Thursday, April 22, 2004

More on miracles, is David Hume inconsistent?

I have not completely read David Hume's treatise on religion I have read his Treatise of Human Nature - a very tedious but easy to read (as far as philosophy goes). I was teaching about induction, or as philosophers say - I hope that I can classify myself as a philosopher - the "problem" of induction. Hume's inconsistency appears to involve the principle of uniformity. This reading section that I have now of Hume's comes from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

The problems that Hume discusses relate to cause & effect, and induction. Induction would be if I observe 99 black crowes, what color can I assume the next crow will be? Well it will be black, because, so far every crow that I have seen has been black. Cause & effect says that if A causes B, everytime B appears, A has preceded it and A is within spatio-temporal proximity to B. Hume denies that we can know anything about cause & effect or induction because both of them presuppose that the future will resemble the past. Now here are some quotes from Hume:
"that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past."
"In reality, all arguments from experience are founded on the similarity which we discover among natural objects, and by which we are induced to expect effects similar to those which we have found to follow from such objects."
"It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance."

How does this relate to the resurrection or miracles? To oversimplify the problem most arguments against miracles or the resurrection are of the variety that X cannot have happened because X does not normally happen; or X goes against the natural laws that govern the universe. We cannot argue for any type of natural laws based upon Hume's denial of the principle of uniformity. How do we know that people don't rise from the grave - it's never happened before, but that doesn't answer why it cannot happen now or in the future. All that tells us is what has happened, similar to the fact that I have seen 99 black crowes, that does not mean that the hundredth crow will not be black, it could be gray. Just like the fact that just because water has not been turned into wine before - before Jesus did - does not preclude the possibility that it can happen.

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