Text 5099, 147 rader
Skriven 2009-04-22 20:15:45 av Ross Sauer (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Miracles
================
Face it Jeff, you are full of shit.

miracle

A miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular
volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent"
(Hume, 123n). Theologians of the Old & New Testament religions consider
only God-willed contravention of the laws of nature to be true miracles.
However, they admit others can do and have done things which contravene
the laws of nature; such acts are attributed to diabolical powers and
are called "false miracles." Many outside of the Biblical based
religions believe in the ability to transgress laws of nature through
acts of will in consort with paranormal or occult powers. They generally
refer to these transgressions not as miracles, but as magick.

All religions report numerous and equally credible miracles. Hume
compares deciding amongst religions on the basis of their miracles to
the task of a judge who must evaluate contradictory, but equally
reliable, testimonies. Each religion establishes itself as solidly as
the next, thereby overthrowing and destroying its rivals. Furthermore,
the more ancient and barbarous a people is, the greater the tendency for
miracles and prodigies of all kinds to flourish.

....it forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous
relations that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and
barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to
any of them, that people will be found to have received them from
ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that
inviolable sanction and authority which always attend received opinions
(Hume, 126).
While there are still many people today who believe in miracles, no
modern historian fills his or her books with accounts of miraculous
events. It is improbable that the report of even a single miracle would
find its way into such texts today. Indeed, only those who cater to the
superstitious and credulous, such as the National Enquirer and a good
portion of the rest of the mass media, would even think of reporting an
alleged miracle without taking a very skeptical attitude towards it. No
scholarly journal today would consider an author rational if he or she
were to sprinkle reports of miracles throughout a treatise. The modern
scholar dismisses all such reports as either lies or cases of collective
hallucination.

Hume was aware that no matter how scientific or rational a civilization
became, belief in miracles would never be eradicated. Human nature is
such that we love the marvelous and the wondrous. Human nature is also
such that we love even more to be the bearer of a story of the marvelous
and the wondrous. The more wondrous our story, the more merit both we
and it attain. Vanity, delusion and zealotry have led to more than one
pious fraud supporting a holy and meritorious cause with gross
embellishments and outright lies about witnessing miraculous events
(Hume, 136).

Hume's greatest argument against belief in miracles, however, was
modeled after an argument made by John Tillotson, Archbishop of
Canterbury. Tillotson and others, such as William Chillingworth before
him and his contemporary Bishop Edward Stillingfleet, had argued for
what they called a "commonsense" defense of Christianity, i.e.,
Anglicanism. Tillotson's argument against the Catholic doctrine of
transubstantiation or "the real presence" was simple and direct. The
idea contradicts common sense, he said. The doctrine claims that the
bread and wine used in the communion ceremony is changed in substance so
that what is bread and wine to all the senses is in fact the body and
blood of Christ. If it looks like bread, smells like bread, tastes like
bread, then it is bread. To believe otherwise is to give up the basis
for all knowledge based on sense experience. Anything could be other
than it appears to the senses. This argument has nothing to do with the
skeptical argument about the uncertainty of sense knowledge. This is an
argument not about certainty but about reasonable belief. If the
Catholics are right about transubstantiation, then a book might really
be a bishop, for example, or a pear might actually be Westminster
Cathedral. The accidents of a thing would be no clue as to its
substance. Everything we perceive could be completely unrelated to what
it appears to be. Such a world would be unreasonable and unworthy of
God. If the senses can't be trusted in this one case, they can't be
trusted in any. To believe in transubstantiation is to abandon the basis
of all knowledge: sense experience.

Hume begins his essay on miracles by praising Tillotson's argument as
being "as concise and elegant and strong as any argument can possibly be
supposed against a doctrine so little worthy of a serious refutation."
He then goes on to say that he fancies that he has (118)

discovered an argument of a like nature which, if just, will, with the
wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious
delusion, and consequently will be useful as long as the world endures;
for so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be
found in all history, sacred and profane.
His argument is a paradigm of simplicity and elegance (122):

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.
Or put even more succinctly (122):

There must...be a uniform experience against every miraculous event,
otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.
The logical implication of this argument is that (123)

no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony
be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the
fact which it endeavors to establish.
What Hume has done is to take the commonsense Anglican argument against
the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and applied it to miracles,
the basis of all religious sects. The laws of nature have not been
established by occasional or frequent experiences of a similar kind, but
of uniform experience. It is "more than probable," says Hume, that all
men must die, that lead can't remain suspended in air by itself and that
fire consumes wood and is extinguished by water. If someone were to
report to Hume that a man could suspend lead in the air by an act of
will, Hume would ask himself if "the falsehood of his testimony would be
more miraculous than the event which he relates." If so, then he would
believe the testimony. However, he does not believe there ever was a
miraculous event established "on so full an evidence."

Consider the fact that the uniformity of experience of people around the
world has been that once a human limb has been amputated, it does not
grow back. What would you think if a friend of yours, a scientist of the
highest integrity with a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard, were to tell you
that she was off in Spain last summer and met a man who used to have no
legs but now walks on two fine, healthy limbs. She tells you that a holy
man rubbed oil on his stumps and his legs grew back. He lives in a small
village and all the villagers attest to this "miracle." Your friend is
convinced a miracle occurred. What would you believe? To believe in this
miracle would be to reject the principle of the uniformity of
experience, upon which laws of nature are based. It would be to reject a
fundamental assumption of all science, that the laws of nature are
inviolate. The miracle cannot be believed without abandoning a basic
principle of empirical knowledge: that like things under like
circumstances produce like results.

Of course there is another constant, another product of uniform
experience which should not be forgotten: the tendency of people at all
times in all ages to desire wondrous events, to be deluded about them,
to fabricate them, create them, embellish them, enhance them, and come
to believe in the absolute truth of the creations of their own passions
and heated imaginations. Does this mean that miracles cannot occur? Of
course not. It means, however, that when a miracle is reported the
probability will always be greater that the person doing the reporting
is mistaken, deluded, or a fraud than that the miracle really occurred.
To believe in a miracle, as Hume said, is not an act of reason but of
faith.

http://www.skepdic.com/miracles.html

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