I was reading Oxford University Press’ ”A very short introduction to Philosophy” just the other day, and in that book I came across something that has bothered me for a day or two now.

This is a book in which the English (I presume) professor of philosophy Edward Craig attempts to present examples of philosophy and philosophers from throughout the ages. One of these examples is David Hume, a Scottish philosopher (amongst other things) from the 18th century. Hume is the main focus of the chapter dealing with the classic philosophic question of “What can we know” or some such epistemological issue. What Craig does here, is that he uses what seems like Hume’s main argument against religion (I think; I’ll get back to this later), to exemplify a discussion about the extent of human knowledge.

Now then, according to Hume, if I’ve understood Craig correctly (ever the problem of reading secondary sources), religion based on miracles is irrational. How does he reach this conclusion?

What he does, is that he — quite reasonably, I think — defines a miracle as something that goes against the laws of nature; something that’s impossible. He then proceeds with claiming that in the case of most miracles, there are few witnesses, and there’s no way in Hel that we can ever test the truth of these miracles; we can only trust the words of those who claimed to witness it, or someone who knows someone who witnessed it, or someone who’s heard about someone who witnessed it, or… you get the general idea.

There were some more factors involved here, mainly concerning how news of a miracle travels, but this is the gist of it, and I’ll try to keep things relatively simple.

Following all this, Hume apparently says that taking the word of another who claims that something miraculous — i.e. impossible — has happened, over your own experiences — that should tell you that what has supposedly happened is indeed impossible, and against the laws of nature — is irrational — or at least against reason, if there’s a difference — because you have no way of knowing if the person making the preposterous claim is telling the truth. After all, people have been known to lie, they have been known to make mistakes, to perceive something wrong, and so on.

Now, here Hume dodges the position of becoming a relativist who throws out science as well, because the basis of science is that other people can test your claims of a new scientific finding, and that you can test those of other people. This is what science is, and this makes science fundamentally different from those religious revelations that come through what Hume calls miracles.

He also avoids the trap of opposing worldviews. Because to, say, a Christian, the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ are completely reasonable phenomena, because they are explained and possible within the “rules of Christianity”. And Hume acknowledges this.

Here, however, we reach what has been bothering me. You see, I must admit that I have some problems realising the relevance of Hume’s “On Miracles” at all, as it seems it is a criticism against “miracles as the basis for new religions”. Hume seems to be claiming that the invention, if you will, of religions shouldn’t have happened, as everyone should know that miracles are impossible!

Like I said, I must have misinterpreted Hume here (and I intend to pursue this issue as soon as I get some spare time on my hands; i.e. later in the week), for the way I interpret him (again, through a secondary source) he seems to be a bit anachronistic. Either that, or he is criticising a phase of human history that practically never were. (These two are probably the same, though.)

Because I can’t really see how people in some hypothetical pre-religious era of human history could possibly have applied something resembling scientific method to reject the first idea of religion. Referring to this as “scientific method” is a bit too arrogant for my taste, though, as even people of this era must have had some kind of self-awareness, of causality, of reason, enabling them to draw conclusions and whatnot. The problem for Hume is these most likely were completely different from what they were in Hume’s day and age.

But back to the thing that bothered me: In an attempt to phrase it concisely, a pre-religious phase must also have been pre-scientific, as the religious way of thinking originally seems to have been an attempt at explaining things people didn’t understand, and thus must be labelled as an advancement compared to what came before, if anything really did. So what, exactly, is it Hume’s “criticism” is supposed to be aimed at? What is its relevance?

(“Concisely” my pale, hairy arse.)

Anyway, now that I’ve written all this down, semi-systematically, I realise that much of what bothers me about Hume’s “On Miracles” comes from my own assumptions of a hypothetic pre-religious, or early religious, and pre-scientific era of human history. But as I think these assumptions seem fairly reasonable — if utterly impossible to prove or falsify — my uneasiness about Hume’s relevance still lives. I should probably repeat that I think what he says sounds sensible; I’m only unsure as to where it really applies.

Now, I seem to remember having some bright readers here once, so I’m hoping someone can help me out: Do I speak sense? And if not, could you help me pull my head out of my ass, please?