Miracles

The term "miracle" is used very broadly in ordinary language. A quick
review of news stories may turn up reports such as that of a
"Christmas Miracle," by which the Texas gulf coast came to be
blanketed with snow by a rare storm. We speak of miracle drugs, or of
miracle babies, and some household products purport to be miraculous
as well. Philosophical discussion of the miraculous, however, is
confined to the use to which religion–and in particular, theistic
religion–puts that conception. These philosophical discussions center
around two overlapping issues.

The first of these issues is a conceptual one: What is a miracle?
Controversy over the conception of a miracle focuses primarily on
whether a miracle must be, in some sense, contrary to natural law.
Must it, in particular, be aviolation of natural law? Supposing that
it must be, a second question arises, namely, whether the conception
of such a violation is a coherent one.

Philosophers have also been concerned about what sort of observable
criteria would allow us to identify an event as a miracle,
particularly insofar as that means identifying it as a violation of
natural law. How, for example, can we tell the difference between a
case in which an event is a genuine violation–assuming that some sense
can be made of this notion–and one that conforms to some natural law
that is unknown to us? And given the occurrence of a genuine
violation, how are we to determine whether it is due to divine agency,
or whether it is nothing more than a spontaneous lapse in the natural
order?

The second main issue is epistemological: Once we settle on what a
miracle is, can we ever have good reason to believe that one has taken
place? This question is generally connected with the problem of
whether testimony, such as that provided by scriptural sources, can
ever give us adequate reason to believe that a miracle has occurred.

1. The Definition of "Miracle"

In sketching out a brief philosophical discussion of miracles, it
would be desirable to begin with a definition of "miracle;"
unfortunately, part of the controversy in regard to miracles is over
just what is involved in a proper conception of the miraculous. As a
rough beginning, however, we might observe that the term is from the
Latinmiraculum, which is derived from mirari, to wonder; thus the most
general characterization of a miracle is as an event that provokes
wonder. As such, it must be in some way extraordinary, unusual, or
contrary to our expectations. Disagreement arises, however, as to what
makes a miracle something worth wondering about. In what sense must a
miracle be extraordinary? One of the earliest accounts is given by St.
Augustine, who held (City of God, XXI.8.2) that a miracle is not
contrary to nature, but only to our knowledge of nature; miracles are
made possible by hidden potentialities in nature that are placed there
by God. In Summa Contra GentilesIII:101, St. Thomas Aquinas, expanding
upon Augustine's conception, said that a miracle must go beyond the
order usually observed in nature, though he insisted that a miracle is
not contrary to nature in any absolute sense, since it is in the
nature of all created things to be responsive to God's will.

In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume offered two
definitions of "miracle;" first, as a violation of natural law
(Enquiries p. 114); shortly afterward he offers a more complex
definition when he says that a miracle is "a transgression of a law of
nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition
of some invisible agent" (Enquiries, p. 115n). This second definition
offers two important criteria that an event must satisfy in order to
qualify as a miracle: It must be a violation of natural law, but this
by itself is not enough; a miracle must also be an expression of the
divine will. This means that a miracle must express divine agency; if
we have no reason to think that an event is something done by God, we
will have no reason to call it a miracle.

More recently, the idea that a miracle must be defined in terms of
natural law has come under attack. R.F. Holland (1965) has argued that
a miracle may be consistent with natural law, since a religiously
significant coincidence may qualify as miraculous, even though we
fully understand the causes that brought it about. Accounts of the
miraculous that distance themselves from the requirement that a
miracle be in some way contrary to the order of nature, in favor of a
focus on their significance to human life, might be said to emphasize
their nature as signs; indeed the term semeion, "sign," is one of the
terms used in the New Testament to describe miraculous events.
2. Miracles and Worldview

The outcome of any discussion of miracles seems to depend greatly on
our worldview. The usual theistic view of the world is one that
presumes the existence of an omnipotent God who, while transcending
nature, is nevertheless able to act, or to express his will, within
the natural world. Clearly belief in miracles is already plausible if
our enquiry may presume this view of things.

The usual way of making this out might be described as
supernaturalistic. Those who would defend supernaturalism sometimes do
this through a commitment to an ontology of entities that exist in
some sense outside of nature, where by "nature" is meant the totality
of things that can be known by means of observation and experiment, or
more generally, through the methods proper to the natural sciences.

Defenses of supernaturalism may also take a methodological turn by
insisting that the natural sciences are incapable of revealing the
totality of all that there is. While supernaturalists typically hold
that God reveals his nature in part through observable phenomena (as
for example in miracles, or more generally, in the order of nature),
as we shall understand it here, methodological supernaturalism is
committed as well to the view that our knowledge of God must be
supplemented by revelation. Revelatory sources for our knowledge of
God might, for example, include some form of a priori knowledge,
supersensory religious experience, or a direct communication by God of
information that would not otherwise be available to us. Knowledge of
God that is passed down in scripture, such as the Bible or the Qur'an,
is generally conceived by theists to have a revelatory character.

Supernaturalistic accounts of the miraculous very commonly make
reference to supernatural causes, which are thought to play a useful
role in the construction of supernatural explanations. However, as we
will see in sections 10 and 11, belief in miracles does not obviously
commit one to belief in supernatural causes or the efficacy of
supernatural explanations.

In contrast to supernaturalism, ontological naturalism denies the
existence of anything beyond nature; methodological naturalism holds
that observation and experiment– or generally speaking, the methods of
the empirical sciences– are sufficient to provide us with all of the
knowledge that it is possible for us to have. Naturalism is sometimes
further characterized as holding that nature is uniform, which is to
say that all events in nature conform to generalizations (e.g. laws)
which can be verified by means of observation. Naturalists do commonly
hold this view– confidence in the uniformity of nature is an important
part of the scientific enterprise– but strictly speaking this
represents an additional metaphysical commitment regarding the nature
of the universe and its susceptibility to human understanding. If
nature turns out not to be fully lawlike, this would not require the
rejection of naturalism. A failure of uniformity, or what a believer
in miracles might refer to as a violation of natural law, would imply
only that there are limits to our ability to understand and predict
natural phenomena. However, the naturalist is committed to denying the
legitimacy of any attempt to explain a natural phenomenon by appeal to
the supernatural. Naturalism denies the existence of supernatural
entities and denies as well the claim that revelation is capable of
providing us with genuine knowledge. Where the supernaturalistic
worldview is quite open to the possibility of miracles, naturalism is
much less sympathetic, and one might argue that the tenets of
naturalism rule out the possibility of miracles altogether; see Lewis
(1947:Ch. 1), Martin (1992:192) and Davis (1999:131).

Much, of course, depends on how we conceive of miracles, and on what
we take their significance to be. One concern we might have with the
miraculous would be an apologetic one. By "apologetic" here is meant a
defense of the rationality of belief in God. Historically, apologists
have pointed to the occurrence of miracles as evidence for theism,
which is to say that they have held that scriptural reports of
miracles, such as those given in the Bible, provide grounds for belief
in God. While this argument is not as popular now as it was in the
18th century, the modern conception of the miraculous has been
strongly influenced by this apologetic interest. Such an interest puts
important constraints on an account of miracles. If we wish to point
to a miracle as supporting belief in a supernatural deity, obviously
we cannot begin by assuming the supernaturalistic worldview; this
would beg the question. If we are trying to persuade a skeptic of
God's existence, we are trying to demonstrate to him that there is
something beyond or transcending nature, and he will demand to be
persuaded on his own terms; we must make use of no assumptions beyond
those that are already acknowledged by the naturalistic worldview.

Because the history of modern thought regarding miracles has been
strongly influenced by apologetic interests, the emphasis of this
entry will be on the apologetic conception of the miraculous– that is,
on the concept of miracle as it has been invoked by those who would
point to the reports of miracles in scripture as establishing the
existence of a supernatural God. It is important to bear in mind,
however, that any difficulty associated with this apologetic appeal to
miracles does not automatically militate against the reasonableness of
belief in miracles generally. A successful criticism of the apologetic
appeal will show at most that a warranted belief in miracles depends
on our having independent reasons for rejecting naturalism; again, see
Lewis (1947:11).
3. The Credibility of Witnesses

A major concern with the rationality of belief in miracles is with
whether we can be justified in believing that a miracle has occurred
on the basis of testimony. To determine whether the report of a
miracle is credible, we need to consider the reliability of the
source. Suppose subject S reports some state of affairs (or event) E.
Are S's reports generally true? Clearly if she is known to lie, or to
utter falsehoods as jokes, we should be reluctant to believe her.
Also, if she has any special interest in getting us to believe that E
has occurred– if, for example, she stands to benefit financially– this
would give us reason for skepticism. It is also possible that S may be
reporting a falsehood without intending to do so; she may sincerely
believe that E occurred even though it did not, or her report may be
subject to unconscious exaggeration or distortion. Aside from the
possibility that she may be influenced by some tangible self-interest,
such as a financial one, her report may also be influenced by
emotional factors– by her fears, perhaps, or by wishful thinking. We
should also consider whether other reliable and independent witnesses
are available to corroborate her report.

We must also ask whether S is herself a witness to E, or is passing on
information that was reported to her. If she witnessed the event
personally, we may ask a number of questions about her observational
powers and the physical circumstances of her observation. There are
quite a few things that can go wrong here; for example, S may
sincerely report an event as she believed it to occur, but in fact her
report is based on a misperception. Thus she may report having seen a
man walk across the surface of a lake; this may be her understanding
of what happened, when in fact he was walking alongside the lake or on
a sand bar. If it was dark, and the weather was bad, this would have
made it difficult for S to have a good view of what was happening. And
of course we should not neglect the influence of S's own attitudes on
how she interprets what she sees; if she is already inclined to think
of the man she reports as walking on water as being someone who is
capable of performing such an extraordinary feat, this may color how
she understands what she has seen. By the same token, if we are
already inclined to agree with her about this person's remarkable
abilities, we will be all the more likely to believe her report.

If S is merely passing on the testimony of someone else to the
occurrence of E, we may question whether she has properly understood
what she was told. She may not be repeating the testimony exactly as
it was given to her. And here, too, her own biases may color her
understanding of the report. The possibility of distortions entering
into testimony grows with each re-telling of the story.

It will be fruitful to consider these elements in evaluating the
strength of scriptural testimony to the miracles ascribed to Jesus.
The reports of these miracles come from the four gospel accounts,
which may not have been written by those who are supposed to have
personally witnessed Jesus' miracles. Some of these accounts seem to
have borrowed from the others, or to have been influenced by a common
source; even if this were not the case, they still cannot be claimed
to be independent. Assuming they originate with the firsthand
testimony of the apostles Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, these men were
closely associated and had time to discuss among themselves what they
had seen before their reports were recorded for posterity. They were
all members of the same religious community, and shared a common
perspective as well as common interests. Unfortunately, there are no
independent reports from uninterested witnesses; while the gospel
accounts tell us that there were miracles that took place in front of
hostile witnesses, this will not help us when it is the accuracy of
these very gospel reports that is at issue. (Later acknowledgements of
Jesus' miracles by hostile parties is, the skeptic will argue,
evidence only for the gullibility of these writers.)

It is sometimes suggested that these men undertook grave risk by
reporting what they did, and they would not have risked their lives
for a lie. But this establishes, at best, only that their reports are
sincere; unfortunately, their conviction is not conclusive evidence
for the truth of their testimony. We could expect the same conviction
from someone who was delusional.

Let us consider a particular report of Jesus' resurrection in applying
these considerations. Popular apologetic sometimes points to the fact
that according to Paul in 1 Corinthians (15:6), the resurrected Jesus
was seen by five hundred people at once, and that it is highly
improbable that so many people would have the experience of seeing
Jesus if Jesus were not actually there. After all, it may be argued,
they could not have shared a mass hallucination, since hallucinations
are typically private; there is no precedent for shared hallucination,
and it may seem particularly far-fetched to suppose that a
hallucination would be shared among so many people. Accordingly it may
be thought much more likely that Jesus really was there and, assuming
there is sufficient evidence that he had died previously to that time,
it becomes reasonable to say that he was resurrected from the dead.

While this report is sometimes taken as evidence of Jesus' physical
resurrection, Paul says only that he appearedto the five hundred
without saying explicitly that it was a physically reconstituted Jesus
that these people saw. But let us suppose that Paul means to report
that the five hundred saw Jesus in the flesh. Unfortunately we do not
have the reports of the five hundred to Jesus' resurrection; we have
only Paul's hearsay testimony that Jesus was seen by five hundred.
Furthermore Paul does not tell us how this information came to him. It
is possible that he spoke personally to some or all of these five
hundred witnesses, but it is also possible that he is repeating
testimony that he received from someone else. This opens up the
possibility that the report was distorted before it reached Paul; for
example, the number of witnesses may have been exaggerated, or the
original witnesses may have merely reported feeling Jesus' presence in
some way without actually seeing him. For the sake of argument,
however, let us suppose that there was at one time a group of five
hundred people who were all prepared to testify that they had seen a
physically resurrected Jesus. This need not be the result of any
supposed mass hallucination; the five hundred might have all seen
someone who they came to believe, after discussing it amongst
themselves, was Jesus. In such a case, the testimony of the five
hundred would be to an experience together with a shared
interpretation of it.

It is also possible that the text of Paul's letter to the Corinthians
has not been accurately preserved. Thus, no matter how reliable Paul
himself might be, his own report may have been modified through one,
or several, redactions.

There are, therefore, quite a few points at which error or distortion
might have entered into the report in 1 Corinthians: (1) The original
witnesses may have been wrong, for one reason or another, about
whether they saw Jesus; (2) the testimony of these witnesses may have
been distorted before reaching Paul; (3) Paul may have incorrectly
reported what he heard about the event, and (4) Paul's own report, as
given in his original letter to the Christian community in Corinth,
may have been distorted. The apologist may argue that it would be very
surprising if errors should creep into the report at any of these four
points. The question we must ask now, however, is which of these
alternatives would be more surprising: That some error should arise in
regard to 1-4 above, or that Jesus really was resurrected from the
dead.
4. Hume's Argument

In Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume tells
us that it is not reasonable to subscribe to any "system of religion"
unless that system is validated by the occurrence of miracles; he then
argues that we cannot be justified in believing that a miracle has
occurred, at least when our belief is based on testimony– as when, for
example, it is based on the reports of miracles that are given in
scripture. (Hume did not explicitly address the question of whether
actually witnessing an apparent miracle would give us good reason to
think that a miracle had actually occurred, though it is possible that
the principles he invokes in regard to testimony for the miraculous
can be applied to the case of a witnessed miracle.) His stated aim is
to show that belief in miracle reports is not rational, but that "our
most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason" (Enquiries, p.
130). Hume surely intends some irony here, however, since he concludes
by saying that anyone who embraces a belief in miracles based on faith
is conscious of "a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts
all the principles of his understanding" (Enquiries, p. 131); this
seems very far from an endorsement of a faith-based belief in
miracles.

There is some dispute as to the nature of Hume's argument against
miracles, and the Enquiry seems to contain more than one such
argument. The most compelling of these is the one I will call the
Balance of Probabilities Argument. (For a brief discussion of some of
the other arguments, see the entry "David Hume: Writings on
Religion.") Hume tells us that we ought to proportion our certainty
regarding any matter of fact to the strength of the evidence. We have
already examined some of the considerations that go into assessing the
strength of testimony; there is no denying that testimony may be very
strong indeed when, for example, it may be given by numerous highly
reliable and independent witnesses.

Nevertheless, Hume tells us that no testimony can be adequate to
establish the occurrence of a miracle. The problem that arises is not
so much with the reliability of the witnesses as with the nature of
what is being reported. A miracle is, according to Hume, a violation
of natural law. We suppose that a law of nature obtains only when we
have an extensive, and exceptionless, experience of a certain kind of
phenomenon. For example, we suppose that it is a matter of natural law
that a human being cannot walk on the surface of water while it is in
its liquid state; this supposition is based on the weight of an
enormous body of experience gained from our familiarity with what
happens in seas, lakes, kitchen sinks, and bathtubs. Given that
experience, we always have the best possible evidence that in any
particular case, an object with a sufficiently great average density,
having been placed onto the surface of a body of water, will sink.
According to Hume, the evidence in favor of a miracle, even when that
is provided by the strongest possible testimony, will always be
outweighed by the evidence for the law of nature which is supposed to
have been violated.

Considerable controversy surrounds the notion of a violation of
natural law. However, it would appear that all Hume needs in order to
make his argument is that a miracle be an exception to the course of
nature as we have previously observed it; that is, where we have had a
substantial experience of a certain sort of phenomenon– call it A– and
have an exceptionless experience of all As being B, we have very
strong reason to believe that any given A will be a B. Thus given that
we have a very great amount of experience regarding dense objects
being placed onto water, and given that in every one of these cases
that object has sunk, we have the strongest possible evidence that any
object that is placed onto water is one that will sink. Accordingly we
have the best possible reasons for thinking that any report of someone
walking on water is false– and this no matter how reliable the
witness.

While objections are frequently made against Hume's conception of
natural law, in fact no particularly sophisticated account of natural
law seems to be necessary here, and Hume's examples are quite
commonsensical: All human beings must die, lead cannot remain
suspended in the air, fire consumes wood and is extinguished by water
(Enquiries p. 114). This may be a naive conception of natural law;
nevertheless it is true that, all things being equal, we can assign a
minimal probability to the occurrence of a counterinstance to any of
these generalizations.

At times Hume sounds as though he thinks the probability of such an
event is zero, given its unprecedented nature, and some commentators
have objected that the fact that we have never known such an event to
occur does not imply that it cannot occur. Past regularities do not
establish that it is impossible that a natural law should ever be
suspended (Purtill 1978). However, regardless of Hume's original
intent, this is a more extravagant claim than his argument requires.
He is free to admit that some small probability may be attached to the
prospect that a dense object might remain on the surface of a lake; it
is sufficient for his purposes that it will always be morelikely that
any witness who reports such an event is attempting to deceive us, or
is himself deceived. After all, there is no precedent for any human
being walking on water, setting this one controversial case aside, but
there is ample precedent for the falsehood of testimony even under the
best of circumstances.

Accordingly Hume says (Enquiries p. 115ff) that "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 endeavors to establish." We must always decide in favor of
the lesser miracle. We must ask ourselves, which would be more of a
miracle: That Jesus walked on water, or that the scriptural reports of
this event are false? While we may occasionally encounter testimony
that is so strong that its falsehood would be very surprising indeed,
we never come across any report, the falsehood of which would be
downright miraculous. Accordingly, the reasonable conclusion will
always be that the testimony is false.

Thus to return to Paul's report of Jesus' resurrection in 1
Corinthians: It may be highly unlikely that the original witnesses
were wrong, for one reason or another, about whether they saw Jesus;
it may be highly unlikely that the testimony of these witnesses may
have been distorted before reaching Paul; it may be highly unlikely
that Paul incorrectly reported what he heard about the event, and it
may be highly unlikely that Paul's original letter to the Christian
community in Corinth has not been accurately preserved in our modern
translations of the New Testament. Suppose the apologist can argue
that a failure in the transmission of testimony at any of these points
might be entirely without precedent in human experience. But the
physical resurrection of a human being is also without precedent, so
that the very best the apologist can hope for is that both
alternatives– that the report is incorrect, or that Jesus returned to
life– are equally unlikely, which seems only to call for a suspension
of judgment. Apologetic appeals frequently focus on the strength of
testimony such as Paul's, and often appear to make a good case for its
reliability. Nevertheless such an appeal will only persuade those who
are already inclined to believe in the miracle– perhaps because they
are already sympathetic to a supernaturalistic worldview– and who
therefore tend to downplay the unlikelihood of a dead man returning to
life.

Having said all this, it may strike us as odd that Hume seems not to
want to rule out the possibility, in principle, that very strong
testimony might establish the occurrence of an unprecedented event. He
tells us (Enquiries p. 127) that if the sun had gone dark for eight
days beginning on January 1, 1600, and that testimony to this fact
continued to be received from all over the world and without any
variation, we should believe it– and then look for the cause. Thus
even if we were convinced that such an event really did take place–
and the evidence in this case would be considerably stronger than the
evidence for any of the miracles of the Bible– we should suppose that
the event in question really had a natural cause after all. In this
case the event would not be a violation of natural law, and thus
according to Hume's definition would not be a miracle.

Despite this possibility, Hume wants to say that the quality of
miracle reports is never high enough to clear this hurdle, at least
when they are given in the interest of establishing a religion, as
they typically are. People in such circumstances are likely to be
operating under any number of passional influences, such as
enthusiasm, wishful thinking, or a sense of mission driven by good
intentions; these influences may be expected to undermine their
critical faculties. Given the importance to religion of a sense of
mystery and wonder, that very quality which would otherwise tend to
make a report incredible– that it is the report of something entirely
novel– becomes one that recommends it to us. Thus in a religious
context we may believe the report not so much in spite of its
absurdity as because of it.
5. Problems with Hume's Argument

There is something clearly right about Hume's argument. The principle
he cites surely resembles the one that we properly use when we
discredit reports in tabloid newspapers about alien visitors to the
White House or tiny mermaids being found in sardine cans. Nevertheless
the argument has prompted a great many criticisms.

Some of this discussion makes use of Bayesian probabilistic analysis;
John Earman, for example, argues that when the principles of Hume's
arguments "are made explicit and examined under the lens of
Bayesianism, they are found to be either vapid, specious, or at
variance with actual scientific practice" (Earman 2000). The Bayesian
literature will not be discussed here, though Earman's discussion of
the power of multiple witnessing deserves mention. Earman argues that
even if the prior probability of a miracle occurring is very low, if
there are enough independent witnesses, and each is sufficiently
reliable, its occurrence may be established as probable. Thus if
Hume's concern is to show that we cannot in principle ever have good
reason to believe testimony to a miracle, he would appear to be wrong
about this (Earman 2000: See particularly Ch. 18 and following). Of
course the number of witnesses required might be very large, and it
may be that none of the miracles reported in any scripture will
qualify. It is true that some of the miracles of the Bible are
reported to have occurred in the presence of a good number of
witnesses; the miracle of the loaves and fishes is a good example,
which according to Mark (Mark 6:30-44) was witnessed by 5,000 people.
But have already noticed that the testimony of one person, or even of
four, that some event was witnessed by a multitude is not nearly the
same as having the testimony of the multitude itself.

Another objection against Hume's argument is that it makes use of a
method that is unreliable; that is, it may have us reject reports that
are true or accept those that are false. Consider the fact that a
particular combination of lottery numbers will generally be chosen
against very great odds. If the odds of the particular combination
chosen in the California Lottery last week were 40 million to 1, the
probability of that combination being chosen is very low. Assuming
that the likelihood of any given event being misreported in the Los
Angeles Times is greater than that, we would not be able to trust the
Times to determine which ticket is the winner.

The unreliability objection, made out in this particular way, seems to
have a fairly easy response. There is no skeptical challenge to our
being justified in believing the report of a lottery drawing; that is,
reports of lottery drawings are reports of ordinary events, like
reports of rainstorms and presidential press conferences. They do not
require particularly strong testimony to be credible, and in fact we
may be justified in believing the report of a lottery drawing even if
it came from an otherwise unreliable source, such as a tabloid
newspaper. This is surely because we know in advance that when the
lottery is drawn, whatever particular combination of numbers may be
chosen will be chosen against very great odds, so that we are
guaranteed to get one highly improbable combination or another.
Despite the fact that the odds against any particular combination are
very great, all of the other particular outcomes are equally unlikely,
so we have no prejudice against any particular combination. We know
that people are going to win the lottery from time to time; we have no
comparable assurance that anyone will ever be raised from the dead.

Nevertheless if we are to be able to make progress in science, we must
be prepared to revise our understanding of natural law, and there
ought to be circumstances in which testimony to an unprecedented event
would be credible. For example, human beings collectively have seen
countless squid, few of which have ever exceeded a length of two feet.
For this reason reports of giant squid have, in the past, been
sometimes dismissed as fanciful; the method employed by Hume in his
Balance of Probabilities Argument would seem to rule out the
possibility of our coming to the conclusion, on the basis of
testimony, that such creatures exist– yet they have been found in the
deep water near Antarctica. Similarly, someone living beyond the reach
of modern technology might well reject reports of electric lighting
and airplanes. Surely we should be skeptical when encountering a
report of something so novel. But science depends for its progress on
an ability to revise even its most confident assertions about the
natural world.

Discussion of this particular problem in Hume tends to revolve around
his example of the Indian and the ice. Someone from a very hot climate
such as that of India, living during Hume's time, might refuse to
believe that water was capable of taking solid form as ice or frost,
since he has an exceptionless experience against this. Yet in this
case he would come to the wrong conclusion. Hume argues that such a
person would reason correctly, and that very strong testimony would
properly be required to persuade him otherwise. Yet Hume refers to
this not as a miracle but as a marvel; the difference would appear to
lie in the fact that while water turning to ice does not conform to
the experience of the Indian, since he has experienced no precedent
for this, it is also notcontrary to his experience, because he has
never had a chance to see what will happen to water when the
temperature is sufficiently low (Enquiries, p. 113). By the same
token, we ought to be cautious when it comes to deciding how large
squid may grow in the Antarctic deeps, when our only experience of
them has been in warm and relatively shallow water. The circumstances
of an Antarctic habitat are not analogous to those in which we
normally observe squid.

On the other hand, when someone reports to us that they have witnessed
a miracle, such as a human being walking on water, our experience of
ordinary water is analogous to this case, and therefore counts against
the likelihood that the report is true. And of course our usual
experience must be analogous to this case, for if the water that
someone walks upon is somehow unlike ordinary water, or there is
something else in the physical circumstances that can account for how
it was possible in this one instance for someone to walk on water when
this is impossible in the ordinary case, then it is not a violation of
natural law after all, and therefore, by Hume's definition, not a
miracle. Jesus' walking on water will only qualify as a miracle on the
assumption that this case is analogous in all relevant respects to
those cases in which dense objects have sunk.

The distinction between a miracle and a marvel is an important one for
Hume; as he constructs an epistemology that he hopes will rule out
belief in miracles in principle, he must be careful that it does not
also hinder progress in science. Whether Hume is successful in making
this distinction is a matter of some controversy.
a. Does Hume's Argument Beg the Question?

Many commentators have suggested that Hume's argument begs the
question against miracles. (See for example Lewis 1947:103, Houston
1994:133) Suppose I am considering whether it is possible for a human
being to walk on water. I consider my past experience with dense
objects, such as human bodies, and their behavior in water; I may even
conduct a series of experiments to see what will happen when a human
body is placed without support on the surface of a body of water, and
I always observe these bodies to sink. I now consider what is likely
to occur, or likely to have occurred, in some unknown case. Perhaps I
am wondering what will happen the next time I step out into the waters
of Silver Lake. Obviously I will expect, without seriously considering
the matter, that I will sink rather than walk on its surface. My past
experience with water gives me very good reason to think that this is
what will happen. But of course in this case, I am not asking whether
nature will be following its usual course. Indeed, I am assuming that
it will be, since otherwise I would not refer to my past experience to
judge what was likely in this particular case; my past experience of
what happens with dense bodies in water is relevant only in those
cases in which the uniformity of nature is not in question. But this
means that to assume that our past experience is relevant in deciding
what has happened in an unknown case, as Hume would have us do, is to
assume that nature was following its usual course– it is to assume
that there has been no break in the uniformity of nature. It is, in
short, to assume that no miracle has occurred. In order to take
seriously the possibility that a miracle has occurred, we must take
seriously the possibility that there has been a breach in the
uniformity of nature, which means that we cannot assume, without
begging the question, that our ordinary observations are relevant.

It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that this criticism
represents a victory for apologetic. While the apologist may wish to
proceed by asking the skeptic to abandon his assumption that ordinary
experience is relevant to assessing the truth of miracle reports, this
seems to beg the question in the opposite direction. Ordinary
experience will only fail to be relevant in those cases in which there
was in fact a break in the uniformity of nature, i.e. in those cases
in which a miracle has occurred, and this is precisely what the
skeptic requires to be shown. It is tempting to suppose that there is
a middle ground; perhaps the skeptic need only admit that it
ispossible that ordinary experience is not relevant in this case.
However, it is difficult to determine just what sort of possibility
this would be. The mere logical possibility that an exceptional event
may have occurred is not something that the skeptic has ever
questioned; when I infer that I will sink in the waters of Silver
Lake, I do so in full recognition of the fact that it is logically
possible that I will not.

If the apologist is asking for any greater concession than this, the
skeptic may be forgiven for demanding that he be given some
justification for granting it. He may be forgiven, too, for demanding
that he be persuaded of the occurrence of a miracle on his own terms–
i.e. on purely naturalistic grounds, without requiring him to adopt
any of the assumptions of supernaturalism. Of course the most natural
place to look for evidence that there may occasionally be breaks in
the natural order would be to testimony, but for reasons that are now
obvious, this will not do.

It would appear that the question of whether miracle reports are
credible turns on a larger question, namely, whether we ought to hold
the supernaturalistic worldview, or the naturalistic one. One thing
seems certain, however, and that is that the apologist cannot depend
on miracle reports to establish the supernaturalistic worldview if the
credibility of such reports depends on our presumption that the
supernaturalistic worldview is correct.
6. Conceptual Difficulties: The Logical Impossibility of a Violation

Recent criticisms of belief in miracles have focused on the concept of
a miracle. In particular, it has been held that the notion of a
violation of natural law is self-contradictory. No one, of course,
thinks that the report of an event that might be taken as a miracle–
such as a resurrection or a walking on water– is logically
self-contradictory. Nevertheless some philosophers have argued that it
is paradoxical to suggest both that such an event has occurred, and
that it is a violation of natural law. This argument dates back at
least as far as T.H. Huxley, who tells us that the definition of a
miracle as contravening the order of nature is self-contradictory,
because all we know of the order of nature is derived from our
observation of the course of events of which the so-called miracle is
a part (1984:157). Should an apparent miracle take place, such as a
suspension in the air of a piece of lead, scientific methodology
forbids us from supposing that any law of nature has been violated; on
the contrary, Huxley tells us (in a thoroughly Humean vein) that "the
scientist would simply set to work to investigate the conditions under
which so highly unexpected an occurrence took place; and modify his,
hitherto, unduly narrow conception of the laws of nature" (1894:156).
More recently this view has been defended by Antony Flew (1966, 1967,
1997) and Alastair McKinnon (1967). McKinnon has argued that in
formulating the laws of nature, the scientist is merely trying to
codify what actually happens; thus to claim that some event is a
miracle, where this is taken to imply that it is a violation of
natural law, is to claim at once that it actually occurred, but also,
paradoxically, that it is contrary to the actual course of events.

Let us say that a statement of natural law is a generalization of the
form "All As are Bs;" for example, all objects made of lead (A) are
objects that will fall when we let go of them (B). A violation would
be represented by the occurrence of an A that is not a B, or in this
case, an object made of lead that does not fall when we let go of it.
Thus to assert that a violation of natural law has occurred is to say
at once that all As are Bs, but to say at the same time that there
exists some A that is not a B; it is to say, paradoxically, that all
objects made of lead will fall when left unsupported, but that this
object made of lead did not fall when left unsupported. Clearly we
cannot have it both ways; should we encounter a piece of lead that
does not fall, we will be forced to admit that it is not true that all
objects made of lead will fall. On McKinnon's view, a counterinstance
to some statement of natural law negates that statement; it shows that
our understanding of natural law is incorrect and must be modified–
which implies that no violation has occurred after all.

Of course this does not mean that no one has ever parted the Red Sea,
walked on water, or been raised from the dead; it only means that such
events, if they occurred, cannot be violations of natural law. Thus
arguably, this criticism does not undermine the Christian belief that
these events really did occur (Mavrodes 1985:337). But if Antony Flew
is correct (1967:148), for the apologist to point to any of these
events as providing evidence for the existence of a transcendent God
or the truth of a particular religious doctrine, we must not only have
good reason to believe that they occurred, but also that they
represent an overriding of natural law, an overriding that originates
from outside of nature. To have any apologetic value, then, a miracle
must be a violation of natural law, which means that we must (per
impossibile) have both the law and the exception.
a. Violations as Nonrepeatable Counterinstances to Natural Law

The conception of a violation may, however, be defended as logically
coherent. Suppose we take it to be a law of nature that a human being
cannot walk on water; subsequently, however, we become convinced that
on one particular occasion (O)– say for example, April 18th,
1910–someone was actually able to do this. Yet suppose that after the
occurrence of O water goes back to behaving exactly as it normally
does. In such a case our formulation of natural law would continue to
have its usual predictive value, and surely we would neither abandon
it nor revise it. The only revision possible in this case would be to
say "Human beings cannot walk on water, except on occasion O." Yet the
amendment in this case is entirely ad hoc; in its reference to a
particular event, the revision fails to take the generalized form that
statements of natural law normally possess, and it adds no explanatory
power to the original formulation of the law. It gives us no better
explanation of what has happened in the past, it does nothing to
account for the exceptional event O, and it fares no better than the
original formulation when it comes to predicting what will happen in
the future. In this case O is what might be called anonrepeatable
counterinstance to natural law. Faced with such an event we would
retain our old formulation of the law, which is to say that the
exceptional event O does not negate that formulation. This means that
there is no contradiction implied by affirming the law together with
its exception.

Things would be different if we can identify some feature (F) of the
circumstances in which O occurred which will explain why O occurred in
this one case when normally it would not. F might be some force
operating to counteract the usual tendency of a dense object, such as
a human body, to sink in water. In this case, on discovery of F we are
in a position to reformulate the law in a fruitful way, saying that
human beings cannot walk on water except when F is present. Since the
exception in this case now has a generalized form (i.e. it expresses
the proposition that human beings can walk on water whenever F is
present), our reformulation has the kind of generality that a
statement of natural law ought to have. It explains the past
interaction of dense bodies with water as well as the original
formulation did, and it explains why someone was able to walk on water
on occasion O.Finally, it will serve to predict what will happen in
the future, both when F is absent and when it is present.

We may now, following Ninian Smart (1964:37) and Richard Swinburne
(1970:26), understand a violation as a nonrepeatable counterinstance
to natural law. We encounter a nonrepeatable counterinstance when
someone walks on water, as in case O, and having identified all of the
causally relevant factors at work in O, and reproducing these, no one
is able to walk on water. Since a statement of natural law is
falsified only by the occurrence of a repeatable counterinstance, it
is paradoxical to assert a particular statement of law and at the same
time insist that a repeatable counterinstance to it has occurred.
However there is no paradox in asserting the existence of the law
together with the occurrence of a counterinstance that is not
repeatable.
b. Miracles as Outside the Scope of Natural Laws

The force of this line of reasoning to deny that natural laws must
describe the actual course of events. Natural laws do not describe
absolutely the limits of what can and cannot happen in nature. They
only describe nature to the extent that it operates according to laws.
To put the matter differently, we might say that natural laws only
describe what can happen as a result of natural causes; they do not
tell us what can happen when a supernatural cause is present. As
Michael Levine (1989:67) has put the point:

Suppose the laws of nature are regarded as nonuniversal or incomplete
in the sense that while they cover natural events, they do not cover,
and are not intended to cover, non-natural events such as
supernaturally caused events if there are or could be any. A
physically impossible occurrence would not violate a law of nature
because it would not be covered by (i.e. would not fall within the
scope of) such a law.

On this understanding, a physically impossible event would be one that
could not occur given only physical, or natural, causes. But what is
physically impossible is not absolutely impossible, since such an
event might occur as the result of a supernatural cause. One way to
make this out is to say that all laws must ultimately be understood as
disjunctions, of the form "All As are Bs unless some supernatural
cause is operating." (Let us refer to this as asupernaturalistic
formulation of law, where of course it is causal supernaturalism that
is at work here, as opposed to a naturalistic formulation, which
simply asserts that all As are Bs, without taking account the
possibility of any supernatural cause.) If this is correct, then it
turns out that strictly speaking, a miracle is not a violation of
natural law after all, since it is something that occurs by means of a
supernatural intervention. Furthermore, since statements of natural
law are only intended to describe what happens in the absence of
supernatural intrusions, the occurrence of a miracle does not negate
any formulation of natural law.

The supernaturalistic conception of natural law appears to offer a
response to Hume's Balance of Probabilities argument; the evidence for
natural laws, gathered when supernatural causes are absent, does not
weigh against the possibility that a miracle should occur, since a
miracle is the result of a supernatural intervention into the natural
order. Thus there is a failure of analogy between those cases that
form the basis for our statements of natural law, and the
circumstances of a miracle. Probabilistic considerations, based on our
ordinary experience, are only useful in determining what will happen
in the ordinary case, when there are no supernatural causes at work.
7. Conceptual Difficulties II: Identifying Miracles

We have seen two ways in which the concept of a miracle, described as
an event that nature cannot produce on its own, may be defended as
coherent. We may say that a miracle is a violation of natural law and
appeal to the conception of a violation as a nonrepeatable
counterinstance, or we may deny that miracles are violations of
natural law since, having supernatural causes, they fall outside the
scope of these laws. Nevertheless, conceptual difficulties remain.
Antony Flew (1966, 1967, 1997) has argued that if a miracle is to
serve any apologetic purpose, as evidence for the truth of some
revelation, then it must be possible to identify it as a miracle
without appealing to criteria given by that revelation; in particular,
there must be natural, or observable, criteria by which an event can
be determined to be one which nature cannot produce on its own. Flew
refers to this as the Problem of Identifying Miracles.

Let us see how this problem arises in connection with these two
conceptions of the miraculous. Are there natural criteria by which we
can distinguish a repeatable from a nonrepeatable counterinstance to
some natural law? Suppose some formulation of natural law (All As are
Bs) and some event that is a counterinstance to that formulation (an A
that is not a B). The counterinstance will be repeatable just in case
there is some natural forceF present in the circumstances that is
causally responsible for the counterinstance, such that every time F
is present, a similar counterinstance will occur. But suppose we do
our best to reproduce the circumstances of the event and are unable to
do so. We cannot assume that the event is nonrepeatable, for we have
no way to eliminate the possibility that we have failed to identify
all of the natural forces that were operating to produce the original
counterinstance. The exceptional event may have been produced by a
natural force that is unknown to us. No observable distinction can be
made between a case in which an exception is repeatable, having been
produced by some as–yet undiscovered natural force, and one that is
not. Worse yet, the naturalist will argue that the very occurrence of
the exception is evidence that there is in fact some previously
unknown natural force at work; where there is a difference in effects,
there must be a difference in causes– which for the naturalist means,
of course, natural causes.

Nor does the difficulty go away if we adopt the supernaturalistic view
of natural law. On this view, natural laws only describe what happens
when supernatural forces are absent; a genuine miracle does not
violate natural law because it is the effect of a supernatural cause.
Suppose an extraordinary event occurs, which the apologist would like
to attribute to a supernatural cause. The following two states of
affairs appear to be empirically indistinguishable:
The event is the result of a natural cause that we are as yet unable
to identify.
The event is the result of a supernatural cause.

This, of course, is due to the fact that we do not observe the cause
of the event in either of these cases– in the first, it is because the
cause is unknown to us, and in the second, because supernatural causes
are unobservableex hypothesi. Thus the issue here is whether we should
suppose that our failure to observe any cause for the event is due to
our (perhaps temporary) inability to fully identify all of the natural
forces that were operating to produce it, or whether it is because the
cause, being supernatural, is in principle unobservable. If Flew is
right, then in order to identify the event as a miracle, we must find
some way to rule out the possibility of ever finding a natural cause
for it; furthermore, if the identification of this event as a miracle
is to serve any apologetic purpose, we must find some empirical
grounds for doing this.

To complicate matters even further, there is yet a third possibility,
which is that:

3. The event has no cause at all.

That is, it is possible that the event is simply uncaused or
spontaneous. It is clear that there can be no observable difference
between an event that has a supernatural cause, since such a cause is
in principle unobservable, and one that fails to have a cause. The
challenge for an account of miracles as supernaturally caused is to
show what the difference is between conceiving an event as having a
supernatural cause, and conceiving of it as simply lacking any cause
at all.

The implications of this are quite significant: Even if the naturalist
were forced to admit that an event had no natural cause, and that
nature is, therefore, not fully lawlike, this does not commit him to
supernaturalism. It is possible that nature undergoes spontaneous
lapses in its uniformity. Such events would be nonrepeatable
counterinstances to natural law, but they would not be miracles. They
would fall within the unaided potentialities of nature; the naturalist
need not admit the necessity of supernatural intervention to produce
such events, because their occurrence requires no appeal to any
transcendent reality. Indeed, should we become persuaded that an event
has occurred that has no natural cause, the naturalist may argue that
simplicity dictates that we forgo any appeal to the supernatural,
since this would involve the introduction of an additional entity
(God) without any corresponding benefit in explanatory power.
8. Supernatural Causes and Supernatural Explanation

The apologist, however, will insist that this is precisely the point.
Describing an extraordinary event as the effect of a supernatural
cause, and attributing it to divine intervention, is justified by the
fact that it offers us a chance to explain it where no natural
explanation is available. Assuming (as the naturalist typically does)
that nature operates according to physical laws, the occurrence of an
apparent exception points to some difference in the circumstances. If
no difference in the physical circumstances can be found, then the
only explanation available is that there is some supernatural force at
work. It is unreasonable to reject such a supernatural explanation in
the purely speculative hope that one day a natural explanation may
become available.

The notion of a supernatural explanation deserves careful attention.
The naturalist will surely argue that the conception of a supernatural
explanation– together with its cognate, the notion of a supernatural
cause– is confused. This position is motivated by the conviction that
the notions of an explanation and of a cause are fundamentally
empirical conceptions.

First, as regards the conception of a cause: Paradigmatically,
causation is a relation between two entities, a cause (or some set of
causal circumstances) and an effect. Now there are many cases in which
we witness the effect of a cause that is not seen; I might for example
hear the sound of a gunshot, and not see the gun that produced it.
Furthermore I will be able to infer that there is a gun somewhere
nearby that produced that sound. This is an inference from effect to
cause, and is similar to what the apologist would like to do with a
miracle, inferring the existence of God (as cause) from the occurrence
of the miracle (as effect). But what makes my inference possible in
this case is, as Hume would point out, the fact that I have observed a
regular conjunction of similar causes with similar effects. This is
precisely what is lacking when it comes to supernatural causes. I
cannot ever experience the conjunction of a supernatural cause with
its effect, since supernatural causes are (by hypothesis)
unobservable– nor can I make an inference from any phenomenon in
nature to its supernatural cause withoutsuch an experience. Indeed
given the very uniqueness of God's miraculous interventions into
nature, it is difficult to see how the notion of divine causation
could draw on any kind of regularity at all, as empirical causes do.

It is true that science often appeals to invisible entities such as
electrons, magnetic fields, and black holes; perhaps the apologist
conceives her own appeal as having a similar character (Geivett
1997:183). These things, one may argue, are known only through their
observable effects. But the causal properties of such natural entities
as electrons and magnetic fields are analogous to those of entities
that are observable; this is what entitles us to refer to them as
natural entities. Furthermore, these properties may be described in
terms of observable regularities, which means that entities like
electrons and magnetic fields may play a role in theories that have
predictive power. Thus for example, an appeal to electrons can help us
predict what will happen when we turn on a light switch. God is not a
theoretical entity of this kind. Far from being able to play a role in
any empirical regularities, God's miraculous interventions into
nature, as these are conceived by the supernaturalist, are remarkable
for their uniqueness.

Another reason for doubting that God can possess causal powers
analogous to those enjoyed by natural objects arises from the fact
that God is typically conceived as lacking any location in space– and
on the view of some philosophers, as being outside of time as well.
Causal relationships among natural entities play out against a
spatio-temporal background. Indeed it would seem that to speak of God
as the cause of event in nature encounters something similar to the
Problem of Mind-Body Interaction. (This should not be surprising given
the usual conception of God as a nonmaterial entity, i.e. as mind or
spirit.) All of the cases of causal interaction of which we are aware
occur between physical entities that are fundamentally similar to one
another in terms of possessing physical properties such as mass,
electrical charge, location in space etc. Thus we know for example how
one billiard ball may move another by virtue of the transfer of
momentum. But God possesses none of these qualities, and cannot
therefore interact with physical objects in any way that we can
understand. God cannot, for example, transfer momentum to a physical
object if God does not possess mass.

It may be argued that the conception of an explanation is inextricably
intertwined with that of causation, so that if the conception of a
supernatural cause is an empty one, the notion of a supernatural
explanation can hardly be expected to get off the ground. The
apologist may respond by distinguishing the sort of explanation she
intends to give, when she attributes a miracle to divine agency, from
the sort of explanation that is common to the natural sciences. In
particular, she might characterize them as personal explanations,
which work to explain a phenomenon by reference to the intentions of
an agent– in this case God. (See for example Swinburne 1979: Ch. 2)
Now, it is true that personal explanations do not have quite the same
empirical basis as do scientific ones; nevertheless, like scientific
explanations, they do typically have empirical consequences. For
example, if I explain Bertrand's running a red light by saying that he
wanted to be on time to his meeting, I have given a personal
explanation for Bertrand's behavior, and it is one that is testable.
It will be supported by any observations that tend to confirm the
hypothesis that Bertrand is due for a meeting and that being on time
is something that he desires, and it will be undermined by any that
are contrary to it, such as discovering that Bertrand does not believe
that any meeting is imminent. Furthermore this explanation also serves
as a basis for rough predictions about other actions that Bertrand
might be expected to perform, e.g. he will likely take other steps
(possibly involving additional traffic violations) in order to make it
to his meeting on time.

The most obvious way in which appeals to divine agency fail to be
analogous to the usual sort of personal explanation is in their
failure to yield even the vaguest of predictions. (See Nowell-Smith
1955) Suppose, for example, that we attribute a walking on water to
divine intervention; from this description, nothing follows about what
we can expect to happen in the future. Unless we can introduce
additional information provided by revelation, we have no grounds for
inferring that God will bring it about that additional miracles will
occur; he may, or he may not. Indeed, as far as this kind of
predictive expansion is concerned, we seem no better off saying that
some event came about because God willed to occur than we would be if
we said of it simply that it had no cause, or that it occurred
spontaneously. (Indeed, often when someone says "It was God's will,"
they are calling attention to the inscrutability of events.) In light
of this fact, there is no reason why the naturalist should find such a
supernatural explanation compelling; on the contrary, faced with a
putative miracle, if his concern was to explain the event, he would be
justified in following Hume's advice and continuing to hold out for a
natural cause and a natural explanation– one that possesses predictive
power– or in the worst case, to simply shrug off the incident as
inexplicable, while denying that this inexplicability warrants any
appeal to the divine.

An objection here may be that all of this makes use of an
unnecessarily narrow conception of causation– one which arbitrarily
seeks to restrict their use to the natural sciences. Undoubtedly the
word "cause" is used in a very diverse number of ways, and it is
surely wrong to say that no sense can ever be attached to a statement
of the form "God caused x to occur." The same may be said regarding
the notion of an explanation. But it is the apologist who tries to
understand supernatural causes as analogous to the sort of causes that
are of interest to natural science. If supernatural causes are not
sufficiently similar to natural ones, they cannot be expected to fill
the gap when natural causes are found to be lacking.

The most fundamental challenge to someone who wishes to appeal to the
existence of supernatural causes is to make it clear just what the
difference is between saying that an event has a supernatural cause,
and saying that it has no cause at all. Similarly when it comes to the
prospect of giving a supernatural explanation: Supposing that someone
walks on water and we are unable to find any natural explanation for
this, what warrants our saying that such an event has a supernatural
explanation, as opposed to saying that it is inexplicable and being
done with it?
9. Coincidence Miracles

Given the difficulties that arise in connection with the suggestion
that God causes a miracle to occur, a non-causal account deserves
consideration. R.F. Holland (1965) has suggested that a religiously
significant coincidence may qualify as a miracle. Suppose a child who
is riding a toy motor-car gets stuck on the track at a train crossing.
A train is approaching from around a curve, and the engineer who is
driving it will not be able to see the child until it is too late to
stop. By coincidence, the engineer faints at just the right moment,
releasing his hand on the control lever, which causes the train to
stop automatically. The child, against all expectations, is saved, and
his mother thanks God for his providence; she continues to insist that
a miracle has occurred even after hearing the explanation of how the
train came to stop when it did. Interestingly, when the mother
attributes the stopping of the train to God she is not identifying God
as its cause; the cause of the train's stopping is the engineer's
fainting. Nor is she, in any obvious way, offering an explanation for
the event– at least none that is intended to compete with the
naturalistic explanation made possible by reference to the engineer's
medical condition. What makes this event a miracle, if it is, is its
significance, which is given at least in part by its being an apparent
response to a human need.

Like a violation miracle, such a coincidence occurs contrary to our
expectations, yet it does this without standing in opposition to our
understanding of natural law. To conceive of such an event as a
miracle does seem to satisfy the notion of a miracle as an event that
elicits wonder, though the object of our wonder seems not so much to
behow the train came to stop as the simple fact that it should stop
when it did, when we had every reason to think it would not.

A similar account of the miraculous comes from John Hick's conception
of religious faith as a form of "experiencing-as." Inspired by
Wittgenstein's discussion of seeing-as in the Philosophical
Investigations(194e), Hick has argued that while the theist and the
atheist live in the same physical environment, they experience it
differently; the theist sees a significance in the events of her life
that prompts her to describe her experience as a continuing
interaction with God (1973:Ch. 2). A theist, for example, might
benefit from an unexpected job opportunity and experience this as an
expression of divine providence; the same event might not move an
atheist in this way. Regarding miracles in particular, Hick (1973:51)
writes:

A miracle, whatever else it may be, is an event through which we
become vividly and immediately conscious of God as acting towards us.
A startling happening, even if it should involve a suspension of
natural law, does not constitute for us a miracle in the religious
sense of the word if it fails to make us intensely aware of God's
presence. In order to be miraculous, an event must be experienced as
religiously significant.

Holland gives no indication that he wants to describe the miracle of
the train in terms of experiencing-as. Nevertheless it seems
reasonable to say, with Hick, that in Holland's example, while the
child's mother has seen the same thing that the skeptic has– the
stopping of the train– she understands it differently, experiencing it
as a miracle, and as an expression of divine providence.

But now a new problem emerges: If the question of whether an event is
a miracle lies in its significance, and if its significance is a
matter of how we understand it, then it is hard to see how the
determination that some event is a miracle can avoid being an entirely
subjective matter. In this case, whether or not a miracle has occurred
depends on how the witnesses see it, and so (arguably) is more a fact
about the witnesses, and their response to the event, than it is to
the event itself. (See Smart 1964:35) But we do not typically analyze
human agency in this way; whether or not Caesar crossed the Rubicon is
not a matter of how anyone experiences things. The question of whether
Caesar crossed the Rubicon is an objective one. Surely the theist
wishes to say that the question of whether God has acted in the world,
in the occurrence of a miracle, is objective as well. And surely this
fact accounts for the attractiveness of a causal account of miracles;
any dispute over the cause of a putative miracle is a dispute over the
facts, not a dispute about how people view the facts.
10. Miracle as Basic Action

This is a serious criticism, but it overlooks something very important
about the character of actions generally. To ask whether a human being
has acted is surely to ask an objective question, but it is not always
to ask a question about causes. Arthur Danto (1965) has argued for a
distinction between two types of action: Those that are mediated, and
those that are basic. (See also Davidson 1982, who refers to basic
actions as primitive.) I act in a mediated way when I perform action
x by doing y; for example, if I turn on the light in my study by
flicking a switch, my turning on the light is a mediated action. My
flicking the switch is also a mediated action if I flick the switch by
moving my fingers. Notice that, when we say that I turned on the
light in a mediated sort of way, this may carry causal implications:
In this case, the light's coming on was caused by the switch's being
flicked, and the switch's being flicked was caused by my fingers'
moving. But not all of our actions are like this. When I move my
fingers in order to flip the switch, I do not bring about their
movement by doing anything else; I just move them. Thus to say I have
acted in moving my fingers does not imply that I caused anything to
happen. Yet clearly it is, in some sense of "fact," a fact that I
moved my fingers.

It is possible, of course, that my fingers' moving has a cause, such
as the firing of various neurons. But my neural firings are not
actions of mine; they are not things that I do. It is not as though I
set about to fire my neurons as part of a procedure aimed ultimately
at bringing it about that my muscles contract and my fingers move. And
even if I did, there would have to be something that I did immediately
in order to set the chain of causes going, or there would be an
infinite series of actions I would have to perform in order to turn on
the light— I could never so much as start to act . Thus the
possibility of being able to describe my fingers' moving in terms of
physical causes, and of thereby being able to give a natural
explanation for this in terms of neural firings and the like, does not
rule out the possibility of saying that in moving my fingers, I have
acted.

Some philosophers believe that the truth of a libertarian account of
free will implies that the free actions of human beings have no
natural cause. This parallels the way that the traditional view of
miracles has understood the manner of God's action in a miracle. (J.P.
Moreland has discussed the analogy between free human actions and
miracles in this regard; see Moreland 1997.) Such a libertarian view
of human action may be correct. It is important to recognize, however,
that we do not have to settle the matter; we do not have to show that
someone's moving of their fingers has no natural cause in order to
attribute this movement to their agency. Thus analogously, a believer
in miracles may insist that there is no natural explanation for
various miracles such as the creation of the universe, Moses' parting
of the Red Sea, or Jesus' resurrection. But if miracles are basic
actions on the part of God, then our attribution of divine agency to
such events does not require us to show that these things cannot be
explained by reference to natural causes. Whatever we must do to
identify an event as a miracle, if a miracle is conceived as a basic
action on the part of God, it cannot involve a requirement to show
that it has no natural cause.

To ascribe a basic action to its agent is not to make any claim about
its cause; thus if miracles are properly conceived as basic actions on
the part of God, it is not the case that "any assertion that a miracle
has occurred is implicitly a causal assertion" (Levine 1994:39),
though this view is widely held. On the contrary, the ascription of a
miracle to God will be logically independent of any causal analysis.
(For a detailed discussion of this point see Corner 2007, and
particularly Ch. 4.)
11. Wittgenstein: Miracle as Gesture

This leaves open the question of how we are to identify an event as a
miracle, if this does not involve a causal analysis. One approach is
to think of a miracle as a gesture on the part of God. In Culture and
Value(1980:45e), Ludwig Wittgenstein writes:

A miracle is, as it were, a gesture that God makes. As a man sits
quietly and then makes an impressive gesture, God lets the world run
on smoothly and then accompanies the words of a saint by a symbolic
occurrence, a gesture of nature. It would be an instance if, when a
saint has spoken, the trees around him bowed, as if in reverence.

It is interesting that Wittgenstein should speak of a gesture as a
symbolic occurrence. A human bodily movement becomes a gesture when it
takes on a particular kind of significance. The significance of a bow,
for example, lies in the fact that it is an expression of reverence or
respect. Being able to identify a bending at the waist as a bow
requires us to be familiar with the culture in which this particular
bodily movement has the significance that it does. Nevertheless, the
question of whether someone has bowed is an objective one– it is, we
might say, a question about the facts. Thus the analogy of a miracle
to a gesture may give us a way to view miracles at once as signs,
allowing us to say that the character of a miracle lies, at least in
part, in its significance within what Wittgenstein would call a "form
of life," and at the same time insist that the question of its
significance is an objective matter.

If a miracle is like a gesture in the way Wittgenstein thinks it is,
then supposing that a miraculous event should occur, part of what
makes it possible to identify that event as a miracle is an
appreciation of its significance. But a miracle does not take on its
significance in a vacuum; the significance of a miracle, like the
significance of a gesture, is dependent on a certain sort of context.
This context is established, at least to some degree, by one's view of
the world; whether one is able to identify an event as a miracle will
depend on one's ability to integrate it with a worldview in which the
possibility of God's acting in nature is already acknowledged. Such a
limitation poses no problem for theology generally, which might
legitimately regard such a view of things as its starting point. It
will, however, be fatal to any apologetic appeal that seeks to
establish the credentials of theistic religion by pointing to the
occurrence of a putative miracle and attempting to establish, on
grounds that are consistent with naturalism, that this event gives
compelling evidence for the existence of God.

Peter Winch has recently taken up Wittgenstein's comparison of a
miracle to a gesture:

A certain disposition, or movement, of a human body can be called a
'gesture' only within a context where it is possible for it to be
recognised and/or reacted to as a gesture… Such a possibility depends,
at least in large part, on the reigning culture within which the
action occurs. (1995:211, emphasis in the original)

Winch observes that our recognition of a gesture is typically
immediate rather than inferred. Thus for example, if we are introduced
to someone and they bow, we would not normally arrive at the
conclusion that they are bowing by means of an inference, after first
eliminating the possibility that their movement has a natural
explanation; on the contrary, if we are sufficiently familiar with
bowing as a cultural institution we will immediately recognize the
character of their act. Furthermore, our recognition of the fact that
they have bowed will typically be shown in our reaction to their
gesture, e.g. in our bowing in return. Analogously, we express our
recognition of a miracle not by looking to see if it has any natural
cause, but by responding in the manner characteristic of theistic
religion; with awe, perhaps, or with gratitude for God's beneficence.
(This is the response of the mother in Holland's miracle of the
train.) But, just as our ability to recognize, and to react
appropriately to, a bow depends on our being immersed in a particular
culture, so might our ability to recognize a miracle and react to it
in the characteristically religious way. If Winch is correct, then the
skeptic, who seeks to show that a putative miracle has a natural
cause, is proceeding in the wrong direction– but then so is the theist
who tries to show that the event cannot be explained scientifically.
Such a theist commits the same error as one would who thinks that in
order to show that a particular gesture is a bow, we must show that no
physiological explanation can be given for it.

The mainstream theistic approach to miracles is, at the moment, one
that would prefer to employ a method similar to that used in the
natural sciences. Philosophers taking this approach are unlikely to be
satisfied with the conception of a miracle as a gesture. But if Winch
is right, this is an indication of how deeply embedded science has
become in modern western culture, and an indication as well of a drift
away from the kind of religious culture in which the conception of a
miracle originally found its home.
12. References and Further Reading
Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, III:100-103
Augustine, The City of God, XXI:8
Beardsmore, R.W, "Hume and the Miraculous," Religions and Hume's
Legacy, ed. Phillips, D.Z. and Tessin, Timothy, Claremont Studies in
the Philosophy of Religion, New York: St. Martin's Press
Corner, David (2007), The Philosophy of Miracles, London: Continuum
Danto, Arthur C. (1965), "Basic Actions," American Philosophical
Quarterly, 2:141-8
Davidson, Donald (1982), Essays on Action and Events, New York: Oxford
University Press
Davis, Stephen T (1999), "Beardsmore on Hume on Miracles," Religions
and Hume's Legacy, ed. Phillips, D.Z. and Tessin, Timothy, Claremont
Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, New York: St. Martin's Press
Earman, John (2000), Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against
Miracles, New York: Oxford University Press
Hume, David (1975), Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Ed. L.A.
Selby-Bigge 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Flew, Anthony (1966), God and Philosophy, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World
Flew, Anthony (1967), "Miracles," Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New
York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1967, vol. 5, pp. 346-353
Flew, Anthony (1997), Hume's Philosophy of Belief, Bristol: Thoemmes Press
Fogelin, Robert J. (2003), A Defense of Hume on Miracles, Princeton:
Princeton University Press
Geivett, R. Douglas (1997), "The Evidential Value of Miracles," in
Geivett, R. Douglas and Habermas, Gary R. eds (1997), In Defense of
Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God's Action in History, Downers
Grove: Intervarsity Press
Hick, John (1973), God and the Universe of Faiths, Oxford: Oneworld
Publications Ltd.
Holland, R.F. (1965), "The Miraculous," American Philosophical Quarterly 2:43-51
Houston, J. (1994), Reported Miracles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Huxley, T.H., (1894) Collected Essays, Vol. VI, Hume:, With Helps to
the Study of Berkeley, New York: D. Appleton and Company
Lewis, C.S. (1947), Miracles, New York: Macmillan
Levine, Michael, P. (1989), Hume and the Problem of Miracles: A
Solution, Dordrecht: Kluwer Publishers
Locke, John (2000), A Discourse of Miracles, in Earman, John, Hume's
Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles, New York: Oxford
University Press
Mackie. J.L. (1982), The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against
the Existence of God New York: Oxford University Press
Martin, Michael (1992), Atheism: A Philosophical Justification,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Mavrodes, George I. (1985), "Miracles and the Laws of Nature," Faith
and Philosophy, Vol. 2 No. 4, October 1985
McKinnon, Alastair (1967), " 'Miracle' and 'Paradox,' " American
Philosophical Quarterly, 4:308-314
Moore, Gareth (1996), Believing in God, Edinburgh: T & T Clark
Nowell-Smith, Patrick (1955), "Miracles," in New Essays in
Philosophical Theology, ed. Antony Flew and Alastair MacIntyre, New
York: Macmillan
Melden, A.I. (1961), Free Action, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul
Moreland, J.P (1997), "Science, Miracles, Agency Theory & the
God-of-the-Gaps," in Geivett, R. Douglas and Habermas, Gary R. eds
(1997), In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive case for God's Action
in History,Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press
Purtill, Richard (1978), "Thinking about Religion: A Philosophical
Introduction to Religion," Prentice-Hall
Smart, Ninian (1964), Philosophers and Religious Truth, New York: Macmillan
Swinburne, Richard (1970), The Concept of Miracle, London: Macmillan
Swinburne, Richard (1979), The Existence of God, Oxford: Clarendon Press
Swinburne, Richard ed. (1989), Miracles, from the series Philosophical
Topics ed. Paul Edwards, New York: Macmillan
Winch, Peter (1995), "Asking Too Many Questions," in Tessin, Timothy
and von der Ruhr, Mario eds,Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious
Belief, Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, New York: St.
Martin's Press
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1958), Philosophical Investigations, 3rd
edition, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1980), Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.