98 Philosophical Investigations

Reported Miracles, by J. Houston, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. xii + 264. Price A35.00

David Comer, Calgornia State University, Sacramento

This book defends the view, contra Hume, that miracle stories can contribute to the reasonableness of belief in God. Houston acknowledges that his project flies in the face of a modern ortho- doxy that takes Hume to have had the final word on the subject. However, since philosophy is the rightful enemy of orthodoxy, Houston’s readers can be grateful for his thoughtful re-examination of Hume’s argument. Houston brings an impressive range of schol- arship to bear on the problem; I s references range from Augustine to Lakatos to Piaget to Pannenberg.

The first five chapters lay out a history of thought regarding the miraculous. In addition to the obligatory chapter on Hume, Houston gives detailed dscussion of authors who are often neglected on this subject, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Bradley, and Troeltsch. There is much here that stands to be of interest to the student of miracles. For example, in Chapter 1 Houston distinguishes three conceptions of ‘miracle’ in Augustine. In addition to the ‘hidden seed’ conception, accordmg to which miracles may have causes that are natural but hidden &om us, he finds a second one that sees miracles not as the result of any pre- established cause in nature, but as brought about immedately by God’s will, i.e. &om outside nature. A third conception has miracles coming about as a result of God’s changing the natures of created things.

Houston believes that he has found a rough agreement among the authors; he considers in his first five chapters that a miracle ‘will be an evident exception to nature’s usual regular course’.’ Hence he finds a rough continuity among Augustine, Aquinas, Locke and Hume. This allows him to speak of the Humean conception as the traditional one, and he finds no radical difference in the way Hume or Augustine would understand the putative apologetic force of miracles. One wonders, however, how much Houston has down- played changes, over the centuries, in the conception of ‘miracle’.

1. Houston, p. 83.

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If, for example, in Augustine ‘repentance, conversion, forgiveness, and true devotion are spoken of as the central miracles’,’ and in Aquinas the work of angels and demons is to be thought of as natu- rally c a ~ s e d , ~ there is reason to wonder how close the agreement really is among these men and David Hume.

Having sketched out a history of thought about miracles, Houston surveys what he understands to be nontraditional accounts of the miraculous. He defends the tradltional conception on both philosophical and theologcal grounds before turning to an assess- ment of Hume. Houston understands Hume as arguing that ‘it will be reasonable to believe a claim that a miracle has happened only if the evidence in favor of the claim outweighs the huge weight of evidence for the law of nature which is, allegedly, ~iolated’.~ And of course Hume thinks it is, to say the least, unhkely that there could ever be such strong evidence for a miracle given that there is always an exceptionless experience that stands behind the law. In Chapters 9 and 10 Houston criticizes this argument on two counts, suggesting that Hume is wrong to assume (a) that the evidence for a law of nature is undeniably relevant to an assessment of the probability that a reported miracle took place, and (b) that the probability of an event of some particular sort determines the probability of the truth of a report of that event. In the final two chapters of his book Houston assesses the import of this conclusion for epistemology and theology, defending Pannenberg’s use of the historical-critical method to assert the historicity of miracles like the resurrection of Christ, and criticizing the alternative accounts of Barth, Cupitt and Maclue.

Houston’s criticism of Hume’s assumption (a) is that Hume can only assume that the evidence for a natural law is relevant to deter- mining the likelihood that a miracle has occurred if he can also assume that there is no God who, from time to time, brings about exceptions to natural law. But in his dispute with the apologist this is something which is at issue and therefore it cannot be assumed without argument. If this assumption is blocked, however, then the huge weight of evidence represented by our experience of excep- tionless uniformities no longer provides a check against the credibility of miracle reports.

2. Houston, p. 15ff. 3. Houston, p. 25ff. 4. Houston, p. 53.

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100 Philosophical Investigations

There is something right about Houston’s criticism. The assump- tion that nature is perfectly uniform seems undeniably inconsistent with the possibility that there exists a miracle-working god. If mira- cles really do occur then observed regularities are not an infallible guide to determining what has happened, or will happen, in a par- ticular case. Now of course in empirical matters we are not accustomed to infallibility, but the problem is more serious than this; if miracles occur, then they represent the very instances in which observed regularities wdl fail to guide us.

It would be easy to suspect that the problem is with Hume’s reliance on induction to determine the truth of miracle reports. However, Houston’s criticism is not so general. ‘Unless we have reason to think that some &vine purpose may be being served by the violation of nature’s usual pattern’, he writes, ‘we may assume uniformity, the apologst with no less justification than the H ~ m e a n ’ . ~ The dispute between the apologist and the Humean is not over whether induction will help us to find out whether testi- mony for the miraculous is reliable. Houston’s apologist accepts Hume’s method. The &spute is over how this method is to be employed.6

Houston is arguing, in essence, that if Hume took the theistic hypothesis seriously, he would have to admit that even though, for example, we have always known dense objects to sink in water, it might stdl be that God brought it about that Jesus could walk on the surface of the Sea of Galilee; that is, he would be forced to adrmt the possibility of an exception to natural law. However this brings us to a surprising position, given that even if God does not exist there might still be, at any time, an exception to natural law. Bringing the possibility of God’s existence to bear on the reliability of induction seems, therefore, to be redundant. The possibility that some god brings about occasional lapses of natural law gives us no special rea- son to question induction when it is already possible that a lapse in natural law might occur spontaneously.

Induction is always performed in spite of the possibihty that any particular case may be an exception to natural law. It is always per- formed, God or no God, without any argument that the evidence provided by our observation of uniformities in nature is relevant to determining what is likely to occur in a particular case. Thus the 5. Houston, p. 141ff. 6 . Houston, p. 142.

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inductive method carries with it a general presupposition that exceptions, regardless of whether they are divinely caused, do not occur. It is not Hume, therefore, who owes us further argument for his assumption. If he does not normally have the burden of showing that the evidence for a law of nature is relevant to determining what is likely to occur in a particular case, despite the fact that a law of nature may suffer a spontaneous exception, then he does not owe us an argument to eliminate the possibility of a divinely-caused excep- tion. It is Houston who must explain why the possibility of a miracle-working god represents a special problem for induction, and why the relevance of our evidence for natural laws is to be ques- tioned only when the possibility of a divinely-caused exception, as opposed to a spontaneous one, presents itself.

Of course the apologist may argue that the theistic hypothesis is more than a mere possibility. If we already had some reason to believe in the existence of the Christian God, this may privilege the case of miracles in regard to the prospect of inductive failure. However Houston insists that the apologetic appeal to miracles requires no presuppositions favouring God’s existence, and he argues specifically that it needs no help from natural t h e ~ l o g y . ~ It seems clear that he thinks the mere possibility of God’s existence is enough to block Hume.8 He explicitly urges that our reason for thinlung that God may have acted in a particular instance is ‘a matter of hav- ing a reason for entertaining and investigating a suggestion, a hypothesis, because it . . . holds out promise of explanatory power’.’ Yet to entertain a theistic hypothesis is merely to accept it as describing a possible state of affairs, and to examine it for explana- tory power, in particular against rival hypotheses. Merely accepting the theistic hypothesis as a possible state of affairs will not give us any reason for suspending our reliance on the evidence for a natural law when it comes to considering the credibility of a miracle report - and if we cannot find some reason for suspending such considera- tions beforehand, then when it comes to comparing the theistic hypothesis with its Humean rival - that the miracle report is the result of error or deception - it is the Humean hypothesis that would appear to have the greater explanatory power.

7. This is discussed in Ch. 10, beginning on p. 156. 8. See especially p. 133E 9. Houston, p. 149.

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Houston deserves recognition for seeing that the usual presump- tion of induction begs the question against the case for miracles. What he does not fully appreciate is that belief in miracles is counter-inductive. A miracle, by its very nature, confionts our worldly expectations. It is in vain, therefore, that we hope to justify belief in miracles by the method of science. For those who accept the presuppositions of this method, Hume’s check remains in place.

Department of Philosophy, Cal$ornia State University, Sacramento dcorner@saclink. csus. edu

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