Authors: John C. Lennox
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 as can be imagined… It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event; otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.
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Hume is actually advancing two arguments here, although they overlap.
1. The argument from the uniformity of nature:
a. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature.
b. These laws have been established by “firm and unalterable” experience.
c. Therefore, the argument against miracles is as good as any argument from experience can be.
2. The argument from the uniformity of experience:
a. Unusual, yet frequently observed, events are not miracles — like a healthy person suddenly dropping dead.
b. A resurrection would be a miracle because it has never been observed anywhere at any time.
c. There is uniform experience against every miraculous event; otherwise it would not be called miraculous.
It is interesting that Hume here selects resurrection as an example of a miracle. The fact is that atheists universally recognize that the supernatural would have to be involved in the “standing up”
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of a body again.
THE ARGUMENT FROM THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE — HUME’S SELF-CONTRADICTORY POSITION
Hume denies miracle, because miracle would go against the uniform laws of nature. But elsewhere he denies the uniformity of nature! He famously argues that, just because the sun has been observed to rise in the morning for thousands of years, it does not mean that we can be sure that it will rise tomorrow.
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This is an example of the
Problem of Induction
: on the basis of past experience you cannot predict the future, says Hume. But if that were true, let us see what it implies in particular. Suppose Hume is right, and no dead man has ever risen up from the grave through the whole of earth’s history so far; by his own argument he still cannot be sure that a dead man will not rise up tomorrow. That being so, he cannot rule out miracle. What has become now of Hume’s insistence on the laws of nature, and its uniformity? He has destroyed the very basis on which he tries to deny the possibility of miracles.
The same argument would work just as well backward in time, as forward. For instance, the fact that no one has been observed to rise from the dead in the past thousand years is no guarantee that there was no resurrection before that. To illustrate this, we might say that uniform experience over the past three hundred years shows that kings of England are not decapitated. If you knew this, and were faced with the claim that King Charles I was decapitated, you might refuse to believe it, because it goes against uniform experience. You would be wrong! He
was
beheaded. Uniformity is one thing; absolute uniformity is another.
In any case, if according to Hume we can infer no regularities, it would be impossible even to speak of laws of nature, let alone the uniformity of nature with respect to those laws. And if nature is not uniform, then using the uniformity of nature as an argument against miracles is simply absurd.
In light of this fundamental inconsistency, I find it astonishing that Hume’s argument has been responsible to a large extent for the widespread contemporary view (at least in the Western world) that we have a straightforward choice between mutually exclusive alternatives: either we believe in miracles, or we believe in the scientific understanding of the laws of nature; but not both. For instance, Richard Dawkins claims: “The nineteenth century is the last time when it was possible for an educated person to admit to believing in miracles like the virgin birth without embarrassment. When pressed, many educated Christians are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know that it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked.”
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It cannot, however, be as simple as Dawkins thinks; since there are highly intelligent, eminent scientists, such as Professor Phillips (Physics Nobel Prizewinner 1998), Professor John Polkinghorne FRS (Quantum Physicist, Cambridge), and the current Director of the National Institute of Health and former Director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins (to name just three) who, though well aware of Hume’s argument, nevertheless publicly, and without either embarrassment or any sense of irrationality or absurdity, affirm their belief in the supernatural, and in particular in the resurrection of Christ, which they regard as the supreme evidence for the truth of the Christian worldview.
This shows that it is clearly no necessary part of being a scientist that one should reject either the possibility (or the actuality) of miracles. To see why such scientists do not feel threatened by Hume, we shall now look more closely at his notion that miracles constitute “violations of the laws of nature”.
MIRACLES AND THE LAWS OF NATURE
It has been one of the impressive achievements of science, not only to describe what goes on in the universe but also to discover the laws that govern its workings. Since Hume defines miracles to be violations of those laws, it will be important for us to understand what scientists think those laws are. Scientific laws are not simply descriptions of what happens, although they are at least that. They arise from our perception of the essential processes involved in any given phenomenon. That is, the laws are giving us insight into the internal logic of a system, in terms of the cause and effect relationships of its constituent parts.
It is here that we run up against a surprising self-contradictory element in Hume’s position, for Hume denies the very cause and effect relationships that are involved in formulating these laws! He says: “All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined, but never connected.”
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Hume then gives the example of someone watching a moving billiard ball collide with a stationary one, and he sees the second ball begin to move. But, according to Hume, the first time he had ever seen such a thing:
He could not pronounce that the one event was connected but only that it was conjoined with the other. After he has observed several instances of this nature, he then pronounces them to be connected. What alteration has happened to give rise to this new idea of connection? Nothing, but that he now feels these events to be connected in his imagination, and can readily foretell the existence of one from the appearance of the other.
When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only that they have acquired a connection in our thought…
I have italicized the last sentence to emphasize the fact that Hume explicitly denies the idea of necessary connection. He would thus undermine a great deal of modern science, since scientific laws involve precisely what Hume denies: cause-effect descriptions of the workings of a system. For example, Hume would admit that there are many cases of smoking being associated with lung cancer, but he would deny any causal relationship. If true, this would undermine the scientifically established relationship between smoking and lung cancer. And just think of what would be left of atomic physics, if we were not allowed to infer the existence of elementary particles from the tracks we observe in a bubble-chamber!
In a famous attack on Hume’s theory of causation, the eminent mathematician and philosopher Sir Alfred North Whitehead pointed out that we all have many everyday experiences in which we are directly aware of cause and effect connections: for example, the reflex action in which a person in a dark room blinks when an electric light is turned on. Obviously, the person is aware that the light flash causes the blink. Research shows that the photon stream from the bulb impinges on the eye, stimulates activity in the optic nerve, and excites certain parts of the brain. This scientifically demonstrates that there is a complex causal chain.
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We conclude that there are two major reasons why Hume’s view of miracles is deeply flawed:
Philosopher Anthony Flew, a world authority on Hume and one-time much feted atheist, radically revised his assessment of Hume, saying that his (Flew’s) celebrated book needs to be re-written:
… in the light of my new-found awareness that Hume was utterly wrong to maintain that we have no experience, and hence no genuine ideas, of making things happen and preventing things from happening, of physical necessity and physical impossibility. Generations of Humeans have in consequence been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study.
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Distinguished philosopher of science John Earman writes:
It is not simply that Hume’s essay does not achieve its goals, but that his goals are ambiguous and confused. Most of Hume’s considerations are unoriginal, warmed over versions of arguments that are found in the writings of predecessors and contemporaries. And the parts of “Of Miracles” that set Hume apart do not stand up to scrutiny. Worse still, the essay reveals the weakness and the poverty of Hume’s own account of induction and probabilistic reasoning. And to cap it all off, the essay represents the kind of overreaching that gives philosophy a bad name.
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In light of all this it is strange that authors like Christopher Hitchens think that Hume wrote “the last word on the subject”.
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He was not shy in pointing that out to me at our debate on his book in Birmingham, Alabama. Hitchens is not a scientist, but Dawkins and others do not have the same excuse.
To be fair, however, not all who regard miracles as violations of the laws of nature would argue along with Hume; and so we must further consider this issue from the perspective of contemporary science and its thinking about the laws of nature. Precisely because scientific laws embody cause-effect relationships, scientists nowadays do not regard them as capable merely of describing what has happened in the past. Provided we are not working at the quantum level, such laws can successfully predict what will happen in the future with such accuracy that, for example, the orbits of communication satellites can be precisely calculated, and moon and Mars landings are possible.
It is understandable, therefore, that many scientists resent the idea that some god could arbitrarily intervene, and alter, suspend, reverse, or otherwise “violate” these laws of nature. For that would seem to them to contradict the immutability of those laws, and thus overturn the very basis of the scientific understanding of the universe. As a corollary to this, many such scientists would advance two arguments:
Argument 1.
Belief in miracles in general, and New Testament miracles in particular, arose in a primitive, pre-scientific culture where people were ignorant of the laws of nature, and readily accepted miracle stories.
Hume endorses this view, when he says that accounts of miracles “are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.”
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However plausible this explanation may seem at first sight, it is in fact nonsense when applied to the New Testament miracles. A moment’s thought will show us that, in order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something that is abnormal, if you do not know what is normal.
This was recognized long ago. It is interesting that the historian Luke, who was a doctor trained in the medical science of his day, begins his biography of Christ by raising this very matter.
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He tells the story of a man, Zechariah, and of his wife, Elizabeth, who for many years had prayed for a son because she was barren. When, in his old age, an angel appeared to him and told him that his former prayers were about to be answered and that his wife would conceive and bear a son, he very politely but firmly refused to believe it. The reason he gave was that he was now old and his wife’s body decrepit. For him and his wife to have a child at this stage would run counter to all that he knew of the laws of nature. The interesting thing about him is this: he was no atheist; he was a priest who believed in God, in the existence of angels, and in the value of prayer. But if the promised fulfilment of his prayer was going to involve a reversal of the laws of nature, he was not prepared to believe it.