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Objection 07 · Hume's argument

Miracles don't happen.

The objection, in full

A miracle is by definition a violation of natural law. Our evidence for natural law is the uniform experience of every observer, ever. Our evidence for any specific miracle is at most a few testimonies, often centuries old, transmitted through religious communities motivated to preserve them. Bayesian arithmetic does the rest.

No 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 endeavours to establish.
— David Hume

or, in plain terms —Nobody rises from the dead. Period.

The Logician
cold reason, syllogism

Hume assumed his conclusion.

The argument: miracles are very improbable; testimony for miracles is more probably false than the miracle is true; therefore reject all miracle reports. But "miracles are very improbable" is a probability conditional on no God. The whole argument is conditional on the conclusion.

On the assumption that there is a God who acts in history, the prior on miracles in connection with that history is not vanishingly small. It is exactly what you'd expect.

The question therefore reduces to: is there a God? Hume hasn't shown there isn't. He has only shown that if there isn't, miracles don't happen.

Citations Earman, Hume's Abject Failure (2000) · Swinburne, The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003)
Ad maiorem Dei gloriam