Tim McGrew, of Western Michigan University, concurs: “The fact that in our ordinary experience dead men stay dead cannot be a significant piece of evidence against the resurrection considered as a miraculous sign - that is, it will not do the work that Hume wants it to do in the very sort of religious context where he is most implacably skeptical.” Ĭan Testimony Ever Be Sufficient to Establish a Miracle? A river must flow, before its stream can be interrupted.” Philosopher Dr. There must be an ordinary regular course of nature, before there can be any thing extraordinary. This point was first raised in response to David Hume by William Adams, who wrote that “An experienced uniformity in the course of nature hath always thought necessary to the belief and use of miracles. Thus, since miraculous signs require that there be a stable natural order, the existence of such a stable natural order cannot be taken as an argument against the occurrence of miracles in religious contexts. It is precisely because it is unique, and is an interruption of the regularities of nature that we can appeal to the resurrection as God’s vindication of the claims of Jesus of Nazareth to be the Messiah and Savior of the world. If people were routinely rising from the dead then the resurrection of Jesus would lose its epistemic value, since it would not be an event that could be distinguished from the way that nature normally operates. Consider, for instance, the relevance of the abnormal character of the resurrection to the epistemic value of Jesus being raised from the dead. If the purpose of miracles in religious contexts, therefore, is to function as signs, then they have to take place against the backdrop of a stable, uniform, natural order, since it is by contrast with a stable, uniform, natural order that miracles are able to serve as signs. The gospel of John refers to Jesus’ miracles as “signs.” Towards the conclusion of his gospel, John writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name,” (Jn 20:30-31). In other words, Jesus’ miracles were signs that authenticated His message. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me,” (Mt 11:4-6). For example, when Jesus is asked by disciples of John the Baptist whether He is the Messiah, or whether they should be waiting for another, Jesus replies, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. What is the stated purpose of miracles in religious contexts? According to Scripture, miracles function as signs that authenticate the message of the person performing them. In this article, I will argue that the dictum that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the philosophy of David Hume that it encapsulates, are fundamentally wrong-headed. As such, it has become a lazy excuse of many atheists for not dealing with the evidence for miraculous events such as the resurrection, but instead to dismiss it by appeal to Sagan’s dictum or to David Hume’s treatise against miracles (which the skeptic has seldom read for himself). And atheists seldom attempt to define what precisely is meant by “extraordinary”, or what sort of evidence would be sufficient to demonstrate an extraordinary event. This principle has led many skeptics to push the bar of demonstration so unreasonably high that it cannot possibly be cleared by any amount of testimonial evidence. The slogan itself goes back to the late astronomer Carl Sagan, though similar ideas were expressed by David Hume, who wrote “that n o 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 endeavours to establish.” Indeed, so confident was David Hume about this principle that he said, humble man that he was, “I flatter myself that I have discovered an argument…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.”
A popular slogan among many contemporary atheists is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.