Theism and Explanation - Appeared-to-Blogly

72 Theism and Explanation
he thereby positing a miracle? Well, the answer will depend on what the
explanandum is and what defi nition of a miracle you adopt. Hume’s classic
defi nition, that a miracle is “a violation of a law of nature,” 45 assumes
that there exists a regular succession of events which the miracle interrupts.
This would certainly apply to many proposed theistic explanations. Christian
theists, for instance, attempt to explain Jesus’ empty tomb by saying
that God raised him from the dead. If this were true, it would certainly
represent a miracle in a Humean sense. But what of the “big bang,” on the
assumption that this was the beginning of the universe? 46 Would a theistic
explanation of this event involve a miracle? It would not, if we understand
a miracle as a violation of a law of nature. 47 We could, of course, adopt
another defi nition of a miracle, perhaps William Lane Craig’s “event which
lies outside the productive capacity of nature.” 48 Is this applicable to a theistic
explanation of the big bang? One could argue that it is, at least on the
assumption that it is beyond the productive capacity of anything, nature
included, to give rise to itself. 49 In any case, even if not all proposed theistic
explanations involve miracles, at least some of them do. And all proposed
theistic explanations posit an agent who is capable of working miracles.
Even if God does not in fact interrupt the regular workings of the natural
world, he could at any moment choose to do so. What implications, if any,
does this have for the explanatory force of the theistic hypothesis?
4.4.2 The Objection to Miracles
Some authors have argued that an “explanation” that posits an agent capable
of miracles is no explanation at all. We fi nd a clear expression of this
view in the work of the historian of religions, Morton Smith, in a passage
worth citing at length.
A basic supposition of sound historical method . . . is, in classical terms,
“atheism.” I say “in classical terms” because the adjective “atheist” was
regularly used in classical times to describe, for instance, the Epicureans,
who insisted that there were gods, but denied that they ever descended
to any special intervention in the world’s affairs. It is precisely
this denial which is fundamental to any sound historical method. [The
historian requires] a world in which . . . normal phenomena are not
interfered with by arbitrary and ad hoc divine interventions to produce
abnormal historical events with special historical consequences. . . .
The historian’s task . . . is to calculate the most probable explanation
of the preserved evidence. Now the minds of the gods are inscrutable
and their actions, consequently, incalculable. Therefore, unless the possibility
of their special intervention can be ruled out, there can be no
calculation of most probable causes—there would always be an unknown
probability that a deity might have intervened. 50