The Bible and Hume

I am going slowly through an important book called Questioning the Bible by Jonathan Morrow. In the last blog I've finished his first chapter taking on the challenge that the Bible is anti-intellectual. I'd like to jump around a bit and go to his eighth chapter because I think it ties in very well with the previous one. This one is titled "Is the Bible Unscientific?" I see this as an extension of the previous chapter dealing with the Bible and rationality.

The author starts by noting that for many people the Bible seems unscientific since it deals with miracles in particular. After all, Christianity and Judaism are supernatural religions. Their worldview clashes with a prominent Scottish philosopher David Hume, who thought such miracle claims were rubbish.

Hume claimed that belief ought to be justified by probability and that probability is based upon the uniformity or consistency of nature. Nature  behaves in a certain way over and over again. Therefore, it's likely that it will always behave that way. So, according to Hume, exceptions to nature's laws are so infinitely improbable they can be considered impossible. He says a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature, and since our experiences have established these laws, the proof against a miracle is complete. 

Here's how his argument looks in a short form:

1. Natural law describes regular occurrences.

2. Miracles are rare occurrences.

3. The evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare.

4. We should always base our belief on the greater evidence.

5. Therefore, we shouldn't believe in miracles.

But there seems to be an obvious problem with this line of reasoning. It is circular. C. S. Lewis takes this on:

            Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely" uniform experience" against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.

Hume's big problem is number 3 in the above statements. There are all sorts of rare occurrences that we believe in--the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the entire history of the world, each of our births, a hole in one in golf, etc. 

The key is not how regular or rare something is--the key is the evidence for the event.