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.
Hume merely says "I don't know if I'm in a simulation or am being systemically deceived by a demon. I can only go with what I have." And thus creates his mitigated skeptic philosophy
I don't mind that they're trying stuff, I just feel like they're stuck in argumentative spirals that, with each new paper, removes their arguments further from reality. Not all philosophy departments are like that ;-)
This is a nice essay. It’s making me think that philosophy of religion—at least the popular online kind—should do more to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to being interdisciplinary. I’ve always thought Phil religion is cool largely because you need to draw on so many different fields of philosophy to do it well, but like I can’t say I’ve ever watched a Phil religion video where the host brought on a Hume scholar to contribute to a miracle discussion. Would be cool to see more of that kind of thing.
I'm a bit confused by the first error. You say "To get to that point, you have to exclude religious assumptions and have a bare bones naturalistic framework, and that’s what Hume does" and "he’s assuming an austere naturalistic framework in order to examine if we can go from that naturalistic framework to revealed religion". Is that not just conceding that Hume is begging the question as an argument against miracles?
I take it that the best takeaway from "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" and "if you assume miracles can happen or God is real, the evidence for their existence supports this probability...Of course miracles can happen if you assume they happen!" is that any argument either direction, either from naturalism against miracles or from miracles for theism is going to be question-begging.
More importantly, it seems like the "uniform experience" question is one primarily of data, and it's unclear to me how your Hume quotes really change anything about that. Schmid and McKay present evidence that a lot of people claim to have experience of the miraculous, which seems to be evidence against the "uniform experience" claim. Your speculation about this experience being mostly (?) from religious people would be interesting if true, but even if so still provides a bit of a blow to the "uniform experience" claim, I think.
Your 6th error is interesting and good to know. This is why before I ever extensively publicly argue anything about miracles I'm going to have to a deep dive into Hume's argument which I've been avoiding
Let me rewrite a TLDR response from my other argument (pardon me, it’s late). After writing this comment, I’m certain it’s a better answer to your questions:
1) Your first paragraph makes the error of confusing Hume’s maxim and Hume’s argument against miracles. His argument is not against miracles in general, but miracles in support of religion and whether it’s wise to believe in them. His argument against miracles via his maxim relies on a formulation of probability that is elaborated upon mostly separate from the piece, and is the subject of what most people care about when they argue against Hume on miracles. Hume isn’t begging the question, because this probability calculus (that the observed laws of nature were less likely violated in some way balanced against human error, corrupted by motivated reasoning) is true even if miracles happen!
2) Second paragraph: Hume is not a naturalist, but a skeptic. He’s modeling a probabilistic world around him based on instances of observation. In some ways I think the naturalistic/supernaturalistic dichotomy doesn’t help because Hume makes no distinction. There is only what we observe and have evidence for, modeled in a probability. The supernatural as we call it could fit in there, but as a matter of fact we don’t see it.
3) For the third paragraph, the reason why this supposed “evidence” doesn’t work is because of the scarcity of miracle observations, the corruption of the testimony by religious motivation, the absence of independent verification from hostile parties, etc. It wouldn’t make sense to say “we’re arguing over whether miracles happen and to argue for this one we’re going to assume the validity of all these miracle testimonies as background.” No! The whole body of the phenomena is what we’re arguing about, and we should address each claim/observation piece by piece. Again, Hume does not elaborate on this in the text of Of Miracles because this is more predicated on his formulation of probability. He alludes to different principles within the piece (like corroborating testimony, etc) but per the writing style of the era, it’s more circuitous and referential to outside the essay.
That helps, thanks. I think that's a helpful distinction in Hume, I wasn't familiar with it.
Re 3: This seems like it is much too speculative about the body of evidence under debate to be a good ground for a claim about uniform experience. It seems like we're back to begging the question either direction, but maybe I need to understand Hume's formulation of probability and if it has independent motivation and undermines this evidence etc.
so i'll talk about this in my subsequent post, but Hume's maxim is about specific miracle claims, not the body. The essay is more about not believing in religion, given this maxim, the nature of the evidence we have for religions (it's all testimony) and the uniformity of the bad testimony we have. The important point is how bridges the maxim to the rest of his argument with the section (I believe it's part 2) about how bad/corrupted religious testimony for miracles is. In this way, he's not looking at every claim ever, but drawing probabilities (that admittedly look like inferences), given how uniformly bad they are. In other words, he's going beyond generalizing the maxim for his argument and going a step farther and taking down the credibility of purported religious testimony.
Okay, so this is a good question/comment because I can’t remember if I talked about this in depth before (I may have?) but it’s worth repeating.
To start, let’s sequester Hume’s maxim (the one about laws of nature balanced against someone being in error, summarized very briefly as such) and the argument Hume is making.
Hume is arguing (this isn’t a syllogism):
1) the standards of overturning a miracle are high, and due to the nature of testimony, it will never reach that standard by itself
2) The nature of religious testimony is especially bad to the point where it’s considered “impossible,” that is, not even to the point of probability (that it could be weighed against the law of nature)
3) And so, a wise person should not believe in a religious miracle based purely on testimony
4) And yet, all the evidence we have for modern religions is testimony!
5) And so a wise person shouldn’t believe in religion because of miracle testimony.
Another shorter way of saying this is “As a wise person, you wouldn’t believe these people <gestures> who testify for a miracle, so why believe in any religion, because that’s basically all we have”
And so, it’s not really circular. It’s cumulative (not in the sense that it’s a bunch of different arguments, but it’s matters of fact that accumulate)
[I wrote a post on this let me know if you want the link]
Hume’s maxim is basically what Schmid and others are trying to debunk, but they’re confusing/misunderstanding its function in the whole context of the argument (which I allude to in the part you quote). And then they’re turning around and getting that wrong because they don’t understand Hume’s conception of probability (which is not fully present in the essay, but piecemeal throughout Hume’s work).
As for your second paragraph, again the idea is that you cannot come up with good evidence for miracles without presupposing them. For the framework that Hume is using (which isn’t naturalistic, as much as it is austere and skeptical), it could be the case that miracles happen, it’s just that they would function much differently than proponents say they were. The causal mechanisms of miracles would be better understood, the evidence for them would be more than just eye witness testimony, and others. For Hume, this argument is a posteriori/matter of fact in the sense that facts about the observations of miracles could be different, but they just aren’t.
For the third paragraph, as a factual matter, the uniformity of experience is something we both assume (to formulate probabilities) and observe. The problem with miracle testimony is that it fails to amount to probabilities for various reasons, not just because of the corrupting nature of testimony, but because of lacking external evidence, etc.
Finally (I’m not sure how clear I’m going to be here), it’s important to realize that Hume’s maxim is not itself a uniform dismissal of all miracle claims, but a tool to decipher individual ones. He sustains, for that probability calculus and the shortcomings of testimony, that they’ll all fail when examined.
This comes back to the conflation of the maxim with the point of the essay. Going back to sequestering the maxim from the argument, people think its Hume intention in the essay to dismiss miracles in the first section, when the probability calculus is merely the first step to get him to his conclusion about natural religion (#5). So there’s this weird (unintentionally played) game where we’re confusing the maxim from the argument, where people think Hume is saying “you shouldn’t believe in supernatural miracles because of this maxim” when he’s actually saying “you shouldn’t believe in revealed religion based only on testimony and part of my argument is this maxim”
TL;DR: Pardon me if this response wasn’t clear! I guess what I’m trying to say is that people confuse Hume’s maxim and his intention/logic behind it and Hume’s argument and his intention/logic behind it.
Great article! I went back and read On Miracles after hearing Joe talk about it and it was striking just how poorly he reproduced the argument. That miracles assume the laws of nature are accurate is something that David Hume himself said. It’s a central piece of his argument, so I don’t know how that could be missed unless he just didn’t actually read it, which I suspect happened.
He didn’t read it. Most Christian Apologists don’t read it. They read either C.S. Lewis or John Earman’s commentary on it, which is resoundly rejected by Hume scholars for completely missing the point. At this point there’s an artificial hyper-real literature among Christian apologists that just assumes Hume is wrong and says “read Earman!” and it’s so nakedly obvious.
Speaking of philosophy of religion, about one-third into this piece of mine from a few years ago is my definition of what religion is. Based on philosophy of religion and psychology of religion ideas, without mentioning it by name, it includes Buddhism as a religion.
I liked this better than the one I read last night. Maybe shorter or, more probable, because I enjoy rebuttals/refutations. In other news, how come this happens? Meaning, Earman (or anyone) writes something and in its contemporary time it is refuted or even destroyed. Years later it is resurfaced, unrevised(!) as evidence par example, strong criticism and a reference to be reckoned with. Same thing happens all the time either with Earman, or the economic idea formulations of Marx, and many other examples. What is happening??? I always supposed or understood that on each side of an idea the opposing arguments attested time where the ones which transitioned from new to old (in the passage of time) due to the fact that are not entirely refutable and even respected by opposing proponents. If this is not the case we are going to traverse endless circles of meaninglessness. Or is it a modern phenomenon? Or are we just in a time hole (maybe a 50-60 year hole) where this happens but will eventually stop? (Sorry for the long and many questions, please correct anything I 've said wrong) Closing, as a Hume lover -and not afraid to say so- I m "disappointed". I never find anything wrong in your writings...
Great post! The testimony bit is a subtle point, if youd forgive me for the self-promotion, I gestured towards it in my insistence for archaeological evidence rather than testimony for things like Christ's miracles.
I suppose Joe would respond by saying wr have physical evidence for miracles, like photos of fatima or Pio's stigmata. But of course thats pretty sus--as another of my friends pointed out, for instance, the fact that the "high quality" photos of fatima are behind a 250 bux paywall and forbidden to be distributed isnt exactly encouraging.
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.
Hume merely says "I don't know if I'm in a simulation or am being systemically deceived by a demon. I can only go with what I have." And thus creates his mitigated skeptic philosophy
I don't mind that they're trying stuff, I just feel like they're stuck in argumentative spirals that, with each new paper, removes their arguments further from reality. Not all philosophy departments are like that ;-)
This is a nice essay. It’s making me think that philosophy of religion—at least the popular online kind—should do more to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to being interdisciplinary. I’ve always thought Phil religion is cool largely because you need to draw on so many different fields of philosophy to do it well, but like I can’t say I’ve ever watched a Phil religion video where the host brought on a Hume scholar to contribute to a miracle discussion. Would be cool to see more of that kind of thing.
Check out the Real Atheology which has two episodes with Hume scholars on these and related subjects.
Awesome, thanks!
I'm a bit confused by the first error. You say "To get to that point, you have to exclude religious assumptions and have a bare bones naturalistic framework, and that’s what Hume does" and "he’s assuming an austere naturalistic framework in order to examine if we can go from that naturalistic framework to revealed religion". Is that not just conceding that Hume is begging the question as an argument against miracles?
I take it that the best takeaway from "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" and "if you assume miracles can happen or God is real, the evidence for their existence supports this probability...Of course miracles can happen if you assume they happen!" is that any argument either direction, either from naturalism against miracles or from miracles for theism is going to be question-begging.
More importantly, it seems like the "uniform experience" question is one primarily of data, and it's unclear to me how your Hume quotes really change anything about that. Schmid and McKay present evidence that a lot of people claim to have experience of the miraculous, which seems to be evidence against the "uniform experience" claim. Your speculation about this experience being mostly (?) from religious people would be interesting if true, but even if so still provides a bit of a blow to the "uniform experience" claim, I think.
Your 6th error is interesting and good to know. This is why before I ever extensively publicly argue anything about miracles I'm going to have to a deep dive into Hume's argument which I've been avoiding
Let me rewrite a TLDR response from my other argument (pardon me, it’s late). After writing this comment, I’m certain it’s a better answer to your questions:
1) Your first paragraph makes the error of confusing Hume’s maxim and Hume’s argument against miracles. His argument is not against miracles in general, but miracles in support of religion and whether it’s wise to believe in them. His argument against miracles via his maxim relies on a formulation of probability that is elaborated upon mostly separate from the piece, and is the subject of what most people care about when they argue against Hume on miracles. Hume isn’t begging the question, because this probability calculus (that the observed laws of nature were less likely violated in some way balanced against human error, corrupted by motivated reasoning) is true even if miracles happen!
2) Second paragraph: Hume is not a naturalist, but a skeptic. He’s modeling a probabilistic world around him based on instances of observation. In some ways I think the naturalistic/supernaturalistic dichotomy doesn’t help because Hume makes no distinction. There is only what we observe and have evidence for, modeled in a probability. The supernatural as we call it could fit in there, but as a matter of fact we don’t see it.
3) For the third paragraph, the reason why this supposed “evidence” doesn’t work is because of the scarcity of miracle observations, the corruption of the testimony by religious motivation, the absence of independent verification from hostile parties, etc. It wouldn’t make sense to say “we’re arguing over whether miracles happen and to argue for this one we’re going to assume the validity of all these miracle testimonies as background.” No! The whole body of the phenomena is what we’re arguing about, and we should address each claim/observation piece by piece. Again, Hume does not elaborate on this in the text of Of Miracles because this is more predicated on his formulation of probability. He alludes to different principles within the piece (like corroborating testimony, etc) but per the writing style of the era, it’s more circuitous and referential to outside the essay.
Hope that helps!
That helps, thanks. I think that's a helpful distinction in Hume, I wasn't familiar with it.
Re 3: This seems like it is much too speculative about the body of evidence under debate to be a good ground for a claim about uniform experience. It seems like we're back to begging the question either direction, but maybe I need to understand Hume's formulation of probability and if it has independent motivation and undermines this evidence etc.
so i'll talk about this in my subsequent post, but Hume's maxim is about specific miracle claims, not the body. The essay is more about not believing in religion, given this maxim, the nature of the evidence we have for religions (it's all testimony) and the uniformity of the bad testimony we have. The important point is how bridges the maxim to the rest of his argument with the section (I believe it's part 2) about how bad/corrupted religious testimony for miracles is. In this way, he's not looking at every claim ever, but drawing probabilities (that admittedly look like inferences), given how uniformly bad they are. In other words, he's going beyond generalizing the maxim for his argument and going a step farther and taking down the credibility of purported religious testimony.
Okay gotcha, cool thanks. I'll have to look at how he spells this out more carefully
Okay, so this is a good question/comment because I can’t remember if I talked about this in depth before (I may have?) but it’s worth repeating.
To start, let’s sequester Hume’s maxim (the one about laws of nature balanced against someone being in error, summarized very briefly as such) and the argument Hume is making.
Hume is arguing (this isn’t a syllogism):
1) the standards of overturning a miracle are high, and due to the nature of testimony, it will never reach that standard by itself
2) The nature of religious testimony is especially bad to the point where it’s considered “impossible,” that is, not even to the point of probability (that it could be weighed against the law of nature)
3) And so, a wise person should not believe in a religious miracle based purely on testimony
4) And yet, all the evidence we have for modern religions is testimony!
5) And so a wise person shouldn’t believe in religion because of miracle testimony.
Another shorter way of saying this is “As a wise person, you wouldn’t believe these people <gestures> who testify for a miracle, so why believe in any religion, because that’s basically all we have”
And so, it’s not really circular. It’s cumulative (not in the sense that it’s a bunch of different arguments, but it’s matters of fact that accumulate)
[I wrote a post on this let me know if you want the link]
Hume’s maxim is basically what Schmid and others are trying to debunk, but they’re confusing/misunderstanding its function in the whole context of the argument (which I allude to in the part you quote). And then they’re turning around and getting that wrong because they don’t understand Hume’s conception of probability (which is not fully present in the essay, but piecemeal throughout Hume’s work).
As for your second paragraph, again the idea is that you cannot come up with good evidence for miracles without presupposing them. For the framework that Hume is using (which isn’t naturalistic, as much as it is austere and skeptical), it could be the case that miracles happen, it’s just that they would function much differently than proponents say they were. The causal mechanisms of miracles would be better understood, the evidence for them would be more than just eye witness testimony, and others. For Hume, this argument is a posteriori/matter of fact in the sense that facts about the observations of miracles could be different, but they just aren’t.
For the third paragraph, as a factual matter, the uniformity of experience is something we both assume (to formulate probabilities) and observe. The problem with miracle testimony is that it fails to amount to probabilities for various reasons, not just because of the corrupting nature of testimony, but because of lacking external evidence, etc.
Finally (I’m not sure how clear I’m going to be here), it’s important to realize that Hume’s maxim is not itself a uniform dismissal of all miracle claims, but a tool to decipher individual ones. He sustains, for that probability calculus and the shortcomings of testimony, that they’ll all fail when examined.
This comes back to the conflation of the maxim with the point of the essay. Going back to sequestering the maxim from the argument, people think its Hume intention in the essay to dismiss miracles in the first section, when the probability calculus is merely the first step to get him to his conclusion about natural religion (#5). So there’s this weird (unintentionally played) game where we’re confusing the maxim from the argument, where people think Hume is saying “you shouldn’t believe in supernatural miracles because of this maxim” when he’s actually saying “you shouldn’t believe in revealed religion based only on testimony and part of my argument is this maxim”
TL;DR: Pardon me if this response wasn’t clear! I guess what I’m trying to say is that people confuse Hume’s maxim and his intention/logic behind it and Hume’s argument and his intention/logic behind it.
Great article! I went back and read On Miracles after hearing Joe talk about it and it was striking just how poorly he reproduced the argument. That miracles assume the laws of nature are accurate is something that David Hume himself said. It’s a central piece of his argument, so I don’t know how that could be missed unless he just didn’t actually read it, which I suspect happened.
He didn’t read it. Most Christian Apologists don’t read it. They read either C.S. Lewis or John Earman’s commentary on it, which is resoundly rejected by Hume scholars for completely missing the point. At this point there’s an artificial hyper-real literature among Christian apologists that just assumes Hume is wrong and says “read Earman!” and it’s so nakedly obvious.
It seemed like it was more of a pastoral point. Like “look at how the arch-naturalist argument got vanquished”
It didn’t feel like the careful reproduction of arguments that Joe is known for.
Which is why it's so disappointing!
Speaking of philosophy of religion, about one-third into this piece of mine from a few years ago is my definition of what religion is. Based on philosophy of religion and psychology of religion ideas, without mentioning it by name, it includes Buddhism as a religion.
https://wordsofsocraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2021/10/harvey-whitehouse-right-on-defining.html
Cooked
"Someone claimed to believe in miracles. Like everyone claiming this before, they're wrong."
There - shortened it for you. ;-)
"I Want To Believe"
-X-Files
I liked this better than the one I read last night. Maybe shorter or, more probable, because I enjoy rebuttals/refutations. In other news, how come this happens? Meaning, Earman (or anyone) writes something and in its contemporary time it is refuted or even destroyed. Years later it is resurfaced, unrevised(!) as evidence par example, strong criticism and a reference to be reckoned with. Same thing happens all the time either with Earman, or the economic idea formulations of Marx, and many other examples. What is happening??? I always supposed or understood that on each side of an idea the opposing arguments attested time where the ones which transitioned from new to old (in the passage of time) due to the fact that are not entirely refutable and even respected by opposing proponents. If this is not the case we are going to traverse endless circles of meaninglessness. Or is it a modern phenomenon? Or are we just in a time hole (maybe a 50-60 year hole) where this happens but will eventually stop? (Sorry for the long and many questions, please correct anything I 've said wrong) Closing, as a Hume lover -and not afraid to say so- I m "disappointed". I never find anything wrong in your writings...
Great post!! Thanks for always injecting some Humean wisdom and skepticism on here.. it’s needed for sure here lately lol!
Great post! The testimony bit is a subtle point, if youd forgive me for the self-promotion, I gestured towards it in my insistence for archaeological evidence rather than testimony for things like Christ's miracles.
I suppose Joe would respond by saying wr have physical evidence for miracles, like photos of fatima or Pio's stigmata. But of course thats pretty sus--as another of my friends pointed out, for instance, the fact that the "high quality" photos of fatima are behind a 250 bux paywall and forbidden to be distributed isnt exactly encouraging.