Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

52 J.J.C. Smart
would not want to do the job this way. Perhaps a theist could indeed say that
this is how the universe really is: that miracles are only events that appear to
be contrary to the laws of nature.
Anyway, whether subsumable under law or not, miracles must be remarkable
events serving some divine purpose. Sometimes it has been held that one
purpose of miracles is to induce faith in those who saw or heard of them. We
wonder then why God does not perform miracles for all to see, not just for a
favoured few. To refer to a previous example, perhaps the stars could be so
placed as to spell out the Apostles’ Creed in Greek. Alpha Centaurians would
see the stars in different patterns from those that we see, but perhaps somewhere
in the sky they would see a pattern of verses in Alpha Centaurian.
Because miracles are, or appear to be, exceptions to the laws of nature there
is a prima facie reason for doubting any report of a miracle. There is always
the possibility of explaining away such reports by reference, as Hume remarked,
to the well-known phenomena of the credulity and knavery of humankind.
Nevertheless someone who already believed in an omnipotent being would
have some possibility of rational belief in a miracle story. At least such a story
would cohere better with his or her system of belief than would be the case
with the system of belief of a sceptic or atheist.
At one place in his very well-known essay on miracles, section 10 of
his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume put forward his
scepticism about miracles with a qualification: he said that ‘a miracle can
never be proved so as to be the foundation of a system of religion’ (my italics). The
interpretation of this very readable and at first sight very lucid essay has given
rise to surprisingly many scholarly problems, as can be seen, for example,
from Antony Flew’s learned chapter in his Hume’s Philosophy of Belief. 90
As I read Hume he is concerned to establish the weaker point, that a
miracle cannot be proved ‘so as to be the foundation of a system of religion’.
He does not quite claim to prove that a miracle could not be proved, but he
does hold that a miracle cannot be proved so as to be the foundation of a
system of religion. Nevertheless he argues that in fact, with the background
knowledge that educated theists, atheists and sceptics should be expected to
have in modern times, such a proof of a miracle encounters great obstacles,
even though by ‘proof ’ here is meant something less than apodeictic proof
but only the sort of establishment that scientific hypotheses are capable of.
He does think that ‘there may be miracles or violations of the usual course
of nature, of such a kind as to admit of proof from human testimony’ but he
adds that ‘perhaps it will be impossible to find any such in all the records of
human history’.
Sometimes when we find a miraculous fact extremely well attested we do
not need to say ‘Ah! a miracle’, but look for a naturalistic explanation. This
happens with reports of miraculous cures of disease. It is possible to suppose