David Hume, who argued that any claim of a miraculous event should be measured against available evidence. As miracles are a violation of a law by a supernatural being these laws of nature are based on past human experience. It would therefore be reasonable to reject the claim of a miracle because it would be contrary to human experience, however, people do claim experience of miraculous events. Hume described such accounts as being sourced from “ignorant and barbarous” people.
These testimonies would have to be weighed against the reasonable doubt raised by the sum total of human scientific experience. If they were to be taken seriously, accounts of miracles would need to be of such a quality that they were difficult to dismiss.
Hume was therefore arguing that it is always more reasonable to reject extraordinary beings as being contrary to the weight of the human experience. There is no evidence to count against the weight of human experience, because the testimonies of people who claim the experience of the miraculous are rarely of any quality. The evidence to support miraculous events is often contradictory and is always tainted by primitive superstition.
Hume would only accept evidence from educated and intellectual sources, only a truly trusted source can there even begin to be any debate of whether a miracle has taken place or not. Hume also stated that all founding figures performed miracles, that religions base their claims for authority on these miracles. Yet they cannot be right. These stories must cancel out the claims of the religions.
Hume made four basic argument against miracles, the first is there are witnesses of “good sense, education and learning” can a peasant witness be taken seriously?
Secondly the witnesses tend to be sympathetic toward miracles and therefore likely to describe an event as miraculous.
Thirdly nations that witness miracles are “ignorant and barbarous nations.”
Lastly religions base their truth claims on the miraculous – they all experience miracles but they all can’t be right.
In light of arguments Hume has put forward one could see how people would not believe in miracles. However there are some problems in Hume’s argument. The laws of nature are born out of human experience, however these laws are based on the experience to date. Hume makes the wrong assumption that laws of nature are constant when in reality they change and evolve over time. Modern science has moved forward to a world of probabilities, amounting to evidence of randomness in nature.
Also many things are once seen as impossible, for example man walking on the moon or the ability to talk to someone from across the globe now this is commonplace.
Hume’s ideas regarding a good witness also are in question, when the Catholic Church seeks to find a miracle, they employ the best doctors and thinkers in the world to verify it.
The mere idea that religions based their faith on miracles is untrue also, apart from Jesus who mainly performed miracles out of compassion rather than to show authority no other religion makes such claims.
He also fails to see how an individual should respond to a miracle that they have experienced, experience of a miracle would surely count as evidence to a person.
Maurice Wiles also makes his arguments against miracles, and God’s action in the world would not be confined to certain instances. Rather the “idea of a divine action should be in relation to the world as a whole.”
There is therefore no single act of God applicable to an instance, but a constant act of God applying to the world as a whole. Wiles considers a God that interferes in the laws of nature to be arbitrary – if God does intervene, why is there suffering in the world? Why does God intervene where children are suffering?
It is on this note that having taking into account the various arguments miracles do not occur as a God who performs such acts is random, unknowable and not Omni – benevolent, therefore miracles should not be believed in.
