Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[Esquilax]

I hear a circular argument: If miracles are impossible, the report of any miraculous event must be false, and therefore, miracles are impossible.

More like, under the argument you presented we'd be bound to accept all miracle claims, even contradicting ones. Would you be willing to do that, or would all miracle claims be impossible except the ones you believe?

I am defining miracles as special acts of God in the world. Since miracles are special acts of God, they can only exist where there is a God who can perform such acts. If one does not believe in God, then they cannot say miracles, as I define them, are impossible.

If I don't believe in a god, then I'm bound to say that miracles as you define them must be impossible, because there wouldn't be a god to perform them.

Instead of weighting the evidence in favor of miracles, Hume simply plays statistical games. He adds evidence against them. Since death occurs over and over again and resurrection occurs only on rare occasions at best, Hume simply adds up all the deaths against the very few alleged Resurrection and rejects the later....But this does not involve weighing the evidence to determine whether or not a given person, say Jesus of Nazareth... has been raised from the dead.

If you had any evidence that Jesus had been raised from the dead, we wouldn't need to play statistical games. We'd have evidence. But since we don't, and theists won't stop insisting that it was a real event anyway, we've gotta do something.

It is simply adding up the evidence of all other occasions where people have died and have not been raised and using it to overwhelm any possible evidence that some person who died was brought back to life... Second, this argument equates quantity of evidence and probability. It says, in effect, that we should always believe what is most probable) in the sense of "enjoying the highest odds". But this is silly. On the these grounds a dice player should not believe the dice show three sides on the first roll, since the odds against it are 1,635,013,559,600 to 1.

What you're missing is that people have observed dice landing threes. There has never been a single observed case of a resurrection. We have to go with things that we've at least observed as possible; under your framework every absurd idea that's broached must be given the same respect, and that's not logical.

What Hume seems to overlook is that wise people base their beliefs on facts, not simply on odds. Sometimes the "odds' against an event are high (based on past observations), but the evidence for the event is otherwise very good. (based on current observation or reliable testimony.) Hume's argument confuses quantity of evidence with the quality of evidence. Evidence should be weighed, not added.

So what about claims where you don't have any evidence? You're asking that we give those equal consideration.

Moreover, Hume confuses the probability of historical events with the way in which scientists employ probability to formulate scientific law. In science, the more times an event is observed, under similar occurrences and similar conditions, the greater the probability that scientists think their formulation of a law is correct. But historical events including miracles are different; the events of history are unique and non-repeatable. Therefore, treating historical events including miracles with the same notion of probability the scientist uses in formulating his laws ignores a fundamental difference between the two subject matters.

However, historical events are still bound by the physical laws of the universe. Saying it happened in the past isn't a license to make shit up.

C.S. Lewis answers Hume’s assertion that nothing is esteemed a miracle if it ever happens in the common course of nature.” Lewis says,” Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other wor4ds they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately, we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports of them to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.”

And the burden of proof is on the claimant to prove the claim. Just because there's no evidence against something happening doesn't mean it has to have happened, and in this case, all of physical reality is against miracle claims, and you're still acting as though they are at all valid, just because they haven't been disproven. That's shifting the burden of proof.