I recall about 25 years ago, a well-known activist priest (Father Daniel Berrigan I believe)was interviewed on CBC.
He was asked if he believed in miracles.
His reply was, "Of course, but I've never seen one!"
One of your champions, Hume's argument against miracles is the most sophisticated, and not easily refuted. Perhaps that’s one reason it is still believed today. Here is Hume's argument in syllogistic form:
1. Natural law is by definition a description of a regular occurrence.
2. A miracle is by definition a rare occurrence.
3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare.
4. A wise man always bases his belief on the greater evidence.
5. Therefore, a wise man should never believe in miracles.
If those four premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows-- the wise man should never believe in miracles. Unfortunately for Hume and for those over the years who have believed him, the argument has a false premise--premise 3 is not necessarily true.
The evidence for the regular is not always greater than that for the rare. At first glance this might not seem to be the case. In the age of instant replay, premise 3 seems to make sense. For example, a football referee sees a play from one angle at full speed, while we get to see it from several angles in slow motion. We have greater evidence seeing a play over and over again (the regular) than does the ref who only sees it once (the rare).
But what may be true for a videotaped football game is not necessarily true for every event in life.
To disprove premise 3 there only needs to be one counterexample. Here's several, and they are from Hume's own naturalistic worldview:
1. The origin of the universe happened only once. It was a rare, unrepeatable event, yet virtually every naturalist believes that the Big Bang evidence proves that the universe exploded into being.
2. The origin of life happened only once. It too was a rare, unrepeatable event, yet every naturalist believes that life arose spontaneously from non-life somewhere on the earth or elsewhere in the universe.
3. The origin of new life forms also happened only once. Those rare, unrepeatable events are nevertheless dogmatically believed by most naturalists, who say it all happened by unobserved (i.e. rare) macroevolutionary processes.
4. In fact, the entire history of the world is comprised of rare, unrepeatable events. For example, David Hume's own birth happened only once, but he had no trouble believing it occurred!
In every one of these counterexamples from Hume's own naturalistic worldview, his third premise must be disregarded or considered false. If Hume really believed in that premise, he would not have believed in his own birth or his own naturalistic worldview!
So we know by some of these counterexamples that Hume's third premise, and thus his entire argument, cannot be true. But what are the specific problems with this naturalistic kind of thinking?
First, it confuses believability with possibility. Even if premise 3 were true, the argument would not disprove the possibility of miracles; it would only question their believability. So even if you personally witnessed, say, Jesus Christ rising from dead as he predicted -- if you were in the tomb, verified the body was dead, and then saw him get up and walk out of the tomb-- Hume's argument says that you (a "wise" person)shouldn't believe it.
There's something wrong with an argument that tells you to disbelieve what you have verified to be true.
Second, Hume confuses probability with evidence. He doesn't weigh the evidence for each rare event; rather, he adds the evidence for all regular events and suggests that this somehow makes all rare events unworthy of belief. But this is flawed reasoning as well. There are many improbable (rare) events in life that we believe when we have good evidence for them. For example, a hole-in-one is a rare event, but when we witness one we have no trouble believing it. We certainly don't say to the golfer, "Since the evidence for the regular is always greater than that for the rare, I'm not going to believe your shot unless you can tee it up and do it five times in a row!" Likewise, we certainly don't tell a lottery winner who beat 76 million-to-one odds that he's not going to get his money until he can win it five times in a row! No, in these cases, the evidence for the rare is greater than that for the regular. Sober, sane eyewitnesses provide greater evidence for a rare hole-in-one no matter how regularly that golfer had missed the hole in the past.
So the issue is not whether an event is regular or rare -- the issue is whether we have good evidence for the event. We must weigh evidence for the event in question, not add evidence for all previous events.
Third, Hume is actually arguing in a circle. Instead of evaluating the veracity of the evidence for each miracle claim, Hume rules out belief in miracles in advance because he believes there is uniform experience against them. As usual, good guy C. S. Lewis has great insight:
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.
So Hume commits the commits a fatal error as he hides his conclusion in the premise of his argument by way of a false philosophical presupposition. His false presupposition is that all human experiences have been against miracles. How can he know that? He can't, so he presupposes it.
The only way to know for sure is to investigate the evidence for each miracle claim. Assuming that each and every miracle claim is false, as Hume does, is clearly illegitimate.
Finally, although Hume correctly defines a miracle as a rare event, he then punishes it for being a rare event! It's as if Hume is saying, "If only miracles happened more often, then we could believe them." But if miracles happened more often, say, regularly (to use Hume's terminology), then they would cease being miracles (rare events), and we might consider them natural laws or part of unexplained natural phenomena.
But as soon as we consider them natural in origin, then they would no longer get our attention as special acts of God. Its rarity is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a miracle from everything else! To put it another way, the reason miracles get our attention is because we know that such an event could not be produced by natural laws.
So by Hume's logic, even if there is a God who performs miracles, we shouldn't believe any miracles he performs because they are not regular events. Again, there's something wrong with an argument that tells you to disbelieve what has actually occurred. And there's something wrong with an argument that requires that miracles not be miracles to be believed.
The bottom line is that Hume, without justification, simply declares that the only believable events are regular events, and since a miracle is not a regular event, it fails to meet this artificial criteria. As mentioned above, if we can't believe in rare events then we can't believe anything from history, because history is comprised of succeeding rare, unrepeatable events.
Spade, not believing in a miracle based on the fact that its a rare event is clearly unreasonable.
Checkmate.
