David Hume
I am putting the finishing touches to a brief twenty-minute presentation for the second in our series of “If you could ask God one question” sessions at Highfields Church. I always find this topic an interesting one, because it forms a challenge to the presuppositions of atheists and Christians alike. In a mixed audience, the subject is one that provokes thought on the nature of science, the extent to which modern scientific method can even address such matters, how we define ‘miracles’ (not entirely straightforward!), and whether in fact the whole thing matters anyway.
Prior to starting my M.A. in 2012, I had spent a little over three years debating online with atheists about this, and related issues. Depressingly, the conversations almost invariably followed the same kind of direction. There would be initial comments which hinted at a kind of open-minded, scientific objectivity – a willingness to be persuaded, rather than any articulation of an entrenched viewpoint which was utterly resistant even to the idea of supernaturalism. Then, almost irrespective of the exact framework of discussion, the matter would invariably resolve into a kind of default denial of even the theoretical possibility of the kind of phenomenon which loosely comes under the heading of ‘miracles’. It is difficult to account for one’s own experiences and views if none of one’s own words may be taken at face value.
This is to be expected. I concluded that the framework for online debates was almost inevitably likely to end up with simplistic or unrealistic resolutions. Furthermore this one issue required so much philosophical unpicking, that one could hardly expect folks whose entire conceptual framework was naturalistic to easily switch onto a completely different set of tracks, even if there was an intention to give me ‘the benefit of the doubt’.
Although the philosophy goes further back than this, the proximal blame for the view currently being regurgitated by Dr. Dawkins and his acolytes, lies firmly with David Hume (1711-1776). The position he outlined was not a particularly thoughtful or sophisticated one, and has passed down into the canons of modern atheism:
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.
Interestingly, the view was not popular at the time. John Locke, the ‘Founder of 18th Century Empiricism’ would have nothing to do with it. It is a view composed of assertions which the thoughtful mind will certainly want to question, and at the heart of it there is a fatal contradiction which renders Hume’s position largely valueless. Intriguingly, almost to a man, the fathers of modern science did not side with Hume in this matter – they adopted a clear theistic view of creation, in which the miraculous certainly had its place, albeit not centre-stage. Hume, in arriving at this view, was borrowing heavily from Spinoza, and his views were rooted in Pantheism. It is intriguing, but not wholly surprising, that atheistic naturalism arises out of Pantheism, whereas modern scientific method was grounded in Christian theology.
That does not, however, negate the value of Hume’s dictum for the modern atheist, where it forms a kind of presuppositional backdrop, framing every subsequent interaction on the subject. John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) had it bang on, when he said,
…if we do not already believe in supernatural agencies, no miracles can prove to us their existence.
theobloggie 
The idea of miracles is a curious one. Whether we consider a phenomenon to be a miracle or not depends at least in part on our expectation, and our assessment of how likely the phenomenon is to happen as a result of natural causes. An Amazonian Indian might consider an iPad miraculous; we don’t. So any definition must necessarily be subjective.
Now, the world of Quantum Mechanics is a curious one … thanks to Heisenberg’s revelation, we can’t precisely measure at the same time both the location and directional momentum of a particle. This means its future behaviour is necessarily unpredictable. And not only can, for example, an electron be anywhere in the universe at any given second, it actually *is* everywhere at once – until you look at it. Chances are, it’s been (broadly) circulating the same atom for a good while, or partaking in chemical reactions, but not moving (generally) very far from the same spot. But the point is it *could* be anywhere – it’s just vanishingly unlikely to be in very remote spots when tracked down. So the position of an electron is best expressed by an infinite probability cloud in all the dimensions in which an electron operates.
It is, for example, entirely possible that a particle is, when observed, a metre to the left of where it once was, it’s just very, very unlikely. And because matter is made up of such particles, an entire chunk of matter could suddenly jump a metre to the left; but the probability of all the particles in it doing so in sync is so small that we can reasonably say that it won’t ever happen. Not that it can’t – it most probably won’t. This sort of miracle could be explained by chance, but you really would be lucky to see one anywhere in the universe during its lifetime.
Other miracles – healing, etc. We do know that, for example, spontaneous remission from cancer does happen. We don’t really know why. We can put forward theories, but unless we can spot it in the act of occurring, or spot something else having changed, it’s all likely to be speculative. Even then causality has to be shown. But lack of a natural explanation does not allow us to conclude that a supernatural agency is at work; that’s a step without foundation. Sainthood effectively means nothing, and prayer is not demonstrably effective, without a better proof than “post hoc, propter hoc”.
And then there are the implausible miracles – statues crying, and the like. I don’t think there’s a recent example that hasn’t been debunked; we can’t do much to debunk historical miracles, but the older they are, the more chance there is that the original happening has been embellished along the way in the re-telling. And resurrection, the greatest and perhaps most implausible miracle of them all? Well, I’ve never known anyone come back to life. It seems to have been a regular occurrence in ancient times. We do, of course, have recent account of people who turned out not to have been dead after all, and for me this is the most likely explanation; I know it’s not universal. But it does, for me, seem infinitely more likely than the alternative, and I’m betting with the odds.
Hi Hugh. Helpful post, thank you.
I think it worth commenting that there is a difference between a worldview which permits the miraculous, because one’s perspective is informed by belief in the existence of a supernatural God who has the capacity to act both within and without (his own) physical laws – and a worldview which is simply credulous or superstitious.
I am less interested here in the sheer degree of credulity which we may bring to our worldview (“science has the answer to everything, even if we cannot see it now”), but rather the assumptions which underpin our perspectives. Thus, Hume would not recognise a miracle if he walked straight into it – because his presumptions have effectively engineered the very possibility out of his world. If you wear green-tinted spectacles, you’ll never recognise the colour red when you encounter it.
Clearly, there is a great deal of implausibility out there. You cited those weeping Madonnas, or the Hindu idols which drink milk. If people are not helped to see that there are rational reasons for faith, then they’ll invent all sorts of silly substitutes. One wonders what such phenomena are supposed to tell us about deity, other than a somewhat childish preoccupation with Spielbeg-type special effects. This is certainly not the biblical picture.
Having said that, in my thirty-odd years as a Christian, I’ve experienced humbling, unexpected, ‘miraculous’ answers to prayer – and I know plenty of others who live their lives at the sharp end whose experiences have taken the whole thing to a whole new level. The thing about ‘miracles’ is that they are not the norm – God has created a world which operates, for the large part, according to established laws, and within the fine-tuning constraints that he has established. If and when they occur, they are there for a purpose. They certainly don’t happen to order, such as in those failed prayer ‘experiments’ that The Dawkin loves to make much of.
Hugh
You’re right about at least one thing, which is that resurrection is the greatest miracle of all. And if all we had to go on was someone’s observation that the person looked a bit dead (perhaps according to more or less generally used modern criteria of having no pulse, no heart sounds, no breathing effort and no reaction to light) and was then alive again then I would happily conclude that they’d probably been alive all along. But the tricky thing with that explanation for what I would see as the most important resurrection, that of Jesus, is that there’s a lot more to go on that says he was dead.
When Monty Python put the question “What have the Romans ever done for us?” in the mouth of some innocent, the answers should have included the fact that they really were rather good at killing people. Aqueducts, roads, military strategy, villas in far flung corners of northern Europe, pinching other cultures’ myths and putting Latin names to the characters – at all these they were fairly skilled. But when it came to execution they were very good indeed. So when they put a man on a cross so that he could only breathe by pushing down with straight legs on his nailed feet, and then they got a bit impatient for him to die so they broke his legs so that he wouldn’t be able to breathe any more, and then waited for him to look dead, and then put enough of a spear hole in his flank that the separated bodily fluids poured out – not what you’d expect in a live body – and when they did this in front of plenty of witnesses, enough of whom were convinced that the authorities took precautions to avoid the theft of the body and one rich follower put him in a sealed tomb (which you just wouldn’t do to your guru if you thought he might pull through), I think it’s a bit more likely that he was dead than that he wasn’t.
And if the earth shook and the sky went dark and a tall tall curtain across town was ripped from top to bottom at that same moment that he appeared to breathe his last, then like the supernatural phenomena that Shakespeare has accompanying Duncan’s death in Macbeth, this was no ordinary day.
So if he is then seen alive by his best friends on the third day, still with those apparently fatal wounds, then either he had survived or he had been raised. And if the same man had spent weeks saying that he would die and be raised on that day it’s clearer still. After all, even if the survival hypothesis were plausible you could hardly see the person finding some Houdini-style way of engineering a sneaky way out. If one Friday in first century Palestine you are stripped and beaten and led to a Roman cross, you are not going to expect to come off it alive. If you are planning some kind of cunning stunt that will see you up bright and early on Sunday morning, you will have to pull one a bit less risky than crossing your fingers as they nail your hands.
And if the two groups of people who wrote this down and repeated it were sceptical Roman historians with a not particularly sympathetic agenda, and eyewitnesses who almost all went to brutal deaths still testifying to what they had seen, then you kind of have to take seriously the idea that it might have happened as they wrote it.
So here’s the rub. The question for thinking sceptics (of whom I am one by nature) is which explanation is more far fetched. For me, the ‘surviving crucifixion’ hypothesis is a lot less credible than the resurrection idea. For me, that’s just the way the facts point. Call it a miracle, call it the natural order of things – I don’t really care. I just think that resurrection is not so far fetched after all.
Idris
The problem is that this event is historical, and not repeatable. We only therefore have whatever accounts have come down through history to go on. We can’t do it again and see what the outcome is the second time. As no resurrection has ever been independently verified in modern times, we only have these accounts’ word that it’s both possible, and actually all happened the way the accounts said it did. So it’s down to whether you trust the accounts or not, and let’s face it, it wouldn’t be half the story it is without the ta-da moment of the resurrection. And of course people want to believe it’s possible, because they want it, or something similar, for themselves.
Personally, I think it’s much more likely, rather than resurrection actually having taken place, that these accounts (which were not, as I understand it, written contemporaneously with the events) were embellished to the point where resurrection having occurred was the only logical conclusion one could draw from them. How can you not feel that authorial exaggeration is a much more likely occurrence than bringing the dead back to life? Just because you revere a book and consider it holy doesn’t mean it’s all true, no matter how much you want or believe it to be. Unless, of course, you start with the assumption that the Bible is 100% fact – and if that’s the case we might as well end this discussion.
Well, I’m not convinced that people believe it because they want it, or something similar, for themselves. That would sound pretty empty, I grant you. I want something like it because I believe it which is rather different. And my view about the accuracy of scripture (where I think I prefer the word ‘truth’ to ‘fact’) is less a starting assumption and more one among a number of conclusions.
The account is historical – there we agree. I’m told that there are accounts of more recent resurrections. I haven’t seen any. When you say that none is independently verified, what do you have in mind? What independence? What kind of verification? There is a broader point here. Lots of things for which strong evidence is claimed by various schools of thought, including scientific humanism, are similarly non-repeatable. Anything about the origins of pretty much anything would be included.
As for the accuracy of the accounts, I go back to what I said. I’m sure Roman historians weren’t always accurate but their bias was not typically in this kind of direction. And most of the other lot, the authors who believed, were variously and unpleasantly executed as a result. Authors exaggerate all the time, like the rest of us; and most of us when we’ve been caught out exaggerating start furiously to back-pedal, mostly for the trivial reason of wanting to avoid embarrassment. Many people would recant even from things they still believe to save themselves from torture and death. Who dies for something they know is a lie?
I’m not trying to prove anything here; I don’t think that’s the point. But I do think that thinking carefully about authorial intent forces us to take the witness accounts a bit seriously.
Verification is an interesting question. I think I might want to see a resurrection happen with my own eyes, but even so I would still prefer my experience to be corroborated by a bevy of doctors and a plethora of monitoring and diagnostic equipment. A real resurrection would be a first for science, and the more extraordinary the event, the more comprehensive the confirmation should be. I certainly haven’t heard of any appropriately verified resurrections of late; I think they might have made the news, and I’m not inclined to give houseroom to unsubstantiated rumours; I want, as you might say, chapter and verse.
I’m finding it hard to see the difference between fact and truth. Facts are true, true statements are facts; there seems to be an isomorphism here. Belief doesn’t create truth. What am I missing?
Repeatability is a verification technique. Experiments that can be successfully repeated gain validation points because of it. You might say “once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a scientific theory” (not seriously, but you get the point). So experiments which bear repetition get repeated, and not just because scientists love proving each other wrong. But, as you rightly point out, there are things that cannot be repeated – the natural history of the Earth and its inhabitants, for example. Well, if you can’t use the confidence that repeatability gives, you have to turn to other, more indirect ways of corroborating or refuting any theory. And when multiple techniques not only corroborate the theory, but are also consistent with each other, you know this is an avenue worth pursuing; but all the time, you’re looking for a new angle that might prove the theory wrong, and lead to the need to formulate a better, more complete, more accurate theory. Unless we’re going to run out of things to discover, it’s a never ending process. So with evolution, which is what I think you were referring to, although we can’t repeat the actual “experiment” of life on Earth, we have a main theory, which is based on Darwin’s ideas, and we look for evidence for or against. Results that don’t fit the theory are not necessarily rejected (but if they are, there’s usually a better reason, such as a flawed process, or being insufficiently conclusive); they are used to help improve the theory; you might say that these theories undergo a kind of evolution themselves, so that the prevailing theory is the one that best fits observational reality. Another technique is simulation; this helps us understand how things could unfold, and can provide new insights (for example, into why transitional fossils are likely to be rarer than one might expect). And we have run experiments which conclusively demonstrate that organisms can evolve in front of our very eyes. Given the wealth of corroborating evidence from biology, archaeology, geology, chemistry, zoology, botany, and paleoanythingology … the chances that the broad mass of the theory of evolution is wrong is vanishingly small. Therefore the chances that the biblical creation theory is correct are also vanishingly small. The sum of the probabilities of all possible explanations must total 1.
There’s also the question of what resurrection actually means; how far through the death process does the subject have to go before its reversal would be considered to constitute true resurrection? These days, we can sometimes re-start a stopped heart through CPR … 2,000 years ago, getting someone’s circulation going again might well have been considered miraculous. So without a definition the whole discussion is a little nebulous. You’re invited to provide one.
Hugh, Idris.
This is brilliant – an almost textbook case of the underlying assumptions of ‘scientism’, and the limitations of it as a framework which purports to prescribe how we know what we know. In its strongest form, scientism defines knowable knowledge purely in terms of what may be known ‘scientifically’. In its weaker form, scientism grudgingly allows other means of ‘knowing’ some kind of place in the scheme of things, but regards them as distinctly second-rate.
Hugh seems to be echoing these underlying beliefs in the rather dismissive way of treating matters that are ‘historical’. Thus the historicity of resurrection of Christ, which at its core is a single, unrepeatable event, looked forwards to over the centuries, and then looked back to, cannot be treated as a kind of ‘fact’ that we may have confidence in, because it is not itself susceptible to the very limited terms of reference that scientism will allow. The resurrection of Christ cannot, by it’s very definition, be ‘repeatable’ (the New Testament tells us that), so of course it cannot form the subject of some kind of double-blind laboratory test. Thus, the methodology offered by this very narrow definition of science (scientism) fails absolutely, because it cannot have anything of value to say.
It is a conundrum why science should voluntarily place such constraints upon its own operations, if it were not for an overarching predisposition to avoid any possibility of considering the available data seriously. After all, scientists (medics) have looked at the NT descriptions of the death of Christ and concluded that they do accurately describe physical (clinical) death. Other scientists have looked at the range and variety of first and second-hand reports of the resurrected Christ, and concluded that phenomena such as mass hallucinations are not a feasible explanation. Other experts (lawyers, historians) have unpicked the narrative in detail, and made sense of it – the kind of sense upon which it is reasonable to build one’s beliefs. Having spent the last few years reading Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and Dennett in some detail, one characteristic that they all share is a pronounced tendency to avoid treating the known data with any seriousness.
My own conclusion is that scientism is essentially a self-refuting model for trying to understand the world around us. It is instead an attempt to rig the terms for referencing data in order to prevent any kind of conclusion which may be inconvenient – this is not at all the same as what we might understand by ‘scientific method’. Indeed, not only is it self-refuting, it is impossible to sustain in practice. Few of us have the facility to interact directly with whatever data subset we’re interested in. All of us tend, in practice, to gain our knowledge second or third-hand – and so therefore we are wholly dependent upon a chain of subjective inputs. Given that evolutionary theory quite cheerfully and openly admits that biological mechanisms are not in any way ‘truth-seeking’, but are interested only in satisfactory outcomes from the perspective of natural selection, then we actually have no reasonable basis for assuming that the much-vaunted claims of scientism actually deliver what they promise. Indeed, I would suggest that Hugh, in looking keenly at these issues and seeking to understand them, is behaving in a very uncharacteristic way if he is purely a biological organism, operating under the constraints of evolutionary mechanisms.
It seems to me that in order for the practice of science to have any meaning, it must presuppose a biblical/Christian view of reality.
Evening Hugh
Your points are important and I’ll risk being a bit tedious by tackling them one by one.
Truth or fact? I grant you there’s little difference and mostly overlap and the distinction I made isn’t important, but for what it’s worth it was meant to be about the truth of the bible being about something more than a list of facts being true. That’s a narrow meaning of ‘fact’, admittedly, but it is what people sometimes mean. Hence my preference.
As for repeatability, I wasn’t particularly referring to evolution, no – I think you read that into what I said. Obviously I’m aware that my comments apply to it but while I find your thesis on triangulation of different methods and disciplines in its support, it doesn’t really challenge my point.
My comments would also apply to the origins of Alpha Centuri and Aberystwyth. In neither case can experimental repeatability be the means to verification. Although traditional scientific method has repeatability at its heart, few people deny that other claims not verifiable by that means can be regarded as true. Even much of what we would now call science uses other ways to establish facts. History certainly does. If we want to avoid the depressing collapse into a lazily empty sceptical nihilism in many areas of human experience, we accept the need to establish truth without direct confirmation by scientific experimentation. That, I think, is part of what you establish with your comments on evolution and far from challenging the basis of believing a particularly plausible interpretation of the historical record, I think your thesis somehow strengthens it. I’m slightly more perturbed by the idea that you could only accept the truth of things you see yourself and even then you might want someone else’s opinion. I assume you don’t mean that you don’t accept any historical realities? Or are you really an absolute sceptic about everything outside of your own direct experience?
Your ‘what is resurrection?’ question really comes down to this: How dead is dead? There is a fascinating debate to be had in the thin grey zone. There are moments when there is a legitimate debate about whether a person is dead or alive, and this is more philosophical than biophysical. But I’m going to decline your invitation to define how we should resolve that debate because with the claimed resurrection we’re talking about here it spectacularly misses the point. Wherever that grey area lies and however it resolves, the man crucified, speared and buried in a sealed in a tomb is not dwelling in that twilight zone. Either he is very very dead or we’ve been given the wrong facts.
With those out of the way, all I can do is come back to what I think is the main thing here. We have a set of historical claims centred around what the bible says was a miraculous resurrection, which as your opener said would be the supreme miracle. The record suggests that the person who died believed that he would be raised and thought he knew when & why. It also suggests that the witnesses persisted in the accounts they had given and endured torture and death when they would have got off scot free had they recanted. You don’t like my explanation which is that this was what the bible said it was. But the alternative explanations – crucifixion survival, witnesses exaggerating, writers fibbing entirely – start to look a bit improbable too when you grapple with them. A lot less probable than at face value. I think you pointed out that the sum of probabilities must be 1 – so if the probability of these others is taking a hit, what does that do for the truth-probability of the biblical account?
Idris