Don't miracles break the laws of nature?

Almost every objection to miracles goes back to David Hume in the eighteenth century, usually without the person knowing it. His argument is elegant: the laws of nature rest on uniform human experience, a miracle would violate them, so the evidence against any miracle is always stronger than any testimony for it.

It sounds unanswerable. It has two problems, and the second one is fatal.

What a law of nature actually says

The first problem is the word violation.

A law of nature describes what happens when nothing interferes. Drop a ball and it falls at a predictable rate — that is gravity, accurately stated.

Now put your hand out and catch it. Has gravity been broken? Repealed? Obviously not. An agent acted within the system, and the law still describes exactly what the ball would have done had you not.

So the definition to work with is not “a violation of natural law” but something closer to Aquinas’s: an event nature would not produce if left to itself. That does not require the laws to fail. It requires somebody to act — which is what the claim was in the first place.

If God exists, he is not a force inside the system competing with physics. He is the one whose sustaining makes there be a system, and an act by him is no more a violation than your hand is.

The circle at the centre of Hume’s argument

Here is the serious problem.

Hume’s case depends on experience being uniformly against miracles. Ask how he knows that, given that history is full of people reporting them.

The answer is that those reports are set aside — as unreliable, as superstition, as not the sort of thing that happens. But that is the conclusion. The argument establishes that miracles never happen by first excluding every report of one from the evidence.

His own contemporary George Campbell saw it immediately: you cannot claim uniform experience while the record contains the counter-examples you have declined to count.

Even sceptics have said so

This is not just Christians complaining.

John Earman, a philosopher of science and not a believer, wrote a book-length study of Hume’s argument called Hume’s Abject Failure. His conclusion is that the in-principle argument does not work: you cannot rule out all miracle claims in advance, and the probability tools Hume needed had existed since before he wrote.

That is not a devotional judgement. It is a technical one from someone with no stake in the answer.

What probability actually depends on

There is a last piece, and it decides the whole thing.

Hume treats the likelihood of a miracle as a matter of past frequency alone. But frequency is not the only input.

Suppose no one has ever left a cupcake with purple icing on your desk. That does not make it improbable tomorrow, if a colleague likes you and knows purple is your favourite. Once an agent with intentions is in the picture, the base rate stops being the whole story.

Apply that here. If there is no God, a resurrection is as improbable as anything could be. If there is a God, and the man in question was making the claims this one made, it is no longer surprising at all.

Which means the question of miracles cannot be settled before the question of God. Ruling them out in advance is not scepticism about evidence. It is a conclusion about God, arrived at first and then used to sort the evidence.

Objections answered

But every miracle we've investigated has had a natural explanation.

Many have, and that is a good reason for caution rather than for a rule. The honest position is case by case: most claims fail on examination, which is exactly what you would expect either way, and it tells you nothing about the ones that remain.

Doesn't science assume nature is a closed system?

Methodologically, yes — science looks for natural causes, which is why it works. That is a working rule about what science investigates, not a discovery that nothing else exists. Treating the rule as a finding is the step where the philosophy gets smuggled in.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A fair principle, and it needs a second half: extraordinary compared to what? On the assumption that there is no God it is astronomically unlikely; on the assumption that there is, considerably less so. The slogan hides the fact that the prior assumption is doing the work.

How to say it

Use the caught ball

“If I catch a falling ball, have I broken the law of gravity?” It takes the word violation apart in one sentence, and everything else follows from it.

Show the circle

“How do we know experience is uniform against miracles?” Let them answer. The answer always turns out to be that the reports do not count — which is what was being argued for.

Name Earman

“An atheist philosopher of science wrote a book called Hume’s Abject Failure.” It is checkable, and it moves this out of being a fight between believers and sceptics.

Shared ground, and where traditions differ

All Christians hold

All the traditions hold that miracles are real, that God is free to act in his own creation, and also that claims should be tested rather than accepted readily — Scripture itself warns repeatedly about signs that mislead.

Roman Catholic

Investigates claimed miracles formally, with medical and scientific panels, and rejects the great majority of what is submitted.

Protestant

Divides between those who hold that the miraculous gifts ceased with the apostles and those who hold they continue — a disagreement about the present, not about whether God can act.