotal evidence, Hume broadly fails to make a cohesive refutation of the occurence of miracles.
This argument becomes almost funny when you apply it to an occurrence in the Bible; for example, in the Old Testament, it is written that God held the sun still, to which Hume might object: “This never happened because the sun does not stay still so that people can win battles” to which one might reply “precisely, that is why it was a miracle that it happened.” Hume’s argument fundamentally fails to address the fact that miracles are miracles because of their rarity because they do not happen all that often, and because they run precisely contrary to the rest of our experiences. If our experiences ran in accordance with miracles, they would not be miracles at all but rather typical occurrences.
Throwing out all the examples of miracles does not disprove the occurrence of miracles; it only proves that some humans are afraid of confronting the truly unknown.