The transgression of a natural law is not considered sufficient in isolation to grant the event status of a miracle. Swinburne and others consider that miracles need to hold some deeper significance than the transgression itself, pointing to some underlying plan or reality.
People do not believe in miracles. Discuss
Fundamental opposition to Hume definition of a miracle as a transgression of natural laws comes from some theists who argue that everything depends on God, whether it is a violation of natural laws or not. However, this is a view held more by a majority than a minority as most theists argue that God governs the world through natural laws.
Hick argues that any apparent violation of a natural law can be explained through an exception to that law. In criticism of these, Swinburne shows that events can be unexpected enough in order to be considered violations of what we should normally expect to happen.
Hume provides the traditional arguments that can be postulated against the existence of miracles. Hume argues that it is always more likely that the testimony of a miracle is incorrect and that any such testimony is generally unreliable. Hume believes that natural laws have been observed to function on an unaccountable number of occasions and therefore evidence for a miracle would have to outweigh all of this collated evidence for the natural law. Although it has been put that as miracles are exceptions to natural laws they do not have to outweigh the natural law. Swinburne has argued that the empirical basis in which natural laws are grounded are the from same sort of testimony as miracles and so if one rules this as inadequate to support the existence of miracles one is forced to reach the same conclusions in the case of natural laws.
It is also argued that miracle accounts from different religions must logically cancel each other out as the religions contradict one another. However, whilst it is true that miracle accounts from different religions may cancel out the religions, they do not always cancel out the miracles.
In criticism of the suggestion which holds that miracles can exist through coincidence, it has been said that one could never prove that a given event involved miraculous intervention on the grounds that it could have been simply a coincidence and nothing more.
Whether one considers the belief in miracles to be strong or otherwise is dependant upon prior beliefs. If one already believes in a God or Gods it would seem reasonable to attribute miracles to them given the properties such as omnipotence which they are said to hold. At this point one may consider the principle of Ockham’s razor where a simple and expected cause is the likely explanation for a certain event, it is not justifiable to invent a more complex one, even if it is a possible alternative. For the believer, divine intervention may well be the likely explanation.
However, for a non-religious believer the occurrence of miracles would not be considered likely given that the event could be attributed to a variety of alternative explanations. Given the empirical basis of these explanations it would be difficult to consider the case for the existence of miracles as a strong one.