You are not currently logged in. Please create an account or log in to view the full course.
Conceptualising Miracles
- About
- Transcript
- Cite
Miracles – Philosophical Perspectives
In this course Dr Arif Ahmed (University of Cambridge) explores philosophical perspectives on miracles, with special reference to David Hume. In the first module we look at different ideas about the nature of a miracle, and introduce Hume’s argument. After that, in the second module we examine Hume’s famous argument against witness testimony as evidence for miracles. In the third module, we evaluate some objections to Hume’s argument and explore Hume’s case for the likelihood of miracle stories. In the fourth module we examine the impact of divergent religions and multiple witnesses on Hume’s account of testimony. In the fifth module, we look at responses to the independent witness argument; before turning to Maurice Wiles’ take on miracles and deism in the sixth lecture. In the seventh and final lecture, we investigate further philosophical problems concerning our understanding of what constitutes a law of nature, as well as the miracles in relation to free will and fideism.
Conceptualising Miracles
In this module, we examine different understandings of a miracle, focusing particularly on (i) Voltaire’s weak and strong senses of a miracle (i) Hume’s idea of a miracle as an unusual, improbable event or prodigy (ii) the theological conception of a miracle as divine intervention (iii) the importance of miracles as prodigies for Hume’s argument (iv) depictions of miracles in religious documents (v) the epistemological character of Hume’s argument.
Hello.
00:00:06My name's Aref Ahmed and I teach philosophy at the University
00:00:06of Cambridge and today I'm going to be talking about miracles.
00:00:10And in fact, I'll be talking about philosophical issues to do with miracles.
00:00:15And I'll be focusing on what's probably the most important
00:00:18and most successful item in the philosophical literature or miracles.
00:00:22And that's the essay by David Hume on Miracles,
00:00:26which actually also appeared as Chapter 11
00:00:29of his inquiry concerning human understanding.
00:00:31Um, in this lecture,
00:00:34I'll be focusing on questions to do with what we mean by a miracle,
00:00:36and I'll say a little bit about what you meant and what other people meant.
00:00:40Um,
00:00:43and then I'll talk about some examples of
00:00:44that and how that connects with the religious
00:00:46questions that human others have always been interested
00:00:48in ever since people started talking about miracles.
00:00:51So what do we mean by a miracle?
00:00:55Now, here I should probably start by making a general philosophical point,
00:00:57which is that in philosophy is often very easy
00:01:00to get bogged down in pointless semantic dispute.
00:01:03So you can have a dispute, or is this really causation,
00:01:05or is that really what we mean by God Or is this really what we mean by a person?
00:01:07But a lot of the time these disputes,
00:01:13I think pointless because as long as you keep track of different
00:01:15things that people can mean or have been meant at different times,
00:01:18and as long as you're consistent about it,
00:01:21I think you can have a productive discussion.
00:01:22So that's the approach I'm going to follow today.
00:01:26I'm going to say a bit about different things
00:01:28that people have meant at different times by miracle,
00:01:29and then give you a sense of which of those senses of the notion Hume's argument
00:01:32was directed against which of those senses relevant in a biblical context and so on.
00:01:36Um, in his philosophical dictionary, Voltaire distinguishes two sorts of senses.
00:01:41What you might call the strong and weak sense of
00:01:46what it is for something to be a miracle.
00:01:48Um,
00:01:51in the weeks sense, a miracle is just something admirable.
00:01:52So if you think about, for instance,
00:01:55the galaxy and all the stars in it, or the arrangement of the planets,
00:01:57or if you think about some beautiful building or beautiful symphony, you could,
00:02:01in a loose sense, say that there was something miraculous about those things,
00:02:06So that's a very weak and relatively un interesting
00:02:09sense in which we can use the word miracle.
00:02:13The stronger sense,
00:02:17which was certainly closer to what Hume had in mind was
00:02:18that a miracle is a violation of a law of nature.
00:02:22Um, now, of course, this raises questions about what cancer is a law of nature,
00:02:25and Hume himself had a lot to say about that.
00:02:29This isn't the place where I'll be discussing that at great length,
00:02:31but roughly speaking, we can say that a law of nature is by thinking about examples.
00:02:34So we have examples.
00:02:38We know examples like Newton's laws of nature, which are not quite right,
00:02:39but sort of right.
00:02:43And then we think about the laws of quantum mechanics, those laws of physics,
00:02:44which probably the best laws that we have have.
00:02:47We have the laws of biology, laws of natural selection,
00:02:49perhaps even laws of social science.
00:02:52And when we talk about miracles,
00:02:55I think in the strong sense we're getting closer to
00:02:57something like a violation of laws of physical science,
00:02:59so that if you look at examples of miracles, you'll see what I mean.
00:03:02if to take a more fanciful example,
00:03:07my head just suddenly turn into a lion's head and I started roaring.
00:03:09That would be a miracle in the sense that
00:03:14it was violating probably some law of biology,
00:03:15laws of physics and so on.
00:03:17Other examples.
00:03:19Examples from the Bible include, for instance, people walking on water,
00:03:20people coming back from the dead and so on.
00:03:23So those are examples where it seems that pretty clearly
00:03:25anything we were counted, law of nature has been violated.
00:03:28So that's the second sense of a miracle
00:03:31that has been current.
00:03:34There are other senses of miracles as well.
00:03:37So a third sense of what's meant by a miracle, um,
00:03:39is one that one that we find in human but also in Senator Augustine.
00:03:43And this is what ST Augustine once called and
00:03:48Hume on a number of occasions called a prodigy.
00:03:50So a prodigy for Hume is just something very unusual or improbable.
00:03:53So an example would be, for instance,
00:03:57supposing I was dealing out a pack of cards and
00:03:59I dealt four perfect hands where each hand was in.
00:04:02You know, 13 cars have given suit.
00:04:04Uh, we're supposed to toss a coin 400 times and it was fair.
00:04:07But the coin landed heads or 400 times.
00:04:10That would be a really unusual, improbable event.
00:04:12It wouldn't violate a law of nature.
00:04:14There's nothing in the laws of physics or anything else that says I
00:04:16couldn't make that deal with the cards or those tosses with the coins.
00:04:19But it would nevertheless be a very unusual, improbable event.
00:04:22And in that sense what Hume would have called apology.
00:04:26And that's the third sense in which we can say that something is,
00:04:28if you like miraculous.
00:04:31Fourth sense of a miracle is one that we find in Saint Thomas Aquinas.
00:04:33The assume does allude to it from time to time,
00:04:37which is that a miracle is the intervention of a deity,
00:04:39Um, now a miracle.
00:04:43In that sense,
00:04:44that is something which the direct action of God or intervention of God in
00:04:45the course of events needn't be a violation of the laws of nature.
00:04:49So Saint Thomas Aquinas gives an example.
00:04:53For instance, when he says,
00:04:55I think a man who's sick might become well through divine intervention,
00:04:56even though he would have got well anyway, perhaps no longer period of time.
00:05:00If nature had been left to take its course
00:05:03or there might be rain in a certain area and rain,
00:05:05it doesn't violate any law of nature.
00:05:08But it could still be that God brought about rain on that occasion.
00:05:10So a miracle in that sort of intervention sense
00:05:13isn't something that would necessarily violate the laws of nature,
00:05:16although it seems that according for Thomas, the most
00:05:20interesting and serious and revelatory miracles
00:05:23were ones that also violated miracles.
00:05:26For instance,
00:05:28if the sun were to stand still or stand still and it's called in the skies,
00:05:29it seems to us or to travel in a different direction.
00:05:33So there's a four different senses of Miracle.
00:05:36Just to reiterate what they are, there's the vault is weak sense,
00:05:39which is just something admirable.
00:05:42There's both a strong sense, which is a violation of the laws of nature.
00:05:44There's humans prodigies, which are things which are very unusual or improbable.
00:05:49And then there's ST Thomas's, uh, miracles,
00:05:54which were divine interventions into the cause of nature.
00:05:57So when we ask our miracles possible,
00:06:02or how can we possibly know that miracles have happened, or why do miracles matter?
00:06:04We need to be clear.
00:06:07Which of those four sensors we have in mind,
00:06:09and probably the one that people most often talk about,
00:06:10is the second one violations of laws of nature.
00:06:13Having said that, it's important to bear in mind that for Hume's argument,
00:06:16or at least as I'm presenting it,
00:06:20Hume's argument is perhaps best understood as being
00:06:22directed against the third sense of Miracle,
00:06:25the sense of Prodigy.
00:06:27So, in fact, it seems that Hume's argument, as we'll see,
00:06:28can tell us something.
00:06:31And in fact, I think, when properly understood it spectacularly successful.
00:06:32It tells us something interesting and not obvious about prodigies in
00:06:35the sense of events that are very unusual or likely,
00:06:39even if they're not violations of laws of nature.
00:06:42Now, when we look at actual examples of laws of nature,
00:06:45sorry of miracles in the Bible or elsewhere.
00:06:48So the sorts of examples that have been important for people when we think about
00:06:51religion will see that actually they fall
00:06:55under a number of these different definitions.
00:06:57So for those purposes doesn't necessarily matter too
00:06:59much which definition we pick up on.
00:07:01So if you look at, for instance, the old testament.
00:07:03Examples of miracles from the Old Testament include
00:07:05the smiling of the first born of Egypt in the time of Moses.
00:07:08The parting of the Red Sea at the same time,
00:07:13vary the smiling of various enemies of Israel, whoever they happen to be at the time,
00:07:16the consumption by fire of various people.
00:07:19Uh,
00:07:22the occasion where Samuel spoke to a ghost with
00:07:23which of indoor various miracles that occur throughout.
00:07:27And that was flooded.
00:07:29So various miracles,
00:07:30I'm sure you'll be able to think of dozens
00:07:31more that we find attested to in the Old Testament
00:07:32in the New Testament.
00:07:36The entire Christian religion is of course, founded upon one central miracle,
00:07:38which was Jesus' resurrection.
00:07:41But there are other miracles that occurred in the New Testament, which have,
00:07:43I guess, kind of secondary importance.
00:07:48So, for instance, if you think about miracles of healing by Jesus,
00:07:49raising of Lazarus and so on curing the lame,
00:07:54um perhaps also speaking in tongues will be regarded as a miracle of some kind.
00:07:56So these are miracles that we find in the Christian doctrine.
00:08:01Islam itself didn't regard Jesus, obviously the way that Christians do,
00:08:05but it does still have space for a notion of miracle.
00:08:10So the Koran itself is supposed to be miraculous,
00:08:13and the provenance of the Koran was miraculous because
00:08:16the Koran was revealed to Muhammad by an angel.
00:08:19And it was the miraculous of appearance of an angel
00:08:21who brought about the basis for the Islamic religion.
00:08:23So there is a miracle, perhaps not the same type as in Christianity.
00:08:28But there is a kind of miracle at the heart of Islam as well.
00:08:31And as you'll see from these examples, and it's always good,
00:08:35I think when you're thinking about miracles already do anything else
00:08:38in philosophy to focus whenever you can on concrete examples.
00:08:40When you think about these examples,
00:08:43you'll see that many of them actually fall under a number of these definitions.
00:08:45So if we take, you know,
00:08:49the one that probably was foremost in humans mind which is the resurrection, um,
00:08:51the central miracle of Christianity that would count
00:08:55as a violation of laws of nature.
00:08:59It would count as something admirable.
00:09:00It would count as something that was very unusual or improbable, Um,
00:09:02and it would also count, as you would think,
00:09:06divine intervention into the course of nature.
00:09:10So in all of those senses, it's a miracle.
00:09:13Having said that,
00:09:15the argument that I'm going to discuss Hume's argument
00:09:16will be focused more on the Prodigy sense.
00:09:19So it will be focused more on the sense
00:09:24of miracles as events that are highly improbable,
00:09:25though of course,
00:09:28it will also be relevant to talk a bit about
00:09:29events that are violations of the laws of nature.
00:09:31Before closing this section,
00:09:35I'm just going to say a little bit about what
00:09:36Hume's argument is going to be and what it shows.
00:09:39So Hume's argument is not that miracles in any of these senses are impossible.
00:09:42Hume does not argue that they could never be a violation of the laws of nature.
00:09:46They could never be an unusual event, anything admirable or divine intervention.
00:09:50Hume's argument is rather what you might call
00:09:55an epistemological rather than a metaphysical arguments.
00:09:57So he's arguing that
00:10:00the sorts of sources of knowledge that we have of miracles,
00:10:02by their very nature cannot give us knowledge that miracles occurred.
00:10:07Indeed, by their very nature, they make it sensible not to believe them, Um,
00:10:11and that's going to be very important to keep that in
00:10:15mind when we try to understand the focus of humans argument.
00:10:17So, as I said, I think it's it's a spectacular argument.
00:10:21It's It's the most important contribution to the literature
00:10:23and amazingly for for such an enormous contribution to the subject.
00:10:26It's really simple and can be stated very straightforwardly.
00:10:31So in the next lecture, I shall give you a basic outline of what human argument is.
00:10:34
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Ahmed, A. (2022, April 21). Miracles – Philosophical Perspectives - Conceptualising Miracles [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/miracles-philosophical-perspectives
MLA style
Ahmed, A. "Miracles – Philosophical Perspectives – Conceptualising Miracles." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 21 Apr 2022, https://massolit.io/courses/miracles-philosophical-perspectives