Hume's Argument Against Miracles is Bad Twice Over

There’s been some miracle talk on Substack lately, and in a couple different places I have seen skeptics reference David Hume’s famous argument against believing in miracles. Since Hume’s argument is terrible, I was a bit surprised. Its a sleight of hand style of argument: you follow the movements and the patter sounds confident, but the ball got palmed a while back without you noticing.

Hume’s Improbable Argument

“I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument of a like nature which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures.” -Hume

Hume lays out his argument in chapter ten of his book An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. If you don’t have time to read the whole chapter, here is how Hume sums up his argument (emphasis mine):

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.

On the surface, this sounds pretty good. If the laws of nature are established by “firm and unalterable experience” then when we hear of something violating those laws, something “that has never been observed in any age or country”, we should consider it extremely improbable that it occurred. And nobody claims something is a miracle unless it violates the laws of nature, which means every miracle claim goes against our universal experience and is infinitely improbable. Even if the testimony was so strong that “it’s falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish” you end up with a 50-50 tie when it comes to probability. Hume is of the opinion that in the case of a tie, you should assume the laws of nature were not violated, as that would be “the greater miracle”.

This all seems reasonable until you actually break the argument down and look at it step by step.

Hume’s Circle

If we were to formalize Hume’s argument into a syllogism, it might look something like this:

1. A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.

2. Something is a law of nature if it is established by firm, unalterable, and uniform experience.

3. Any miracle testimony would then go against the universal experience of mankind.

4. No amount of testimonial evidence can overcome the universal experience of mankind.

5. Therefore, any miracle claim should be considered less probable than any non-miraculous explanation.

Once we do so the problem becomes apparent. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, and the laws of nature as being supported by the universal experience of mankind. As he 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!

Not to worry though, Hume explains that we should discount any miracle claim as being too improbable to believe. Yet the argument for why we should do so is circular: we should discount it because it goes against the universal experience of mankind. In other words, we should disbelieve experiences miracles because they are too improbable, and we know they are too improbable because universal human experience goes against them, and we know universal human experience goes against them because any miracle experience reported is too improbable to believe.

Or as C.S. Lewis puts it in his book Miracles:

Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

An Attempt to Salvage the Argument

While explaining the unfortunate circularity of Hume’s argument in the comments of a different post, I got this reply from Kenny Easwaran that tries gamely to salvage the argument:

It’s *meant* to be circular! If you really become convinced that there’s a bright dot behind a solid sphere in a single beam of light, or that an ordinary piece of glass can turn sunlight into a rainbow, then you no longer think these things are miracles, but part of a new law that may or may not have been fully explained.

The real argument is - if you still say the thing is a law, then *you* don’t believe in the miracle (that’s what it is to say the thing is a “law”); but once you believe in the event, you’ve stopped believing in the law, so the event is no longer a “miracle”.

In other words, Hume is saying that we know the laws of nature are backed by universal experience, because if we experience them being violated then they couldn’t have been the laws of nature. If it turns out that dead bodies do rise from the dead sometimes then it isn’t the case that a miracle occurred: instead it is just proof that our understanding of the laws of nature was limited, and the real laws of nature allow for dead bodies to rise from the grave under the right circumstances.

I don’t know if Hume would have actually argued this, but if he did it wouldn’t work. The argument is that miracles cannot happen, because if it happens then it’s not a miracle. This argument is logically coherent, but useless, as it relies solely on using a weird definition of “miracle” that has only a surface resemblance to the way people actually use the word.

The Cake is a Lie

Here the argument restated, but instead of proving that miracles can’t exist, it proves that cake can’t exist.

1. Cake is food that is never eaten.

2. If something is eaten, then it is food.

3. Therefore, cake does not exist.

This argument is logically sound: if cake is food that is never eaten, and something needs to be eaten to be food, then cake cannot exist. The only problem with it is that that’s not what cake is.

Kenny would have us believe that

1. A miracle is something that violates the laws of nature.

2. If something happens, then it doesn’t violate the laws of nature.

3. Therefore, a miracle can’t happen.

Just like the cake, this works if you carefully define “miracle” and “laws of nature” in a way that people don’t actually use them.

What is a Miracle?

C. S. Lewis defines a miracle as “an interference with Nature by supernatural power.” This matches other Christian source, such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church which defines a miracle as “A sign or wonder, such as healing or the control of nature, which can only be attributed to divine power.” In other words, a miracle is God making something happen that would not have happened otherwise.

Now imagine that God does exist, and that he did raise Jesus from the dead. If we use Kenny’s definition of “miracle” and “laws of nature” we would have to say “God raising Jesus from the dead is not a miracle, because it is a thing that happened, and anything that happens does not violate the laws of nature.” This is logically sound if you accept his definitions, yet someone might be excused for thinking that it misses the point a bit. The reason why people cite Hume’s argument against miracles is to say that God does not exist, or if He does exist He does not do such things. If your argument against miracles allows for the existence of God actively making things happen that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, then it’s a pretty weak argument against miracles! It’s an argument even Christians would agree with, given your definitions.

Acts of Mod

Here’s a useful analogy that illustrates the uselessness of Kenny’s version of Hume’s argument. Think of a video game, like World of Warcraft. The video game has it’s own “laws of nature”: when you jump off a cliff you fall to the ground, you can’t walk through walls, if someone attacks you you get hurt according to definable rules, etc.

Yet it is also the case that these “laws of nature” do not apply to everyone. Game moderators, or “Mods”, typically have abilities that apply to them that do not apply to normal players. They can fly through the air, or noclip through walls, or activate “Godmode” and become immune to damage. They are given these powers by the programmers, the agents who wrote the laws of the game in the first place.

Now it is true that in one sense when a mod teleports a player to them across vast distances, or flies through solid walls while shrugging off attacks, they are not violating the “laws of the game”. In fact beneath the rules that apply to normal players there are secret rules programmed into the game that allow mods to do these things. So in that sense, in the sense Kenny argues, the mods are not violating the laws of the game at all.

On the other hand, it clearly makes sense to describe the mods as being able to “break the rules of the game”! Yes, technically they are following deeper and restricted rules, but for all practical purposes they are performing miracles out there. The fact that they can ignore the rules is very much evidence of the existence of the mighty Programmers, who exist outside the nature of the game, and created it, and update it to this day!

All this to say, Hume’s argument is unrecoverable. The useful version, the one you might actually use to convince someone that miracles don’t exist, is circular. The version that isn’t circular is useless, as it uses a definition of “miracle” and the “laws of nature” that nobody is defending.