Historical insights on miracles: Babbage, Hume, Aquinas

Abstract

The profundity of a set of distinctions may go unmarked in too many quarters for all too many centuries. Aquinas offered a profound and yet commonsensical triplet of distinctions concerning the miraculous at Summa Contra Gentiles II, 101 . Outside New-Thomist circles it is still surprising how many books, which include discussions of miracles neglect even to mention those distinctions despite their obvious relevance. For example, a great many English-speaking students who take a course in philosophy of religion while at college will read at least one of the following: Frederick Ferre, Language, Truth and God (1961); John Hick, Philosophy of Religion (First Edition, 1963, Second Edition, 1973); Terence Penelhum, Religion and Rationality (1971); William L. Rowe, Philosophy of Religion (1978); Richard L. Purtill, Thinking about Philosophy (1978). All these authors are respectable or admirable philosophers who take the history of Christian thought very seriously indeed. Since I found that they discuss questions about the miraculous at some length in their work without noting Aquinas' distinctions, I began to suspect that someone should speak out. It then struck me, also, that philosophers of religion, Thomist, non-Thomist and anti-Thomist have singularly neglected the contributions to natural theology of a cranky, but highly original scientist and philosopher, Charles Babbage. So much published discussion of miracles is addressed to arguments of David Hume. Yet Babbage was one of the first critics and probably the boldest critic to claim that mathematics and scientific method undermine Hume's attempts to use science against claims about miraculous revelations of the Divine. The profundity of a distinction is best brought out by showing how excellent minds may be brought to stalemates by neglecting it. This is an interesting part of what happened to the strategies of Hume and Babbage. In what follows I shall endeavour to bring Babbage the philosopher of religion out of obscurity his work on novel machines to be engineered is still recognized. His kind of opposition to Hume on miracles will be presented. Aquinas' crucial distinctions may then be dropped ex machina on the impasse to show that Babbage was making matters both too hard and too easy for himself.