Christian apologists argue that the testimony of the miracles of Jesus provide evidence for Christianity. Hume tries to undermine this argument by pointing out that miracles are said to occur in other religious traditions and so miracles do not give us reason to believe in Christianity over the alternatives. Thus, competing miracles act as an undercutting defeater for the argument from miracles for Christianity. Yet, before Hume, Locke responds to this kind of objection, and in this paper I explain and (...) defend his response. In short, Locke argues that God will ensure that there is more evidence for Christianity (if true) and this greater evidence is an undercutting defeater for Hume’s competing miracles defeater (i.e., it is a defeater-defeater). If so, then, as Locke argues, competing miracles do not weaken the evidence from miracles for Christianity. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, despite Locke’s explicitly subjectivist definition of miracle, he in fact employs an objectivist understanding of the concept. This contrast between his official definition and his employment of an objectivist understanding of what it is for an event to be a miracle is a result of his confusing the epistemological issue of how to recognize a miracle with the ontological issue of what a miracle is.

The aim of this chapter is to explain why Locke thinks religious belief requires evidence and, on his view, what evidence there is for religious belief. I will explain and defend Locke’s view that revelation can provide evidence for religious beliefs so long as there is evidence that God revealed it. Further, I will show how he takes the historical evidence of the miracles of Jesus as justification for belief in Christianity.

This article explores the connection between Hume’s view of “laws of nature” and his view of miracles by addressing three foci. First, it presents arguments that Hume construed “laws of nature” as merely beliefs in perfect or imperfect causal uniformity. So construed, laws of nature can be violated, so miracles are possible. Second, it shows that Hume’s criteria for evaluating human testimony are found in the popular textbooks of logic of the time. Hume explicitly used these criteria to criticize nonbiblical (...) reports of miracles. Finally, the article shows that Hume took John Tillotson’s examination of transubstantiation to reduce scripture to apostolic testimony and to collapse the distinction between divine and human testimony. This implies that educated Christians entertain inconsistent beliefs. (shrink)