The Internet Is Wrong About David Hume

Setting The Record Straight On Of Miracles

This post is too long for email, so please click on the title to read the whole thing!

Everyone on Substack is talking about miracles and my favorite philosopher, David Hume, is catching unworthy criticism.

This post is the attempt by a mere philosophy BA, a decade out of school, to clarify what Hume believes and defend him from this wrongheaded criticism. I am not an expert on Hume, though I would love to be.¹

For this and future posts on Hume, I’m participating in what I call a Hume binge. I’m reading as many books on Hume as I can get my hands on, written by experts. This exercise is fun for me, not just because I’m feeling validated in my memory of what Hume’s arguments were, but also because I realize that, as a student, I was so wrong about Hume.²

Out of the spirit of transparency, here are the books I’ve read:

• Who the Hell is David Hume by Mark Robson

• Hume: A Very Short Introduction by James A. Harris

• How to Read Hume By Simon Blackburn

I’m currently reading Hume by Don Garrett, while Hume (Arguments by philosophers) by Gary Stroud, The Infidel and The Professor by Dennis Rasmussen, Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hume, and Peter Millican’s Reading Hume on Human Understanding are all in the mail.

I also have an Amazon wishlist of Hume books I want to read on Hume, which you can find here.³

If you’ll notice, I’m saving the original works for last, and the reason why is simple: Hume writes in an old style that is hard to discern. In my opinion, the main reason people get Hume wrong is because they either only read someone critical of Hume or just excerpts of him without this expert guidance, and so they’re led astray.

My motivation for writing these posts is a response to feeling (unintentionally) gaslit by the internet about David Hume. I feel too many people are repeating falsehoods about his beliefs and arguments, and many of them should know better. So, I’m going to go back, be thorough, and have fun with this. I’m reading as much Hume as I can, so where I can argue about his beliefs.⁴

Don’t Just Take My Word For It!

In this post, I’m going to be talking about how people get Hume wrong. Hume does not argue that miracles metaphysically can’t happen, nor does he make many of the arguments his critics allege. As far as I can tell, it is the consensus among Hume scholars that his argument Of Miracles is not an argument that miracles cannot happen.

But you don’t have to take my word for it, here are just a handful of quotes from the scholars I’ve read:

Naturally Hume is in no position to insist a priori that any consistently described event is impossible. If there is no contradiction in the supposition that an event occurred, then for all reason can tell us in advance, it might occur. According to him, the question of whether events of any particular kind actually do occur is always one for experience to settle. Hence the issue has to be fought not on the question of whether miracles are possible, but whether we can be assured that they have happened.

-Blackburn (page 70, Kindle Edition)

The issue here was not the abstract metaphysical question of whether or not miracles are possible. The general scepticism about metaphysics which Hume developed in the Treatise made it impossible for him to answer that question either way.

-Harris (page 85ish, Kindle edition)

Or, more bluntly (after Harris summarizes the synopsis of Hume’s argument)

It is worth emphasizing that this was not meant by Hume as a way of proving that miracles never happen. Instead it was meant to show that reasonable people, when faced with a report of a miracle, will always find the report incredible. For all their experience of the world will be against it-and (so Hume has shown in the Treatise) they have nothing other than experience on which to decide what to believe.

-Harris (page 86ish)

What Hume Really Says About Miracles

Of Miracles is about how testimony by itself cannot rationally justify belief in miracles, and thus we cannot rationally accept foundational religious miracles because the only evidence we have for those miracles is testimony.

Notice how much more humble of a claim Hume is making about miracles. He’s not saying that miracles can’t happen or don’t happen (a metaphysical or ontological claim), but that if they did happen, testimony by itself would not be sufficient to establish their credibility (an epistemological claim).

The First Portion Is Important

A significant portion of the first few sections of Of Miracles discusses the relationship between testimony and experience, how experience is our primary way of evaluating events, and how we trust testimony because in our experience it generally correlates with experience.

To apply these principles to a particular instance; we may observe, that there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators. This species of reasoning, perhaps, one may deny to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. I shall not dispute about a word. It will be sufficient to observe, that our assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses. It being a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction; it is evident, that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event seems, in itself, as little necessary as any other. Were not the memory tenacious to a certain degree; had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood: Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be qualities, inherent in human nature, we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony. A man delirious, or noted for falsehood and villany, has no manner of authority with us.”

Of Miracles 10.5, SBN 111-2

For example, we trust when people report seeing rain because, in our experience, rain is real, and people claiming to see rain typically describe the situation accurately. We trust testimony because we experience the thing being attested. The problem for Hume is that we cannot do the same for testimony about miracles, because of the unlikelihood of miracles.

Most people who misread Hume start quoting him after or at the end of his discussion on the relationship between testimony and experience. They don’t recognize how:

1. This section is just the beginning of the argument,

2. The relevance of the preceding section in framing the relationship between testimony and experience

3. How the context of the entire piece narrows Hume’s claims about miracles to be about the sufficiency of testimony.

The General Argument

Continuing on, per Harris’s summary of Hume, there are about five reasons to not find miracle testimony sufficient.

First, is the general claim that miracle reports go against common experience (Easy enough! That’s kind of what we’re arguing!).

Second, even if we were able to counter this uniform experience with uniform experience of the reliability of a witness, that wouldn’t overwrite common experience. Rather, in that situation, the reasonable person wouldn’t know what to believe because the evidence would be of equal weight, and so they would just suspend judgment.

Third, no historical miracle testimony, according to Hume, rises to that level of accountability.

Fourth, there seems to be an inverse correlation with education and miracle claims. Namely, to the extent educated people make and believe miracle claims, they’re usually purported by a long dead ancestor, while less educated people are more likely to make miracle claims today.⁵

Fifth and finally, if we use testimony by itself as evidence for a religious miracle or faith, we run into the inconvenient reality that many religious faiths attest to miracles that support contradictory conclusions.

Per Harris:

Hume’s conclusion is that it is a mistake to imagine that the Gospels might provide historical evidence of the actuality of Christ’s miracles, and hence of the truth of Christ’s redemptive message. “Our most holy religion,” Hume declares, “is founded on Faith, not reason.” Christian belief is itself a miracle, a subversion of reason such as could only be effected by God himself…He surely knew that “Of Miracles” would be taken by most readers as suggseting that the whole of Christianity was a superstitious delusion…”

(Harris 87)

Plausible Vs. Implausible Improbable Accounts

It’s also worth mentioning that Hume, later in his essay, draws the distinction between a miraculous event that he would consider plausible and a purported miraculous event that started a religion that he would dismiss out hand.

I beg the limitations here made may be remarked, when I say, that a miracle can never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system of religion. For I own, that otherwise, there may possibly be miracles, or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit of proof from human testimony; though, perhaps, it will be impossible to find any such in all the records of history. Thus, suppose, all authors, in all languages, agree, that, from the first of January 1600, there was a total darkness over the whole earth for eight days: Suppose that the tradition of this extraordinary event is still strong and lively among the people: That all travellers, who return from foreign countries, bring us accounts of the same tradition, without the least variation or contradiction: It is evident, that our present philosophers, instead of doubting the fact, ought to receive it as certain, and ought to search for the causes whence it might be derived. The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered probable by so many analogies, that any phænomenon, which seems to have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.

But suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprized at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it: I should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was, nor possibly could be real. You would in vain object to me the difficulty, and almost impossibility of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice: All this might astonish me; but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phænomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.

But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact, but even reject it without farther examination. Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be, in this case, Almighty, it does not, upon that account, become a whit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than from the experience which we have of his productions, in the usual course of nature. This still reduces us to past observation, and obliges us to compare the instances of the violation of truth in the testimony of men, with those of the violation of the laws of nature by miracles, in order to judge which of them is most likely and probable. As the violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matter of fact; this must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and make us form a general resolution, never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered.

-Of Miracles

If you’re misreading Hume, you think he’s singling out religion for an irrational reason, but in the context of the piece, it’s not irrational. The account of the sun darkening for days, and being purported by diverse testimony across cultures without religious significance is excellent evidence that something weird happened. Hume believes such evidence should lead philosophers to investigate what happened. This is in contrast to the idea that the Queen of England rose from the dead to govern, and this miracle started a religion.

Hume believes you can dismiss this out of hand because all of the reasons religious miracle claims incentivize people to lie, exaggerate, sensationalize, and otherwise promote falsehood. If you’re nitpicking Hume and not reading him in full, you’ll think he’s making up reasons to not believe the religious claims on the spot. But if you read Of Miracles in full, you’ll see the middle section goes on and on and on about how the incentives of religious belief lead people to deceive themselves and others.

What Critics Get Wrong

Hume’s Of Miracles Is About Epistemology, Not Metaphysics/Ontology. Critics fail because they assume Hume is making an ontological or metaphysical claim about the validity of miracles, but instead an epistemological argument.

He’s not saying that miracles don’t happen, just that if they did, we would not be justified to believe them just on testimony, which happens to be the evidence we have for the natural miracles of religion.

Hume Has A Misinformation Problem

It’s one thing to be misunderstood by your critics, but with Hume, there’s a weird thing going on with social media and philosophy where it’s more normal to see people get him wrong than get him correct. Even people who make their living doing philosophy in some capacity butcher basic components of his argument.

For one example, here’s William Lane Craig, trying to come up with a simple argument to rebut Hume. Perhaps you could be charitable and say in his attempt to simplify his argument he misstated the argument, but I don’t think so. He uses an analogy to a crime scene where we recalculate the probability of a husband being a murderer, not based on testimony but based on…new non-testimonial evidence like DNA!

For another example, here’s the Apologetics YouTuber Testify. In the below video, he changes Hume’s claims about testimony to be about claims about evidence in general to overturn a miracle (at about 1:40). He then goes on to make the routine mistakes we’ve already outlined, and some more we’ll get to in a moment.

I hope the above summary that I’ve given about Hume’s arguments is sufficient to prove why this is silly. I’m not joking when I say that when you go into YouTube and search “Hume on miracles” these are first page results. It’s misinformation, and it’s bad for philosophy education. This post is intended to counterbalance it.

FLWAB Repeats These Mistakes

With all of that context out of the way, I want it clear that people getting Hume wrong is not a mark of unintelligence or dishonesty, so much as it’s just going with the flow or META of philosophy posting in 2025. It’s a meme at this point.

What’s more, people think they can go into centuries-old text without the aid of experts and understand its meaning, but that’s usually not the case, especially with Hume. He’s a hard read!

Most recently on Substack

FLWAB

published two articles critical of Hume. The first I will address here, and the second one will be addressed in my next post. The first article was so well written, that it got a response from

Scott Alexander

, which you can find here.

I will admit, if Hume truly argued against miracles in the way FLWAB describes, this would be a compelling case against Hume. But it isn’t because it’s not the argument that Hume made, nor is it the argument that any Humean scholar would attribute to Hume.

I’m not going to go point by point on FLWAB, simply because this post is already long, while his post is relatively short.

First off, he quotes Hume at length to supposedly restate his argument. The quote is below, the bolding is FLWAB, the emphasis is mine (while uploading this onto Substack, I realized underlining doesn’t transfer over!) :

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable that all men must die, that lead cannot of itself remain suspended in the air, that fire consumes wood and is extinguished by water, unless it is that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature and there is required a violation of these laws or, in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is esteemed a miracle if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die all of a sudden, because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event; otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle, nor can such a proof be destroyed or the miracle rendered credible but by an opposite proof which is superior.

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention): that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors 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.

Now, had you not read that context I gave you, about how Hume’s comments are about the insufficiency of testimony to establish a miracle, you may mistakenly revise in your head the bolded/italicized word “testimony” to mean “evidence.” But that is explicitly, literally, and definitely not what Hume is saying!

Operative words in sentences, change the entire meaning of a sentence. Guess What! For this essay, the word “testimony” is the operative word of the entire essay. Because Hume writes like an 18th century writer and is often hard to follow, people’s brains omit the word testimony when reading him, and so they misread him.⁶

All Hume is saying in this passage is the mundane fact that, to the extent that we trust testimony, it’s because it falls in line with our experience, and that testimony will always be at an evidential disadvantage to data we perceive directly. I outlined the summary of that argument above, so I’m not going to rehash it here.⁷

FLWAB’s argument really takes a negative turn when he tries to summarize Hume’s argument by way of a syllogism. Namely, the passage he is quoting/simplifying, is not Hume’s entire argument. The entire essay is the argument. As I already summarized above, this passage misses Hume’s key discussion about the relationship between trusting testimony and experience, and it stops before getting into the accumulated case of why testimony by itself isn’t sufficient to attest a miracle.

The argument really takes a negative turn when FLWAB says:

As [Hume] puts it, “It is experience only which gives authority to human testimony and it is the same experience which assures us of the laws of nature.” Yet clearly, this isn’t the case: any miracle claim is evidence against the experience being universal. If anybody has the experience of a dead body coming back to life, then it is not the case that there is uniform and firm experience that dead bodies do not come back to life. If a miracle claim exists at all, then the experience of miracles not occurring is not universal, and clearly there are a lot of miracle claims out there!

This is an equivocation and moving of the goal posts (Testify does something similar in his video). The issue is not whether the accumulated experience of individual peoples’ experiences of miracles is evidence of miracles, but if you, as a rational person balancing all of the evidence, should accept that testimony alone is sufficient evidence to accept a miracle claim.

To use a metaphor, the fact that lots of people report being abducted by UFOs is ontological/metaphysical evidence that these things may happen. But the individual testimony of your best friend saying he was abducted by aliens is not by itself sufficient evidence that it happened or that alien abductions happen.

In this metaphor, FLWAB is trying to argue the former, while Hume is arguing the latter. Both can be right! But the arguments aren’t really addressing the same thing.

And honestly, that’s all you need to know about FLWAB’s post. I initially tried to speed run rebuttals to the rest of his points, but he makes the same mistakes other Hume critics make: misunderstanding the full context of Of Miracles, confusing Hume’s epistemological claims with metaphysical or ontological ones, and subsequently moving the goal posts.

What Was Innovative About Of Miracles

Based on my studies of Of Miracles and its surrounding discourse, people get it completely wrong why the essay was innovative.

Namely, Of Miracles isn’t trying to say that we can never believe miracles happen ever in the future, but that we don’t have good evidence for the miracles that happened in the distant past. Because the evidence we have for those miracles today are just testimony!

And if we can’t feel confident about the evidence of those miracles, we can’t be confident in the rational foundation of religion, as reasonable observers won’t be convinced by the evidence.⁸

That doesn’t mean the miracles didn’t happen, that religion is false, or that God isn’t real. Indeed, reasonable people can be unconvinced of something that is ultimately true.⁹

But in Of Miracles, Hume isn’t arguing these points; He’s just arguing that there isn’t a rational foundation for believing in the establishment of miraculous religion, given the insufficiency of testimony.

The second innovation of Hume’s argument is that, funnily enough, everyone kind of agrees with him that testimony by itself isn’t enough to prove a miracle!

For example, everyone currently making arguments about Fatima on substack are…not relying just on testimony! We’re staring at the sun like maniacs! Evaluating its place in the sky over Portugal in 1917! Looking at old ass black and white photos for evidence of moisture!

As I was writing this post, I got this great comment on a note by

Helmer Dekker

Hume actually already won this debate about miracles over 250 years ago, we take for granted his argument, and we don’t give him credit! So I’ll give credit to my GOAT here: For at least providing a philosophy 101 reference, David Hume, collect your flowers! Internet commenters who get him wrong, show up to detention!

1. That will probably never happen because it’s unlikely I’ll go back to school to be a Hume scholar. It’s too expensive and impractical, however, I can spend a couple hundred dollars over the course of a year reading used books by experts and the original texts. This will do!

2. I thought he was a naturalist first and a skeptic/empiricist second; as we’ll see this is wrong!

3. If you yourself have access to more resources or are willing to help me on my Hume binge buy more books, I will likely not say no!

4. Because I’m in my 30s, off the dating market (woohoo married life!) and this is how men like me spend their time. I will also note that this is not a good response to being gaslit!

5. I am definitely steel manning Hume’s argument here as he uses language like “barbarism and ignorance”

6. Reading commentaries before reading him helps because you know what words are most important.

7. Nor am I going to have a dialogue about what Hume “really meant here,” unless you’re a Humean scholar that tells me otherwise! I consider this a factual disagreement, and critics are just wrong. You can say Hume’s conclusion is wrong, but that’s a separate discussion. If you think Hume Of Miracles is about the probability of miracles generally and not testimony, you’re wrong. Argue with your mother.

8. In this way, one could argue Hume is equating being a reasonable observer to being an empiricist. That’s probably not good! But that’s another argument altogether.

9. I don’t know where to put this as I realized this about 40 minutes before publishing, but Hume doesn’t actually argue that you shouldn’t believe a miracle that you directly perceive. Usually people interpret Hume under this lens, but that’s a product of contemporary skepticism and/or a relatively recent Christopher Hitchens quote. As far as I can tell, at least in Of Miracles, Hume does not say you shouldn’t believe a miracle that you directly perceive. I’m sure he would have objections to believing a perceived miracle, but that’s also because he’s skeptical of our inferential faculties in general. That’s a post for another time.