Rational to Believe in Miracles?

Christ raising Lazarus from the tomb

“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.”

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Two and a half centuries on, Hume’s sentence above is still where the case against miracles begins, and it is worth noticing how economical it is. He does not claim that miracles are impossible, or that he has examined the reports and found them wanting. He offers a rule of evidence which, if sound, disposes of every miracle claim in advance and without inspection — because the falsehood of testimony is never as surprising as a suspension of the order of nature.

A good deal of what passes for the reply to Hume is not worth much. Most reported miracles really are false; credulity is real, and pious exaggeration is real, and the honest believer should say so before he says anything else. Any argument that requires taking every wonder story at face value is not going to survive.

But the rule itself has a difficulty, and it is not a theological one. It was pressed hardest in recent years by a philosopher of science who does not believe in miracles at all, in a book whose title states his verdict without ceremony: Hume’s Abject Failure. The question this page takes up is therefore narrower than it looks. Not whether any particular wonder happened, but whether we are entitled to decide that none did before looking at any of them.

Let’s examine the rule first, and then what would count as evidence, and ask … If uniform experience is what rules miracles out, how do we know experience is uniform without first assuming every report of an exception is false? And would the same rule, applied consistently, have let us believe the first reports of stones falling out of the sky?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Atheist/Skeptic View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The skeptic follows Hume. A miracle is a violation of a law of nature, and those laws rest on the entire uniform experience of mankind. Set against that weight there is only human testimony — and testimony fails constantly, from honest error, enthusiasm, faulty memory and outright fraud. So the wise man proportions his belief to the evidence, and the evidence for the regularity of nature will always be heavier than the evidence of a few witnesses to its breach.

What They Affirm

The balance can never come out the other way. To accept a miracle report, on Hume’s reasoning, its falsehood would have to be more improbable than a suspension of natural law — and nothing, he holds, is. That witnesses lie, misremember, or believe what they hope is among the most ordinary facts about human beings. That the dead rise is not ordinary at all.1

The circumstances of miracle reports are suspicious. They come chiefly from places and periods where checking was impossible, they multiply in conditions of religious excitement, and they attach to the founding of movements that benefit from them. People love the marvelous, Hume observed, and passing on a wonder story costs the teller nothing while gaining him an audience.2

Rival miracles cancel one another. Every religion has them, and they are offered as proof of contradictory doctrines. The miracles of Islam, of Hinduism, of pagan antiquity, and of Christianity cannot all be evidence for the systems they support. In crediting one and dismissing the rest, the skeptic argues, the believer is applying a standard he has not justified.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The principle is not hostility, it is proportion; we apply it to everything. Nobody accepts a new particle on the word of two witnesses. The evidence offered for the central Christian miracle is, on this view, a handful of ancient documents by interested parties — evidence the skeptic judges too thin for a claim of this size.3

And nothing survives investigation. Wherever a claim can be examined under controlled conditions, it dissolves. Studies of intercessory prayer show no effect. Lourdes has received millions of pilgrims across a century and a half and its own medical bureau has certified about seventy cures — a rate the skeptic reads as indistinguishable from spontaneous remission, which is what he would expect if nothing were happening. The miraculous, he concludes, is simply the not-yet-explained, retreating as explanation advances.4

Endnotes
  1. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), §X, “Of Miracles,” part 1, where the maxim quoted at the head of this page appears. ↩
  2. Hume, §X, part 2, on the passion of surprise and wonder, on the concentration of such reports among what he calls ignorant and barbarous nations, and on the interest of religious parties in propagating them. ↩
  3. The maxim is Laplace’s in substance and Carl Sagan’s in the familiar wording; see Sagan, Cosmos (Random House, 1980), ch. 12. ↩
  4. On intercessory prayer, see H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer,” American Heart Journal 151 (2006). The Lourdes figure is the Bureau des Constatations Médicales’ own count of cures recognized as medically inexplicable. ↩

Christian View

The Christian reply is not that Hume undervalued the evidence, but that his rule, taken strictly, is not a rule of evidence at all — it is a way of never having to look at any. What follows is about the argument, not about any particular wonder.

What Is Granted

Most reported miracles are not miracles. Credulity and pious fraud are real, and the Church is stricter than her critics assume: of roughly seven thousand cures claimed at Lourdes, her medical bureau has certified about seventy — a ninety-nine percent rejection rate. The skeptic reads the ratio as proof that nothing happens, but the argument rests on the character of the cases that pass: cures instantaneous, complete, and durable, in organic disease — not the shape spontaneous remission takes. The question those cases pose is not how many? but what could do that? Even so, the bureau’s verdict is only that a cure is medically unexplained; the judgment that it is a miracle is the bishop’s, and it is a further step. An unexplained cure is not yet a miracle, and this page claims no more than that such cases are the kind that make the question live.

A Miracle Is Not a Broken Law

If a miracle is by definition a violation of a law of nature, then laws are by definition exceptionless, and the question is closed by the dictionary before the evidence arrives. But a law of nature states what happens in a system left to itself; it does not say the system is never interfered with, and no amount of observation could establish that. C. S. Lewis put it as arithmetic: money left in a drawer and found missing does not refute the laws of addition — they told me what would be there if nothing intervened, and something did. A miracle is not a suspension of nature’s order but a new event fed into it — which is why the Christian expects the world to be regular.

The Circle in “Uniform Experience”

The heart of Hume’s case is that uniform experience stands against every miracle. Ask how the uniformity was established: not by examining all testimony and finding it false — the argument is offered precisely as a shortcut past that examination. So experience counts as uniform only if the reports of exceptions are set aside in advance — and they are set aside because experience is uniform. John Earman, a philosopher of science and no believer, titled his book on the argument Hume’s Abject Failure. When its most thorough modern critic is an unbeliever, the argument’s authority is doing more work than its logic. Earman’s complaint is exact: stated in the probability theory Hume lacked, the question is never whether a miracle is improbable in itself but whether the testimony is more probable if the event occurred than if it did not, and Hume never asks it.

The Rule Proves Too Much

Test the maxim where the answer is known. For most of the eighteenth century, educated opinion held that stones do not fall from the sky; peasants reported them, and the French Academy of Sciences dismissed the reports on exactly Hume’s grounds — unlettered witnesses, contrary to uniform experience. The peasants were right, and after the fall at L’Aigle in 1803 meteorites entered science. Nothing about the reports had improved; what changed was that somebody examined them instead of ruling them out. A principle that would have kept us wrong about meteorites is not a test of truth. It is a way of protecting whatever we already think.

Three Objections Wearing One Coat

The skeptic’s argument usually runs together three claims that stand or fall separately. That history can never establish a miracle is Hume’s shortcut, and it dies of the circle above. That miracles are antecedently very improbable is granted cheerfully, but improbable events are established every day: yesterday’s lottery numbers were a hundred-million-to-one against, and one newspaper report settles them, because the report is far likelier on their truth than on their falsehood. And the prior is not worldview-neutral: “God raised this man” is a different hypothesis from “a dead man rose by chance.” The third claim — that this evidence for this event is insufficient — is the only one that engages the facts, and it is answered the only way it can be: case by case, on the resurrection page.

Rival Miracles Do Not Cancel

The cancellation argument assumes all miracle claims are of the same kind and equally supported, and they are not: many are not public events, many are attested centuries late by a single source, and a great many are what this page has already conceded. Claims must be weighed individually — which is precisely what the Humean rule forbids. That two witnesses contradict each other is a reason to examine both, not to dismiss the pair unheard. And the oldest hostile witness agrees on the facts: Celsus, the second century’s ablest pagan critic, conceded the wonders and blamed sorcery.

The Slogan, and the Prayer Experiment

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” trades on an ambiguity. If it means the evidence must be extraordinarily good — early, independent, public, costly to those who gave it — granted: that is ordinary historiography, and the Christian case asks to be judged by exactly that standard. If it means no testimony could ever qualify, it is not a standard but a refusal. And a resurrection is maximally improbable only if there is no God — so the slogan, as deployed, quietly assumes the atheism it was brought in to defend. As for the prayer studies: they test a god no theology asserts, one who performs on protocol for scripted petitions — everything Christian prayer is not, and an experiment Scripture rules out in advance (Matt. 4:7). The null result refutes the vending-machine god; no Christian ever believed in him.

The Reply in Brief

The definition begs the question, since a law of nature tells us what happens when nothing interferes and cannot tell us that nothing ever does. The appeal to uniform experience is circular, because the uniformity is obtained by discarding the very reports at issue. The rule proves too much, since applied consistently it would have kept the Academy of Sciences wrong about meteorites for another generation. And the cancellation of rival miracles works only if claims are never weighed individually, which is what the rule was designed to avoid.

None of that shows a miracle has occurred. It shows the question is open, and that it is a question about evidence rather than the dictionary. The Christian case rests on one event, in a known place, under a named governor, proclaimed within a few years in the city where it was said to have happened — weighed on the resurrection page and in the case for Christianity in particular. Nothing in Hume entitles anyone to refuse to look.

The full essay takes Hume’s section apart in order, sets out Earman’s Bayesian reconstruction of why the argument fails, examines Craig Keener’s two-volume survey of modern eyewitness reports and what can and cannot be made of them, works through the Lourdes medical bureau’s criteria and several certified cases, and takes up the question of what a genuine miracle would be for, and why signs are given at all.

Summary

Hume’s argument does not claim that the evidence for miracles has been examined and found wanting. It offers a rule which, if sound, makes examination unnecessary. That is its appeal, and it is also the difficulty with it.

Most reported miracles are false, and the Church agrees. Credulity and pious fraud are real, and a defense that takes every wonder story at face value deserves to lose. Lourdes has recorded some seven thousand claimed cures and certified about seventy, a rejection rate of ninety-nine percent, applied by a medical bureau that has included unbelieving physicians. That figure is cited as proof nothing happens; it is at least as good proof that the filtering is severe. The verdict, even so, is only that a cure is medically unexplained; calling it a miracle is a further step.

A law of nature is not a claim that nothing ever interferes. Define a miracle as a violation of natural law and the case is closed by the dictionary. But laws describe what happens in a system left to itself. As C. S. Lewis put it, if money vanishes from a drawer, arithmetic has not failed; it told you what would be there if nothing intervened, and something did. On that account nature is not suspended; a new event is fed in, and nature carries on.

“Uniform experience” is circular. Experience counts as uniform only if the reports of exceptions are set aside first, and they are set aside because experience is uniform. Hume explicitly offers the argument as a shortcut that spares us examining the testimony, which is exactly the step that would be needed to establish the uniformity.

The sharpest critic of the argument is not a believer. John Earman, a philosopher of science, devoted a book to it and called it Hume’s Abject Failure, holding the reasoning confused and the probability theory absent. When the most thorough modern demolition comes from an unbeliever, the argument’s standing is resting on its reputation.

The rule would have kept us wrong about meteorites. Eighteenth-century science held that stones do not fall from the sky. Peasants said otherwise; the reports were dismissed as superstition and the French Academy declared against them: uneducated witnesses, rural places, testimony contrary to uniform experience. After L’Aigle in 1803 the peasants turned out to be right. Nothing about the testimony had improved; someone examined it instead of ruling it out.

And rival miracles do not cancel. The claims are not all of one kind or equally supported, and false sightings of a man do not prove he never existed. Contradictory witnesses are a reason to examine both, not to dismiss the pair unheard, which is what weighing claims individually means, and what the Humean rule was built to avoid.

In short: none of this shows that a miracle has occurred. It shows that the question is open, and that it is a question about evidence rather than about definitions. If there is a God, the order of nature is His and He is not trespassing in it. Whether He has ever done anything unusual there is a matter for looking, and looking is the one thing the argument was designed to make unnecessary.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Can We Rationally Believe in Miracles? (.docx) or (.pdf)

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