Miracles vs natural laws

The reasoning

Hume's argument, in full. Hume (1711–1776) defines a miracle as "a violation of the laws of nature", and argues that because those laws are established by "a uniform experience", there "must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event" (E 10.12). His example: "it is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country" (E 10.12). His maxim: "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" (E 10.13). In Part 2 he adds four reasons why, in practice, the testimony never meets that bar:

1. No miracle in history is "attested by a sufficient number of men" of good sense, education and integrity (E 10.15).
2. "The passion of surprize and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion" makes people eager to believe and repeat such stories (E 10.16).
3. Miracle stories "are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations" (E 10.20).
4. The miracles of different religions cancel each other: "all the prodigies of different religions are to be regarded as contrary facts" (E 10.24).

Where Hume is open to challenge. Millican, who edited the Enquiry for Oxford, gives a careful assessment:

• The maxim fails as stated. Hume compares the reliability of the witnesses with the improbability of the event. Millican shows that this rule gives wrong answers for ordinary improbable events, like lottery results, because it ignores how many different ways a false report could arise. He offers a "Revised Humean Maxim" instead (§§2–3).
• The question-begging charge. If "uniform experience" means that no one has ever seen a dead man rise, then citing it against a resurrection report assumes the report is false. Millican says the better point is that the Christian (or Muslim) claims a special divine intervention, which is compatible with accepting that the dead normally stay dead (§4). The evidence for a miracle is the witness reports and physical traces, not the evidence for the natural law: "There is no serious dilemma here, just distinct bodies of evidence" (§4).
• The real issue is prior belief. Millican concludes that whether to accept a miracle report depends on whether there is good evidence for supernatural intervention in general, and that the dispute between naturalism and theism "cannot be settled by inductive evidence alone". A successful argument for God would raise the prior probability of a miracle (§6).

So where does Hume "assume what he needs to prove"? In treating "uniform experience against every miraculous event" as already known. Whether experience is uniform is exactly what a miracle report disputes. Hume's Part 2 points are stronger: they are real reasons to be cautious about miracle stories, and Muslim hadith scholars, who judged reports by the reliability and number of their narrators, would agree with much of that caution.

Why would God break His own habits? In the Islamic view, a miracle is not a repair of a faulty machine. It is a sign that addresses people at a particular moment, usually to confirm a messenger, and the Quran says, "We send not the signs except as a warning" (17:59). A habit that is never broken teaches that God is reliable; a rare, meaningful exception teaches that He is free and present. Both are part of the message.