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.
Causation
Hume’s better-known target in the theory of knowledge is causation: causal power is unobservable, and the necessity we attribute to causes is a habit of the mind rather than a feature of the world. Norton’s “The Metaphysics of Causation: An Empiricist Critique” (2024) is explicitly not a Humean critique: it keeps Hume’s reservation about adding metaphysical facts to observed relations while rejecting his inductive skepticism — science has “found many ways in which things connect with other things in the world”, and calling those connections “causal” is a pragmatic convention rather than a deeper discovery. 2
See Also
- humes-argument-against-miracles
- bayesian-apologetics
- richard-swinburne
- john-d-norton — 2024 empiricist critique of the metaphysics of causation