AO2 - Are Swinburne’s Responses To Hume Valid? Flashcards
P1 - Not valid - Hume suggests that a religious believer may know the miracle is false but due to vested interest and bias “perseveres in it with the best intentions in the world for the sake of promoting so holy a cause”. This easily accounts for delusions about miracles as Hume argued religious people have a psychological need to believe in miracles, “A religionist may imagine he sees what has no reality”.
Ex1 - Freud argues against miracles from human psychology, its ‘universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’ which sprung from psychological imbalances and peoples deep rooted insecurities.
R1 - Valid - Swinburne argues that belief doesn’t affect sight.
Ev1 - Weak - Frank Davis “With such widespread epistemic failure, religious experiences generally would have to be considered an unreliable source of knowledge”. He highlighted the lack of comparability between miracles recorded in the Bible and the present day: they relied on authority as opposed to rational inquiry.
L1 - Hume also argued that a miracle has never been witnessed by a sufficient number, Peter Vardy questions this and asks what even is a sufficient number, he is also wary that Hume has never experienced a miracle himself. Therefore Swinburne is not valid.
P2 - Valid - Swinburne accepts Hume’s 3 arguments against miracles involving credulity of witnesses. Hume emphasises quality of testimony: credibility of witnesses and susceptibility of belief. Firstly no miracle has a sufficient number of witnesses: educated trustworthy witnesses are required of ‘such unquestioned good sense as to secure use against all delusions in themselves’.
Ex2 - Swinburne highlights that Humes standards of evidence are set very high, questioning what exactly constitutes a number of witnesses. For example Hume’s example of the Tomb of Abbé, Paris: credibility of witnesses based on their number, integrity and rationality, thus miracles do exist, “how things seem is usually a good guide to how they are”.
R2 - Swinburne points to the fact there are people who are entirely honest in their description of a miraculous event.
Ev2 - Strong - Swinburne says Hume seems to identify an ignorant nation as one that believes in miracles, to him this is unjustified.
L2 - Swinburne is Valid.
P3 - Valid - in a section of Swinburne’s book ‘Enquiry Concerning understanding’ he defines a miracle as a violation of natural law. Hume develops this by offering a fuller definition “a transgression of a law of nature by particular volition of the deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent”. For Hume a miracle not only broke laws of nature but had to express a divine cause e.g. raising a person from the dead. It breaks our regular experience of the law and nature and demands an intervention by God or supernatural agent.

Ex3 - Swinburne endorses Hume’s definition and accepts that a miracle is an objective event in which God intervened. Mckinnon argues that Miracle would be defined as ‘an event involving the suspension of the actual course of events.’
R3 - In response to this however, Swinburne’s responses to Hume can be accepted as valid as Hume maintains that miracles in different religious traditions were contradictory and self-cancelling.
Ev3 - This is a weak point as Swinburne responds by suggesting that this argument is only valid if two miracles were in conflict and incompatible. He highlights that the most alleged miracles do not give rise to conflict: for example, a Roman Catholic priest might be praying for a miracle to demonstrate the truth of the doctrine of transubstantiation when the tabernacle containing the Sacrament levitated. Within Hinduism, Ramakrishna stated that ‘all religions are true’, concluding that the ‘One, eternal, undivided being is at the heart of all tradition; the cause of all miracles is the universal God, thus eradicating conflict. He advocated ‘God is one and only.’
L3 - Therefore, Swiburne’s responses to Hume can be accepted as valid.
