Philosophy 1600 - Honors Seminar

 

Topic 5: Miracles and Revelation

John L. Mackie's Discussion of Miracles

1. The Purpose of the Appeal to Miracles

Mackie observes that one may appeal to miracles to establish two different sorts of claims:

(1) The general claim that there is at least one supernatural being that has the power to intervene in the natural world, and who occasionally does so

(2) The claim that some particular religion is true, or that some particular individual either is an authoritative source of religious truth, or has special powers, or both.

2. Hume's Discussion of Miracles

The main points that Mackie makes about Hume's discussion are as follows:

(1) Hume does not claim either that miracles cannot happen, or that, in fact, they never have happened.

(2) Hume's claim is rather an epistemological one concerning the difficulty of one's ever being justified in believing that a miracle has taken place.

(3) Hume's argument rests upon principles concerning the rational acceptance of testimony.

(4) It is not always necessary to go back to such basic principles: ordinarily, we can simply accept what people say, unless there is reason to think that the person is lying, or was not in a position to know, etc. But in the case of miracles we do need to go back to the basic principles for assessing the force of testimony.

(5) Hume did not have a very satisfactory idea of laws of nature, viewing them as mere regularities, and so did not have a very satisfactory picture of what is involved in establishing laws. (Mackie refers to John Stuart Mill's 'method of difference'.)

(6) In particular, Hume did not have a sufficient appreciation of the difficulty of moving from a claim about all observed cases to a universal claim about all cases, and so he tended to talk of their being a proof when such talk was not justified.

3. The Coherence of the Idea of a Miracle

Mackie sets out an a priori argument against the possibility of miracles, and then shows that that argument is unsound by arguing that the concept of a miracle is a coherent concept:

(1) We can make sense of the idea of there being ways in which the world works, where this covers both laws governing causal interactions, and the ways in which persist through time.

(2) We can view these laws as dealing with how things work in a closed system, and so we can make sense of the idea that things need not proceed in accordance with those laws if the system was not a closed one, and there was, instead, intervention from without.

(3) The idea of a violation of a law of nature is thus that of a case where the natural world is not a closed system.

(4) The idea of a violation of a law of nature is applicable in the case of probabilistic laws as well as in the case of deterministic laws, and the epistemological situation is not really very different in the two cases.

4. The Importance of the Concept of Independent Testimony

Mackie argues that there is a crucial question concerning testimony that Hume failed to focus upon - the question, namely, of whether the testimony in question involves independent witnesses.

(1) In the case where one has the testimony of only one person, it is not difficult to set out quite probable hypotheses that imply that the testimony is inaccurate

(2) Once one has two or more witnesses, it becomes much more difficult to formulate plausible explanations of the testimony's being erroneous, unless the witnesses are not in fact independent, and either the testimony of one is based upon the testimony of the other, or they both go back to a common source. For if they are independent, then one may well have a coincidence that is very unlikely if the event to which they testify did not in fact take place.

(3) A crucial question that one always need to raise, accordingly, when one is confronted with testimony from more than one person to a purported miracle is whether the witnesses are independent witnesses or not.

5. Two Responses to a Given Miracle Claim: The 'Fork' Strategy

Mackie points out that the person who wants to challenge a claim that a miracle has taken place can do so in two ways:

(1) One possibility is to argue that what purportedly happened is not really contrary to any law of nature. (Mackie mentions the case of psychosomatic illness.)

(2) The other possibility is to argue that since the event would have been contrary to a law of nature, it is therefore extremely improbable that it took place, and so it is very unlikely that the testimony is strong enough to overcome that improbability.

(3) Mackie emphasizes that in some cases the first strategy will be the stronger one, and in other cases it is clearly the second that must be adopted.

(4) Mackie thinks that it is very difficult to advance a claim that a miracle has taken place that will not succumb to one or other of these objections.

6. Two Contexts for the Discussion of Miracle Claims

Mackie distinguishes two contexts in which miracle claims may arise:

(1) There is the context in which both people believe that there is at least one supernatural being who has the power to intervene in the natural world, and a disposition to do so.

(2) There is the context in which at least one of the people is an agnostic.

(3) Mackie says that in the case of the second context, "From this point of view, the intrinsic improbability of a genuine miracle, as defined above, is very great, and one or other of the alternative explanations in our fork will always be much more likely - that is, either the alleged event is not miraculous, or that it did not occur, that the testimony is faulty in some way." (321)