Herein lies the theists’ own circular argument: to have faith, you must have faith to make the leap, you must make the leap. A claimed miracle cannot be a justification for faith, but faith can justify believing the claim. You could put it more simply: one needs faith before one can believe in miracles. In remarking that ‘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’, makes the point that the act of believing in a miracle is, in itself, a minor miracle, for in accepting a miracle the believer must forsake the laws of probability. However, he then goes on to identify what he considers to be the “interesting truth in Hume’s essay”: Parris isn’t familiar with Saints and Sceptics! Well, perhaps he could be forgiven for that, but hasn’t he heard of John Lennox, Alister McGrath, John Polkinghorne, Richard Swinburne or Keith Ward, just to mention a few people from this side of the Atlantic? In light of his subsequent discussion on miracles, it appears that he hasn’t.Īfter outlining David Hume’s argument against miracles, Parris attempts to strike a moderate tone by identifying some weaknesses in Hume’s case. In search of a stimulating conversation about religion, we are reduced to arguing with ourselves. It’s certainly infuriating for us non-believers, because there’s hardly anyone left who seems capable of giving us a good argument. It must be dispiriting for believers to encounter so little intelligent support for belief. I wish I were a religious conservative: the field’s wide open. In a recent article in the Spectator, Matthew Parris writes:
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