Everything that has happened is a part of nature and since it is a part of nature it is according to nature. Therefore miracles being contrary to nature are not or are impossible. So the record of miracles in the New Testament can not be believed.
David Hume so reasoned. Sitting in his study in England in the 18th century he could by this cunning but craven begging of the question and this ingenius assumption, affirm what was done or not done in Palestine in the first century. If there ever was a raw insult flung in the face of reason, and that, too, in the name of logic, this is it. Professing to think as a philosopher he assumes in his premises the very thing that is to be proved. Famous as a historian he undertakes by means of dialectics alone to say what was not a fact. We can easily conclude that an event which is defined as impossible has never happened. Some great men “make history” but David Hume proposed to unmake it. It is a case of adjusting fact to philosophy not philosophy to fact. Had it not served so well the prejudices of skeptics and infidels this specimen of deduction would have given Hume fame not as a great logician but as a smart sophist.[1]
His other argument against miracles, namely, that no amount of testimony can make a miracle credible, inasmuch as it is more probable that men lie than that miracles happen, is another
- ↑ Cf. his essay on Miracles.
