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The Doubts Of Infidels: Or, Queries Relative To Scriptural Inconsistencies & Contradictions. Submitted For Elucidation To The Bench Of Bishops [Anonymous] on.
Table of contents
- William Nicholson (1753-1815)
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- Apologetics Press | Christian Evidences |
- Richard Carlile (1790 - 1843)
Thanks to its site structure, BRANCH offers users an innovative approach to history itself, suggesting that any given bit of historical information can branch outward in often surprising directions. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
William Nicholson (1753-1815)
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Chronologies normally give a sense that there was only one way for events to play out. If you are trying to find information on a specific topic, I suggest that you visit the Topic Clusters tab or use the Search boxes top right—the NINES search is much more precise and includes relevant text snippets.
If you prefer to browse, click on the Timeline at the top of this browser window. Throughout, you will find links to geospatial information for locations mentioned in the article, with the first instance in each article marked by the geolocation image to the right. If the Caricature Argument were correct, then the argument against miracles could not be labeled as such. A second, related problem is that, if one accepts the Caricature Argument, then one must accept the entailed modality.
From the conclusion of the a priori deductive argument, it follows that the occurrence of a miracle would be impossible. If this were the case, then no testimony could persuade a person to believe in the existence of a miracle.
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However, many take Hume to implicitly reject such an assumption. Therefore, there are hypothetical situations in which our belief in a miracle could be established by testimony, implying that the conclusion of the Caricature Argument is too strong. This reply, however, is incorrect. From this passage alone, it is not clear whether Hume means for the darkness scenario to count as an example of the former, the latter, or both. For instance, the absence of the sun during 48 hours; but reasonable men would only conclude from this fact, that the machine of the globe was disordered during this time.
L1, Letter The conclusion Hume draws is that, even if testimony of a strange event were to amount to a full proof, it would be more reasonable to infer a hiccup in the natural regularity of things on par with an eclipse, where apparent, but not the disturbance of a higher level regularity , rather than to conclude a miracle.
Hume states:. It is the business of history to distinguish between the miraculous and the marvelous ; to reject the first in all narrations merely profane and human; to doubt the second; and when obliged by unquestionable testimony…to admit of something extraordinary, to receive as little of it as is consistent with the known facts and circumstances. He therefore never grants a proof of a miracle as a real possibility, so the Caricature Argument may surmount at least this objection. However, a final difficulty related to the modality of the conclusion concerns the observation that Hume couches his argument in terms of appropriate belief.
This gives us reason to reject the metaphysical conclusion of the Caricature Argument. Hume does not say that violations are impossible, only unknowable. Of course, it could be that Hume grants this merely for the sake of argument, but then the stronger conclusion would still have a problem. For whether or not Hume grants the occurrence of miracles, he certainly allows for their conceivability , something the Caricature Argument cannot allow since, for Hume, conceivability implies possibility.
Finally, there is the fact that Part II exists at all. The proper conclusion is, therefore, the epistemic one. In overcoming the weaknesses of the Caricature Argument, a more plausible Humean argument takes form. There is much to be said for this reconstruction. First, in addition to Humean axioms, we have empirical premises rather than definitions that support the key inferences.
Hence, the reconstruction is a proof, not a demonstration. Second, given that Hume has ancillary arguments for these empirical premises, there is no question-begging of the form that the Caricature Argument suggests. However, there is a separate worry of question-begging in 4 that needs to be addressed before moving on to the arguments of Part II.
However, there are people that do testify to miracles. The worry is that, in assigning existence to laws of nature without testimonial exception, Hume may beg the question against those that maintain the occurrence of miracles.
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This worry can be overcome, however, if we follow Don Garrett in realizing what Hume is attempting to establish in the argument:. This is, of course, compatible with there actually being exceptions to it, so long as one of those exceptions has, for the judger, the status of experiments within his or her experience. To believe in a miracle, the witness must believe that a law of nature has been violated. However, this means that, in endorsing the occurrence of the miracle, the witness implicitly endorses two propositions: that there is an established law of nature in place and that it has been broken.
Thus, in order for a witness to convince me of a miracle, we must first agree that there is a law in place. The same testimony which seeks to establish the miracle reaffirms the nomological status of the law as universally believed. This leads to the second point that Garrett raises. Only after this common ground is established do we consider, as an experiment , whether we should believe that the said law has been violated. Hence, even such a testimonial does not count against the universality of what we, the judges, take to be a law of nature.
Instead, we are setting it aside as experimental in determining whether we should offer assent to the purported law or not. If this is right, then 4 does not beg the question. This leaves us with empirical premise 5 , which leads to Part II. He then gives four considerations as to why this is the case, three of which are relatively straightforward. To be persuaded of a miracle, we would need to be sure that no natural explanation, such as delusion, deception, and so forth, was more likely than the miraculous, a task which, for Hume, would simply take more credible witnesses than have ever attested to a miracle.
Second, it is a fact of human nature that we find surprise and wonder agreeable. We want to believe in the miraculous, and we are much more likely to pass along stories of the miraculous than of the mundane. For Hume, this explains why humans tend to be more credulous with attested miracles than should reasonably be the case, and also explains why the phenomenon is so widespread. Miracles are used as placeholders when we lack the knowledge of natural causes.
However, as learning progresses, we become increasingly able to discover natural causes, and no longer need to postulate miraculous explanations. Every miracle, therefore, pretended to have wrought in any of these religions…as its direct scope is to establish the particular system to which it is attributed; so has it the same force, though more indirectly, to overthrow every other system.
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In destroying a rival system, it likewise destroys the credit of those miracles, on which that system was established; so that all the [miracles] of different religions are to be regarded as contrary facts, and evidence of these…as opposite to each other. His general idea is that, since multiple, incompatible religions testify to miracles, they cancel each other out in some way, but scholars disagree as to how this is supposed to happen.
Therefore, a miracle wrought by Jesus is opposed and negated by one wrought by Mohammed, and so forth. However, as both Gaskin and Yandell point out, this inference would be flawed, because miracles are rarely such that they entail accepting one religion exclusively. Put another way, the majority of miracles can be interpreted and accepted by most any religion.
As the rest of the section centers around appropriate levels of doxastic assent, we should think that the notion is at play here too.
Richard Carlile (1790 - 1843)
A less problematic reconstruction therefore has his fourth consideration capturing something like the following intuition: the testifiers of miracles have a problem. In the case of their own religion, their level of incredulity is sufficiently low so as to accept their own purported miracles. However, when they turn to those attested by other religions, they raise their level of incredulity so as to deny these miracles of other faiths.
Thus, by participating in a sect that rejects at least some miracles, they thereby undermine their own position. In claiming sufficient grounds for rejecting the miracles of the other sects, they have thereby rejected their own. For Hume, the sectarians cannot have their cake and eat it. Intellectual honesty requires a consistent level of credulity. Thus, the problem for Hume is not that the sectarians cannot interpret all purported miracles as their own but that they, in fact, do not. These are the four evidential considerations against miracles Hume provides in Part II.
However, if the above reconstruction of Part I is correct, and Hume thinks that the Categorical Argument has established that we are never justified in believing the testimony of miracles, we might wonder why Part II exists at all. Its presence can be justified in several ways. First, on the reconstruction above, Part II significantly bolsters premise 5. Second, even if Part II were logically superfluous, Michael Levine rightly points out that the arguments of Part II can still have a buttressing effect for persuading the reader to the conclusion of Part I, thereby softening the blow of its apparently severe conclusion.
A third, related reason is a rhetorical consideration. As Hume himself acknowledges, resting one part of his system on another would unnecessarily weaken it T 1. Therefore, the more reasons he can present, the better.
Fourth, Hume, as a participant in many social circles, is likely to have debated miracles in many ways against many opponents, each with his or her own favored example. Part II, therefore, gives him the opportunity for more direct and specific redress, and he does indeed address many specific miracles there. Finally, the considerations of Part II, the second and third especially, have an important explanatory effect.
If Hume is right that no reasonable person would believe in the existence of miracles based on testimony, then it should seem strange that millions have nevertheless done so. Like the Natural History discussed below, Part II can disarm this worry by explaining why, if Hume is right, we have this widespread phenomenon despite its inherent unreasonableness. He offers them under three broad headings, metaphysical, moral, and physical. Written for a popular audience, they should be treated as challenges or considerations against, rather than decisive refutations of, the doctrine.
His first two considerations against this doctrine draw on arguments from his Treatise , referring to his conclusion that we have only a confused and insufficient idea of substance. If this is the case, however, then it becomes exceedingly difficult to discover the essence of such a notion a priori. Further, Hume says, we certainly have no conception of cause and effect a priori , and are therefore in no position to make a priori conclusions about the persistence conditions of a mental substance, or to infer that this substance grounds our thoughts.
Indeed, even if we admit a mental substance, there are other problems.