David Hume finally gets around to miracles in Paragraph 12 of his famous essay on this subject (see here), where he writes: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature” (Hume, Of Miracles, para. 12; cf. Voltaire 1764/1901, p. 272). For Hume, the textbook example of a miracle is the resurrection of Lazurus of Bethany in the Gospel of John (see John 11:1–44), or in the immortal words of the Scottish essayist, “… it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country” (para. 12).

But is Hume’s definition a circular one? As my colleagues Timothy McGrew and Robert Larmer explain in their 2010 essay on “Miracles” for The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (available here), Hume’s miracle definition raises many more difficult questions than it answers. For starters, how many “laws” of nature are there? What do these so-called natural laws consist of? And who is the “lawgiver”, so to speak? If it’s God or some other deity, then why can’t the lawmaker violate his own laws, and what does it mean to “violate” a law of nature anyways? Consider again the resurrection of Lazurus. However remarkable or rare this feat is, which natural law in particular did Jesus violate when he performed this miracle?

In any case, if we have multiple firsthand or eyewitness reports of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (direct evidence, not just hearsay!), why should we follow Hume in rejecting this testimony out of hand? That is, why should we assume that a law of nature has been violated whenever something strange, unusual, or unexpected has occurred? As we shall see in my next post, Hume’s answer to these questions is an ingenious one!