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MIRACLES - Coggle Diagram
MIRACLES
SWINBURNE
(religious significance)
"if He has a reason to interact with us, He has reason very occasionally to intervene and suspend those natural laws by which our life is controlled"
"an occurence of a non-repeatable counter-instance to a law of nature"
non-repeatable differs from Hume (the law doesn't change)
principle of credulity
principle of testimony
occasional and possess religious significance
Richard Swinburne’s examples of violation of the laws of nature taken from the Bible:
levitation and resurrection from the dead in full health of a man whose heart has not been beating for twenty four hours and who was dead also by other currently used criteria; water turning into wine without the assistance of chemical apparatus or catalysts; a man getting better from polio in a minute
AQUINAS
(miracles different from the usual order)
"that which has a divine cause, not that whose cause a human person fails to understand"
three types of miracle
events done by God, that nature could never do
events done by God, which nature could do, but not in that order
events done by God, which nature can do, but God does without the use of natural law
believed everything that existed had a
nature
miracles are beyond the natural power of any created being - they have a ‘divine’ cause and so are not a normal part of the nature of things; God alone can do miracles since he is uncreated
miracles are primarily identified by God's intervention
HOLLAND
(contingency miracle)
a religiously significant coincidence might qualify as a miracle
train example
a boy plays on train tracks and his little toy car gets stuck which causes the train to brake, stopping it from hitting the boy - his mother calls it a miracle. To Holland, it would be a miracle.
down to interpretation
contingency miracle: a remarkable and beneficial coincidence that is interpreted in a religious fashion - non-cognitive language
Holland's definition does not involve a break in the law of nature
HUME
(transgression of a law of nature)
hard - laws of nature are unalterably uniform
if miracles are a ‘violation’ of what cannot be altered then they are impossible, or, what appears to be a violation is a misstated law and a new law of nature is needed
soft - natural laws are not fixed and can have exceptions e.g. due to God’s interventions.
this makes the issue of belief in miracles not about logical impossibility but about whether the evidence for the altered law is credible and convincing
performed by the particular volition of a deity, or the imposition of some invisible agent