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Essay on Hume’s Reasons for Rejecting Miracles

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Hume’s Reasons for Rejecting Miracles One of the main philosophers in the debate about miracles is David Hume. I will start this essay with a basic summary of Hume’s argument. Hume’s argument is not that miracles cannot happen, but that, given the amount of evidence that has established and confirmed a law of nature, there can never be sufficient evidence to prove that a law of nature has been violated. He believes that miracles have no rational background. Hume was an empiricist, in other words, he believed that all knowledge is based on evidence that we gain through our senses. He argues that if a miracle goes against a law of nature, then it represents a single piece of evidence that …show more content…

Hume argues that a miracle is a breach of a law of nature. As I said earlier, he believes that the belief in miracles is not rational. He maintains that if you were a rational human being, you would not believe in miracles. Hume states that we have a uniform past evidence for laws of nature. For example, when people walk on water, they sink and when someone dies, they do not rise from the dead. However, Hume only deals with reports of miracles and doesn’t look at them from first hand experience. Hume furthers his argument by saying that the reports of witnesses are unreliable and untrustworthy. He makes the point that people who are claiming a miracle has happened should have a reputation to lose and absolutely nothing to gain. Hume advances on this argument to say that reports of miracles generally come from ignorant and barbarous people. He states that humans love the fantastic. People love the idea of something unlikely happening since wonder and excitement are enjoyable emotions. This argument seems to be weak since he only deals with word of mouth miracles whereas today there is much more scientific research into miracles. For example, the miracles at Lourdes. There have been 68 carefully checked claims that Natural Law has been broken and the church has declared them miracles. Physical things have happened when all the

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