Free Gunning for God by John C. Lennox

is in vain and your faith is in vain.” 7
    DAVID HUME AND MIRACLES
     
    It is here that the Christian gospel conflicts with the widely held notion that science has rendered miracles impossible. Christopher Hitchens pointed this out to me in our debate in Alabama, citing the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume as having said the last word on this.
    Hitchens was referring of course to a famous essay Hume wrote, in which he said:
A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined… It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die on a sudden: because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event; otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. 8
     
    Hume is actually advancing two arguments here, although they overlap.
1. The argument from the uniformity of nature:
     
a. Miracles are violations of the laws of nature.
     
b. These laws have been established by “firm and unalterable” experience.
     
c. Therefore, the argument against miracles is as good as any argument from experience can be.
2. The argument from the uniformity of experience:
     
a. Unusual, yet frequently observed, events are not miracles — like a healthy person suddenly dropping dead.
     
b. A resurrection would be a miracle because it has never been observed anywhere at any time.
     
c. There is uniform experience against every miraculous event; otherwise it would not be called miraculous.
     
    It is interesting that Hume here selects resurrection as an example of a miracle. The fact is that atheists universally recognize that the supernatural would have to be involved in the “standing up” 9 of a body again.
    THE ARGUMENT FROM THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE — HUME’S SELF-CONTRADICTORY POSITION
     
    Hume denies miracle, because miracle would go against the uniform laws of nature. But elsewhere he denies the uniformity of nature! He famously argues that, just because the sun has been observed to rise in the morning for thousands of years, it does not mean that we can be sure that it will rise tomorrow. 10 This is an example of the Problem of Induction : on the basis of past experience you cannot predict the future, says Hume. But if that were true, let us see what it implies in particular. Suppose Hume is right, and no dead man has ever risen up from the grave through the whole of earth’s history so far; by his own argument he still cannot be sure that a dead man will not rise up tomorrow. That being so, he cannot rule out miracle. What has become now of Hume’s insistence on the laws of nature, and its uniformity? He has destroyed the very basis on which he tries to deny the possibility of miracles.
    The same argument would work just as well backward in time, as forward. For instance, the fact that no one has been observed to rise from the dead in the past thousand years is no guarantee that there was no resurrection before that. To illustrate this, we might say that uniform experience over the past three hundred years shows that kings of England are not decapitated. If you knew this, and were faced with the claim that King Charles I was decapitated, you might refuse to believe it, because it goes against uniform experience. You would be wrong! He was beheaded. Uniformity is one thing; absolute uniformity is another.
    In any case, if according to Hume we can infer no regularities, it would be impossible even to speak of laws of nature, let alone the uniformity of nature with respect to those laws. And if nature is not uniform, then using the uniformity of nature as an argument