Do We Ever Have Reason to Believe in Miracles?

Tyler Piteo-Tarpy
12 min readMay 9, 2024

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1. Introduction

My purpose for this essay is twofold: First, I will defend Richard Swinburne's arguments that, even from within his empiricist worldview, David Hume’s case against miracles is weak. And secondly, I will make my own argument that there is a different worldview that would render the occurrence of miracles as explicable as the laws of nature, and compatible with them, so that Hume’s concerns along these lines would be unwarranted. I will not have space in this essay to argue that this particular worldview is rational (or to delve into the controversial conflict between empiricism and rationalism), but neither does Hume justify his strict empirical stance in “Section X: Of Miracles.” In essence, therefore, I will claim that if we have reason to doubt Hume’s method, and even if we do not, then we may have reason to believe in miracles.

2. Summary

Hume begins his chapter “Of Miracles” by asserting that “experience is our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact” (577). He admits that reasoning based on experience is fallible, but that “a wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence” (577). Hume then states that we usually have reason to believe the testimony of other people’s experiences because our own experiences have usually shown testimony correct. However, testimony must be balanced against our experience of the reliability of the reporter or our experiences of facts that are contrary to the testimony. Proceeding then to “the extraordinary and the marvelous” (578), given what he has established, Hume concludes that

The very same principle of experience which gives us a certain degree of assurance in the testimony of witnesses gives us also, in this case, another degree of assurance against the fact which they endeavor to establish — from which contradiction there necessarily arises a counterpoise and mutual destruction of belief and authority (578).

Indeed, since “a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined” (579).

That being said, Hume does construct one thought experiment where he admits belief in what appears to be a miracle could be justified — a universal historical report that the whole earth went dark for eight days in the year 1600 (584–585) — but then constructs another — where all English historians report that Queen Elizabeth had died and then returned to life after a month (585) — saying that, even with such reliable testimony, a non-miraculous explanation of the testified event is more rational.

In premise/conclusion form, Hume’s argument looks like this:

P1: Experience is our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact.

P2: The laws of nature are proved by our most consistent experiences.

P3: A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.

C1: Miracles contradict our most consistent experiences.

C2: It is unreasonable to believe testimony of miracles.

He does add the qualification that it is unreasonable to believe in miracles unless the falsehood of the testimony would be even more miraculous still. But I will argue that this qualification, even in the Eight-Days-of-Darkness example — as reliable testimony as Hume could imagine — would not apply, and is thus irrelevant to Hume’s point.

3. The Empiricist Case for Miracles

I am not claiming that Swinburne is an empiricist, just that his arguments are capable of subverting Hume’s from within that framework. Swinburne uses “approximately” (Swinburne 320) the same definition of miracle as Hume, and his goal, to show “that there are no logical difficulties in supposing that there could be strong historical evidence for the occurrence of miracles” (328), is also empirical. His assertions, summarized by Morgan Luck, are thus:

Assertion 1: The occurrence of a violation of a law of nature is logically possible.

Assertion 2: The existence of particular present events would indicate the prior occurrence of a particular violation of a law of nature.

Assertion 3: There are conditions under which it is reasonable to assume a violation of a law of nature was caused by a god (Luck 7).

I will not discuss Assertion 3 as I will make a similar point but for different reasons in section 4, but I will describe Assertion 1 and defend Assertion 2.

As Luck describes in his essay, laws of nature can either be thought of as prescriptive or descriptive; as coming from necessity or regularity. But if they are necessary then they necessarily cannot be violated, and if they are merely regular — “highly generalized shorthand description of how things do in fact happen” (Luck 11) — then we could define a miracle “as an ‘event involving the suspension [or violation] of the actual course of events’. And someone who insisted on describing an event as a miracle would be in that rather odd position of claiming that its occurrence was contrary to the actual course of events” (McKinnon qtd. in Luck 11).

Luck claims there is only one way a violation of a law of nature can occur, and that is given the Best Systems definition of a law which is part of the regularity interpretation but that refuses to dismiss a law as law simply because of one or a few counterexamples. The Best Systems approach tries to balance simplicity and strength (Luck 12), and as Swinburne puts it,

We have to some extent good evidence about what are the laws of nature, and some of them are so well established and account for so many data that any modifications to them which we could suggest to account for the odd counter-instance would be so clumsy and ad hoc as to upset the whole structure of science. In such cases the evidence is strong that if the purported counter-instance occurred it was a violation of the laws of nature (323).

Luck accepts that what he calls this “Humean account of laws” (7) makes the occurrence of miracles logically possible, but he objects to Swinburne’s claim that testimony is not “the only type of evidence. All effects of what happened at the time of the alleged occurrence of E [the miracle] are also relevant” (Swinburne 324), because “the occurrence of a miracle necessarily falsifies the principle of causal closure” (Luck 15). Causal closure, like determinism, is the idea that what happens in the physical world is caused by what happened earlier, so on and so forth. If a miracle violates the laws of nature, which govern how effects are caused, then we will become uncertain about how effects are caused, which will make the claim that we can use the effects of “the alleged occurrence of E” as evidence for E less believable. Luck acknowledges that this problem does not mean there cannot be any evidence for a miracle, just that it makes us unable to be certain which particular event was the miracle. For example, in the biblical story of the men thrown into a furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar and emerging unscathed, the miracle could be that the men were protected from the flames, or that the flames were an illusion, etc.

I don’t think this is much of a problem, at least for the purposes of refuting Hume’s arguments. In order for Hume to make this objection he would have to accept that the principle (or law) of causal closure had been violated; he would have to accept that a miracle had occurred in order to object that we don’t know what miracle it was. Additionally, we do generally assume that the principle of causal closure is violable since we generally assume that we and others have free will, which is the ability to act as our own causes and not merely be acted upon by prior causes. In our interactions with others, and even in our self-reflections, it is often difficult to identify the unique event — the free choice among the externally caused behavior. But we nevertheless cannot dismiss the existence, or at least the possibility, of these free choices without dismissing a) our extremely consistent experience of freely choosing, and b) our ability to, say, read, write, and decide rationally for ourselves our beliefs about, say, the existence of miracles among the naturally caused events. We might even say free will is a miracle, and we can say that without accurately identifying particular free choices.

All this is to say that, even given Hume’s empiricist worldview, we could have reason to believe in miracles. But I would go further than this conclusion and argue that the miracle of free will gives us evidence of a different worldview; one in which laws of nature are necessary (not just regular), and yet still violable; one in which miracles are explicitly supernatural, not just outliers to our best contemporary theories.

4. The Non-Empiricist Case for Miracles

It has been objected (Luck 10) that necessary laws of nature tell us the relation between natural causes and natural effects, thus, if the cause of a miracle is supernatural it cannot be said to violate those necessary laws. But this is a semantic difference, and it does not disprove the possibility of miracles, it only shows that rather than events that violate the laws of nature, we would be more accurate to speak of events that are impossible given only the laws of nature. Additionally, to McKinnon’s earlier point, this supernatural definition can also be challenged by saying anything that happens — whatever is “the actual course of events” — is natural, thus there is no supernatural. However, this too is not a substantive objection, just a difference in terminology, one I would accept so long as different terms were then substituted for whatever tends to govern the movement of matter and whatever causes events that are impossible given only whatever tends to govern the movements of matter.

The Best System’s theory does get us out of these trivial disagreements by allowing for miracles to be either naturally or unnaturally caused events, depending on preference. But I think that is actually a detriment to the theory’s utility, as physicalists or empiricists are unlikely to use the term miracle even if they could, and non-materialists or religious people are unlikely to use the term miracle in the available naturalistic way. The theory must be seen as a compromise even for the few who accept it, not a true resolution of the debate between those supporting the primacy of the laws of nature and those supporting the existence of miracles.

Another problem with the Best System’s attempt at resolution is that it accepts a descriptive definition of laws. Either the actual course of events occur for no reason, or they occur for some reason. If they occur for no reason, then they occur randomly, in which case looking for regularities is a fool’s errand. If they occur for some reason, then it would be useful to discover that reason; science would be pointless without necessary laws. It is likely the case that those thinking of laws as regular are merely using regularity as shorthand for saying that what we’ve called the laws of nature are imperfect attempts at describing the reasons behind what happens; that these laws explain what we’ve commonly observed, and might therefore be necessary, but that we might also have formulated them incorrectly so that their necessity lies still in other formulations. So long as the goal of science is actually to find necessary laws, science may proceed with regularity theory as a placeholder.

If, then, it is true that the laws of nature cause necessary events and that miracles are impossible events given only these laws, my next step is to posit a higher law that gives reasons for both the laws of nature and miracles. This higher law is an agent who created and maintains control over the natural world. The laws of nature and the events they cause are necessary because He tells the world to act in such a way; He is the reason behind them. But He can also change them at will, and cause an event that, given his regular commands to nature, would not occur. One need not accept this worldview (keep in mind that I am more concerned here with presenting a miracle-friendly worldview than defending it, if only to show that Hume’s empirical stance is only regular, not necessary), but what I will argue here is that a decision to dismiss this worldview outright, or to call empiricism the only path to truth, is an attitudinal judgment. The merit of this worldview is not something empiricism alone can decide as it would be irrational to claim that empiricism must be the standard by which we judge its own merits.

For example, in Hume’s Eight-Days-of-Darkness thought experiment, Hume says that “our present philosophers, instead of doubting the fact, ought to receive it as certain and ought to search for the causes from which it might be derived” (585). Two sorts of causes could theoretically be found, either the laws of nature were momentarily violated/superseded or our understanding of the laws of nature was flawed. If the present philosophers are unable to update their understanding of the laws of nature, then they could either accept a “supernatural” cause or hold off judgment indefinitely, assuming that a natural cause will one day be found (perhaps aliens covered the sun with a giant screen for eight days). I think Hume, through his Queen-Elizabeth thought experiment, is saying that we ought to choose the latter option.

In that case, he argues that “the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature” (Hume 585). And in the Darkness case, I expect Hume would likewise say it is a common phenomena that our understanding of the laws of nature has been updated to explain what was before unexplainable, thus the supernatural explanation, having no basis in experience, is always irrational. But this line of reasoning has a flaw that can be illustrated simply by asking how this question would have been decided before the first time anyone ever updated their understanding of the laws of nature. At that moment, it would clearly have been an attitude that decided whether to come up with a new worldview or hold off until the phenomena could be incorporated into the existing one, and my point is that it is still attitude that decides this question today.

William James argues that there are some beliefs we cannot prove logically. For example, in debating a “pyrrhonistic sceptic” about the belief “that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other… It is just one volition against another, — we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make” (James §3.10). Additionally, even the [logician’s] belief that we must only base beliefs on evidence, not on will, “is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use” (§3.11). The will, or faith, is necessary, James argues, to decide what is enough evidence to act upon, or what to do in uncertain situations that require judgment, and I would add that the will also participates in deciding what constitutes evidence. This is why, at the end of section 2 of this essay, I claimed that Hume’s qualification that it is unreasonable to believe in miracles “unless the falsehood of the testimony would be even more miraculous still” is irrelevant, because people’s judgments about which event is more miraculous than the other will differ based on attitude, will, or faith.

Physicalists demonstrate this especially well (Alyssa Ney has a paper arguing that considering physicalism an attitude solves the logical problems it faces when considered a doctrine) as, in order to be a physicalist, one must never accept a supernatural explanation, no matter how long a phenomena goes naturally unexplained. I agree with James that very often the “horror of being duped” is not nearly as bad as the potential loss of truth, especially “In a world where we are so certain to incur them [errors] in spite of all our caution” (James §7.19), but persuading a skeptic or physicalist of this is a very different task than persuading them to believe in miracles.

4. Conclusion

Hume’s argument that it is irrational to believe in miracles supposes an empiricist worldview and relies on testimonial evidence. However, the Best Systems theory allows for the laws of nature to coexist with miracles, and Swinburne’s argument shows that there may be historical evidence for miracles, which is not as easily dismissed as delusion or tall tale as testimony is. These points alone give us reason to doubt Hume’s thesis, even if we agree with his foundational beliefs. But we need not agree with those beliefs (at least, it is not self-evident that we need to), and we may hold a different worldview that makes miracles not only reasonable to believe in, but perhaps even expected. If we hold this worldview then it would not always be (even if it often would be) necessary, as Hume says, to weigh our experience of the reliability of testimony against our experience of the reliability of the laws of nature because they would not necessarily contradict.

Bibliography

Hume, David. Section X: Of Miracles, University of California, San Diego, http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/ewatkins/HUM4Texts/Hume-Miracles%2810%29.pdf.

James, William. The Project Gutenberg E-Text of “The Will to Believe,” www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm.

Luck, M. “Against the possibility of historical evidence for miracles.” SOPHIA 44, 7–23 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02780480.

Ney, Alyssa (2008). “Physicalism as an attitude.” Philosophical Studies 138 (1):1–15.

Swinburne, R. G. “Miracles.” The Philosophical Quarterly (1950-), vol. 18, no. 73, 1968, pp. 320–28. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2217793.

(Written December 2023)

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Tyler Piteo-Tarpy
Tyler Piteo-Tarpy

Written by Tyler Piteo-Tarpy

Essayist, poet, screenwriter, and comer upper of weird ideas. My main focus will be on politics and philosophy but when I get bored, I’ll write something else.