Summary of miracles

• Realist view of miracles 1/2

  Realist understandings of miracles see them as real events in the world, brought about by a transcendent being

  Examples:

  • Juliane Koepcke’s 1971 survival of a plane crash and free fall over the Peruvian rainforest
  • The 1590 Nebraska church choir incident

  Types of miracles:

  • Miracles as events brought about by the power of God, working through people. For example, stories in the Bible concerning Moses. Important in the Catholic tradition: canonisation
  • Miracles as violations of natural law: Hume’s understanding. Could not occur without divine intervention
• Realist views of miracles 2/2

  Problems with defining miracles as violating natural laws

  • Science does not accept such a possibility. Natural laws are descriptive or probabilistic - they do not dictate what must happen, they summarise what has been found to happen.
  • The mass of evidence supporting those laws make it unreasonable to believe in miracles
  • If God intervenes miraculously, why do some still suffer?
• Anti realist views of miracles

  Anti-realists believe that miracles do not occur. Miracles are mental states or attitudes which are ’revelatory‘ only in terms of human psychology. Transforms a community of people, lifts the spirit
• Anti realist - Tillich

  • Miracles are not interventions by God, they are sign-events
  • An Event which is astonishing and unusual, points to the mystery of being and is an occurrence which is recieved as a sign event in an ecstatic experience
  • No law of nature is violated, God does not intervene and others would observe the same events but not see them as miracles
• Miracles - Hick

  Miracles are natural events seen through the eye of faith. They are events through which we become vividly conscious of God acting towards us. A miracle is any event that is ‘experienced as’ a miracle
• R.F. Holland - anti-realism

  • Miracles are coincidences
  • Story of the boy on the train tracks: he almost gets run over by the train but the driver faints and falls on the breaks. Some may say this is a coincidence but others may interpret it as intervention from a transcendent being, however this does not mean that God actually caused it; its just that individual’s belief.
• David Hume’s realist view of miracles 1/2

  1. Hume says that miracles are maximally improbable. He recognises the possibility that one could occur but believes that they are so improbable it suggests a witness would be lying or mistaken if they were to claim they‘d experienced the divine
  2. He critiques miracles. This is based on his empirical assumptions: all knowledge comes from sense experience and religion is based on (incorrect) factual claims
• David Hume’s realist view on miracles 2/2

  2. Hume defines a miracle as a violation of a law of nature by God. Our experience of the consistency of these laws shows that a violation of them is the least likely of all events, and no testimony can ever overcome that

  3. His main argument is inductive: the logic of its four steps shows that it is always more likely that witnesses are lying than a miracle to have occurred. His supporting arguments from psychology further dismiss miracles as the product of weak integrity; the natural credulity of human nature and conflicting miracle claims.
• Weaknesses of Hume’s arguments

  1. No inductive argument can ever be certain, so however improbable miracles might be, we cannot say for certain that they do not happen
  2. Christians can make their own counter argument claiming that there are reliable observations of violations of natural laws, and that the improbability of a miracle is a necessary condition for it to happen
  3. Christians say that faith leads them to believe that God has intervened in the world. For them, faith is more important than reason. You cannot dismiss the idea of miracles just because YOU do not happen to believe in them
• Wiles anti-realist view of miracles

  1. God does not act in the world through miracles. Language about miracles is symbolic, not literal
  2. Understanding miracles as God intervening in the world has come about by thinking that God is intervening in a chain of causes, or else that God is an agent controlling the chain of causes as a whole
  3. The only miracle is creation itself
  4. If God intervened he would be selective. Raises the problem of evil
  5. Miracles are to do with our fight against evil; this language is mythical not literal. Jesus refused to perform miracles for Satan
• Weaknesses of Wiles

  1. Christians would argue that the Bible, Church and present events dictate things differently. Miracles do occur
  2. Conservative Christians argue that to call religion symbolic is to demean central parts of the faith
  3. Why would God only intervene once?
• A comparison of Hume and Wiles

  1. Hume is an atheist, Wiles is a Christian, so Hume assumes that there is no God to violate anything but Wiles assumes that there is a God who preserves human freedom by not intervening
  2. Hume assumes that Christianity is irrational; Hume’s whole interventionist account of miracles is irrelevant to Wiles
  3. Hume is a realist but Wiles is an anti-realist, so Wiles does not have to explain how natural laws can be violated
  4. Their view of the value is different. Hume ignores the real value, namely its personal and religious elements.