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WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Miracles

Form

  1. Miracles are events that cannot be explained by natural causes.
  2. Well-documented miracles have occurred (healings, the Resurrection, answered prayer).
  3. Therefore there is a supernatural agent acting in the world, and that agent is God.

My Positions

  1. No empirically testable suspension of natural law has ever been verified.
  2. I do not hold that any such suspension has occurred.
  3. Where miracle claims have been examined under controlled conditions (for example intercessory prayer in the STEP trial, Benson et al., American Heart Journal, 2006), no effect has been found.

Notes

  1. David Hume's argument in "Of Miracles" (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748, Section X) remains decisive: a miracle is by definition a violation of a law of nature established by uniform experience. The testimony for any miracle must therefore be weighed against the entirety of experience that supports the law. It will always be more probable that the witness is mistaken, deceived, or deceiving than that the law was suspended. "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 endeavours to establish."
  2. Miracle claims are made by every religion, including mutually exclusive ones. If the argument worked, it would prove Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity simultaneously. The Christian apologist dismisses the miracles of other religions by exactly the reasoning I apply to theirs.
  3. The quality of miracle claims is inversely proportional to the quality of the recording equipment available. The age of the camera phone has not been accompanied by a single verifiable miracle.
  4. "Unexplained" is not "inexplicable". That medicine cannot currently explain a remission does not make it supernatural; it makes it unexplained. To infer God from the gap is the Appeal to Ignorance.
  5. The miracles that would be easy to verify never occur. No amputee has regrown a limb. Healings are invariably of conditions that remit spontaneously, respond to placebo, or were misdiagnosed.
  6. Claims of miracles are improper subjects of belief by the Sagan Standard (extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence) and Hitchens' Razor.

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