During the Q&A after my paper presentation (available here ) and workshop dinner, I noticed that the philosophers there struggled with the fact that Shepherd didn't see miracles as inherently 'special'. They wanted to keep the awe inspiring 'specialness' of miracles to fit in with their own personal preferences and beliefs so, therefore, found it difficult to relate to her definition. I couldn't see the relevance of this subjective approach. For me, it's not about what fits in with my beliefs, or lack of, it's all about what is in the text and how well it's argued.
My points of agreement with Hume:
✔ I agree with Hume's account of adjusting one's degree of assurance to avoid mistakes
✔ I agree with Hume's aim to "silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition" to "free us" from it and prevent "superstitious delusion"
✔ I agree with Hume that when error is introduced, it's due to a lack of understanding, not experience/empiricism itself
✔ I think Hume has excellent methodological points which I identify with e.g. weigh up all evidence and base judgement on that which defeats other possible readings
✔ I agree that force of argument is important
✔ I like Hume's positive view of human nature and his argument that people who have a vicious nature and lie should lose their epistemic authority. Yes they should, it's a shame that they don't enough, whether in politics or elsewhere.
✔ I agree that claims about the miraculous that expect testimony to be an entire proof is asking too much because it can be mistaken. I learnt about errors in testimony in psychology, such as eye witness bias.
✔ I enjoy Hume's writing style and authorial voice. His dismissive tone about religion, especially institutional religion, is fine by me. My point was that his dismissive tone may have been a problem for him which is why he sometimes had to write anonymously because there was so much negative criticism about him. And I think that his blunt and dismissive tone could sometimes mean that academics did not really read his arguments correctly and give him due respect.
Where I question Hume:
✖ I think extrapolating from Dr Tillotson's disproof of transubstantiation could be doing Hume a disservice because there might be some dissimilarities.
I don't know anything about transubstantiation other than it's a Catholic doctrine / belief that says that the wafer they receive during Mass somehow literally turns into the body of Christ (and the wine somehow also literally turns into the blood of Christ). Hence, in my draft paper and workshop presentation, I didn't go into the issue of whether Hume picked up any possible, inherent flaws in his argument structure from Dr Tillotson.
I'm still struggling to get my head around this one but for the purposes of briefly assessing my intuition that Dr Tillotson's argument against transubstantiation may not have been the best starting point for Hume's argument against miracles, I've checked a Catholic website (CatholicBible101.com) to get the basic facts straight. Just as well, because I assumed that transubstantiation wasn't a miracle so I couldn't see a parallel between this and miracles. However, this website refers to it as a daily miracle. So I can now see why Hume thought he could extrapolate from disproving a daily miracle to disproving miracles in general, especially ones in the past.
Also of relevance might be that this website says that Catholics believe that "the substance part of the bread and wine elements changes; but the accidental parts -- sight, taste, smell, touch -- do not." They quote 2 Corinthians 5:7 to argue that sensory perception is irrelevant, the belief is based on faith alone. Therefore, I can see now how Hume has inadvertently introduced problematic details into his argument against miracles, especially when it comes to holding his own against Catholic contras. As an empiricist, Hume based many philosophical arguments on sensory experience and so was attracted to Dr Tillotson's sensory approach. However, this Catholic site dismisses taste and sight as irrelevant so could argue that Dr Tillotson has not disproved transubstantiation because the senses are only detecting the accidental properties of how the host tastes and looks. Likewise, does Hume end up trying to refute past miracles on the basis of what some believers could argue are merely accidental properties (sensory perception as evidence and testimony) that do not prove one way or the other whether a miracle has taken place?
On the other hand, transubstantiation doesn't rely on testimony alone. It is believed solely because it's become a doctrine of faith, not because someone claimed they witnessed it happen at Mass. Whereas the miracles Hume and Shepherd are debating rely solely on testimony. Thus, in this sense, I think it's possibly harder to refute Hume's argument against miracles than Dr Tillotson's argument against transubstantiation. However, such Catholic rejection of empirical evidence from sensory perception could be why Hume's empirical style arguments are sometimes dismissed as merely a lack of faith.
✖ I think the Indian Prince example is possibly undermining his empirical argument. Just because frost is out of the Prince's experience, it doesn't follow that it doesn't exist.
✖ I don't completely agree with Hume's Roman-inspired notion of testimony being automatically voided simply because it seems far-fetched. That's not to say that if it's far-fetched, it's necessarily plausible either.
✖ Hume wants to achieve a definition of miracles which wouldn't have any possible counterexamples. This is totally unrealistic but it is nevertheless philosophically and methodologically interesting to analyse if Hume has managed to achieve this.
✔✖ Yes and no:
yes, Hume's definition of miracles coheres with many Christians' agreed usage, especially some hardline Christians who put miracles on a pedestal and require a leap of faith, so it's worth Hume addressing it
no, in the sense that moderate Christians like Shepherd (and Jews) find this definition too strong and narrow. So his definition does not work against events that some term miracles but are simply rare occurrences and with greater knowledge of the natural world, could be rationally explained
My points of agreement with Shepherd:
✔ I think Shepherd has the better definition overall but not for religious reasons. I agree with her for linguistic reasons (etymology); textual evidence reasons (e.g. the same point about laws of nature come up in secondary literature such as Augustine and Aquinas so she's right to claim it's common knowledge / widely accepted definition / belief).
However, I'm surprised that the Vatican has a different definition from these Catholic thinkers, namely that God intervenes in the world in a way that goes over and above His own laws of nature. So there's a certain confusion here within the Catholic church. If Catholics can't even agree amongst themselves (so definitions are not even uniform within one branch, never mind between all branches of Christianity), why be critical of Hume's and Shepherd's definitions? Neither of whom are Catholics anyway!
✔ I like that Shepherd accounts for the problem of induction. It was quite a central topic on my philosophy degree so it's one I'm familiar with. I find it impressive that she accounted for arguments that were to be made centuries later e.g. Goodman's grue example (1955) and Taleb on black swans (2010)
✔I agree that there are always exceptions to every rule and marvellous events (miraculous or not) do truly happen
✔I like that Shepherd is not attempting to settle religious disputes as such, especially Catholic ones. She wasn't brought up to adhere to any particular strict Christian dogma and interacted with Christians of various denominations, freethinkers and dissenters.
Differences between me and Shepherd:
✖ I'm unclear why Shepherd takes into account whether anyone would lose their Christian faith on reading Hume. This is of no concern to me at all. I didn't pick this out for personal reasons because e.g. I don't want people to go off Christianity. Hardly! I'm an atheist when it comes to Christianity!
I'm merely stating what Shepherd has in her text since people are unfamiliar with it so I leave less details out. Hume, however, is very well-known amongst philosophers so I can assume more background knowledge of his writings. Also the talk was for a Humean audience not a general one or one that focuses on Shepherd's writings.
I don't read this comment as necessarily meaning that Shepherd is promoting Christianity here. She also states that she wouldn't blindly believe someone peddling dogma without any risk to themselves.
✖ I don't agree with Shepherd that the apostles are a good example of true testimony, simply because she sees their testimony as posing a risk to themselves. I merely include it as the example she gives of people who aren't expounding something for personal gain, but for me, it's not relevant or of interest.
I'm with Hume here, I wouldn't make the apostles an exception or argue that they are in any way more believable or plausible than someone who appears to be taking less risks when putting forward their testimonies. Nevertheless, Shepherd has a good point that the more the person has to lose through giving their testimony, the more believable they are. So if someone claims they saw something for which they have no good evidence and it has no risk for themselves (they may even get brownie points for exaggerating or making it up) then they are less believable. But the apostles are not a good example of this. There were many of them and they do not have any evidence to support it. But then she hasn't explained herself fully and that's not her style so maybe she's just blurting it out quickly at the end to get it through peer review and be finally published, much as philosophers do today.
✔✖ Shepherd is not as sceptical as Hume but I think both have good points here. She merely states that falsehoods show up in poor evidence.
Conclusion:
There's a subtle feminist point that I'm trying to show and that is that Shepherd was a good enough philosopher to argue academically and successfully against an established male philosopher and not make a mess of it! So it's not a pro-Christian argument when I say Hume would need to adjust his definition of miracles and his argument. It's a feminist one that Shepherd is not some inconsequential female philosopher but one that can argue with the best of them and find loopholes in their arguments. So she shouldn't have been lost in history. That was my main point. But it clearly didn't come across loud and clear though. So now I'm being loud and clear.
In the paper, I stated that the problems I see in the miracles debate are metaphysical, epistemological and explanatory ones, not religious ones, thus I perhaps assumed that my humanistic approach was obvious.
My suggestion that Hume could adjust his argument to include the notion that God acts through the laws of nature was not a personal preference or belief. It was based on Shepherd's observation that Hume has already argued this elsewhere so it would make him more consistent across his writings. And because I was linking his views with Spinoza on miracles and religious superstition. Spinoza also argues that God acts through the laws of nature, just not in an interferring, completely external, anthropomorphic way.
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