Introducing David Hume's Skeptical Empiricism

David Hume: Skeptical Empiricism vs Supernaturalism

 

“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.”

—David Hume (Of Miracles)

I will publish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume's essay Of Miracles on this blog as a series of three web pages. This first web page contains an introduction to Hume's essay; the second page will contain Part One of the essay; and the third page will contain Part Two. Hume's essay evaluates whether supernatural revelation and religious faith are legitimate means of acquiring knowledge of the world.

Although Of Miracles was among David Hume’s earliest philosophical writings, he did not publish it until much later, when he included it as Section X of his longer work, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Of Miracles is probably the most widely read and quoted portion of that larger work.

As a stand-alone essay, Of Miracles is a concise introduction to Hume’s philosophy of skeptical empiricism. It also remains a compelling critique of religious faith and supernaturalism, and it is as important and instructive today as it was when it was published 270 years ago.

This essay was written while Hume was visiting a Jesuit college in France. It was apparently an impassioned response to a priest who had told Hume about a miracle that had purportedly occurred at the college.

In the beginning of the essay, Hume examines the methods we use to evaluate claims to Truth. Hume believed that we test new information against our own experience of the world, and ultimately, our experiences are derived from sense impressions. Moreover, he held that we recognize patterns of conjoined experiences, where one event seems to follow another so consistently and reliably, that we infer beliefs about the world and make predictions based on those beliefs. These predictions can, in turn, be tested, and if they are found to be accurate, then we accord a greater degree of certainty to those beliefs.

What Hume was describing was, in essence, the modern scientific method. Since Hume’s time, science has incredibly improved our understanding of the world and our ability to predict and utilize natural phenomena. All of these advancements were made possible by the scientific method, which involves rigorously testing hypothetical claims and predictions based on those claims, and then, to use Hume’s words, proportioning our beliefs to the evidence. Modern science has largely validated Hume’s empiricism.

Against the method of empirical skepticism, Hume contrasts the claims of supernaturalism. Here, he is not primarily concerned with the substance of supernatural claims (i.e., what supernaturalists believe to be true), but rather with the method used by religious believers to validate those claims (i.e., why supernaturalists believe what they do.

One is reminded of the trite saying, popular in evangelical circles, that “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.”

For Hume, that did not settle it. How do we know God really said it? Not by our own experience. None of us were directly involved with the production of the Bible as we know it (the same would be true with the world’s other theistic texts). We are basing our belief about what God said on the claims of other people whom we’ve never met, who lived millennia ago, who did not have the benefit of modern knowledge about the world, and who inhabited a cultural and technological landscape that would be utterly foreign to us. Considering how we “know” the things that we think we know, just how much weight should we accord the claims of these ancient witnesses?

As a side note, the question is actually more thorny for religious believers than that. As New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has pointed out in best-selling books such as Misquoting Jesus and Jesus Before the Gospels, we really can’t be sure what the actual “eyewitnesses” said or believed, because most of the Bible wasn’t written by people who even claimed to be eyewitnesses, but rather by people living decades or centuries after the fact.

As Hume famously wrote, “A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.” To assess a person’s claim that a miracle has occurred, we must first determine the relative probabilities of two things: (1) that the regular patterns of nature have been momentarily disrupted, and (2) that the person making the claim is either mistaken or simply lying. For Hume, the odds are always stronger that the person who claims a miracle has happened is either mistaken or simply lying.

One important caveat, Hume is not saying, as some critics have tried to make him out to say, that miracles are impossible or that the “laws of nature” are immutable and certain. Rather, Hume is simply saying that it is impossible for us to know whether a miracle has happened, and that in the absence of such knowledge, we must judge the probability of a miracle’s occurrence on the information available to us. For Hume, that information always favors the judgment that a miracle is unlikely to have occurred. 

To read Part One of Hume's essay Of Miracles, click here: https://www.finding-meaning-in-life.com/p/david-hume-of-miracles-part-one.html

To read Part Two of Hume's essay Of Miracles, click here:  https://www.finding-meaning-in-life.com/p/david-hume-of-miracles-part-two.html    or you can return to the Finding Meaning in Life homepage here: https://www.finding-meaning-in-life.com/