Hume’s Counterfeit Check

Acknowledgments

I thank Peter Lang Press for the professionalism and expertise they have demonstrated in the publication process. In particular, I thank Dr. Philip Dunshea, the editor, and Mathangi Balasubramanian, his editorial assistant for making the process so easy and pleasant.

Introduction

Few pieces of philosophy are as famous as Hume’s essay “Of Miracles” found in Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Whether it deserves its fame is another matter entirely. The undertaking of this work will be to demonstrate that it does not. Far from advancing an elegant tightly reasoned argument that amounts to “an everlasting check”¹ against belief in miracles, Hume presents readers with what amounts to a counterfeit check, an argument that at first glance looks persuasive, but upon further examination does not stand up to scrutiny.

Despite its unpopularity with Hume’s many admirers, this conclusion is hardly new. During Hume’s lifetime, George Campbell² and Richard Price³ were trenchant critics of the Essay. Subsequently, William Paley,⁴ John Henry Newman,⁵ C.D. Broad,⁶ and A.E. Taylor,⁷ to name only a few, found it deeply flawed and not of the standard of Hume’s other writings. Early on, Campbell, ever polite, and an admirer of much of Hume’s other work was nevertheless willing to claim, right from the outset of his extended critique of the Essay, that “its merit is more of the oratorical kind than the philosophical.”⁸ Broad, writing early in the twentieth century was much blunter, observing that “Of Miracles” is over-rated and falls below the standard of Hume’s other work.⁹ More recently, David Johnson writes that “the view that there is in Hume’s essay, or in what can be reconstructed from it, any argument or reply or objection that is even superficially good, much less, powerful or devastating, is simply a philosophical myth.”¹⁰ Likewise, and even more recently, John Earman, an atheist and no apologist for the reality of miraculous events, argues that the Essay, is an abject failure, “largely derivative and where original almost wholly without merit”¹¹ warning that “philosophers who try to mine it for nuggets of wisdom are bound to be disappointed – it is a confection of rhetoric and schien Geld.”¹²

This being the case, on what grounds can the present volume be justified? Apart from the fact that I have at least a few original insights to offer, there are several. First, in the larger academic community and its many disparate disciplines there exists the almost completely unexamined assumption that Hume has had the final word on whether belief in miracles could ever be thought rational. Even in the fields of philosophy and theology, there are many who have either never read the Essay, or have only the most cursory acquaintance with it, but who are nevertheless prepared to embrace its fame as justified. I recall being in graduate school and hearing a distinguished philosopher of history give a paper in which he discussed “Of Miracles” and its implications for historical research. After the talk was over, I overheard one of my professors say to another that he had never actually read “Of Miracles” and now, given the talk, would never need to read it.

On a later occasion, in conversation with a well-known philosopher who writes in the areas of philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, and the intersection between them, he appealed to Hume as having said all that needs to be said on the topic of belief in miracles. Further conversation made clear that he had no knowledge of past or contemporary criticisms of the Essay and was, at most, only superficially familiar with its arguments. Belief that the Essay is worthy of admiration and that Hume developed a powerful case against the rationality of belief in miracles appears largely a matter of accepting a culturally entrenched opinion without ever examining whether such admiration and acceptance is in fact warranted. It is important, therefore, to insist that the Essay be subject to continued critical examination, and not simply be given a pass based on Hume’s reputation.

Second, even in contemporary attempted philosophical defenses of the Essay, there exists what can only be characterized as chronological snobbery. This snobbery takes two forms; the first being the tendency to discount the criticisms made by Hume’s contemporaries, the second being the tendency to ignore what R.M. Burns has termed “the great debate on miracles” that preceded Hume’s writing the Essay. This dismissal of context is unfortunate since it contributes to radical misinterpretations of Hume’s goal in writing the Essay. Taking seriously the intellectual climate in which the Essay was written makes it impossible, for example, to accept the claim of a recent commentator that for Hume there is no sense in which an event being a miracle is independent of one’s epistemic state and that whether an event merits being called a miracle has nothing to do with the question of whether it was supernaturally caused.¹³ Not only does such a claim make no sense in terms of what Hume explicitly states, it makes no sense given the positions of those to whom Hume addresses the Essay. As Earman notes, “no amount of logic chopping can avoid the fact that for all of the participants in the eighteenth-century debate on miracles, Hume included, a resurrection is the paradigm example of a miracle.”¹⁴ There are many mistakes and confusions in the Essay, but Hume is not guilty of attempting to refute his interlocutors by redefining the term “miracle,” such as to make no reference to supernatural causation.

Third, ever since the publication of Antony Flew’s Hume’s Philosophy of Belief, it has become increasing common for commentators to claim that Hume never intended to rule out the possibility that testimonial evidence could, in principle, be sufficiently strong to justify belief in a miracle. Hume, on such a reading, was only concerned to show that belief in miracles requires very strong, perhaps extraordinarily strong, evidence if it is to be rational. Adopting this interpretation is attractive to defenders of the Essay, since it would absolve Hume of the charge of plain dogmatism and provide an easier position to defend than if he is taken as claiming that no amount of testimonial evidence, could, even in principle, be sufficiently strong to make belief in miracles rational.

Even so, such a reading fails to rescue the Essay. Earman has made a strong case that even on the view that “Hume did not mean to foreclose the issue of whether testimony could establish the credibility of a miracle” – a view Earman accepts¹⁵ – the Essay is an abject failure. Yet the situation is much worse than he concludes. Earman finds it convenient to accept the claim that Hume never attempted to provide argument against the possibility of belief in miracles ever being rational, since this allows him to concentrate on Hume’s misunderstanding of probabilistic reasoning and “to bring into focus a number of central issues in induction, epistemology, and philosophy of religion”¹⁶ that in his view require the use of Bayesian probability theory.¹⁷ He spends virtually no time, however, in defending his acceptance of reading Hume as allowing the possibility, at least in principle, of testimonial evidence being sufficiently strong to justify belief in a miracle. The reasons he adduces in favour of his interpretation are far from convincing; a conclusion that he implicitly grants when he allows that the Essay permits the traditional reading, namely that Hume takes himself to have shown that no amount of testimonial evidence could ever be sufficient to establish rational belief in miracles.

Indeed, Earman appears unintentionally disingenuous on the matter of what Hume was attempting to demonstrate. He explicitly claims that, on the mistaken “straight account of induction” which he attributes to Hume, the probability of a miracle is “flatly zero”¹⁸ and quotes Hume’s 1761 letter to Hugh Blair in which Hume was prepared to say that “the proof against a miracle, as it is founded on invariable experience, is of that species or kind of proof which is full and certain when taken alone, because it implies no doubt, as is the case with all probabilities.”¹⁹ It makes no sense for him to observe that on Hume’s account of induction the argument of the Essay makes the probability of a miracle zero, yet deny that Hume was concerned to demonstrate that belief in a miracle could never be warranted.

Although it suits Earman’s purposes to adopt the interpretation he does, and although reading Hume as never disallowing in principle the possibility of testimony being strong enough to justify rational belief in miracles has become increasingly popular, I will argue that close examination of the text, the context in which it was written, and Hume’s response to his early critics, does not warrant attributing so modest a goal to the Essay. Rather, Hume clearly takes himself to have shown that no amount of testimonial evidence could conceivably justify belief in the miraculous. It may be granted that the changes Hume makes to “Of Miracles” in the various editions of the Enquiry, demonstrate he came to see there were more difficulties with the argument than he first thought. We see, for instance, in later editions a greater emphasis on the marvel versus miracle distinction, whereby Hume attempts to defuse the worry that his argument proves too much. When push comes to shove, however, Hume was not prepared to abandon his claim that he has provided an in-principle refutation of any attempt to validate belief in miracles based on testimonial evidence. For example, although critics have made much of the existence of Part II of the Essay, where Hume lists a number of arguments designed to show that the testimonial evidence in favour of miracles is of extremely poor quality, as a reason to reject such a reading, we find in Part II a number of remarks that, on pain of him simply begging the question, can only be understood as Hume having taken himself in Part I as having already demonstrated the inconceivability of testimonial evidence ever warranting belief in miracles.²⁰

To argue that this is the correct understanding of Hume’s goal in the Essay is not to be guilty of violating the Principle of Charity. It is one thing to allow the most charitable reading where the text does in fact permit multiple interpretations, quite another to insist that the author does not mean to say what he clearly claims. The muddledness of the Essay lies not in what Hume takes himself as trying to establish, namely that belief in miracles on testimonial grounds can never be rational, but rather in the confused argumentation by which he attempts to demonstrate this claim.

Neither will it do to insist that Hume cannot really have meant to defend such a claim, since a “straight” or “flat” reading of the text reflects badly on a philosopher of Hume’s stature. Invariably, such insistence leads to claiming that Hume cannot have meant to say what he did, and then interpreting the text to make it say what the author thinks Hume should have said, rather than what in fact Hume did say.

For example, J.C. Gaskin, although noting Hume’s dogmatic obscurantism,²¹ the “slightly [?]‌ arrogant tone of the Essay,”²² and Hume’s “undue confidence about what is or is not physically possible,”²³ nevertheless insists that Hume is guilty of these faults in only a “few off-duty” moments.²⁴ Admitting that the attention the Essay receives is not merited as compared to Hume’s other writings on religion,²⁵ Gaskin is still adamant that “‘Of Miracles’ is manifestly one of those rare philosophical pieces whose very inconsistencies and ambiguities are more fruitful than the cautious balance of a thousand lesser works.”²⁶ One wonders if Gaskin would be willing to overlook such clear and evident faults if the writer were any other than Hume.

Earman likewise finds it necessary to claim that Hume cannot mean what he so clearly says. He maintains that by the term “law of nature” Hume does not actually mean an actual law of nature, but rather a presumptive law of nature.²⁷ This, however, is to do violence to the text. Deficient though Hume’s understanding of what a law of nature is, he clearly takes a miracle to be a violation of an actual law of nature and not simply a presumed law of nature. To his credit, Earman recognizes that his claim as to what Hume means by a law of nature does not fit with the emphasis which Hume places on the distinction he draws between a marvel and a miracle.²⁸ He nevertheless takes for granted that Hume should be understood as meaning a presumed law of nature rather than an actual law of nature.

Other authors, concerned to defend the Essay, are even less hesitant than Gaskin and Earman to assert that Hume cannot be taken to mean what he explicitly says.²⁹ Ironically, despite their high praise of the argument’s clarity, elegance, and simplicity – we are routinely assured that such is the case – they find it necessary to claim they are making clear what Hume really meant to say. That their various proposals turn out to be at odds with one another routinely ignoring crucial passages, and featuring denials that Hume means what he clearly says, does not inspire confidence that the Essay deserves admiration as a model of philosophical rigor.³⁰

If the Essay is to be correctly interpreted and appraised and not simply ride the coat tails of Hume’s other writings, then it must be viewed in the context of the debate to which Hume took himself to be contributing. Who were the authors Hume would have read on the topic of miracles and what were their arguments? What did Hume really say in the Essay, as opposed to what many modern commentators maintain he must have meant? How did his contemporaries understand the Essay, what were their criticisms, and what was Hume’s response to those criticisms?

This is just to say that context and exegesis is prior to any criticism or defense of the Essay. It will not do to defend Hume by constructing what he should have claimed and then insist on reading such an argument back into the text. Neither will it do to attribute to Hume an originality that history does not support. He must be allowed to speak for himself, however embarrassing this may prove to his reputation. I have, therefore, included the Essay as an appendix.

My goal has been to make the organization of this book straightforward and easy to follow. Apart from the introduction and the epilogue, it is divided into three inter-connected parts.

Part One entitled “The Road to ‘Of Miracles’” is comprised of Chapters One and Two and chronicles the historical, philosophical, scientific, and religious concerns that are the backdrop to Hume writing the Essay. In Chapter One, I briefly explore the beginning of what R.M. Burns has called “the great debate on miracles” that took place in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. I note the intertwining of religious and scientific thought in the writings of members of the newly established Royal Society, in particular their emphasis on the miracles of the New Testament and their use of the idea of “moral certainty” as grounding religious and scientific belief.

In Chapter Two, I consider the deist reaction to this emphasis on miracle. I explore the various arguments against taking miracles seriously that were developed by deists such as Annet, Chubb, Morgan, and Woolston, to name only a few. I observe that their arguments anticipate both Hume’s argument of part one and his arguments of part two of the Essay. I also note the responses that were made to these arguments by orthodox writers such as Butler, Chandler, and Sherlock.

Part Two entitled “Evaluating ‘Of Miracles’” is the focus of the book and is comprised of Chapters Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven. In Chapter Three, I defend what I take to be a correct interpretation of the Essay. My interpretation is basically the traditional view that in part one Hume develops an a priori epistemological argument designed to show that the testimonial evidence for a miracle could never outweigh the evidence against a miracle, namely the evidence for the laws of nature. I suggest that the existence of part two is largely explained by Hume’s view that, even if one disagrees with the argument of part one, the actual evidence for miracles is so poor that no rational person should take the possibility of belief in them seriously.

In Chapter Four, I examine criticisms of the Essay that were made by contemporaries of Hume such as William Adams, George Campbell, and Philip Skelton. These criticisms, I argue, have not received an adequate response. Indeed, the difficulty of meeting these criticisms motivates Hume’s defenders to offer interpretations of the Essay that cannot be supported as instances of sound exegesis.

In Chapters Five and Six, I scrutinize two contemporary monograph treatments of the Essay, Robert Fogelin’s much lauded A Defense of Hume on Miracles, and Alexander George’s The Everlasting Check. I argue that both badly misinterpret the Essay, finding it necessary to ignore crucial passages and attribute to Hume views he rejects.

In Chapter Seven, I examine the four a posteriori arguments found in part two of the Essay. My reason for deferring detailed discussion of these arguments until Chapter Seven is that these arguments were in no way original to Hume, being stock in trade of the deist polemic and very familiar to Hume’s readers. Hume’s use of these arguments appears disingenuous since he makes no reference to the numerous and detailed responses they had already received. Further, his adoption of these arguments is marked by what can only be seen as out of context references to the argument of part one, understood in the traditional way as claiming that the testimonial evidence for miracles could never be sufficiently strong to warrant belief.³¹ They add nothing, therefore, to the overall plausibility of his position.

Part Three is entitled “Miracles and Doxastic Responsibility” and consists of two concluding chapters in which I argue that the prospects of justifying belief in miracles on testimonial grounds are bright. In Chapter Eight, I do two things. First, I note the importance of the point raised by early critics of the Essay such as William Adams³² and Richard Price,³³ namely that, contra Hume, miracles do not necessitate violation of the laws of nature, and thus the evidence for miracles does not conflict with the evidence for the laws of nature. Second, I consider the objection that even if testimonial evidence were to prove sufficient to establish a highly unusual event, it is always more rational to view the event as having a natural rather than supernatural cause.

In Chapter Nine, I examine the claim that justified belief in miracles requires extraordinary evidence. I conclude that this claim is false and argue that even a modest amount of testimonial evidence from honest and competent individuals is sufficient to justify belief in the occurrence of events best understood to be miracles.

By way of concluding my overall argument, I include a very brief “summing up.” I also have included three appendixes. The first of these is Hume’s Essay. I want my readers to examine my interpretation and criticisms given Hume’s own words. The second of these lists the seventeenth and eighteenth writers to which I refer and whether they were critics or defenders of belief in miracles. The third of these is a brief examination of evidence suggesting that Hume did not feel that he could answer George Campbell’s A Dissertation on Miracles.

1 Hume, Enquiry, 110, Sec. 86.

2 Campbell, Dissertation on Miracles.

3 Price, Four Dissertations.

4 Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity.