I didn’t want to write a post on Joe Schmid’s conversion to Catholicism. I’m fine with Schmid1 converting to whatever religion he wants, so long as he’s a nice person.
Unfortunately, Schmid confirmed a lot of my suspicions about him in his most recent video on his arguments for miracles. Namely, I think he’s absorbed many arguments against theism/in favor of atheism/skepticism via meme and not from the actual proponents of the arguments.
This may seem like I’m punching above my weight; no doubt Joe Schmid knows more about philosophy of religion arguments than I do. But still, I would wager that I’ve done more research on Hume’s argument than Schmid has.
What’s more, the best skeptical arguments don’t come from philosophy of religion, but philosophy of science. Having observed the online philosophy debate space for a while now, it’s obvious to me that nontheistic philosophers2 don’t use these arguments against miracles or the supernatural in their debates. Now, I don’t think that’s because these philosophers are unaware of these arguments, but because philosophy of religion has different methodologies, and they just don’t come up.3 Thus watching philosophy of religion debates ends up being this weird, bizarro world where the most potent skeptical arguments against theism are, weirdly nowhere in sight, with the proper terms of debate completely confused.
This culminates in no one talking about David Hume’s argument on miracles (which by itself isn’t bad), and when it is brought up, it’s completely misunderstood to the point of misinformation (that is really bad!). Combine that with clickbaiting YouTube algorithms, and a critical mass of the top videos on Hume are misinformation by virtue of Christian Apologists completely misunderstanding the argument.
Joe Schmid fell victim to his misinformation. This post exists to correct the record, even though Schmid’s video will no doubt reach more people by an order of magnitude.
This Post Title Is Not Bait
Before I begin, I want to reiterate that the title of this post is not clickbait. Joe Schmid is objectively wrong about David Hume’s miracle argument. The error he makes is in misunderstanding the text of the argument, and thus the reasoning of the argument. The sources he cites and relies upon in the Hume section of his video also rely on similar misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Put another way: Hume may be right or he may be wrong, but Schmid’s rebuttal is completely irrelevant because he does not address the actual argument.
To reiterate: this is not a matter of opinion. The interpretation I’m going to explain is the consensus of Hume scholars ranging from Bill Vanderburgh, Roger Fogelin, and others. Pretty much no one who studies Hume for a living agrees with Schmid’s interpretation of Hume.
To use a metaphor, this is like arguing over the plain text of the Bible because of its theological implications. Theologians may disagree on the theological implications of a text, but they generally come to consensus on the reading of the plain text. Schmid and Hume opponents don’t even understand the plain text.
I’m Not Going Over Hume’s Argument In Full Here
Normally, I like to tableset with an overview of what Hume’s argument on miracles actually says and actually means. However! I have already done this so many times that it’s getting repetitive. In fact, I wrote a post earlier this week where I basically put the argument in a bulleted format. You can find that post here:
You can also find my two general explanations of Hume’s argument below, as well as a list of other posts clearing up misconceptions about Hume. If you’re curious where I’m sourcing my commentary on this post, it’s those posts, which themselves cite primary and secondary sources.
This may seem convoluted, but at this point, I’ve repeated myself so many times that I’m not wasting my or anyone else’s time by repeating the entire argument again.
The Many Errors of Joe Schmid
(If you couldn’t tell, I’m responding to the section of this video that starts at 14:56 or so)
Error #1: “What Uniform Experience?”
Schmid’s first problem is misunderstanding Hume’s methodology and how that methodology influences formulations of probability, the evidence we accept as permissible, and other things.
Schmid asserts that Hume assumes from the get go that there’s nothing to the various miracle reports throughout history. As I’ve written before, this is not true.
The part of Hume’s argument Schmid objects to is the part in section one referred to as Hume’s maxim, which says:
“That 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; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.”
To understand why Hume doesn’t spend that much time defending this maxim, we have to look at the overall structure of his essay and how philosophical writing in the 18th century differed from today
First, If I were to summarize the text of Hume essay, it would be this:
The standard of evidence for overturning the laws of nature is high
Because of its high probability of error, eyewitness testimony does not meet that standard
Because of the corrupting nature of religious belief on testimony in particular, religious testimony especially doesn’t meet that standard.
Given that the only evidence we have for revealed religion today is testimony, a wise person who looks at the probabilities and the quality of evidence, should not believe in religious miracles on testimony and thus not revealed religion.
Second, Hume’s essay Of Miracles is not like a modern work of scholarship where there’s peer reviewed citation ad nauseum in the footnotes. This was a chapter in a book that doesn’t collectively build to a climax or conclusion, but it is more like an anthology of essays where details of his reasoning in one place are elaborated upon elsewhere. I mean, after all, Of Miracles was not included in the original edition.
In this way, Hume doesn’t elaborate on his maxim that much because he elaborates on his theory of probability in other places, and the maxim is not the conclusion of the essay! Rather, the point and conclusion of the essay is about rejecting revealed religion.
Again, this may seem like pedantry, but it’s relevant to understand Hume’s formulation of probability and Schmid’s confusion. I explain this formulation in various places, one of which you can find here:
For Hume, assuming a uniform experience is foundational to forming probabilities. As he says:
“It seems evident, that, if all the scenes of nature were continually shifted in such a manner, that no two events bore any resemblance to each other, but every object was entirely new, without any similitude to whatever had been seen before, we should never, in that case, have attained the least idea of necessity, or of a connexion among these objects. We might say, upon such a supposition, that one object or event has followed another; not that one was produced by the other. The relation of cause and effect must be utterly unknown to mankind. Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and the memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind. Our idea, therefore, of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity, or connexion.”
In the context of his argument on miracles and his general philosophy, he excludes assuming miraculous things happen because that’s the point of the investigation in the first place! He’s not saying a priori that the miracles don’t happen, but making as few assumptions as possible to formulate a basic probability to help determine if miracles happen.
A common theme throughout this piece, criticisms of Hume, and arguments about miracles in the first place, is that miracle advocates will say something along the lines of Well if you assume miracles can happen or God is real, the evidence for their existence supports this probability.
For Hume and skeptics such as myself this is trivial and circular. Of course miracles can happen if you assume they happen!
A common theme of Hume’s work is trying to see if we can connect natural philosophy or theology with revealed (religious) theology. To get to that point, you have to exclude religious assumptions and have a bare bones naturalistic framework, and that’s what Hume does.4
So when theists complain that Hume presupposes naturalism while not making the effort to accurately understand and rebut his actual arguments, they’re basically conceding that Hume is right. It’s a little silly to say Hume is dogmatically excluding the supernatural when he’s assuming an austere naturalistic framework in order to examine if we can go from that naturalistic framework to revealed religion.
To clarify one more time to avoid the appearance of contradiction: Hume is not being circular or defining the supernatural out of existence or assuming a priori that the supernatural is impossible. No, he’s taking an austere naturalistic framework that makes minimal (arguably no) ontological assumptions (as he would assume a wise neutral observer evaluating religious miracles would) and seeing if it’s probable and rational to believe in miracles.
I could actually be forgiving of Schmid and others for their misreadings here, but unfortunately his readings get much worse.
Also, I’m skipping the section of Noah McKay’s clip because it’s just really bad and I actually know something about this. But it’s not relevant to this post as much.5
Error #2: Hume’s Argument Doesn’t Lead To Absurdities, You Just Revised It To Make Him Look Bad
No need to go in depth in this section. Schmid just straight up misapplies Hume’s maxim. He says:
“Specifically, if the argument worked, then it would imply that awesome, miraculous evidence should never convince us of a miracle” (17:50ish)
I’m sorry, but where in the hell does Hume say that? Let’s repeat Hume’s maxim, for those of you with poor memory:
“That 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; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.”
Where does Hume say that we should reject all awesome miraculous evidence? Or all evidence period? He’s just talking about testimony!
Hume doesn’t explain it as directly as I do, but testimony in general is inferior to other forms of evidence because we have to make inferences about its accuracy and intention on top of the attested data. For Hume, religious testimony is inferior to even regular testimony when it comes to miracles because of the long documented negative influence religion has on testifying for miracles.
How does the maxim lead to the categorical rejection of all evidence for miracles? Schmid does not say, he just asserts it. He then comes up with all of these absurd scenarios of people observing miracles or having data supporting miracles that isn’t testimony and saying the skeptic/Humean would reject them.
It’s abundantly clear that this is a straw man. Schmid is echoing another common Christian/miracle advocate tactic to straight up revise Hume’s words to make them sound sillier, absurd, and erroneous. It’s dishonest and it’s below the expectations we should have for a philosopher of Schmid’s quality.
Error #3: Begging The Question
After his strawman of Hume’s maxim, Schmid begs the question as I describe for Error #1. I won’t repeat that here.
Error #4: A Misleading Probability Comparison
While making his question-begging argument, he makes the point that supernatural claims can be more probable than naturalistic ones, such as whacky conspiracy theories. This is exactly why we have Hume’s maxim in the first place! Because even if you believe in miracles, they’re probably rarer than people making mistakes or lying. Heck, they’re even more rare than conspiracies! So again, this argument only works if you smuggle in the assumption of supernaturalism in the first place, which is an error.
Schmid continues with a weird digression in his third argument that also makes a combination of these errors, and I’ll just group that in here because I don’t have more to say that isn’t redundant.
Error #5: Misunderstanding Hume’s Probability
Quoting from his paper on screen (man, maybe I should have been doing that all this time?), Schmid says:
”…the fact that nature generally operates uniformly according to laws of nature is, contra Hume, not good evidence against the existence of miracles, since the hypothesis that miracles occur actually predicts this.”
First of all, Hume does not say or imply in any manner that “nature generally operating uniformly according to laws of nature is good evidence against the existence of miracles,” nor does his philosophy imply anything of the sort.
For Hume, the fact that nature is uniform is the backbone for how we formulate probability. We cannot formulate (actionable) probability without the uniformity of nature. It is from that uniform experience, that we can observe uniform conjunctive events without deviation that we can formulate natural laws.
Neither the uniformity of nature nor the highly attested confidence in our natural laws predicts that miracles don’t happen. In fact, there is no prediction at all!
To reiterate what I’ve written previously, Hume’s argument is an a posteriori argument. It’s an argument based on matters of fact, not a priori logic. There are parts of his argument, that, if the empirical/observed facts of the matter were different, his argument would not work.
It could be the case that we lived in a universe where all we had were probabilistic laws that were not so uniform as the laws of nature we see today. But as a matter of fact, we don’t. We live in a universe with laws that are so abundantly and uniformly attested to, with no credible contravening observations. This testament is so abundant that on the rare occurrence someone says they saw a deviation, the probability of eye witnesses’ error is beyond exponentially more likely! You are acting rationally by denying the witness!
In this way, Hume’s argument does make predictions, but they’re predictions about human behavior, not on the nature of miracles. Again, his argument is epistemic, not ontological!
Hume doesn’t predict that miracles don’t happen. Rather, he predicts all testimony for miracles is bad and less likely to be true than the uniformity of nature (a prediction in my experience, checks out).
The rest of his fourth argument is continued question begging and ontological speculation that Hume doesn’t care about or talk about, so I’ll move along.
Error #6 Oh My God, Shut The Fuck Up About John Earman
Schmid continues by playing a long clip by Tim McGrew which basically commits the same mistakes that Schmid has been making and so I’m not even going to address much of them specifically here (again: Hume’s argument does not close off the possibility of miracles, it’s not an ontological argument, his translation of Hume is wrong, etc.)
What I do want to discuss is the shameless appeal to John Earman, the agnostic statistician who wrote Hume’s Abject Failure before many people reading this post could read anything period (but I could! Ha), let alone read philosophy. Earman is the archetypal example of the trope of an apologist appealing to a non-religious authority with no regard for truth.
To be clear, I don’t want to smear Earman, but I will point out that he was catastrophically wrong about Hume. From what I’ve read from Hume scholars, the reception to Earman when he first published Hume’s Abject Failure was that it was so bad that it was almost not worth responding to. He just got basic aspects of his philosophy wrong.
Thankfully, many people, such as Vanderburgh and Millican wrote articles refuting Earman. I wish I could give you a full overview of how Earman got Hume wrong, but that deserves its own post. The short summary is that Earman projected Bayesian assumptions on Hume’s argument that were anachronistic. He also completely misunderstood Hume’s argument, to the point where he made up concepts like “Hume’s Straight Rule of Probability” which were fake.6
Now, there is a nuanced true criticism of Hume that Earman put forward, but it’s not really relevant here, and it doesn’t undermine Hume’s core argument. Millican’s piece does a good job of revising Hume’s maxim to be more in line with Bayesian probability. But considering Hume’s argument wasn’t a Bayesian one in the first place (but weighted probability comparing two mutually exclusive hypotheses), among other reasons, it’s good enough.
Again! This is nuance! But I guarantee you that Schmid and other apologists who smirk and say “Read John Earman” have not actually read responses to John Earman. It’s just considered a truism in apologetic circles that Earman refuted Hume because that talking point made its way into William Lane Craig’s stump speech. No one really follows up to see if what Earman said was true or in line with the correct readings of Hume because they don’t care about the truth or seeking falsifying information.
To be clear here, I think Schmid is motivated to find the truth more than the average theist, he just lives in this pro-theistic, anti-skepticism echo chamber (see my criticisms of philosophy of religion not promoting skeptical arguments) and absorbed this by osmosis. That doesn’t make it right, and I’m calling it out.
Bonus Error
Okay, I’m kind of mailing it in on this section, as I’ve been successfully nerd sniped. I want to get this post out tonight as I have work tomorrow morning. When I first listened to this video clip (I didn’t watch the whole video) I was stun locked to the point that I didn’t notice the final error that Schmid made, that Matt Whiteley pointed out to me:
At this point, I think I’ve made the case abundantly clear that Joe Schmid has no idea what the hell Hume’s argument is. He’s not being inconsistent for dismissing both Catholic and Protestant miracles. In fact, he even explains how miracles are mutually destructive of each other in both their “impossible” probabilities given the impoverished nature of their testimony. I would say more, but I’ve already said so much, so I will refer you to my various posts already written.
Closing Thoughts
Joe Schmid does not understand David Hume’s argument on miracles, nor do most popular theists and Christian Apologists. This is not a matter of interpretation, but of a clear understanding of the text. It’s exhausting to seemingly be the only person committed to the truth of the matter.
I don’t actually care if you believe in miracles. I care if you believe that it’s irrational to believe there is reasonable doubt here, because you’re calling me irrational (as well as a rich philosophical tradition that’s informed both science and philosophy for centuries). I care if you believe that there’s no reasonable doubt, and as a result, that we should all become Traditionalist Catholics, which would be a catastrophe for reason and society. We’ve run that experiment before.
In the past, I’ve written about the political project of Christian Apologetics and why I oppose it, even if God is real. I’m happy for people when they find faith. My parents are ministers, my wife prays Hail Marys on most days, some of my best friends are Christian, and I imagine they believe in miracles.
But the sleep of reason produces madness, and I fear some of us have dozed off.
I would informally call him “Joe” in this post, but to my psychology *I* am Joe, so it just doesn’t work out.
Like Alex Malpass or Dan Linford
Not least which because Humean arguments essentially shut down the conversation for theists, who are at least a plurality of those who self-select into the field.
As a result of his explorations on religion, Hume doesn’t think you can actually bridge the gap between natural and revealed religion.
His polling data of doctors at religious hospitals is just an egregiously bad use of polling and social science. If you’re going to run a study such as that, you have to make sure that the sample is representative of the general population. There are lots of religious doctors! You also have to be very specific about your definition of miracle in that data. I suspect that, unlike McKay and Schmid, I have actually taken more than one graduate level course on collecting and interpreting survey data, so this is something I’m actually familiar with.
I basically refuted Hume’s straight rule of probability in error 5, for what it’s worth.
I only remember Schmid from his arguments in favor of infinite causality to disprove the necessity of a "first cause" or "prime mover" - more of the realm of arguing over the generalize god-of-the-philosophers.
For him to suddenly pivot to the miracle discourse is odd, but then philosophers are not immune to rationalizing themselves into any possible position. Maybe it's the former Catholic in me but when I listen to the miracle apologists or Thomists I just see it as so much assumption-laden rationalizations, often accompanied with giant walls of text or Latin phrases clearly intended to impress.
"To reiterate what I’ve written previously, Hume’s argument is an a posteriori argument. It’s an argument based on matters of fact, not a priori logic. "
To me this is why so many of the Princeton philosophy crew are throwing up continual air balls on the subject of religion and miracles; philosophy as taught seems to always have to start with some standard set of hard-set logical assumptions; it doesn't like just starting from a bare minimum based on observed reality. Which is a real thing; unless one wants to be a clown "well is observed reality reliant on assumptions?" and get into the whole dumb-fu^& "are we in a simulator" debate which ugh I can't stand that bullshit. Honestly there's no way I could last in a Phil PHD program I'd end up at some point tipping over 10 desks and storming out.