Saturday, November 13, 2004
Hume-us sandwich
Or, what our beloved philosopher is all about, courtesy of JPH.
The next major stage in Hume's overall thesis is the premise that "causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience" -- and this leads to the main bugaboo Christians have had with Hume, for he says he cannot believe in the resurrection of Christ, having not seen it himself: "...it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or century." But, we may ask, what of apostolic testimony to the resurrected Jesus? No problem: "...(N)o testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." And here is how else Hume solves that problem:
...(T)here is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of Men of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning as to serve us against all delusion in themselves; of such undaunted integrity as to place themselves beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood, and at the same time attesting facts performed in such a public manner and in so celebrated a part of the world as to render the detection unavoidable...
Christian "resurrectional" apologetics, of course, has thoroughly answered Hume on half of these points, and the other half are clearly little more than Hume's personal Enlightenment bigotry (Re: "good sense, education, and learning" -- yes, Hume has all the usual references to "barbarous and ignorant peoples"; yet how much "education" does it take to see that a dead man is alive, and at any rate, what of Matthew and Paul?; "celebrated part of the world" -- Palestine was a major crossroads, but it hardly makes a difference!). But all of that may have meant nothing to Hume anyway. It is quite revealing that even when he offers a hypothetical situation where these conditions are met (Hume hypothesizes a situation in which the Queen has supposedly died and come back to life), Hume admits he would be surprised, but "should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event." He would "still reply that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena" that he would rather believe that it was a conspiracy than a miracle. O ye of little faith? Nay -- o ye of little sense, more likely. Hume was right about the knavery and folly of men -- but he forgot to include himself as a prime example. Hume laid the foundation for many moderns who take anything, no matter how crazy (Jesus was a space alien) or uninformed (McKinsey's Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy) and find it preferable to the Christian faith. Whether that faith is right or wrong in this context is beside the point: The point is that the preference for the unreasonable, the outrageous, and the theoretical against the evidence available is nothing new. Hume was just one major name that encouraged that line of thinking in modern Western society.
The next major stage in Hume's overall thesis is the premise that "causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience" -- and this leads to the main bugaboo Christians have had with Hume, for he says he cannot believe in the resurrection of Christ, having not seen it himself: "...it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or century." But, we may ask, what of apostolic testimony to the resurrected Jesus? No problem: "...(N)o testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish." And here is how else Hume solves that problem:
...(T)here is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of Men of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning as to serve us against all delusion in themselves; of such undaunted integrity as to place themselves beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood, and at the same time attesting facts performed in such a public manner and in so celebrated a part of the world as to render the detection unavoidable...
Christian "resurrectional" apologetics, of course, has thoroughly answered Hume on half of these points, and the other half are clearly little more than Hume's personal Enlightenment bigotry (Re: "good sense, education, and learning" -- yes, Hume has all the usual references to "barbarous and ignorant peoples"; yet how much "education" does it take to see that a dead man is alive, and at any rate, what of Matthew and Paul?; "celebrated part of the world" -- Palestine was a major crossroads, but it hardly makes a difference!). But all of that may have meant nothing to Hume anyway. It is quite revealing that even when he offers a hypothetical situation where these conditions are met (Hume hypothesizes a situation in which the Queen has supposedly died and come back to life), Hume admits he would be surprised, but "should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event." He would "still reply that the knavery and folly of men are such common phenomena" that he would rather believe that it was a conspiracy than a miracle. O ye of little faith? Nay -- o ye of little sense, more likely. Hume was right about the knavery and folly of men -- but he forgot to include himself as a prime example. Hume laid the foundation for many moderns who take anything, no matter how crazy (Jesus was a space alien) or uninformed (McKinsey's Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy) and find it preferable to the Christian faith. Whether that faith is right or wrong in this context is beside the point: The point is that the preference for the unreasonable, the outrageous, and the theoretical against the evidence available is nothing new. Hume was just one major name that encouraged that line of thinking in modern Western society.
