Maurice Wiles

• Was Maurice Wiles a realist or anti-realist?

  Anti-realist
• How does Wiles interpret miracles?

  Symbolically, similar to Tillich. Do not interpret them factually but instead metaphorically.
• What is Wiles' 5 points?

  1. God does not act in the world through miracles

  2. If God intervened it would be immoral. Miracles happen infrequently so God would have to be selective. If he can help some people, why does he not help others

  3. This means that the problem of evil would be unsolvable because there would be no reason why God could not help everyone. Easier to insist that God does not intervene in this way at all

  4. Take an anti-real perspective: Jesus did not want to perform miracles

  5. The only miracle is creation itself. Wiles is a deist so he believes that God is wholly transcendent
• HUME VS WILES: ATHEIST VS DEIST

  HUME: assumes that there is no God who is able to violate natural laws

  WILES: assumes that there is a God who chooses not to intervene in order to preserve human freedom
• HUME VS WILES: IRRATIONAL VS RATIONAL

  HUME: Christianity is irrational, particularly about miracles. A believer is required to believe in miracles, and that his own argument that miracles are the least likely of all events shows that religious belief is fundamentally irrational

  WILES: miracles are merely symbolic and are there for religious people to interpret and understand. Religious people are to bring about good and fight evil and 'miracles' are symbolic of that fight
• HUME VS WILES: REALIST VS ANTI-REALIST

  HUME: accounts of miracles, in the Bible and elsewhere, are literal descriptions of (false) facts

  
  

  Because Hume accepts the realist definition of miracles, he has to create an argument of why it is improbable

  
  

  WILES: uses biblical criticism to point out that much of the text in the Bible is not literal or scientific, but symbolic and mythological. He seeks to shift the argument away from Hume's question about the evidence for whether an event can be explained in natural terms to one in which an event reveals something of God's intention for the world.
• HUME VS WILES: THE 'VALUE' OF MIRACLES

  HUME: miracles are not impossible they are just maximally improbable events. His argument is an inductive one and is not meant to provide a conclusion. For Hume, unless a miracle is an event that is so unexpected and unexplained that it appears to be a violation of a law of nature, then there is little point in calling it a miracle at all

  WILES: what counts as a miracle is a matter of personal interpretation - it is a symbol, not simply a matter of physical fact