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Miracles sit at the intersection of philosophy, theology and science, and they raise an unusually sharp set of questions. What is a miracle — a breach of the laws of nature, or merely an ordinary event invested with religious meaning? Could a miracle ever occur, and if it did, could we ever be rational to believe a report of one? And what would a miracle, if genuine, signify for religion? The AQA 7062 specification frames the topic around a contrast between realist and anti-realist understandings — between a miracle as a violation of a natural law and a miracle as a natural event experienced as an act of God — and, above all, around the contrasting key ideas of Hume and Maurice Wiles. Hume mounts the classic epistemological attack: it is never reasonable to believe testimony for a miracle. Wiles mounts a theological attack: a God who intervened only selectively would be morally arbitrary, so a good God does not work miracles at all. This lesson sets out both with care, places them against the realist and anti-realist definitions, and reaches a judgement about whether miracles can be either credible or religiously significant.
The definition one adopts shapes the entire debate, and the spec's organising contrast is between realist accounts (a miracle is an objective event in the world — a violation of natural law) and anti-realist accounts (a miracle is constituted by the religious meaning read into a natural event, not by any breach of law).
Key term: Realist vs anti-realist views of miracles — a realist holds that a miracle is an objective event that really breaks the ordinary course of nature (a violation of a law); an anti-realist holds that "miracle" describes the religious significance a community attaches to an event, which may be entirely natural.
Aquinas (1225–1274) gives the classic realist account: a miracle is an event "done by God outside the order of the whole created nature" — beyond the power of any natural (secondary) cause. He distinguishes three grades: (1) events nature could never produce (e.g. the sun reversing its course, or two bodies occupying the same place); (2) events nature can produce but not in that order (e.g. life after death — nature gives life, but not to what has died); and (3) events nature can produce but which God does without natural means or more swiftly than nature would (e.g. an instantaneous cure of a disease that would normally heal slowly, or recovery from a fever without medicine). For Aquinas the divine agency, not merely the rarity or the strangeness, is essential: an eclipse once astonished people but was never a miracle, because it is nature's own doing. Crucially, Aquinas does not regard a miracle as God fighting against his own creation; God is the author of the natural order and can act within or beyond it without contradiction, since the laws of nature are not constraints upon their Creator but descriptions of how God ordinarily acts. This already anticipates a reply to Hume and Wiles: the realist need not see a miracle as an unseemly "interference," but as the free act of the One whose sustaining will the regularities express in the first place.
Hume (1711–1776) supplies the definition that frames the modern debate: a miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent" (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, 1748). The accent falls on violation: a miracle is an event that contradicts the uniform, law-like order of nature as established by experience.
Swinburne (b. 1934) refines the realist account to blunt Hume's objection. A miracle is "an occurrence of a non-repeatable counter-instance to a law of nature" brought about by God. The key word is non-repeatable. A law of nature, Swinburne argues, describes what happens regularly and repeatably; a one-off exception, attributable to a divine agent and not part of any pattern, does not overturn the law (we do not revise the law to accommodate it, because it will not recur) — it is precisely a counter-instance, not a refutation. This lets him say a miracle "violates" a law without the incoherence of an event that is both lawful and unlawful. The distinction is sharper than it first appears. If a supposed counter-instance did recur under the same conditions, we would not call it a miracle at all; we would conclude that the original "law" had been wrongly formulated and needed revising to include the new case — exactly as science proceeds when an anomaly turns out to be repeatable. What makes an event a candidate miracle, on Swinburne's account, is precisely that it does not fit any improved law: it is a singular exception that we have strong, well-evidenced reason to think will not happen again under those conditions, yet which actually occurred. Swinburne adds that, to count as a miracle rather than a mere unexplained oddity, such an event must also be the sort of thing a God would have reason to bring about — it must carry religious significance, fitting a pattern of divine purpose — so that not every freak occurrence qualifies.
It is worth distinguishing the realist accounts by what they make essential to a miracle. For Aquinas the essence is the divine agency operating beyond created powers; for Hume it is the violation of the law (which he then argues is maximally improbable); for Swinburne it is the non-repeatable, religiously significant counter-instance. These differences are not pedantic: an objection that targets "violation" (as Hume's does) lands squarely on Aquinas and on the crude version of the realist view, but Swinburne's refinement is designed precisely to slip the objection by redescribing what the violation amounts to.
Key term: Miracle as a violation of natural law (Hume) — a transgression of a law of nature by the volition of God or an invisible agent; the realist core of the debate, on which Hume builds his argument that such an event is maximally improbable.
Tillich (1886–1965) rejects the violation model outright: a "miracle" understood as a breaking of natural law would be a "demonic" distortion that destroys the structure of reality and turns God into a magician. A genuine miracle, he argues, has three marks: it is an astonishing event that does not contradict the rational structure of reality; it points beyond itself to the mystery of being (the "ground of being"); and it is received in an ecstatic experience as a sign. Such a "sign-event", without breaking any law, is grasped in faith as a disclosure of the holy. The miracle lies in the meaning and the mode of reception, not in any breach of nature.
R.F. Holland (1923–2013) gives the most-cited anti-realist case, the "contingency" miracle. A child playing on a railway line is in the path of an approaching train; the child cannot be seen by the driver, who nonetheless brakes in time — because, unknown to anyone, he has just fainted at the controls (from a coincidental rise in blood pressure) and his unconscious hand has fallen on the brake lever, automatically applying the brakes. Every event has a complete natural explanation; no law is broken. Yet the mother, witnessing her child saved, rightly calls it a miracle — an extraordinary, beneficial coincidence experienced as the providential act of God, and Holland insists she is not making a mistake in doing so: she need not believe any law was suspended. For Holland, a coincidence-miracle is constituted entirely by its timing, context and the religious significance given to it. This has a clear strength — it lets the believer call something a "miracle" without taking on the heavy burden of asserting a law-violation, and it fits the way the word is often used in religious life. But it has an equally clear weakness: critics object that it dissolves the distinctive content of the concept, since on this account a miracle is in the event nothing but a coincidence, and the "miracle" lives entirely in the eye of the beholder. If two people watch the same lucky escape and one calls it providence while the other calls it chance, there is — on Holland's view — no fact about the world on which they disagree, only a difference of interpretation, which is a long way from the traditional claim that God acted.
| Thinker | Definition | Realist or anti-realist? |
|---|---|---|
| Aquinas | Event "outside the order of the whole of created nature," done by God | Realist (violation) |
| Hume | Transgression of a law of nature by divine volition | Realist (violation) |
| Swinburne | Non-repeatable counter-instance to a law of nature, brought about by God | Realist (refined violation) |
| Tillich | A "sign-event" disclosing the ground of being; no law broken | Anti-realist (significance) |
| Holland | A beneficial natural coincidence experienced as an act of God | Anti-realist (significance) |
Hume's critique, in Section X of the first Enquiry, is the most influential treatment in the philosophy of religion. It is crucial to state his thesis precisely: Hume does not claim that miracles are impossible, nor that they certainly never occur. His claim is epistemological — that it can never be rational to believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony, because the evidence against will always outweigh the evidence for. The argument has a famous "Part 1" in-principle core and a "Part 2" set of in-practice considerations.
The "wise man," Hume says, "proportions his belief to the evidence." A miracle is by definition a violation of a law of nature, and a law of nature is established by "a firm and unalterable experience" — by uniform, exceptionless observation. So the evidence against any miracle is "as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined." Against this stands the testimony of witnesses, which is fallible. The result is a weighing: we should believe a miracle report only if the testimony's falsehood would be more miraculous than the event it reports. Hume's maxim: "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." Since the uniform experience supporting a law is always at least as strong as the best possible testimony, the wise man's verdict is to reject the miracle. The argument is a proof "from experience" against the reasonableness of belief, not a metaphysical demonstration that miracles cannot happen.
It helps to see the maxim at work. Suppose several apparently honest witnesses report that a man, certified dead and three days buried, was seen alive and well. Two hypotheses compete. Either (a) a genuine resurrection occurred — a violation of the exceptionless regularity that the dead stay dead — or (b) the witnesses are mistaken, deceived, lying, or misremembering, which happens constantly in ordinary human affairs. Hume's point is that (b) is always the less astonishing supposition, because human error and deceit are utterly common while resurrection is, by hypothesis, contrary to all uniform experience. To accept the testimony, one would have to regard the witnesses' being wrong as more miraculous than a man rising from the dead — and that, Hume contends, the wise man can never reasonably do. The brilliance and the limitation of the argument lie in the same place: it never needs to examine the particular evidence in any given case, because the general improbability of any law-violation is set so high that no testimony can in principle clear it. That generality is its strength against the credulous and, as critics charge below, its weakness as a piece of reasoning.
Even setting the in-principle point aside, Hume argues, no miracle testimony has in fact met the required standard:
| Hume's consideration | Core claim |
|---|---|
| Balance of probabilities (in principle) | Uniform experience for a law always outweighs fallible testimony for its violation |
| Unreliable witnesses (in practice) | No miracle is attested by enough educated, reputable, disinterested witnesses |
| Love of the marvellous | The pleasure of wonder corrupts our judgement of extraordinary claims |
| Ignorant and barbarous nations | Miracle reports recede as education advances — a psychological tell |
| Contrary miracles | Rival religions' miracles support incompatible claims and cancel out |
Hume's case has been pressed hard from several directions. Against Part 1, critics object that Hume's reasoning is close to question-begging: if "uniform experience" already includes the claim that miracles never happen, then he has assumed his conclusion, for the uniformity is only "firm and unalterable" if we have already dismissed every miracle report. This is the heart of the matter. To know that experience against miracles is "entire" and exceptionless, Hume must already know that every reported exception is false — but that is precisely what is in dispute. The argument thus threatens to be circular: miracles are improbable because experience is uniform, and experience is uniform because miracles do not occur.
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