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What Are Hume's Arguments Against Miracles

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David Hume, 18th century Scottish philosopher, had an empiricist view on miracles. This means he needed scientific evidence in order to believe it and prove ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ that they did or did not happen. Although Hume accepted that miracles were possible, he also says he believes they have never happened and are very unlikely to. He says the ‘wise’ man must make his judgement on the basis of the evidence before him. Hume defined a miracle as a ‘transgression of natural law by a particular volition of the deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent’. In his essay ‘on miracles’ he divided his argument into two parts philosophical and practical. In this essay I am going to explain Hume’s main arguments against miracles …show more content…
He created a check list that in his eyes would validate a miracle. He said it would need to have a sufficient amount of evidence to support the miracle, a sufficient number of witnesses, the witnesses must be of good sense, education and reputation and must have been a public performance.
His first argument against miracles is that there had never been ‘in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men of unquestionable good-sense’ essentially this means that there have never been enough smart men to whiteness a miracle. However, Hume doesn’t state how many men is a sufficient number so in theory a sufficient number of men could be 10, 100 or even 1000. He also doesn’t say how smart those men have to be, and since the time of Hume our education system has improved massively so what was smart then is not smart now.
His second argument is that ‘a religionist may be an enthusiast’. This means that religious people are bias towards their religion and tend to seek out miracles to validate them, ignoring the possibility that it’s probably wasn’t a miracle. Despite this being somewhat true, Hume fails or refuses to see that scientist are also enthusiast

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