David Hume
Scottish Enlightenment philosopher (1711–1776) whose 1748 essay Of Miracles laid the epistemological groundwork for critiquing miracle claims — an argument that prefigures Bayesian reasoning by centuries.
Key Contribution: “Of Miracles” (1748)
Hume’s central argument: the evidence against a miracle (our uniform, unalterable experience of the laws of nature) will always outweigh the evidence for it (human testimony).
This can be framed in Bayesian terms: the probability that human testimony is flawed, fabricated, or mistaken — P(E|~H) — is practically always higher than the probability that the laws of physics were suspended. 1
Influence
Hume’s argument remains the foundation for most modern critiques of bayesian-apologetics. It essentially formulates an early conceptual version of Bayesian reasoning applied to testimony and miracles.