Abstract
David Hume's attack on belief in miracles in his famous essay 'Of Miracles', which appears as Section X of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, is frequently taken, and once was taken by me, to be the definitive word on the subject.' In this paper, however, I shall argue that Hume's criticism fails. I shall here be only slightly concerned with Part II of Hume's essay. There he offers a number of specific arguments against common claims of miracles with which I have little quarrel. The facts Hume cites in Part II show what I suspect most philosophically inclined readers of the present day have little need to have proved to them, namely, that even the best attested reports of miracles generally should be greeted with great caution, and that it is easy for people to give undue credence to reports of the marvelous and miraculous that in fact arise from deception and chicanery. This much I think can be accepted with little worry. However, the heart of Hume's essay is an argument, given in Part I of the essay, to show that, in principle, it can never be reasonable to believe in a miracle on the basis of the testimony of others. It is this argument that I believe to be fallacious and to which I shall devote the bulk of this paper.
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