Defense Laboratory / Can miracles be historically investigated?
1. The objection
“A miracle is by definition an event that goes against the regular course of nature. A historian works by comparing the past with the present and asking what usually happens. Reports of miracles are always old, always secondhand and always come from people who already believed. The wise person weighs what is more likely: that the laws of nature were broken, or that someone was mistaken, exaggerated or lied. The second has happened countless times. The first has never been observed. History cannot investigate miracles because it has no way to give them any weight.”
2. Investigation
Assumptions
- That the laws of nature are known well enough to say, in advance, that a particular event cannot have a cause beyond nature.
- That the only possible explanations for a report of a miracle are a mistake or a lie.
- That the probability of an event can be judged without considering whether God exists or acts.
- That uniform past experience is a reason to think that a unique event did not happen, rather than just a reason to be careful.
- That a historian can be neutral on the question of whether God exists.
Evidence and historical claims
- What did David Hume argue in his essay on miracles (published in 1748), and what exactly was his claim about testimony and the laws of nature?
- What are the main replies to Hume, including the point that his argument seems to assume what it needs to prove, and the argument from probability theory?
- What kinds of miracle reports exist in the modern world, such as the documented cures examined at Lourdes by a medical bureau, and how do medical and religious authorities each describe what they have found?
- How do the Catholic and Orthodox churches investigate a claimed miracle (for example in the process of canonization), and what do they require?
- How did ancient writers, Christian and non-Christian, report and test claims of wonders? What did they believe about natural and supernatural causes?
Philosophical and theological claims
- How should a miracle be defined: as a violation of the laws of nature, as an event that nature alone would not produce, or as an event that is a sign of God’s action?
- Can a person reason about the likelihood of an event without having already decided whether God exists?
- If an event is unique and cannot be repeated, what kind of evidence can bear on it at all? Is that a reason to dismiss it or only to be cautious?
Logical structure
- Premise 1: Laws of nature are established by uniform human experience.
- Premise 2: A miracle is a violation of a law of nature, and so goes against uniform experience.
- Premise 3: The evidence for a miracle is always testimony, which is sometimes wrong.
- Conclusion: Therefore testimony can never make it reasonable to believe a miracle occurred.
- Check each premise separately. Premise 1 may assume that experience is uniform, which is the question at issue, and the conclusion may follow only if the weight of testimony can never be strong enough, which needs an argument of its own.
3. Christian responses
Response A: Miracles can be weighed by ordinary historical methods (many Christian philosophers and historians)
Defenders hold that Hume’s argument fails because it assumes in advance that the evidence for a miracle must be outweighed. The philosopher John Earman has argued that Hume’s reasoning does not hold up as a general argument, and Christian philosophers such as Richard Swinburne use probability theory to argue that testimony, together with background belief about God, can make a miracle more likely than not. On this view, the question is not whether miracles are possible, but whether the particular evidence for a given event is strong enough.
They add that historians already weigh unusual claims, and that rejecting the possibility in advance is a philosophical choice, not a result of historical study.
Response B: Miracles are investigated within the life of the church, with caution (Catholic and Orthodox practice)
The Catholic Church has a formal process for examining claimed miracles, especially cures. In the process of canonization, a claimed cure is studied by medical experts, who must find that it has no natural explanation known to them, and then by theologians. The church has also been cautious in other cases, and many reports are never accepted. The Orthodox tradition accepts miracles, especially through icons, relics and holy people, and generally does not use a formal investigation of the same kind.
Both traditions treat a miracle as a sign that points to God, and not as a proof that compels belief. The Gospels themselves record that some who saw wonders did not believe (for example John 12:37), which suggests that the evidence was never expected to force belief.
Response C: History can only study what is natural, and must be silent on miracles (methodological naturalism, held by many secular and some Christian historians)
Many historians, including some Christians, hold that the discipline of history works only with natural causes, in the same way that a physicist works only with physical ones. This does not mean that miracles never happen. It means that the tools of history cannot say that one did. The historian can say that people believed something happened and describe what the sources show, but the further step belongs to faith or philosophy.
On this view, a historian who says that a miracle occurred is no longer doing history. Some Christian scholars welcome this limit, since it keeps faith from depending on the results of historical research.
Response D: Skeptical and secular critics
Skeptics argue that most reports of miracles come from places and times where there was little scientific knowledge, where people were eager to believe, and where records were poor. They point out that miracles are claimed in every religion, and that these claims contradict each other, so that evidence for one faith’s miracles seems to be evidence against another’s. They also point out that medical cures that were once thought to be miracles have often later been explained.
Many skeptics hold that the pattern of reports, which fall away as methods of checking improve, is itself a kind of evidence. Defenders reply that this can overlook the cases that still resist explanation, and that the argument from rival religions proves less than it appears to.
4. The strongest counterargument
The strongest reply to Responses A and B is that the argument depends on a prior belief that God exists and acts. A person who already believes may find a report of a cure more likely to be a miracle, while a person who does not may find it more likely to be an unexplained natural event. If so, critics say that the evidence is not doing the work, and that two honest people can weigh the same testimony and reach opposite results. They add that appeal to events that science cannot yet explain risks a God of the gaps, in which the space for God shrinks as knowledge grows.
The strongest reply to Response C is that if history can never say a miracle happened, it has settled the question by its method before looking at any evidence. Critics say this makes the claim that miracles cannot be investigated into a rule, not a result. Defenders reply that this is a limit on a method, not a denial of the claim, and that there is a difference between saying that historians should not decide and saying that no one can know.
5. Your independent defense
- Write the objection in one sentence in your own words.
- List the premises hidden in it, using the logic outline above, and mark which one you think is weakest.
- Write your own definition of a miracle in one sentence. Then test it: does your definition require that a law of nature is broken, or only that God acts? What follows if you choose each?
- Read a reliable summary of Hume’s essay and of one reply to it. Write a paragraph on what Hume claimed and a paragraph on what the reply says is wrong with it.
- Choose one reported miracle from any period and write down the sources for it, their dates, who wrote them, and what a careful historian would ask about each.
- Choose your own position and write 300 to 500 words defending it. State what you think history can and cannot say, and where your own belief about God enters the reasoning.
- Write the strongest objection to your own position. Make it as strong as you can, then answer it.
- Finally write one sentence on what would change your mind.
- Keep this in your own notebook or document. Do not send it anywhere.