Miracles and Evidence
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1a. Hume holds that provable knowledge of miracles is an empirical impossibility. As a matter of logic, and by the evidence of natural law, one must reject the notion that miracles are manifest in the physical universe. Hume's definition of miracle is that it "is a violation of the laws of nature" (Hume 300). Nothing that one can assert about miracles can be proven except the partiality, credulity, or delusional quality of reporters of miracles, says Hume. When he says that "a religionist may be an enthusiast, and imagine he sees what has no reality" (302), he is specifically arguing that miracles not only do not provide evidence of the truth of traditional Christian theism but also actively argue against such truth. This is amplified by the documentation of forgeries and deliberate deceptions of the credulous and uneducated.Along the same lines, Hume (303) argues that miracle stories arise "among ignorant and barbarous nations" on one hand, or in connection with legendary stories on the other. Miracles, Hume says sarcastically, "never happen in our days," which argues that Christian theism is not equal to the task of proving its truth by means of miracle but is capable of producing Christians who tell lies about miracles. Further, conflicting accounts of supposed witnesses to miracles on one hand, or partisan accounts of miracles by conflicting religions (e.g., Islam and Christianity) on the other, support the view that miracle stories cannot be trusted to account for any
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f it is taken symbolically, as an assertion that the doctrine of the Incarnation and Redemption is useful to the enterprise of eliciting faith, then miracles more generally can be assigned symbolic significance as well. They need not be enlisted in the enterprise of proving the truth of faith, but they can be enlisted in the enterprise of strengthening it.
2. To appreciate whether Pascal's Wager establishes that it is rational to believe theistic proposition P in absence of evidence for the truth of P, it is necessary to realize that Pascal begins from a standpoint of both faith and scientific rationalism. It is obvious very early on in his argument that he is predisposed to faith, from the famous statement, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know" (Pascal 181). At the same time, when Pascal says that man night "contemplate the whole of nature" even though man himself is "lost in this remote corner of nature," he asserts a right of private judgment and the privilege of criticism and reason. When he says that the nature of human existence is such that we are "incapable of certain knowledge and of absolute ignorance" (182), he is indirectly saying that individual reason is itself paramount. This leads to a conscious
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3143
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
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