MIRACLES

Adrian Brown

What is required on the syllabus?

AQA: 15.2 MiraclesConcepts of ‘miracle’, ‘laws of nature’ and ‘interventionist God’. Challenges to belief in miracles from philosophy, with particular reference to David Hume, and from scientific explanations.Religious responses to these challenges.

Picked up in other areas such as religious experience and New Testament studies.

What is required on the syllabus?

OCR: The concept of miracle and the

criticisms made by Hume and Wiles.

References to standard A-level texts

It seems clear from the shape of the OCR syllabus that Vardy’s The Puzzle of God has been a major resource in their planning, not least because it is the place where Wiles is fully discussed at this level.

So it is worth having a closer look at the way in which Vardy deals with the topic. I will comment on what he doesn’t say (and should) later!

Some non-standard A-level resources

Dialogue magazine has carried helpful articles accessible to A-level: no 4, Apr 95, Hume on Miracles; no 10 Apr 98, Rationalism & Empiricism; no 11, Nov 98, Miracles; no 13, Dec 99 Miracles; At a more basic level, but excellent on Miracles and Laws of Science is Mike Poole’s A Guide to Science and Belief, Lion, 1997, ch.5Do not overlook web resources, some of which are now written specifically for A-level, for example: www.colfox.dorset.sch.uk/alevelre/ There is an excellent section including a fine introduction and selected classic articles in Brian Davies, Philosophy of Religion: a guide and anthology, Oxford, 2000, p397-437.A particular favourite of mine is the 1982 Zondervan book by Norman Geisler, Miracles and Modern Thought.A significant omission from his references is Colin Brown’s Miracles and the Critical Mind, Eerdmans/Paternoster, 1984.

An excellent recent article is Terence Penelhum’s The Paranormal, miracles and David Hume, in Think Spring 2003

References to standard A-level textsOCR A2 Philosophy of Religion 2771 (b) Specification REFERENCES TO STANDARD TEXTS

PATRICK J CLARKE Questions About God

PETER COLE Philosophy of ReligionBRIAN DAVIES An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion

C STEPHEN EVANS Philosophy of ReligionJOHN HICK Philosophy of Religion

ANNE JORDAN ET AL Philosophy of Religion for A-levelMICHAEL PETERSON ET AL Reason and Religious Belief

MEL THOMPSON Teach Yourself the Philosophy of ReligionPETER VARDY The Puzzle of God

CLARKE COLE DAVIES EVANS HICK JORDAN PETERSON THOMPSON VARDY

MIRACLES c3p109-111 c10p190-211 c5p107-117 c3p38-39 c12p167f c9p190-211 c6p155-165 c17p175-192

Concept c10p191 c5p107 c9p190-211 c2p42&c6p155-165 c17p175-184Critique: Hume c4p28 c10p196 c12p171f c17p184f

Critique: Wiles c3p110 c17p189-191Implications for Prob of Evil c3p125

(standard refs to the Prob of Evil) c3p125-134 c8p63-76 c3p32-54 c6p130-140 c4p40-56 c8p82-101 c7p146-165 c7p167-192 Puzzle of Evil

CONCEPTUAL CLARITY Because of the way the term ‘miracle’

can be variously used, it is important to agree on which sense is being deployed.

One of the most helpful definitions (pace Hume) is this one: “A miracle is an extraordinary and striking event, intended by God to be a special disclosure of his power and purpose.”

HUME’S APPROACH This has dominated the discussion in the literature and until the advent of Wiles’ contribution, Hume’s has set the agenda for the standard lines of debate.Note that for him miracles are not impossible. His argument concludes that we would have to regard any report of them as incredible.

LAWS OF NATURE What precisely do we mean by Laws of Nature? Mike Poole makes an interesting distinction

between Laws of Nature and Scientific Laws. His point is that science has always a provisional understanding. Our current formulation of our belief in a particular regularity in the way the universe appears to behave, according to our investigations so far, is not necessarily equivalent to either how the universe actually is, or how the universe has to be, at all times and in all places.

BIBLICAL ‘MIRACLES’ [1]

Discussions in the Philosophy of Religion have a tendency to allow the miracles agenda to be set by philosophical writings, not least the classic discussion of Hume.

This results in focussing on miracles as violations of so-called ‘laws of nature’.

The Biblical tradition predates scientific ways of talking about the world and what we translate as ‘miracle’ had a different focus for the writers and readers of Biblical material.

BIBLICAL ‘MIRACLES’

[2] In the New Testament the three terms we tend to

translate into ‘miracle’ in English are: Semeion – a ‘sign’ (focus on the purpose) Teras – a ‘wonder’ (focus on the effect) Dunamis – an ‘act of power’ (focus on cause) Acts 2:22 “..Jesus..was a man accredited by God to

you by miracles (dunamesi), wonders (terasi) and signs (semeiois).. which God did through him.. as you yourselves know.” The emphasis here is on the significance of the event; its impact on those who witnessed it. Notice that some Biblical miracles will not fit into the category of what we would call violations of laws of nature.

BIBLICAL ‘MIRACLES’

[2]

One helpful classification is as follows: Miracles of nature – eg. Jesus stilling the

storm on Galilee [Mk 4:35-41] Miracles of healing – eg. Woman with a

haemorrhage [Mk 5:25-34] Miracles of exorcism – eg. Legion [Mk 5:9-

20] Miracles of timing – eg. Red Sea [Ex 14:21f]

BIBLICAL ‘MIRACLES’

[3] Violations of laws of nature

Amazing events attributed to God

Vng

?Vg NVg

BIBLICAL ‘MIRACLES’

[4] Violations of laws of nature

Amazing events attributed to God

Vg NVg

Given that no-one has seriously suggested that there are other

agents than God who can violate laws of nature, we should

perhaps redraw the diagram like this:

EXAMPLES OF MIRACLES: contemporary ‘violations of laws of nature’

[1] Rice is not conserved in Olivenza[2] Korean healing miracles [3] Teeth filled in Chile[4] Welsh RS teacher’s hearing

restored[5] Sri Lankan leg shrinkage

A PRIORI REJECTIONS

Spinoza is a good example of a thinker who made his mind up about the possibility of miracles without reference to any relevant empirical evidence. His presuppositions were those of a rationalist and a pantheist. As a rationalist, he accepted as true only what he saw as self evident. As a pantheist, God’s activity was no more than nature’s regular activity. His argument boils down to a dogmatic assertion:

1. Miracles are violations of laws of nature2. Natural laws are immutable3. Therefore, miracles are impossible

EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM Historically, these are two distinct major schools of philosophy whose approach to the question of miracles should differ because of their presuppositions about what counts as valid knowledge.

Rationalists Empiricists

Descartes Spinoza Locke Hume

EMPIRICISM AND RATIONALISM You would expect that empiricists, with

their emphasis on the importance of sense data as evidence, would be interested in whether or not you can establish whether a miracle has actually taken place.

Rationalists may be expected to have decided beforehand whether or not miracles are possible.

IS MIRACLE AS A SUSPENSION OF A NATURAL LAW SELF-CONTRADICTORY?

Consider this extract from Alistair McKinnon’s Miracle and Paradox, American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1997):

“The idea of a supension of natural law is self-contradictory. This follows from the meaning of the term … Natural laws bear no relation to civil codes … They are simply highly generalised shorthand descriptions of how things do in fact happen … Hence there can be no suspensions of natural law rightly understood. Or … Miracle contains a contradiction in terms.”

Is McKinnon’s argument right?

SURELY IT IS INCREDIBLE TO BELIEVE IN MIRACLES IN AN AGE OF SCIENCE!

Consider this letter posted in THE TIMES on 13 July 1984 by 14 UK professors of science:

“It is not logically valid to use science as an argument against miracles. To believe that miracles cannot happen is as much an act of faith as to believe that they can happen. We gladly accept the virgin birth, the gospel miracles, and the resurrection of Christ as historical events … miracles are unprecedented events … science (based as it is upon the observation of precedents) can have nothing to say on the subject. It’s ‘laws’ are only generalisations of our experience.”

Vardy’s discussion – 1 VARIOUS DEFINITIONS - 1

[1] A miracle is a change for the better that can take place in a person in even the most unlikely situation.

[2] A miracle is an event or occurrence which the believer considers to have religious significance, even though it is not in fact due to a creator God.

[4] A miracle is an event which happens against the laws of nature, and which is brought about by the action of the everlasting and timeless God.

Vardy’s discussion – 2 VARIOUS DEFINITIONS - 2

[3] A miracle is an event caused by the action of an everlasting and timeless God. The event is either in accordance with the normal laws of nature, or else brought about by a human being, in which case God will be the primary cause whilst the person will be the secondary cause.

Vardy makes the point that we are assuming in the discussion that we are talking about God who can act or intervene in the world he has created.

Vardy’s discussion – 3 MIRACLE AS A CHANGE FOR THE

BETTER IN A PERSON?

Vardy cites Alyosha’s transformation in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov as an example of what Sutherland sees as a true miracle. (But) this use of miracle doesn’t demand a creator God.

Vardy’s discussion – 4MIRACLE AS AN EVENT WHICH BELIEVERSCONSIDER TO HAVE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE (EVEN IF NOT THE WORK OF GOD)

Any event could be a ‘disclosure event’ for a believer. This is an anti-realist view. The only thing that matters is that the believer sees it as significant. No correspondence is necessary: Moore’s, “God causes what nothing causes”. The believer says, “God” or “miracle”, where non-believers would say, “baffling”. ie. a miracle is an event which has no explanation at all on this view.

Vardy’s discussion – 5A MIRACLE IS AN EVENT CAUSED BY GOD EITHER IN ACCORDANCE WITH KNOW LAWS OF NATURE OR BROUGHT ABOUT BY HUMAN BEINGS.

This is a realist understanding. ie. A miracle iff God did it. Claims about violations of laws of nature are not provable. They are articles of faith. On this definition God acts providentially within the structures he has ordained. eg. Holland’s level crossing example. The miracle is in the eye of the beholder but unlike the non-realist view, the action of God, not merely a belief coherent with the religious form of life of the believer.

Vardy’s discussion – 6MIRACLES HAPPEN AGAINST THE LAWS OF NATURE AND ARE BROUGHT ABOUT BY A TIMELESS AND EVERLASTING GOD

This rests on Hume’s definition: “A transgression of a law of nature by a particular violation of the Deity, or by the imposition of some invisible agent.”This fits a number of New Testament miracles – God/Jesus rules over nature.Swinburne points out the undesirability of allowing “clumsy and ad hoc” counter-instances to natural laws due to this kind of miracle. It would “upset the whole structure of science.”

Vardy’s discussion – 7 ATTACKS ON THIS DEFINITION: 1. HUME

In the balance for rational human beings is:

[a] The improbability of miracle(s)

[b] The evidence that they have occurred.

[a] [b]

The wise man, proportioning his belief to the evidence, will always conclude that it is more

likely that natural laws have held good than that a miracle has occurred.

Vardy’s discussion – 8ATTACKS: HUME - 2

Vardy paraphrases Hume’s argument:“A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence. A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature and is therefore an event which past human experience is uniformly against. This in itself makes it overwhelmingly probable that the miracle did not occur, unless the testimony to its occurrence is of such superlative quality that it can be seriously be weighed against our own uniform past experience”

Vardy’s discussion – 9ATTACKS: HUME - 3

“In fact, however, the testimony to miracles is not of this character at all. The standard of the witnesses to miracles is not high. The human capacity for accepting or believing the unlikely has all too probably been at work, the stories of miracles deriving from ‘ignorant and barbarous places and nations’ and, in any case, the miracle stories of different religions contradict one another. Consequently testimony to miracles can never establish them so that one could proceed from a proper assurance that they occurred to infer some theistic conclusions.”

Vardy’s discussion – 10 HUME - 4

Vardy spells out the meaning of each stage of the argument:

1. Examples of miracles of this kind.2. What it means to say that miracles are not rational. 3. On witnesses:

1. The testimony is poor; unreliable, untrustworthy, unintelligent, uneducated, seeking advantage.

2. We are predisposed to love the fantastic.3. Source of miracle stories is generally the ignorant &

barbarious.4. All religions claim miracles to buttress contradictory

truth claims; the stories cancel out.

Vardy’s discussion – 11 HUME – 5 Some critical remarks#1

1. Are laws of nature set in stone as Hume seems to suggest? The history of science shows that our understanding is always provisional. {AB: the key question here is not about particular historical formulations of laws, but lawlikeness as a general belief. Is the methodological assumption about laws tied to metaphysical beliefs about laws. For a naturalist – yes. For a theist – not necessarily; God may not be bound by his regular way of running the universe} (cf. Hume’s generally anti-inductivist stance)

?

Vardy’s discussion – 12 HUME – 6 Some critical remarks #2

2. Hume’s discussion only deals with reports of miracles. What if Hume had experienced a miracle himself. Might he believe it as a trustworthy, intelligent, educated, neutral, informed and civilized individual?{Is it Hume’s inherent scepticism, or poverty of religious experience, or both, that matter here?}

?

Vardy’s discussion – 12HUME – 7 Some critical remarks #3

3. Today’s reports of miracles are often supported by scientific evidence eg. at Lourdes. This overcomes many of the Humean difficulties.

?

Vardy’s discussion – 13HUME – 8 Some critical remarks #4

4. Neither Judaism, Christianity or Islam relies on miracles as the (only) basis of belief cf. Jesus & Satan’s temptations, “an evil generation…seeks a sign” (Mt 16:4) etc. If you already believe that God exists, it is rational to believe God acts miraculously.Believing reports of miracles as a basis for belief in any one religion is not enough.But remarkable events in themselves do not prove that God was the cause. It could be, say, psychosomatic {AB: cf. God-of-the-Gaps thinking}

?

Critical lines of response to Hume (Davis p401)

1. Is it true that we should only believe that for which we have personal evidence?

2. Is it true that reports of miracles only come from dubiously reliable sources?

3. Does the fact that reports of miracles come from people who have conflicting beliefs mean that none of these reports should be taken seriously?

4. Are miracles as intrinsically improbable as Hume makes them out to be?

A.E.Taylor on Hume

In “David Hume and the miraculous”, Philosophical Studies, Macmillan, 1934,

A.E.Taylor famously argues that Hume’s conclusion can only urge us

not to believe in second hand reports of miracles – not that miracles cannot occur, or that anyone who witnesses

one for himself ought to refuse to believe the evidence of his senses.

A.E.Taylor on Hume

“It is quietly forgotten [by Hume] that, on the premises, there cannot be said to be ‘uniform experience’ against the resurrection of a dead man or any other sequence of events. At best I have only a uniformity within the range of my own experience to urge; a narrator who professes to have seen the resuscitation of actually

appealing to his own experience as the foundation of the story. Thus, unless I am to assume that my own

personal experiences are the standard of the credible – and if I do assume this, there is an end to all correction of expectations – it is a petitio principii [ a begging of the question] to say that there is ‘uniform experience’ against any event to which any man claims to be able

to testify”. Ch9,

p336

Vardy’s discussion – 14 MAURICE WILES

In his 1986 SCM book of his Bampton Lectures, God’s action in the world, Wiles claimed that there is only one act of God encompassing the world as a whole. Wiles says that God never intervenes in the world by individual acts. He says that even if God did miracles, understood as interventions, they would be rare and should not be relatively arbitrary or trivial. But given that God appears not to have been concerned enough to stop major atrocities, miracles as reported infer a strange and debased idea of God, not worthy of our worship!

Vardy’s discussion – 15 MAURICE WILES

Thus Wiles is raising a moral objection to the notion of a God whose miraculous interventions are seemingly arbitrary and focussed on relatively trivial matters. He also doubts, along with Brian Hebblethwaite, that miracles are consistent with a mature response to the problem of evil. This requires that God maintains the stable structures of creation, and also thereby answers the question of why God does not do more to alleviate suffering if he is able to do so.

Vardy’s discussion – 16 MAURICE WILES

Wiles and other theologians assume that we can rationally understand the ways of God – operating within the Kantian tradition of “religion within the limits of reason alone.” Vardy points to Paul’s preaching of “Christ crucified … foolishness to the Greeks (philosophers, see 1 Corinthinans 1)”, and suggests that God is beyond our apprehension and irreducible to human constructs, at least in significant measure.

Vardy’s discussion – 17 MAURICE WILES – useful quotations

“The world as a whole as a single act of God”“There are no good grounds for speaking of particular divine actions with respect to particular

phenomena”“..it would be strange that no miraculous intervention prevented Auschwitz or Hiroshima,

while the purposes apparently forwarded by some of the miracles acclaimed in traditional Christian faith seem trivial by comparison.”

Wiles would “deny God the freedom to act without causal restraint in the world.”Wiles sees, “no reason for the Christian believer to affirm any sort of direct divine intervention

in the natural order and good reasons for not doing so.”An interventionist God for Wiles is, “both implausible and full of difficulty for a reasoned

Christian faith.”“Why does God not intervene more often?” Hebblethwaite

So what do you think?

And of some importance as you approach the examination, do you know the material well enough to be able to answer any question thrown at you?