Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism
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<strong>Atheism</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Theism</strong> 51<br />
11 Miracles<br />
The discussion in section 9 on the argument from religious experience led on<br />
naturally to a brief discussion of Pascal’s Wager <strong>and</strong> James’s ‘Will to Believe’.<br />
It should also lead on to a discussion of miracles, in so far as if one did witness<br />
a miracle, this would surely count as having a religious experience. Still<br />
if there really are miracles, perception of them would usually be by the usual<br />
organs of perception, eyes, ears <strong>and</strong> so on. So ‘experience’ here would not refer<br />
to a special mode of acquiring knowledge, though the knowledge acquired (if<br />
it was acquired) would be of something naturalistically inexplicable. Discussion<br />
of the reality of miracles, <strong>and</strong> of if or how we could be assured that a<br />
miracle really occurred, usually concerns itself with the reliability of witnesses<br />
<strong>and</strong> this will lead on in section 12 to some remarks on the New Testament.<br />
One type of alleged miracle is that of ‘conversion experience’, as in the case<br />
of St Paul already mentioned. These, as William James remarked, certainly<br />
occur. 89 On the other h<strong>and</strong> a sceptic will put the experience down to natural<br />
causes, <strong>and</strong> so while agreeing that the experience existed will deny that any<br />
supernatural cause of it existed or that putative perceptions involved were<br />
veridical. Conversion experiences are inevitably subjective, <strong>and</strong> our attitude to<br />
reports of them will depend on our views about the argument from religious<br />
experience. The sceptic may agree that the experience is in fact had but will<br />
doubt that it constitutes a perception of anything external. On the other h<strong>and</strong><br />
there are claimed to be inter-subjectively observable miracles, for example the<br />
feeding of the five thous<strong>and</strong> or the appearance of angels at the battle of<br />
Mons, to take two very different examples.<br />
Such a miracle as the feeding of the five thous<strong>and</strong> clearly involves a violation<br />
of the laws of nature. Some philosophers have contended that this makes<br />
the notion of a miracle a self-contradictory one, on the grounds that an<br />
exception to a putative law of nature would show that the putative law was<br />
not really a law <strong>and</strong> that laws are universal regularities. This objection can be<br />
got over by supposing a clause in the statement of any law of nature ‘except<br />
when there is divine intervention’. Or to put it otherwise, the laws of nature<br />
tell us how the universe regularly works, even though there can be miraculous<br />
exceptions. A theist might say that the laws of nature are imposed by God on<br />
the universe as a whole by one comprehensive creative act, whereas miracles<br />
would be exceptional events imposed by God for particular reasons at particular<br />
locations in space–time. Such a notion is not obviously contradictory<br />
though I sense a problem of whether a truly omnipotent <strong>and</strong> omniscient God<br />
would not be able to create a universe in which the laws of nature would be<br />
such that the desired exceptional events occurred without breaking a suitably<br />
chosen set of laws, <strong>and</strong> whether God, for aesthetic reasons if for no other,