User:Biggsy

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Miracles

What do you think of when you hear the word 'miracle'? What presicely is a miracle? Is it someone suddenly cured of terminal illness or even the birth of a baby? the concpept of miracles is widely debated in the modern world and there is no scientific test to see whether a miracle is as it seems. Can we ever truly know whether a miracle is true or false?

[edit] Hume and Mircales

For Hume, by definition a miracle is a "violation of the natural law by some divine being". interestingly the Vatican uses Hume's criticism as its own defintion of miracles. As an empiricist, Hume believed in evidence that can be interpreted through the senses. For Hume miracles cannot happen because of the amount of evidence for the law of nature, there can never be enough evidence to prove they have been violated. The more evidence we have for something the more certain we are about it. We proportion our beliefs to the strength of the evidence we have. since we proportion belief to evidence, there can never be enough evidence to prove that a miracle has taken place. Hume also considered the matter of the reliability of the witnesses to a miracle and whether or not they may be mistaken in their understanding and reporting of what they have seen. However what makes something religious is often a matter of interpretation rather than fact. thus a violation of a law of nature need not be seen as a miracle, and may have no religious or personal significance whatsoever.

[edit] References

access to philosophy - AN INTRODUCTION to PHILOSOPHY and ETHICS. Author: Mel Thomson, Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton, First Published: 2003