1. Below is a 2,000 word excerpt from a response I wrote to David Hume’s essay, “Of Miracles”.
Removed from the original essay were Section III, as well as further comments on conclusions to
be drawn from the arguments.
A Response to Hume’s Critique of Historical Miracle Testimonies
Ross M. Allen
In his essay, “Of Miracles”, David Hume claims that it is irrational to believe, on the basis of
testimony alone, that miracles occur. To set up his argument in the first section of the essay,1
Hume notes that the only case in which testimony could reasonably be said to support a miracle
claim would be a scenario in which the falsity of the miracle claim seemed less likely than the
probability that the relevant law of nature could be violated. Taking himself to have shown this,
he dedicates Part II of the essay to demonstrating “that there never was a miraculous event
established on so full an evidence” as to make it defensible (Hume 575). He attempts to
demonstrate this by offering four reasons why the standard testimony used to support belief in
the occurrence of miracles fails to meet the criteria he gave earlier in the essay and must
therefore be rejected. In his explanation of the third reason, he notes that, “It forms a strong
presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to
abound among ignorant and barbarous nations” (576). The ethnocentrism of his phrasing set
aside, in expanding on this observation, Hume commits himself to something like the following
argument: historical miracle testimonies are suspect, since the events which they describe have
been observed exclusively by people who would not have been capable of recognizing false
instances of miracles.
Further detracting from their reliability, for Hume, is the fact that the rest of us only have access
to this testimony by way of non-falsifiable claims: it is not merely impossible to independently
corroborate this testimony by other means, but it is also difficult for miracle claims to be
investigated scientifically. I will argue that Hume was too quick to dismiss historical miracle2
testimonies and that his arguments should not dissuade the reader from belief in them. I will base
this argument, first, on a demonstration that, Hume dismissed supernatural claims too broadly
Here, it might be useful to note that, on Hume’s view, a miracle is defined as “a violation of the laws of1
nature” (574). Other philosophers in the literature would be quick to note that this definition is controversial.
Leibniz, for example, argues for a definition in which God is said to bring about so-called miraculous events while
operating exclusively within ‘general laws’, which he describes similarly to how Hume describes his ‘laws of
nature’ (36). I will assume Hume’s definition for the purposes of this response.
Put another way, it seems that the modern Humean empiricist would use something like Popper’s falsifiability-as-2
demarcation-criterion here to dismiss miracle claims as unscientific, and therefore not knowledge-rendering, given
that they imply a violation of the laws of nature (Popper).

2. and without justification. Second, by illustrating how conclusions Hume draws from what he
calls the “propensity of mankind toward the marvelous” could be seen as presumptive based on
the assumptions they smuggle in. Finally, I will raise a concern about the way in which Hume
cashes out the reliability of claims made by cultures which he deems “ignorant and barbarous”.
Section I
Hume claims that when we look at history, we recognize how cultures from bygone days
described the world around them in a fashion which seems antiquated to modern
sentimentalities: “…we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the
whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operations in a different
manner, from what it does at present” (576). He goes on to make the claim that, because they
understood most events in a way that many would now think of as superstitious, we should
regard their testimonies about naturalistically inexplicable events as ‘renowned lies’.3
There are many background assumptions that Hume appears to smuggle in when he claims that
the ancients were ignorant in ascribing supernatural causes to things like war, political upheaval,
plagues, famine, and dying. Among these assumptions seems to be a framework for assessing
claims through a false dichotomy that he applies when assessing claims. In keeping with Hume’s
empiricism, the reader seems meant to understand all claims as either being explicable in terms
of natural causes, and thus worthy of belief, or else only explicable in terms of supernatural
causes, and thus untenable. This framework implicitly dismisses views that include concepts of
supernatural causation, “…as we advance nearer the enlightened ages, we soon learn, that there
is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case” (Hume, 576).
This raises a few important questions. Why must events either have merely natural explanations
or merely supernatural ones? Why must a natural explanation of an event preclude the trueness
of a supernatural one? It seems controversial to claim that plagues, famine, etc. lack any and all
supernatural backstory, especially when that claim is based solely on the assertion that we now
have a naturalistic backstory which renders this backstory unnecessary. It seems Hume would
need to further support this claim, at least enough to demonstrate that natural and supernatural
causation stories are mutually exclusive, which he fails to do.
A defender of Hume might concede that they cannot fairly dismiss claims about supernatural
causes based solely on the presence of natural ones, but would likely counter that anyone
attempting to defend supernatural causation would have find a similarly difficult task in proving
In other words, Hume claims that when the ancients went about assigning supernatural causes to events which we3
now think of as fully explicable in naturalistic terms, they opened up their more fantastic claims to a level of
incredulity. As is noted later; however, you might think that this could force a false dichotomy.

3. that these sorts of claims are true. One might wonder, though, if this is a fair assessment of the
work a miracle-believer need take on. The believer might do just as well to prove that testimony-
givers from antiquity could tell a supernatural back-story about historical events, and still talk
about those events in a historically reliable way. Empirically, it seems that they do. Indeed, most
of our historical understanding of antiquity, especially as we discuss Greco-Roman and Near-
Eastern history, is at least partially informed by texts that mix myth and historical narrative. It4
does not seem that Hume would necessarily take issue with this response, at least not to begin
with, but would probably reiterate that we must “check from sense and learning” what we take
from these texts in order to successfully glean truth from the falsity (576). He does not, for
instance, ever claim that the events (wars, political upheaval, etc.) described by the ancients did
not occur, just that the ancients painted an incorrect explanatory picture of them.
This would be unproblematic, if it were not the case that Hume had attempted such a sweeping
dismissal of historical testimony. Why should one arbitrarily accept some ancient testimonies as
historical, yet ill-described, and dismiss others outright as ‘renowned lies’? Unless we are willing
to dismiss the ancients as reliable truth-tellers altogether, we ought, at least, to concede the
possibility that they were attuned to a supernatural reality. While this falls short of defending the5
existence of this reality, it should suffice to illuminate the need for assessment of the claims on
their own merit. In other words, it should dissuade the reader from dismissal of miracle claims
based solely on criticisms surrounding the epistemic value of testimony in general.
Section II
Hume thinks that the so called “propensity of mankind toward the marvelous”, has, as humanity
has become enlightened, been rightly dismissed as fallacious (576). He applauds the idea that
societies would moderate an innate desire to ascribe supernatural causes to events, which he
thinks can be sufficiently understood within the framework of natural laws. Intuitively, one might
agree, in part, with Hume, that we still find ourselves with a tendency to hold on to belief in a
The Iliad, for example, was largely dismissed as fable by most historians up until the 19th Century. While there is4
still debate amongst the scholarship on this issue, many historians argue for at least a partly historical understanding
of this poem, even given its epic attributes. In much the same way, one could accept writings of the ancient Greeks
as fair testimony, even if they did not believe in the Greek gods.
This touches on an existing debate surrounding the degree to which Hume would have meant to argue against5
testimony claims as epistemic justification, and seems to echo the inconsistency that Mavrodes pointed out in his
essay, David Hume and the Probability of Miracles. In it, he claims Hume’s hyper-criticism of testimony needs to be
applied beyond the realm of religious testimony, if it is to be justified in principle, and then outlines objections to
doing so.

4. supernatural reality, even as we reject some of what that tendency would imply (e.g. childhood
fears of the bogeyman).6
Even if one were to grant that this “propensity toward the marvelous” is present in the human
psyche, a description of this psychological process would not, in and of itself, have any bearing
on whether or not there is something “marvelous” about the world. Hallucinations illustrate how
our everyday sense of sight, which normally gives us correct input about real objects, can
sometimes leave us deceived. By analogy, it seems to matter very much whether or not the
propensity, or sense, which Hume describes is operating on some object which actually exists or
not when we consider its general fallaciousness. Answering this question hinges on some rather
obvious background assumptions, and we are unwarranted in dismissing our “propensity toward
the marvelous” in the way that Hume does, without first fleshing out those background
assumptions, a feat which I will not attempt in this essay.7
A rather obvious objection of the following sort could be raised. Historically, supernatural causes
have been ascribed to a variety of events out of necessity, due to a deficit in our understanding of
science. As our understanding of science has increased; however, that initial deficit has been
largely eliminated and we no longer need the supernatural to understand our surroundings. In8
other words, it seems that we have used supernatural explanations to “fill in the gaps” where our
knowledge of the natural world left unanswered questions, and that, to the degree modern
scientific inquiry continues to answer these questions, we will find a diminishing requirement for
such explanations and see less value in our “tendency toward the marvelous”. A respondent
could point out that it is a fallacy of composition to assume that some supernatural explanations
about the world being found out as faulty, and subsequently being replaced with more
observational explanations, implies that all of them are untrue. Additionally, a purely naturalistic
story about reality has a hard time dealing with supernatural experiences that some people seem
to have. They would have to concede, however, that this line of argument will not be pertinent9
to people who have never had such experiences.
It is important to note that this claim is based almost exclusively on intuition and subjective experience and would6
not be singularly compelling to any reader who does not share them.
This debate is not unique, specifically, to miracle claims, and touches on similar questions raised by the seemingly7
intuitive deistic beliefs many people hold. Not surprisingly, background assumptions inform the conclusions which
philosophers arrive at for this line of inquiry as well. Belief in God, for example, has strong bearing on whether one
understands the intuitions described more so in terms of Calvin’s sensus divinitatis or Freud’s “wish
fulfillment” (Calvin, Freud).
I.e. we now explain rain as a meteorological event instead of act of Tlaloc as the Aztecs would have.8
À la Rudolf Otto's concept of the "numinous" (Otto). Although deserving of discussion, I will not fully vet this9
topic for the purpose of this essay.

5. Works Cited
Calvin, John. "Institutes of the Christian Religion." Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient
to Contemporary. Ed. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
501-503. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Future of an Illusion." Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to
Contemporary. Ed. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
187-190. Print.
Hume, David. "Of Miracles." Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary. Ed.
Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 572-582. Print.
Leibniz, G. W., and E.M. Huggard. Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of
Man and the Origin of Evil. La Salle, Illinois, United States of America: Open Court, 2005. Web.
Mavrodes, George I.. "David Hume and the Probability of Miracles." Readings in Philosophy of
Religion: Ancient to Contemporary. Ed. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009. 583-593. Print.
Otto, Rudolf. "The Numinous." Readings in Philosophy of Religion: Ancient to Contemporary.
Ed. Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 119-136. Print.
Popper, Karl R. Conjectures and Refutations; the Growth of Scientific Knowledge,. New York:
Basic, 1962. Print.