Humes arguments against miracles and the design argument

Well my sabbatical is now over and I've had a chance to read the God Delusion in detail. Of course its quite annoying to be misrepresented as a bible believing Christian. Equally annoying is the misrepresentation of scientific research, like the research that seemed to show no efficacy in prayer. What is interesting is that the original study that Dawkins quotes did show a significant difference between control groups and evangelical Christians. When evangelical Christians pray, things change. Of course this fits with my experience. Being a church goer and praying without any answer ever, was different to coming to know the Christ of the bible and finding that prayer worked! But of course this does not fit with Dawkins thesis, so he omitted it. Another thing that I was intrigued by was the way in which he relies on David Hume's arguments. There seem to be two arguments Dawkins is particularly fond of. Now I'm no philosopher so forgive me if I've misunderstood Hume's arguments, although I do know his arguments against the teleological argument. Hume's arguments against miracles seem to go something like this.

A miracle has occured only if you only explain the phenomena without postulating a greater miracle. Now while I rely on Dawkins presentation of Hume's argument this argument does initially seem to have weight. Surely if we can think of a natural explanation it's the correct one?

Not necessarily so. One may doubt that a person can fall from many thousands of feet and walk away, but this has happened in reality. Just because one cannot imagine something happening according to the laws of science, does not mean it cannot have happened. But Hume does not believe miracles can exist, so how can he disprove their existence by appealing to greater miracles? It seems a rather clever way of saying that unless you can't imagine any other explanation other than a more miraclous one, then it is not a miracle. But surely only a person who believes in miracles could imagine a greater miraclous explanation, thus proving it?! In other words he borrows someone else's worldview to undermine that very worldview. Is this allowed philosophically?

Take the resurrection of Jesus Christ for example, the miracle that establishes Christian faith, as Paul argues. The claim is that a man was raised from the dead. He was seen dead by the man who wrote John's gospel (that will be John then - the closest friend of Jesus). Christ was seen bodily raised, physically present so that he could be touched, by this same man John. So what is the greater miracle that Hume wants us to imagine that would prove that this was indeed a miracle? What miracle did he have in mind? What is more unlikely, more impossible an explanation thus proving that this is indeed a miracle? Surely he really means to say that if we can think of a natural explanation, then this is the right one? Even if we weren't there, didn't se what John saw and live 2000 years after the event. If a man claimed to have seen Jesus dead, and also claimed to have seen him alive again, and this man wrote it in a book that has come down to us virtually unchanged (according to textual criticism) why can't we believe this? Why do we have to think of all possible explanations and then also imagine something more impossible to prove the existence of this miracle? We can think of alternative explanations by rubbishing the evidence - like John didn't write this, or the chinese whispers argument. But that is not his argument. His argument is basically - if you can think of it happening naturally - then it did. Which of course is not an argument at all. It is only to say that everyone must believe that a miracle cannot have happened if they can think of an alternative explanation 2000 years later. and this is what most people believe. Although I wasn't there and I can't imagine how a man could have been raised from the dead, it can't have happened because I can't imagine miracles can ever happen. I can think of a less miraculous explanation so that's the true one because I believe that miracles cannot happen. QED. So he just frames this argument in a clever way, but it's not clever. It's just saying naturalistic explanations are always better than miraculous ones. Why? Because they are .........stupid! They may well be in the majority of cases, but that does not mean that exceptions can be granted if the evidence is compelling, which it is.

What he does is assume the truth of the possibility of miracles (which are not irrational if there is a God) to disprove their existence. This surely is to be self contradictory, a clever man trying very hard to think of good ideas why God cannot exist.

He does the same with analogy. Analogy is the idea that we can tell what God is like by what this world looks like. He takes issue in his "Dialogues concerning natural Religion" with the Christian viewpoint that God is good and beautiful because the world has so much beauty and goodness in it. But he cannot then use this belief in analogy, which in his system he has no evidence for at all, and apply it to disprove the argument from design. He argues thus:

OK so God might be beautiful because there are beautiful things. But there are ugly things too. There are cruel and vicious things in nature. So God might be ugly or cruel. So God cannot exist. Now even Dawkins comes close to admitting that this is not to destroy the argument from design. It is simply to argue that God cannot be good. Which is a different argument. Hume has had to rely on the Christian belief in analogy to destroy it - which is self contradictory.

All that Hume can do is say that the Christain argument for a good God does not hold weight, not that God does not exist at all. If analogy is true, and he makes no effort to question this belief, then God could be ugly, cruel and impersonal, as nature is. But this is not to disprove the existence of God. This is to support agnosticism when it comes to the goodness of God - which Dawkins disparages on different grounds.

So I cannot really see why Hume is so easily believed, given that he uses belief in miracles to disprove miracles, and belief in analogy to disprove the analogical belief in a good God. This seems surely just to be a clever way of pretending that God doesn't exist, whereas all he has succeeded in doing is disproving the existence of a good God. But then even when Christians argue for the goodness of God from creation they also miss out what they are supposed to believe, which is that God is not a cuddly and cute, comfort blanket of love. The God that Jesus believed in is a God of destruction and horrific antipathy to evil and he is more so in the New Testament than in the Old. But then of course its not just atheists like Dawkins who want to avoid what God is really like, we all do.