Simon Blackburn

Miracles and Testimony

Blackburn addresses three ways in which religious faith is often justified: testimony regarding miracles, utility arguments such as Pascal's wager, and persons' rights to believe blindly. This excerpt is mostly devoted to the first of the three. His discussion of miracles and testimony largely follows Hume's arguments about when it is reasonable to believe another person's testimony about a miracle (by which he means events which would require a suspension of natural law – raising the dead, turning water into wine, and so forth – and not merely unusual events). Normally, we are warranted in inferring that p is true from someone else's claim that p is true because our experience tells us that this is the case. Most often, persons' reports are accurate. (Of course this is the case only absent contrary evidence. The reporter may be a notorious liar, or there may be conflicting reports.) However, in the case of miracles this is not the case. Because miracles are things that never happen otherwise, the likelihood of the miracle having occurred and the person saying that the miracle occurred is vastly smaller than the likelihood that the person reporting the miracle is wrong. Thus, there are no occasions on which we are justified in believing testimony about miracles.

One counterargument to this line of reasoning is that large numbers of people believe in miracles, and it would be unlikely that so many people would be wrong. Hume's response is that many groups of people believe in different and conflicting miracles, such that if any one group's belief turns out to be true, there would be large numbers of people who are mistaken. This undermines the counterargument because the counterargument is premised on the unlikelihood of large numbers of people being wrong about miracles, yet if anyone is right in their belief about miracles, it would follow that large numbers of people are wrong.

Blackburn also points out that we are in general warranted in being skeptical of people's testimony when that testimony favors the reporter. So, just as we have good reason to be skeptical of an auto mechanic's claim that most cars need immediate servicing, we ought to be skeptical of religious believers' testimony about miracles that, if true, provide evidence for those persons' beliefs. Finally, Blackburn points that under the hypothesis that miracles do occur; one must explain why no miracles have intervened in particularly awful circumstances. Why, that is, should Giuseppe have levitated by a miracle when the Holocaust or AIDS might have been prevented by a miracle? One would expect that a good God would work miracles for the latter before the former.