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In
this essay, I hope to show that some of the criticisms levelled against Hume,
especially those by Robert Hambourger (1980), are not effective in their
attempts to erode Hume’s argument. These issues were discussed in an article
by Dorothy Coleman (1988), which I will use to outline the problems with
Hambourger’s arguments.
Firstly,
I will give an interpretation of Hume’s definition of a miracle, as discussed
in his Enquiries Concerning Human the Understanding (Selby-Bigge ed, 1975).
Hume’s
argument is not in principle against the possibility miracles, but rather
against the possibility that it could be reasonable to believe that a miracle
had ever occurred. Hume’s argument is trying to weigh up various probabilities
against each other in order to determine the credibility of testimony for a
miracle. In order to measure this credibility, the probability of the event must
be weighed against the probability that the report is mistaken. An event’s
probability is determined by the degree to which it conforms to known laws of
nature, which are formulated on the basis of uniform experience. Assuming, as
Hume does, that a miracle is an event which is a violation of the laws of
nature, any
judgment that an event is indeed a miracle presupposes a judgment that there
exists a uniform pattern of causation to which it is opposed. This pattern would
count as empirical evidence against the occurrence of the miracle. However,
testimony is not so reliable, because it has been shown by experience to not be
uniformly reliable in the same way that a law of nature is. Therefore, no report
of a miracle will be credible or rational to believe, because there is always a
uniform experience or law as empirical proof against it, which is obviously
going to outweigh the merits of the testimony. As Hume remarks:
[N]o
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.... When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored
to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that
this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he
relates, should really have happened ....
If
the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he
relates: then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion
(Hume, Enquiries, pp115-116).
This
idea is criticised by Robert Hambourger (1980), who believes that there are
counterexamples to this idea. Hambourger’s counterexamples involve lotteries,
which he believes show that Hume’s argument is unsound. Hambourger believes
that Hume’s idea relies upon an idea known as “the principle of relative
likelihood”. He restates Hume’s ideas, basically saying what Hume did about
weighing the probabilities of the event and the testimony against each other. If
it were more likely that the people testifying are mistaken than it is that the
event has occurred, then it would not be reasonable to believe that the event
has occurred.
To
counter this principle, Hambourger gives an example of someone winning a
lottery. He says that there is a lottery in which there are one million
entrants, each of whom has a one in a million chance of winning. A reliable
newspaper such as the New York Times reports that someone called Smith has won
the lottery. The Times only makes mistakes one in ten thousand times. Therefore,
if we apply Hume’s principle as laid out by Hambourger, the conclusion would
be that the Times report is mistaken, as this is the more likely of the two
probabilities. But, as Hambourger says, this does not seem right. It seems more
likely that the report is correct. He says that the credibility of the report
should not be assessed in terms of its statistical probability, but rather its
track record in giving correct reports. Hambourger therefore concludes that
Hume’s principle is invalid, and so his argument against the possibility of
having a rational belief in miracles is false.
To
apply these considerations to miracles and their credibility, Hambourger says
what we want to know to evaluate the testimony is the non-relative likelihood
that the testimony is true. Just as in the case of the lotteries, we should not
look at the probability that the testimony is true, but rather, how often are
examples of that type of testimony true. So, for the case of miracles we should
ask “How often are reports of miracles true?”. Hambourger does agree that
this question is not easily answered in any way, but it is definitely not
possible to answer it from Hume’s relative likelihood principle. This is
because when you look at testimony you cannot “factor out the plausibility of
what one reports, consider the remaining factors without it, and then, by
weighing the two together, arrive at the probability that a report is true.” (Hambourger,
1980, p599).
The
point of this argument “is to show that Hume falsely assumes that the
predictability of an event must have a bearing on the credibility of a report of
the event once it has occurred” (Coleman, 1988, p5). However, Coleman
believes, and I am inclined to agree, that Hambourger’s criticism is not as
damaging as he makes it out to be.
One
reason for this is that Hambourger overlooks the two senses of the word
probability. The first being the sense of probability of events pertaining to
unique occurrences, and the second is in the sense of probability of events
pertaining to the instances or tokens of event types. This, Coleman says, echoes
the distinction made by Hume is his Treatise of Human Nature (Mossner ed., 1986)
between “probability of chances” and “probability of causes” (Bk. 1, Pt.
111, Sect, XII and XIII).
Hume’s
argument against the rationality of believing in miracles invokes the second
sense, whereas Hambourger’s argument invokes the first. Following the first
sense of probability, the likelihood of an event occurring is measured by its
degree of predictability as a unique occurrence. But in the second sense it is
measured by its degree of conformity to causal laws applicable to events of its
type. It seems that an event that has low predictability may still be credible
if it conforms to the relevant causal laws. Coleman (1988, p8) gives an example.
She says that the credibility of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon has little to
do with its predictability. Clearly, the historical testimony relies upon the
causal probability of the event it reports, i.e. the conformity of the events to
causal laws pertaining to events of its type. The story of Caesar’s crossing
is credible in part because it is not said to have violated any known natural
laws, for example his crossing by walking on the water.
If
it is granted that Hume’s idea invokes the second sense of probability, which
I would agree with, then it can be seen why Hambourger’s lottery example does
not prove to be a counter- example to Hume’s relative likelihood principle in
the way it was assumed. The principle will only be invoked by reports of events
that do not conform to laws pertaining to their event type. But this is not the
case in the lottery example, because Smith winning the lottery is not an
exception of the rules governing lotteries. Smith has a small chance of winning,
but it is an equal chance to everyone else, and somebody will win the lottery,
so no laws are broken. Therefore, when evaluating the Times’ report about
Smith, we would not use the principle at all, but do as Hambourger himself says,
and look at the reliability of the Times in terms of report of this nature, or
look for further evidence to corroborate the story.
I
will now look at Coleman’s (1988, pp9-10) lottery example, which she believes
does invoke the relative likelihood principle. This example, as Coleman says,
must be analogous to evaluating the credibility of a report of an improbable
event in the sense that the event does not conform to causal laws pertaining to
its event type, rather than in the sense that the statistical odd are against
it. Furthermore, she says it must be analogous to our situation of not fully
knowing the laws of nature, as in the only way we can know anything about nature
is to form generalisations from recurring patterns within our experience. So,
the lottery example must be one in which the participants of the lottery do not
know the precise rules of it. An laws about the lottery, therefore, will be
generated from observed uniformities throughout the length the game is being
played.
The
example is as follows: let us assume that there is a small country called
Lottovania that has sponsored a lottery every month for the past one hundred
years. It is known that the government of the country print up an indefinite
number of tickets each month, but only distribute some of them. Each month a
winning ticket is announced, but for all the hundred years it has been going,
the winning ticket has always been one that is not distributed. Based on this,
it can be generalised as a law that the winning ticket will always be one that
is undistributed, since this is the only uniform observation we have on which to
base a law. Now suppose that the newspaper known as the Lottovania Times prints
a report that Smith of Lottovania has won the lottery this month. The paper is
usually accurate, and only prints something wrong once every ten thousand times.
In reporting this, however, the paper is reporting an event that is not just
unlikely, but an event that is not conformable with past experience, and
therefore not consistent with the laws pertaining to its event type. To
determine the credibility of this report requires more than looking at the track
record of the newspaper, it also requires looking whether the event is an
instance of a regular pattern or type known to occur. While it may be possible
that the lottery laws have changed, or that the rules were not what they were
thought to be, it still seems that on the current evidence, the report does not
conform with past experience, and so should be looked at skeptically. More
evidence in favour of the event would need to be put forward to corroborate the
story.
I
will now look at how this principle can be applied to the evaluation of miracle
reports. Hambourger believes that it may be rational and reasonable to infer
that a miracle has occurred provided it meets two factors:
The
event is sufficiently
well testified to warrant the belief that the event has occurred
Without
any plausible explanation, and,
It
is the type of event that would be appropriate for God to cause.
Hambourger
does not give an argument to support these factors, but uses examples that he
believes establish his case. I will look at the Hambourger example that Coleman
(1988, p11) analyses, which is as follows:
“If
all records and accounts from the beginning of the last century agreed that on
January 1, 1800,
in
all parts of the earth, the clouds of
each
region began to spell out the Old Testament with perfect precision and in the
language of the region, and that they continued to do so
for
several weeks until the new Testament was completed, then I
think
it would be hard to escape the conclusion that a
miracle
had occurred. Thus I believe that, at least in principle, testimony could give
one adequate reason to believe in a miracle.” (Hambourger, 1980, p603).
It
will be granted straight off for argument’s sake that what Hambourger says
could have occurred and that the testimony would provide sufficient evidence to
support a belief that it did occur. Now it comes down to deciding whether the
aforementioned event, which is obviously anomalous, is indeed a miracle. This,
as Coleman says, is more a question about the nature of the event rather than
its occurrence. It comes down to whether it is more reasonable to believe that
an event has a supernatural cause rather than a natural cause. It seems that of
the factors Hambourger states, (1) and (3) on their own do not sufficiently give
justification for the event being a miracle, as many ordinary events can meet
these conditions. It is therefore up to (2) to separate the natural from the
miraculous. However, I would agree with Coleman here that it does not seem that
just because an event has no readily available natural explanation that it is
indeed miraculous. For an event to be a miracle, it must be inexplicable in
terms of what the laws of nature actually are, not just what they appear to be
or we believe them to be. If the aforementioned event has no readily available
natural explanation, then it could be that the laws of nature were not what they
appeared to be. For example, someone could have learnt, without anyone else’s
knowledge, how clouds really work, and used this to write the words of the bible
into the cloud. Or it could be possible the event was of a different nature
altogether. For example, the clouds were not really clouds but laser images
produced by aliens. If we apply Hume’s law of relative likelihood, we must ask
whether it is more likely (i.e. conformable) that the reporters of the events
are mistaken than it is that the events are genuine miracles. It seems that the
former is more likely to me in most cases, although there could be exceptions.
However, counter-instances of what are taken to be natural laws are not by
themselves enough to establish that no natural law could explain them. At most,
Coleman (1988, p13) says, it provides some evidence for revising the laws or
seeking a better understanding of the particular phenomena in question. And at
the very least they simply provide grounds for suspending judgements about the
nature of their cause until we have more evidence. Past evidence shows us that
events, which were once considered violations of natural law, are now seen as
parts of nature. Therefore, it seems that it is always more reasonable to
believe that any claim about a miracle is mistaken than it is to believe that
the miracle occurred.
It
might be seen that this approach is a form of dogmatic objection of the
supernatural in that it always puts the weight of evidence in favour of
rejecting the claim that an event is a violation of natural law. It is claimed
that if one assumes that God exists, then an event that has no natural
explanation must be an appropriate event for God to cause. However, it seems
that this is a mistake, because unless every event that has no natural
explanation is seen as an appropriate act of God, there is no way to
differentiate between the appropriate and non-appropriate ones. Also, it seems
that the evidence we have for God’s existence makes it no more plausible than
to say aliens or some other unknown force caused the events.
In
conclusion, I believe I have shown that Coleman’s ideas about Hume are
correct, and that Hambourger’s critique of Hume is not damaging in the
slightest once it is properly analysed. Therefore I believe that if a miracle is
defined as a violation of natural law, which seems like a sound definition, then
it is never rational to believe that a miracle has occurred. This does not rule
out miracles actually occurring however, just that belief in them can never be
justified.
Hume,
David (1986), A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by Ernest C. Mossner.
Viking.
Hume,
David. (1975). Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the
Principles of Morals. Edited by L.A.
Selby-Bigge
(3rd. ed.) revised by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hambourger,
Robert. (1980) "Belief in
Miracles
and Hume's Essay," Nous
14
(1980): 587-604.
©David Friesen 2004