From Free Life, Issue 23, August 1995
ISSN: 0260 5112

This book consists in twelve chapters, plus a Bibliography and an Index. The first five chapters are historical: Augustine, Aquinas, Locke and Hume get one each while the fifth is shared by Bradley and Troeltsch. The next six chapters constitute the philosophy of Hume. The last applies the author's findings to the work of various twentieth century theologians who have accepted substantially those of Hume. Reported Miracles develops by far the most painstaking, comprehensive and formidable theistic critique of Hume on the miraculous ever published. A copy should, therefore, if only it could be afforded, be in every theological library.

Curiously, the expository chapter "Hume on the Miraculous" is very little longer than the corresponding chapter about Aquinas. (That, by the way makes no reference to the surely most relevant Chapter 6 of Book l of the Summa centra Gentiles. There Aquinas insists that, absent suitable endorsing miracles, it is frivolous - levis - to accept the claims of Mohammed to be a true prophet of God) The disproportionate brevity of this crucial Hume chapter results in the squeezing out of all mention of various points to which attention ought to have been drawn. Some of these are weaknesses which neo-Humeans have been able to remedy. Others are strengths of which Dr Houston takes too little account.

One minor weakness is Hume's too literal conception of weighing up and balancing evidence for and against. This is an eminently disposable relic of his attempt in A Treatise of Human Nature to develop a sort of psychological mechanics.

The most important weakness, however, is the fact that, whereas it is essential to Hume's argument to distinguish the very unusual and hence very improbable from the truly miraculous and hence physically impossible, this essential distinction is one for which Hume himself could not provide. Indeed he was committed to rejecting it. For - since we allegedly have no impressions, no experiences, of physical necessity or physical impossibility - Hume argued that we could have no legitimate ideas of such things.

This weakness is closely connected with another. Whenever Hume is on what he sees as his philosophical best behaviour he thinks of people having experiences - having what he calls impressions - as being purely passive and inert observers rather than as active, inquiring, testing and experimenting agents. His Treatise was misleadingly subtitled An Attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning with moral subjects. The key word ought to have been not "experimental" but "experiential".

Once neo-Humeans have remedied these weaknesses we are in a position to see that and why a statement that an event of such and such a kind is precluded as a physical impossibility by a law of nature is and must be a statement of vastly greater logical strength than any assertion that an event of that particular kind did on some occasion in the past in fact occur. For a statement of the first kind is in principle although certainly not in practice falsifiable - can, that is to say, if it is false be shown to be false - anywhere and at any time. But the truth or falsity of a statement of the second kind could, even in principle, only have been determined directly at the now past time when the event in question actually did or did not happen.

Any present determination of the truth or falsity of such singular and particular past tense propositions as are expressed by statements of this second kind has to be indirect and achieved by the employment of the methods of critical historiography. It has, that is to say, to be achieved by first interpreting some of the detritus of the past as relevant historical evidence, and then determining the true significance of that evidence; always by reference to what we know or believe that we know about what at the time in question was probable or improbable, possible or impossible.

The main strength of Section X "Of Miracles" in Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of which Dr Houston takes too little account is its complementarity with the immediately subsequent Section XI. Under the innocuously inept title "Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State" Hume there deploys - discreetly veiled in dialogue form - his unprecedentedly devastating assault on Natural Theology. (Natural Theology attempts to establish the existence of the God (the God of Mosaic Theism) by appealing only to considerations available to natural Reason and without relying on any supernatural Revelation.)

Sections X and XI, taken together, were intended totally to discredit the system of rational apologetic for the Christian religion which, originally outlined by Locke, reaches its apogee in the writings of Archdeacon Paley, and was canonically decreed to be valid by the First Vatican Council in 1870-1. Miracles played no part in the development of its Natural Theology, which was held to justify only a sketchy and inadequate Natural Religion. But that very inadequacy was thought to probabilify the Divine provision of a supplementary Revelation, the authenticity of which could only but would be and had been endorsed by the occurrence of miracles.

The fundamental disagreement between Dr Houston and the neo-Humeans is about the question of what, if anything, could be probabilified by what Hume loved to call "the religious hypothesis". Dr Houston asserts that "the reasoning within theistic hypotheses about what divine purposes may be being served by particular miracles will draw on our understanding of intelligent (human) motivation". [p.142] Indeed it will. But it is precisely this kind of reasoning which Hume contends to be radically unsound:

The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single being... not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities, we can, by analogy, infer any attribute or quality in him. As the universe shows wisdom and goodness, we infer wisdom and goodness. As it shows a particular degree of these perfections, we infer a particular degree of them.... But farther attributes or farther degrees of the same attributes, we can never be authorised to infer or suppose by any rules of just reasoning.[1]

In the chapter "Locke on the Miraculous" Dr Houston notes that "a supreme cause of us might, for all Locke argues, have no interest in the welfare of his creatures". [p.43] But what natural argument is there - natural argument as opposed to one drawn from some supposed Divine self-revelation - which could be offered either by Locke or by anyone else? Notoriously the existence within the universe of abundant and manifest evils has always been the strongest objection to the contention that it is the creation of a Being both omnipotent and good.

Locke's failure to appreciate the need to find, and the impossibility of finding, any natural reason for believing that an omnipotent Creator would be concerned with the behaviour and general welfare of creatures is paralleled by the similar failures of almost everyone else who has ever essayed to seek evidencing (as opposed to motivating) reasons for believing in the Mosaic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Their failures are to be explained by the reference to the fact that they were all raised among what Islam knows as "peoples of the Book". They were, we all were, and many of us still are, prejudiced by the teachings of generations of parents and pedagogues, of priests and rabbis, of Imams and Ayatollahs, into accepting without question or surprise a conception of God under which the Creator and sustaining cause of the universe is at the same time a partisan taking sides in conflict within that universe. For it would surely appear obvious to anyone who was for the first time and open-mindedly entertaining the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent Creator that everything that occurs or does not occur within a created universe must he expected to be precisely and only what its Creator wants to occur or not to occur.

In this perspective we may see the achievement traditionally attributed to Moses as possessing a truly world-historical significance. For it was he who is supposed to have produced the God of Mosaic theism by an extraordinary marriage of a tribal god with a Creator. Although hugely fertile that was nevertheless a case of theological miscegenation. Tribal gods are naturally devoted to the values and the best interests of the tribe: that, after all, is what they are for. But it is equally natural to characterise a or the Creator - as I am told, that some Indian thinkers unprejudiced by any Mosaic commitments do characterise a or the Creator - as being, essentially and in the nature of the case, "beyond good and evil".

Antony Flew

Notes

1. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1749), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1902, Section XI, "Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State", pp.144- 45.