rockpie wrote:but to say that a miracle is a violation of physical laws would suggest that in Biblical times when the word miracle was used to describe things like resurrection from death and walking on water the people using the word did know the laws of nature. as i understand it nobody back then could comprehend what the laws of nature were so to say that a miracle violates laws of nature cannot be applicable because miracles occured when natural laws weren't considered. but then i realise that on the same basis that is why they were explained by the actions of God because there was no other explanation right? and the circle continues...
For Hume, "natural laws" were really just human expectations that had proven, over time, to be without exception. Thus, it is a natural law that dead people stay dead, not because some scientists had proven that dead people stay dead, but because all instances of people dying in the past had, without exception, showed that the dead people stayed dead. That fits with what Hume regarded as the
"problem of induction," i.e. that no empirical fact can be logically justified. At best, we can say that past evidence provides a guide for what the future will look like, and the more evidence we have of the past, the more confident we can be in our prediction of the future. Thus, all past instances of dead people staying dead, without any exceptions, makes it highly likely that, in the future, dead people will stay dead. And the number of those exceptionless instances in the past would make us extremely dubious of any report of an exception in the future -- so much so that we would rightly regard any exception as being "miraculous."
rockpie wrote:i suppose, but i did some research on Hume, and he proves his own definition wrong by saying that laws of nature cannot actually be broken so miracles are impossible as laws of nature being broken is only our understanding of them being previously unsound. but what about miracles that don't actually break a law of nature... if they work through the laws of nature like Holland suggests?
Where does Hume say that the laws of nature cannot actually be broken?
rockpie wrote:Hume hasn't proved that wrong, plus he says that past experience would show us that when people die they stay dead, however in 1960, we could say past experience shows us that man cannot walk on the moon, but they did. just because something hasn't happened before doesn't mean it won't happen. besides if it was an everyday occurance it wouldn't be classed as miraculous.
A man walking on the moon isn't miraculous, any more than a man walking on the surface of Mars wouldn't be miraculous. Since there had been no attempts to walk on the moon prior to 1969, we couldn't say that it was inductively "impossible" to walk on the moon. At most, one could speculate as to its possibility. That's far different from speculating as to the possibility of resurrecting the dead.
