Miracles

What is a miracle? A miracle is an extraordinary event caused by God’s intervention in the regular course of nature A miracle is often said to be a violation of the laws of nature – ‘a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity’ – Hume Aquinas defined three types of miracles – events caused by God which could occur, events which would be very unlikely to occur and events which would be impossible without divine intervention

Difference to other justifications for belief Unlike other religious experiences, many miracles are objective publicly observable events Determining whether they have occurred usually depends on testimony

Are the definitions correct? Do miracles need to contravene laws of nature? Holland called them ‘signs’, coincidences with religious significance Hick said that experiencing an event as miraculous depends on perspective Wiles said that no particular events are miraculous – the whole of creation is a real miracle William Adams – ‘There must be an ordinary regular course of nature, before there can be anything extraordinary. A river must flow, before its stream can be interrupted’

Things used as examples of miracles Turning water into wine Walking on water Jesus’ resurrection The parting of the red sea The child and the train Existence itself Allah in tomatoes

Hume’s criticisms of miracles: the argument from probability Testimony of a miracle should be believed if and only if the testimony being false is less probable than the event being attested to, and this is never the case Our knowledge of the probability of such events is not great enough to assume that this is never the case – just because something has never happened before does not mean that it has a low probability of happening

The argument from inauspicious conditions ‘there is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense... as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity, as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others...’

The argument from the passions of surprise and wonder We like hearing and telling of wonders, so miracle stories are more likely than others to be told, and also more likely than others to be believed

The argument from culture ‘Miracle stories are most popular in backwards cultures’

The argument from parity The miracles of different religions are all used to validate the truth, but they can’t all be right, so they could count against each other

Other arguments against miracles The idea of breaking a law of nature is logically incoherent, and if such laws can be broken, we were wrong about them, so their being broken is not so impressive as to make us believe in a God (Augustine, Spinoza) Why should the God which caused a miracle be the God of classical theism? How could an atemporal God intervene in the temporal order?

God’s interventions could be accused of being arbitrary, and this could be related to the problem of evil Naturalistic explanations can always be found for supposed miracles

Arguments in support of miracles Publicly observable miracles would be hard to misperceive – e.g. The 500 witnesses to Christ’s resurrection Which is written in a book written by an author to whom we cannot assign good testimony Swinburne’s principles of testimony and credulity: we ought to believe things are as they seem unless we have good evidence that we are mistaken Hume’s argument only shows that we shouldn’t believe in particular miracles, not that they aren’t possible

Hume’s objection rules out the evidence of one’s own senses (Smart) Hume’s argument is too strong, as it suggests that we should never believe in novelties – yet they do occur. For example the Indian prince we does not believe in frost but then sees it Hume makes a distinction between miracles and marvels (the Indian prince example being the latter) How do we know what is miracle and what is marvel? Hume’s objection rules out the evidence of one’s own senses (Smart) Hume presupposes that miracles can’t occur by presupposing that things that have not yet happened do not happen Miracles are logically possible

Conclusion There are no ‘laws of nature’, so they cannot be ‘broken’ So miracles are simply extraordinary events which are caused by a divine being Extraordinary events happen all the time People lie a lot, and there has been no example of a (modern) miracle which has had the testimony of a large number of people – the Bible does not count as evidence So miracles, though logically possible, do not happen