Miracles

• What do Realists believe?

  - Science is our best method of discovering what the world is like, even if the way science describes the world is different to how things seem to us.
• Realist views

  - For Christianity, this means that miracles are a real part of what happens in the world.

  -> They come about through the activity of God or someone empowered by him.

  -> They are signs of the Kingdom of God.

  -> They are objectively true even though they are not fully understood.
• Important note

  - Not all realists think miracles actually happen. (The realism/anti-realism debate is about what miracles are and what the word miracle means, not a debate about whether they exist).
• Realists and experience

  - Reality can be different to the way we experience it to be.

  - Reality doesn't depend on what we see, think or experience. Science is trusted to tell us what reality is like.
• Mind-Independence

  - Realists believe that reality is mind-independent.

  - Something is mind-independent if it would exist without the presence of any kind of mind.
• What would a realist believe about miracles?

  - Miracles are a mind-independent part of reality. They are a part of what happens in the world.
• What would a realist believe about miracles?

  - Miracles are events brought about by God (or somebody empowered by God).
• What would a realist believe about miracles?

  - Even though we can't see God doing the miracles, they're still evidence He exists (the same way we can't see protons, but we know they exist because of their effects).
• What would a realist believe about miracles?

  - These things are true even though we don't understand everything about miracles yet.
• Realist account of miracles

  - Whether something is a miracle is mind-independent. Either something is a miracle or it isn't.
• Miracles are God working through people

  - Something is a miracle if it is God intervening in the world.
• Miracles are God working through people: Example

  - Bible: when God worked through Moses to deliver the Israelites from slavery.

  - Bible: miracles of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels as historical events.
• A miracle is a suspension of the natural laws

  - A natural law is something that describes the way nature works. A miracle occurs when the world goes differently to the way the natural laws would make it go normally.

  - It is something that happens when God's intervention interferes with the normal workings of the laws of nature.

  - It is an intentional act of God's will.

  - It has religious significance.
• A miracle is a suspension of the natural laws: Issues

  - Encourages a 'god of the gaps' approach.

  - Today's science does not accept this concept of violation, since it sees the laws of nature as: descriptive (based on experience through observation) and probabilistic (showing what is likely to happen as opposed to what will definitely happen.

  - If the concept of violation is accepted, then it is likely that the evidence to support the miracle will outweigh the mass of evidence supporting the natural law that is said to be breached.

  - If such intervention is an act of God's will, why is there so much suffering?
• Miracles are extraordinary, beneficial coincidences

  - Some things in life are incredibly unlikely. When these unlikely coincidences work for our benefit, they are miracles.
• Miracles are extraordinary, beneficial coincidences: Example

  - The explosion that demolished the chapel in Nebraska.

  -> All 15 members of the choir were, for different reasons, uncharacteristically late for choir practice.

  -> They would've died if they had been there on time, as always in the past they had been.

  -> This was seen as God's work.
• Anti-Realism

  - Someone is an anti-realist if they are not a realist.

  - Anti-realists fundamentally believe that experiences shape reality.
• What anti-realists believe

  - Reality is mind-dependent. The way things are does depend on people's experiences of them.

  - If we can't directly experience something, we can't know what it's like.

  - There isn't always a right and wrong answer to a question.

  - The best way to find out about reality is human experience.
• Anti-realist account of miracles

  - Whether something is a miracle is mind-dependent. Whether something is a miracle does depend on whether we think it is.
• Miracles are events we interpret in a religious way - R.F. Holland

  - If something unusual happens, and we interpret it as being from God, then to us, it is a miracle.

  - To Holland, it doesn't really matter whether God intervened or not - what matters is the way we think about the miracle.
• Holland's view of miracles: Examples

  - The child who runs his toy car onto the railway track, where it gets stuck, at the same time as the train is coming along the line. The fact that the driver faints and accidentally causes an emergency stop is seen by the mother as a miracle, even though she knows there is a natural cause.
• Holland's three aspects of miracles

  - They are natural occurrences.

  - They are beneficial in nature.

  - They have religious significance.
• Issues with Holland's view & all anti-realist understandings of a miracle


  - It is very subjective. Whether or not an event is a miracle is dependent on how an individual interprets it.

  - It reduces God to the interpretation and understanding of human minds.
• Miracles are 'sign events' - Tillich

  - A miracle depends on how people feel about it.

  1) It's astonishing.

  2) We are more confident in our understanding of God's nature.

  3) It causes a feeling of joy.
• Feeling: We find it astonishing

  - Miracles are separated from mundane things, like reading the Bible, that we could also find out about God from.
• Feeling: We are more confident in our understanding of God's nature

  - Much like we could judge a person on the basis of their actions, we could judge God on the basis of His actions too.
• Feeling: It brings a feeling of joy

  - God would not enjoy causing suffering, and would not induce 'miracles' that were bad.

  - Miracles must cause joy.
• Hume's empiricism

  - Human knowledge is derived from sense experience.

  - We cannot know if an event was due to a deity because any deity is 'hidden' and unobservable.

  - Hume accepted the possibility of new and extraordinary events, but they are not miraculous.
• Hume's empiricism continued

  - When we are trying to estimate how likely something is to happen in the future, we have to consider how often we have observed that thing to happen in the past.

  - If we have observed something many times before, we should believe that it is more likely to happen again.

  - If we have only observed something to happen very rarely, we assume that it is less likely to happen again.
• Hume's view on natural laws

  - Hume believes that natural laws are reliably stable relationships between events.
• Examples of natural laws

  - Every single time we drop something, it falls. So gravity is a law of nature. There is a perfect link between the first event (dropping) and the second event (falling).
• Links between Hume's empiricism and his view on laws

  - Things that we've seen happen a lot before are more likely to happen again.

  - Hume says that we should be very sure that the laws of nature are never violated because we have so much evidence in their favour.
• Hume's first argument: alternative explanations

  - We should never believe that an event is a miracle, because of alternative explanations for that event are always more likely than a suspension of the law narrative.

  - "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless that testimony being false would be more miraculous than the miracle which it is trying to establish".
• Testimony

  - The vast majority of people have not seen a miracle themselves - they have heard about it or read about it from someone else.
• Hume's argument for testimony

  1) If someone tells you they have seen a miracle, there are two other options: either they really have seen a miracle, or they are saying something that isn't true.

  2) A miracle is a suspension of the laws of nature. We have never observed this. So we should consider it extremely unlikely that it would happen.

  3) We have often observed people say things that aren't true. So we should consider this happening to be quite likely.

  C1) Therefore, it is more likely that someone is saying something that isn't true than that a miracle really occurred.

  C2) Therefore, when someone tells you they have seen a miracle, we should not believe that a miracle had occurred.
• Eyewitness

  - Hume's first argument says that even if we had eyewitnesses who were well-educated, trustworthy, sensible, unbiased and with great memories, their testimony still wouldn't be good enough to prove a miracle occurred.

  - The person could be honestly mistaken about what they've seen.
• Criticisms of hume: good arguments track truth

  - 'Truth Tracking' means that the suggestions of a theory reliably correlate with the truth.

  - Hume's theory would tell us not to believe a miracle even if we saw a real one. This means his theory does not track the truth.