An Argument against the Argument against Miracles

[Don Mc]

According to Hume's famous "general maxim" against the confirmation of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "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." The basic idea is that the laws of nature being what they are, and human nature being what it is, the probability of a miracle is always lower than the probability that the testimony given for it is simply false. In this Hume seems to have anticipated the logic of Carl Sagan, who popularized the idea that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

While this principle appears rational enough at first blush, there are reasons to think it's not sound. First, it was Hume himself who spelled out the problem of induction – that there is no logical basis for inferring future outcomes from past experiences. Assuming there exists a set of well-defined "laws of nature," those regularities would seem to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. But if the laws of nature are descriptive, there is no reason to think miracles cannot or should not occur. Second, the argument against miracles is essentially circular. Hume asserts that there is "uniform experience" against the resurrection, for example, adding that a man risen from the dead "has never been observed, in any age or country." The question of the resurrection, however, is precisely whether or not Jesus was observed by his disciples to have risen from the dead. To say that a resurrection event was never observed because there is "uniform experience" against it is to beg that question (and we should bear in mind that there is equally uniform experience that life does not arise from nonliving elements – yet here we are). Finally, while it's true that human nature has the potential to corrupt the testimony of eyewitnesses and the writings of biographers and historians, it also has the potential to corrupt the field reports, lab results, journal articles, textbooks, etc., that lead us to accept the same scientific theories thought to render miracle reports implausible or even impossible. The problem of "confirmation bias" among humans, and scientists in particular, is well documented.

Evidently underlying popular skepticism of miracles is a belief that miracles are inherently, extremely improbable. But that seems to hold only if a miracle is defined in naturalistic terms. After all, the proposition "A man rose from the dead by natural processes" appears considerably less probable on its face than the proposition "Jesus Christ rose from the dead by the power of God." As Paul put it, "Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?" (Acts 26:8)

Questions for debate:
Are miracles improbable? If so, how improbable are they and why?
Could historical evidence for a miracle give us good evidence for theism?

[FarWanderer3]

First, it was Hume himself who spelled out the problem of induction – that there is no logical basis for inferring future outcomes from past experiences. Assuming there exists a set of well-defined "laws of nature," those regularities would seem to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. But if the laws of nature are descriptive, there is no reason to think miracles cannot or should not occur.

Hume is not claiming "miracles cannot or should not occur", he's claiming their existence cannot be established. Meaning, they could theoretically exist, but even if they do we wouldn't have a reliable way to identify them as such.

Second, the argument against miracles is essentially circular. Hume asserts that there is "uniform experience" against the resurrection, for example, adding that a man risen from the dead "has never been observed, in any age or country." The question of the resurrection, however, is precisely whether or not Jesus was observed by his disciples to have risen from the dead. To say that a resurrection event was never observed because there is "uniform experience" against it is to beg that question (and we should bear in mind that there is equally uniform experience that life does not arise from nonliving elements – yet here we are).

Just take his point to be that we're weighing a handful of biblical claims against all the rest of human experience. I'm sure that's what he means, and even if it weren't you should still always take the strongest version of an argument anyway.

Finally, while it's true that human nature has the potential to corrupt the testimony of eyewitnesses and the writings of biographers and historians, it also has the potential to corrupt the field reports, lab results, journal articles, textbooks, etc., that lead us to accept the same scientific theories thought to render miracle reports implausible or even impossible. The problem of "confirmation bias" among humans, and scientists in particular, is well documented.

Are you suggesting the problem is that these theories are scientifically wrong? Or that people are wrongly applying them to miracles, which are scientific exceptions?

If it's the former, then the event simply being a misunderstood natural event is no less viable an interpretation than it being a miracle. After all, the very premise is that we are lacking in scientific understanding.

If it's the latter, then you are simply making a special pleading.

Questions for debate:
Are miracles improbable? If so, how improbable are they and why?

The implication of Hume's position would be that assigning a probability to miracles is nonsense (be it 0 or 100 or whatever), because there's no way to establish their existence or non-existence in the first place.

[brunumb]

If you toss a thousand unbiased coins in the air and they all land heads up, that is a natural event. The probability for that outcome is very low but it is not an impossible outcome. If it occurred, would it be considered a miracle? I would say no. To me a miracle refers to an outcome which would be considered unnatural or impossible. For example, a three day old exsanguinated corpse coming back to life would be a miracle. Has it ever happened? We don't really know. I don't believe there are any substantiated events that would qualify as miracles.

[Mithrae]

- Firstly, that it implies absurdities flying in the face of common sense in any scenario where a miracle obviously occurs such as my parable of the Prophet. If the logic doesn't hold true in such a circumstance (or when allowing for the possibility of truth in various religious reports etc.) then there's obviously something wrong with the logic.

The presumption you are making is that a miracle "obviously" occurs. What actually occurred was an event that cannot be currently explained. How can you have an unexplained event that you explain by labeling it as a miracle?

If you're going to declare in the face of common sense that the occurrence of a miracle is not an explanation were such a scenario to occur, you're going to have to define what you mean by that term. Near as I can tell, explaining an observed phenomenon means situating it within a broader, coherent theory with better scope and parsimony than competing alternatives; for example falling objects are explained in the context of gravity, overseas shift in manufacturing work is explained in the context of globalisation and labour costs etc.. In this scenario, the theory that someone's legs spontaneously, coincidentally happened to grow back in the seconds after our Prophet prayed for it is obviously absurd. The theory that he was a clever illusionist who collaborated with the atheist and the mayor, somehow ensuring that they'd be the first ones to make miracle requests and with unknown motivations unhindered by the probable eventual discovery of the deception would be more plausible, but perhaps not by much and, more importantly, in contrast to the miracle explanation the fraud explanation would have zero explanatory scope regarding miracles credibly reported elsewhere.

Of course discovery of hidden gadgets and wires which allowed them to pull of the stunt would make that latter explanation much more plausible and thereby obviously replace the miracle explanation. In the rest of your post you still seem to be confused about the fact that an explanation will not be falsified if it's not false, and equating that with not being falsifiable in principle.

- Secondly, it's arbitrary; if the possibility of the existence of God were proven, the next questioner could then demand proof that it's 'possible' for God to intervene in the natural order, the next could demand proof that it's 'possible' for God to hear and answer prayers so rapidly etc.; there'll always be some part of a theory or proposed sequence of events where one so inclined can arbitrarily say "But is that even proven to be possible?"

I don't understand how that is arbitrary. Also, it is not about "proving" a claim but trying to disprove a falsifiable claim. Maybe try revising the hypothetical so that it describes a situation where people are attempting to disprove falsifiable claims instead of trying to "prove" unfalsifiable claims.

Again, in principle it could easily be falsified. In fact the story is already explicitly about the ad hoc attempts of the atheist and the mayor to falsify the Prophet's claim of divine power. And it seems you're trying to change your goalposts here in any case; your original objection was that we don't know whether miracles are actually possible... now you're trying to say it's not about proving anything possible? The 'negative' approach of seeing which particular theories/explanations can be falsified by further observational data or better explanations is the angle I have always taken; you were the one claiming that some positive demonstration of 'possibility' is required. If you've changed that view now that's good

- Hence the third problem, that such an approach rules out all explanations equally. How would you go about demonstrating that it is "empirically possible" for all the stuff in existence to be governed by the same 'laws,' for example? How can it be proven that one bit of stuff which is not identical to another bit of stuff (eg. a hydrogen atom separated by centimeters or seconds from another hydrogen atom) is nevertheless capable of having perpetually identical behaviour and interactions with all other stuff? The fleeting patterns which we observe in an infinitesimally small fraction of space and time obviously don't prove any such thing; as far as I'm aware it cannot be proven, so your argument would necessarily throw the science out with the holy water.

Once again, science is not in the business of "proving" unfalsifiable claims. The scientific method functions to disprove falsifiable claims.

Correct, which is why your original argument was at odds with the science as much as with miracle claims.

- And that's closely related to the fourth problem, that proving something to be 'possible' prior to admitting its explanatory utility for observed phenomena seems impossible; observational data about the age of the universe might be interpreted very differently, for example, if we first had to prove independently of that data that it is even 'possible' for a universe to be more than 6,000 years old! Exactly how would you go about proving that God or miracles are "empirically possible" in the first place, if the apparent occurrence of miracles were ruled out as evidence for their possibility on the basis that more commonly observed types of things are always necessarily more rationally justifiable causes?

Hence, this is the problem with trying to prove unfalsifiable claims instead of trying to disprove falsifiable claims.

So you agree that your original argument about trying to demonstrate the 'possibility' of something before evaluating it's explanatory merit was a flawed position, and you're now returning to the falsification paradigm?

No-one has ever demonstrated this argument to be fallacious, no; merely making that assertion is not an argument or demonstration of any kind. Citing and noting that the conclusions of intelligent, educated experts in their field not only support a given conclusion, but do so at an even higher rate than for the general population is obviously not comparable to the likes of ghost or alien sightings, if that's what you were thinking.

And as I believe I've pointed out to you before, A) essentially no claim is truly falsifiable since they can always be saved by ad hoc revisions - for example a geocentric model of the universe can still be constructed, it's just exceptionally complex - but what we can and do aim for is the possibility of finding more plausible, parsimonious or comprehensive explanations; and B) the fact that something has not been falsified or superseded by a better explanation obviously isn't the same thing as not being falsifiable in principle. We readily imagine (for example) each doctor picking up a medical journal and learning about the not widely known but already-understood mechanisms behind cures that they had thought to be miraculous, such that a survey next year has doctors reporting significantly lower levels of observation and belief in miracles than the general population; or researchers tomorrow discovering....

Your failure to mitigate for confirmation bias in your argument doesn't make it logically fallacious. There are many logically sound arguments that don't map onto reality. I'll take your argument more seriously once you've demonstrated where the miracle explanation maps onto reality. Until then, the miracle explanation is no better or worse than any other imagined unfalsifiable explanation.

You're just making random assertions here. You haven't shown any hint of 'confirmation bias' in my position. You seem not to understand what 'falsification' entails; that an explanation will not be falsified if it's not false, which is not the same thing as not being falsifiable in principle. You seem happy to blindly dismiss thousands of credible miracle reports by experts in their field simply because they don't "map onto" your version of reality.

[unknown soldier]

Are miracles improbable? If so, how improbable are they and why?

You didn't define "miracle," but I assume you mean events like Moses parting the Red Sea and Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Since we have no evidence that any such events have happened under controlled conditions, I'd say that the probability of such miracles is close to zero. On the other hand, we have an enormous amount of evidence that people are often deluded or dishonest making up wild stories that never happened. So to compare probabilities:

P(Miracles stories are fiction) > P(Miracles have actually occurred.)

The sensible conclusion is to go with what is more probable; miracle stories are fiction.

Could historical evidence for a miracle give us good evidence for theism?

No. If we had good evidence for a miracle, then it does not follow that we have good evidence for a god. Miracles might happen yet involve no god.

[Don Mc]

Like winning the lottery, the prior probability of a miracle occuring is essentially zero. As with lotteries it seems that most people go their entire lives without witnessing one, or even having any close friends or family witness one. But we have no basis for supposing it to actually be zero-in-a-billion rather than one-in-a-billion; a tiny but rather important distinction.

That doesn't sound quite right. What I'm concerned with here is not the probability that you or I, or a close friend or relative, experience a miracle personally, but that miracles happen at all. Given the background knowledge that a winner is eventually announced for any particular lottery (even if after multiple drawings), the prior probability of someone winning the lottery must be near one.

Besides, there really is no "the" prior probability for these sorts of scenarios, as there might be for a fair coin landing heads, or an industrial supplier filling an order completely. For a nonstatistical inductive (or abductive) inference, especially one with metaphysical implications, there will always be a considerable subjective element to the prior. Take the people you describe below. For some of those who have been trained in Western science and have never experienced anything like good fortune, much less a miracle, the prior probability may hover around zero, while for those of us who have (in principle) experienced a miracle directly, that prior will be considerably higher. It could be argued that the prior probability of Jesus' resurrection, in light of his claims to divinity, wide reports of his healings and exorcisms, and his own prediction that he would be crucified and rise from the dead, was quite high.

It's worth noting that for all we know there could be two or three miracles happening every single day, somewhere in the world, and still most people would never have first- or close second-hand experience of one. That could be the world we live in. Nor by their very nature would most miracles be subject to experimentation, repetition or universal observation. Of course from the absence of such, the world we live in strongly suggests that God if there is one doesn't particularly care whether people 'believe' in her or not; if she did there'd be far better reasons for believing, likely including more obvious miracles.

If God did miracles routinely, or even notably more often, I suspect we would ascribe those miracles to the workings of nature rather than God. But a one-time event like the resurrection of Jesus, multiply attested within the well-documented historical context of ancient Judean culture and the rise of the early church in the face of persecution, would stand as a lasting testament to God's nature-transcending power. Even so, it seems to me there is "prehistoric" evidence of miracles in the origin of the universe and the origin of complex and even intelligent life, both of which boost the aforementioned prior probability of miracles for observers like me. Those events (or at least how they occurred) are not only two of the most enduring unsolved mysteries of science, but prominent among the miracles of Scripture. For believers that remarkable situation is no coincidence.

But for the hypothesis of a strong independent God who don't need no worshippers, one of the few criteria I can think of which might clearly distinguish between that world and one with no god is based on the premises that A) if miracles from a benevolent god do occur then divine healings should feature prominently among them, as in the NT and in popular perception, and B) if miracles don't occur then well-off, highly educated analytical thinkers should be much less prone to belief in them borne of desperation/hope or ignorance/superstition. As it turns out, medical doctors (at least in the USA where data is most readily available) are about as likely to believe in miracles as the general population and far more likely to report having personally witnessed miraculous healing. So to my mind that pretty strongly suggests that miracles do happen, perhaps more commonly than we might assume.

Historical evidence, no. For example suppose we had the names and sworn testimonies of three or four renaissance surgeons and medical workers that a man's leg was amputated and, after a couple of years as a one-legged beggar, even more overwhelming evidence that he was widely hailed as a two-legged man and recipient of a miracle: Would that be proof that Our Lady of the Pillar Mary answered his prayers and healed him? Or can we reasonably speculate - even without any evidence - that the doctors' testimony might have been part of a conspiracy to create a fraudulent miracle? I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'good' evidence, but it seems to me that the conspiracy explanation would have about as much merit give or take as the supernatural healing explanation, even in that case (with particular theories about the cause of supernatural healing obviously having even smaller probabilities); so perhaps a 20-60% probability that it was a genuine divine healing, possibly via Her Ladyship?

Interesting. But why should we trust the credibility of modern doctors, yet suspect all the doctors from previous ages of inclining toward conspiracies? I think Lewis called this sort of thing "chronological snobbery." (From all indications chronological snobbery will not be going away any time soon, which means future generations will likely think of us as rather intellectually stunted and biased, if not simply a bunch of ignorant dolts.)

When it comes to Christian apologetics about Jesus' resurrection, obviously the evidence doesn't even remotely come close to that miracle of Calanda: Anonymous iron age propaganda tracts contradicting each other even in key details and possibly deriving from as few as one or two original indeterminate sources. I'd argue for at least a 1% probability of Jesus' resurrection, maybe even as high as 10 or 20 depending on my mood, but it's pretty meagre evidence by any measure.

This last part is disappointing. I followed you until the overstated and scarcely relevant rhetoric about "anonymous iron age propaganda tracts contradicting…" and so forth. It sounds almost like something out of an antireligious propaganda tract.

Great post overall, though, at least in my not-always-so-humble opinion…

[Don Mc]

Consider the origin of life. Here is an event not only completely at odds with our knowledge of how the world actually works,

Four sources of information showing how abiogenesis is in agreement with our knowledge of how the world actually works.

New evidence emerges on the origins of life
source

From your source:

"'We know a lot about LUCA and we are beginning to learn about the chemistry that produced building blocks like amino acids, but between the two there is a desert of knowledge,' Carter said. 'We haven't even known how to explore it.' The UNC research represents an outpost in that desert."

Abiogenesis: Definition, Theory, Evidence & Examples
source

From your source:

"Such a process could not take place on Earth today because the necessary conditions no longer exist."

Researchers May Have Found the Missing Piece of Evidence that Explains the Origins of Life
source

From your source:

"The question of how life first emerged here on Earth is a mystery that continues to elude scientists. Despite everything that scientists have learned from the fossil record and geological history, it is still not known how organic life emerged from inorganic elements (a process known as abiogenesis) billions of years ago."

Scientists Just Found a Vital Missing Link in The Origins of Life on Earth
source

(I couldn't get this last link to work.)

So how exactly would one reconcile the quoted statements above with the statement, "Abiogenesis is in agreement with our knowledge of how the world actually works"?

[bluegreenearth]

If you're going to declare in the face of common sense that the occurrence of a miracle is not an explanation were such a scenario to occur, you're going to have to define what you mean by that term. Near as I can tell, explaining an observed phenomenon means situating it within a broader, coherent theory with better scope and parsimony than competing alternatives; for example falling objects are explained in the context of gravity, overseas shift in manufacturing work is explained in the context of globalisation and labour costs etc.. In this scenario, the theory that someone's legs spontaneously, coincidentally happened to grow back in the seconds after our Prophet prayed for it is obviously absurd. The theory that he was a clever illusionist who collaborated with the atheist and the mayor, somehow ensuring that they'd be the first ones to make miracle requests and with unknown motivations unhindered by the probable eventual discovery of the deception would be more plausible, but perhaps not by much and, more importantly, in contrast to the miracle explanation the fraud explanation would have zero explanatory scope regarding miracles credibly reported elsewhere.

Of course discovery of hidden gadgets and wires which allowed them to pull of the stunt would make that latter explanation much more plausible and thereby obviously replace the miracle explanation. In the rest of your post you still seem to be confused about the fact that an explanation will not be falsified if it's not false, and equating that with not being falsifiable in principle.

The problem with the regrown limbs miracle claim is that, even if the discovery of hidden gadgets and wires would falsify that one particular miracle claim, every other miracle claim would also need to be similarly falsified to disprove "miracle" as an explanation for those. Alternatively, a failure to find any hidden gadgets and wires only rules-out that one particular natural explanation but not any other potential natural explanation including those we haven't thought of or discovered yet. In any case, the miracle explanation is not an explanation at all because it doesn't provide us with a description of how the limbs were regrown. In other words, claiming the event was caused by a miracle is functionally equivalent to having no explanation for how the limbs were regrown. Hence, the event would be more accurately described as unexplained.

Again, in principle it could easily be falsified. In fact the story is already explicitly about the ad hoc attempts of the atheist and the mayor to falsify the Prophet's claim of divine power. And it seems you're trying to change your goalposts here in any case; your original objection was that we don't know whether miracles are actually possible... now you're trying to say it's not about proving anything possible? The 'negative' approach of seeing which particular theories/explanations can be falsified by further observational data or better explanations is the angle I have always taken; you were the one claiming that some positive demonstration of 'possibility' is required. If you've changed that view now that's good

To demonstrate where an explanation is possible is to disprove the potential for the explanation to be impossible. If you cannot disprove the impossibility of the explanation, then it is unfalsifiable and cannot be known as possible or impossible.

Correct, which is why your original argument was at odds with the science as much as with miracle claims.

See my responses above.

So you agree that your original argument about trying to demonstrate the 'possibility' of something before evaluating it's explanatory merit was a flawed position, and you're now returning to the falsification paradigm?

I do not agree. See my responses above.

You're just making random assertions here. You haven't shown any hint of 'confirmation bias' in my position. You seem not to understand what 'falsification' entails; that an explanation will not be falsified if it's not false, which is not the same thing as not being falsifiable in principle. You seem happy to blindly dismiss thousands of credible miracle reports by experts in their field simply because they don't "map onto" your version of reality.

I did not claim your conclusion was a result of confirmation bias but that you cannot know if confirmation bias was a factor or not because of your failure to mitigate for it. Also, I don't blindly dismiss miracle reports by "experts" because they don't map onto my version of reality, but I am compelled by intellectual honesty to withhold a positive belief in them because the potential for the explanation to be impossible has not been disproved.

[Mithrae]

Like winning the lottery, the prior probability of a miracle occuring is essentially zero. As with lotteries it seems that most people go their entire lives without witnessing one, or even having any close friends or family witness one. But we have no basis for supposing it to actually be zero-in-a-billion rather than one-in-a-billion; a tiny but rather important distinction.

That doesn't sound quite right. What I'm concerned with here is not the probability that you or I, or a close friend or relative, experience a miracle personally, but that miracles happen at all. Given the background knowledge that a winner is eventually announced for any particular lottery (even if after multiple drawings), the prior probability of someone winning the lottery must be near one.

Besides, there really is no "the" prior probability for these sorts of scenarios, as there might be for a fair coin landing heads, or an industrial supplier filling an order completely. For a nonstatistical inductive (or abductive) inference, especially one with metaphysical implications, there will always be a considerable subjective element to the prior. Take the people you describe below. For some of those who have been trained in Western science and have never experienced anything like good fortune, much less a miracle, the prior probability may hover around zero, while for those of us who have (in principle) experienced a miracle directly, that prior will be considerably higher. It could be argued that the prior probability of Jesus' resurrection, in light of his claims to divinity, wide reports of his healings and exorcisms, and his own prediction that he would be crucified and rise from the dead, was quite high.

Not very high according to the guys who supposedly saw all those healings and exorcisms. I try to take the approach that if I couldn't convince a fair-minded sceptic of my opinions - or at least convince her of their plausibility - then it's an opinion which I would have to want to believe. Believing what we want to believe leaves little safeguard against error; that's why scepticism is so important. Those subjective prior probabilities based on personal experience seem to fall into that category.

It's worth noting that for all we know there could be two or three miracles happening every single day, somewhere in the world, and still most people would never have first- or close second-hand experience of one. That could be the world we live in. Nor by their very nature would most miracles be subject to experimentation, repetition or universal observation. Of course from the absence of such, the world we live in strongly suggests that God if there is one doesn't particularly care whether people 'believe' in her or not; if she did there'd be far better reasons for believing, likely including more obvious miracles.

If God did miracles routinely, or even notably more often, I suspect we would ascribe those miracles to the workings of nature rather than God. But a one-time event like the resurrection of Jesus, multiply attested within the well-documented historical context of ancient Judean culture and the rise of the early church in the face of persecution, would stand as a lasting testament to God's nature-transcending power.

It's a pretty weak testament, if that were its purpose. Whether or not you like these facts, the gospels are anonymous, they are propaganda, they do contradict each other even on key details etc. Growth in the face of persecution doesn't make Jesus' resurrection any more likely than Muhammad flying to Jerusalem or Joseph Smith and his mysteriously-vanished golden tablets. According to the gospels what Jesus himself taught were things like forsake all your possessions, trust in God for your daily bread, stop working for money and start working for God. Believing in his supposed resurrection apparently doesn't help Christians actually do what he taught; quite the opposite, it's a huge distraction to the extent that most professing 'followers of Christ' don't even know that he taught that kind of stuff, and fight tooth and nail against any suggestion that they should actually obey!

Even so, it seems to me there is "prehistoric" evidence of miracles in the origin of the universe and the origin of complex and even intelligent life, both of which boost the aforementioned prior probability of miracles for observers like me. Those events (or at least how they occurred) are not only two of the most enduring unsolved mysteries of science, but prominent among the miracles of Scripture. For believers that remarkable situation is no coincidence.

It's not coincidence, no... the bible says the same stuff about everything under the sun; sunrise and sunset, rain and drought, plague and prosperity, grass and trees and the diversity of human language. They're all marvelous works of God, according to the bible - would claim that they're all "miracles"? Cherry picking one or two of them merely because they have not (yet) been fully incorporated into the context of broader or deeper observations/theories seems like a god of the gaps kind of argument. To my understanding there's nothing about chemical/mechanical life or even intelligent machines such as humans which poses a serious conceptual problem, it's just the exact process (and there are some plausible theories) and the odds of it happening on a single planet which are 'mysteries,' and the vast number of star systems in the universe almost certainly obviates the probability question. The hard problem of consciousness on the other hand does seem to be a serious problem even conceptually; yet most Christians nevertheless share the belief in a non-conscious material reality that many atheists do.

But for the hypothesis of a strong independent God who don't need no worshippers, one of the few criteria I can think of which might clearly distinguish between that world and one with no god is based on the premises that A) if miracles from a benevolent god do occur then divine healings should feature prominently among them, as in the NT and in popular perception, and B) if miracles don't occur then well-off, highly educated analytical thinkers should be much less prone to belief in them borne of desperation/hope or ignorance/superstition. As it turns out, medical doctors (at least in the USA where data is most readily available) are about as likely to believe in miracles as the general population and far more likely to report having personally witnessed miraculous healing. So to my mind that pretty strongly suggests that miracles do happen, perhaps more commonly than we might assume.

Historical evidence, no. For example suppose we had the names and sworn testimonies of three or four renaissance surgeons and medical workers that a man's leg was amputated and, after a couple of years as a one-legged beggar, even more overwhelming evidence that he was widely hailed as a two-legged man and recipient of a miracle: Would that be proof that Our Lady of the Pillar Mary answered his prayers and healed him? Or can we reasonably speculate - even without any evidence - that the doctors' testimony might have been part of a conspiracy to create a fraudulent miracle? I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'good' evidence, but it seems to me that the conspiracy explanation would have about as much merit give or take as the supernatural healing explanation, even in that case (with particular theories about the cause of supernatural healing obviously having even smaller probabilities); so perhaps a 20-60% probability that it was a genuine divine healing, possibly via Her Ladyship?

Interesting. But why should we trust the credibility of modern doctors, yet suspect all the doctors from previous ages of inclining toward conspiracies? I think Lewis called this sort of thing "chronological snobbery." (From all indications chronological snobbery will not be going away any time soon, which means future generations will likely think of us as rather intellectually stunted and biased, if not simply a bunch of ignorant dolts.)

Educated modern folk have access to much more information in each field, a long history of earlier falsified or discredited theories to look back on and, where uncertainty exists, usually a stronger array of current/viable theories to consider. We could use the same term, 'chronological snobbery,' to dismiss folk who take the opinions of adults more seriously than kids, but the reality is that people with more information etc. available to them have numerous potential errors ruled out by that fact. If memory serves Lewis' specific use was regarding reliability of observational reports(?); and in that regard he was probably right that ancient folk were not noticeably more prone to erroneous or dishonest reporting. If four medical workers swore up and down that they'd seen an amputee regrow his limb today, we should take that with a fair dose of salt too. There've been more than enough frauds and hoaxes to warrant it.

And as for four anonymous contradictory propaganda tracts...?

[Don Mc]

The origin of life is not an event completely at odds with our knowledge of how the world actually works. It is unknown as yet so we cannot make any such claim.

In a sense what is unknown obviously is at odds with what is known, but I see what you're saying. Let me put it this way: in empirical/observational terms, life does not arise from nonliving constituents. To put it another way: if it is a law of nature that men do not rise from the dead, it's just as much a law of nature that life does not arise from inorganic chemicals.

Life is essentially chemistry and the world works on chemistry, therefore it is not unreasonable to consider the origin of life as resulting from natural processes.

I think that's begging the question. It's not too unreasonable to posit abiogenesis on the premise that life is "essentially chemistry," true, but we can't really know that life is essentially chemistry until someone confirms abiogenesis. Spending decades of work and millions in research dollars to reverse engineer bacterial DNA and transplant it into a living bacterium, or producing some amino acids from a chemical soup shot through with electricity, falls way short of confirming abiogenesis as a genuinely natural phenomenon.

Even if it were correct to say that life is an emergent property of a certain chemical arrangement, that arrangement seems to require an explanation beyond gradual chemical evolution, because each of many and various biological systems and structures must be set in place simultaneously for an organism to live. The problem is replication. At least in principle, biological evolution can call upon natural selection to account for the gradual rise of specified – or functionally organized, if you prefer – complexity, given countless cycles of reproduction (though I think the logic behind natural selection is fallacious). But chemical evolution requires essentially a set of happy coincidences taking place within a set of presumed conditions that are no longer operating (if they ever were). And coincidence is not an explanation.

[Don Mc]

It's good to see you posting here again, FW. I've always found your arguments intriguing even if not entirely convincing.

First, it was Hume himself who spelled out the problem of induction – that there is no logical basis for inferring future outcomes from past experiences. Assuming there exists a set of well-defined "laws of nature," those regularities would seem to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. But if the laws of nature are descriptive, there is no reason to think miracles cannot or should not occur.

Hume is not claiming "miracles cannot or should not occur", he's claiming their existence cannot be established. Meaning, they could theoretically exist, but even if they do we wouldn't have a reliable way to identify them as such.

That sounds about right, honestly. But Hume's is a complicated and nuanced argument, which many readers have interpreted to suggest that miracles cannot or should not be expected to ever occur. Some scholars take care to distinguish two arguments – one argument that human testimony is inherently suspect, and another that there is "uniform" or "firm and unalterable" experience against miracles – with the overall implication that the testimony is always weaker than the experience. The latter of the two arguments seems to entail that no miracles are included in all of human experience, in which case it's understandable that some would read Hume to be arguing against the actual occurrence, and not merely the reliable identification, of any and all miracles.

Second, the argument against miracles is essentially circular. Hume asserts that there is "uniform experience" against the resurrection, for example, adding that a man risen from the dead "has never been observed, in any age or country." The question of the resurrection, however, is precisely whether or not Jesus was observed by his disciples to have risen from the dead. To say that a resurrection event was never observed because there is "uniform experience" against it is to beg that question (and we should bear in mind that there is equally uniform experience that life does not arise from nonliving elements – yet here we are).

Just take his point to be that we're weighing a handful of biblical claims against all the rest of human experience. I'm sure that's what he means, and even if it weren't you should still always take the strongest version of an argument anyway.

I would suggest that's an oversimplification. Biblical accounts are not the only testimonies to miracles, for one thing. More significantly, the only way we could know that the rest of human experience is really against the "handful of claims" is if humans were to universally attest to that experience – but that would mean…accepting their testimony. On Hume's premise that miracle claims should be rejected because human testimony is inherently suspect, then all claims should be rejected regardless of their content. That would leave precious little for us to learn about beyond our own personal experiences.

Your point about charitable interpretation is well taken, though. There needs to be more of that in these kinds of discussions.

Finally, while it's true that human nature has the potential to corrupt the testimony of eyewitnesses and the writings of biographers and historians, it also has the potential to corrupt the field reports, lab results, journal articles, textbooks, etc., that lead us to accept the same scientific theories thought to render miracle reports implausible or even impossible. The problem of "confirmation bias" among humans, and scientists in particular, is well documented.

Are you suggesting the problem is that these theories are scientifically wrong? Or that people are wrongly applying them to miracles, which are scientific exceptions?

If it's the former, then the event simply being a misunderstood natural event is no less viable an interpretation than it being a miracle. After all, the very premise is that we are lacking in scientific understanding.

If it's the latter, then you are simply making a special pleading.

That's a compelling dilemma at a glance, I must admit. But I think your argument relies too heavily upon an assumed reliability of natural science that doesn't seem justified.

Now if the misunderstood natural event interpretation is "no less viable" than the miracle interpretation, then belief in certain miracles is at least as rational for an unbiased observer as belief that there is a natural explanation for all phenomena. In that case the argument against miracles has lost much of its force.

For me to be guilty of special pleading, on the other hand, there would have to be a rule in place for which I am arbitrarily making an exception. But scientific theories are often falsified and otherwise shown to be wrong, which means that the rules entailed by them do not always hold. That leaves open the possibility of confirming a miracle on the basis of testimony and related evidence.