Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVieWS 239 R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles From Joseph Glanvill to David Hume. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses; Lewisburg: Buckneli University Press, 1981. Pp. 3o5 . NP. From time to time there appears a work in the history of ideas which treats its subject definitively, depriving other scholars of any excuse for covering the same ground again. R. M. Burns's The Great Debate on Miracles is such a work. It tells us all that we will need or care to know about a controversy that preoccupied English intellectuals in the last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. Dr. Burns has read not only the religious apologists and polemicists of the period, but also the natural scientists and philosophers. He has some instructive things to say to historians and philosophers of science as well as to theologians and historians of religion. His account of the early modern history of probability judgements and theory o| induction is interesting and informative. His concluding chapter, which comprises the most thorough modern critique of Hume's essay "Of Miracles" that I am acquainted with, raises some profoundly troubling questions about Hume's empiricism , particularly about what is now called his nomological-deductive model of explanation. However these questions are to be answered finally, it is to Burns's credit to have shown that a debate which has subsided into the recesses of history involves the central issues which today engage and divide our leading episternologists and philosophers of science. His book not only closes the record on a great debate which languished before it was decided, but it also opens the way to reappraising the basic principles upon which Hume relied to discredit all testimony to miracles. Burns corrects the usual view that Hume initiated the great debate with an original treatment of the subject by showing that when "Of Miracles" first appeared in print interest in the topic was already flagging and 1-1ume's piece was mainly derivative . He amply documents his case that Part 1 of Hume's essay was largely drawn from earlier work presenting a priori arguments against the intrinsic credibility of miracles, William Wollaston's Religion of Nature Delineated of 1722 having provided a primary source. The Deists who preceded Hume in attempting to discredit miracles, particularly those related in the New Testament, were bent upon showing that natural religion sufficed and revealed religion was unsuitable for rational men in an enlightened age. They were less concerned with denying the possibility of miracles occurring than with declaring them to be an unsatisfactory foundation i~)r religious belief, ttume's main conclusion on the subject, "that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion," bad been anticipated many times by his deist predecessors, and the secorul part of his essay "in fact," Burns says, "'functions as a fairly compendious summary of all but one of the major types o| these [a postcriori] arguments as presented by the Deists..." (72). Burns's handling of Antony Flew's challenge to the classical interpretation of Hume's essay provides an instructive lesson in the complexities of philosophical interpretation . On the traditional view, by his a priori argument in Part I Hume removed the theoretical possibility of rational belief in miracles. On Flew's reading, Hume 24 ~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:2 APR 1984 allowed the possibility of miracles, but, because of their intrinsic improbability, required testimony of a high order of reliability to warrant belief in any one of them. The chief advantage of Ftew's interpretation is that it reserves a relevant point to be made in Part ~, where Hume advances a posteriori arguments to prove that no alleged miracle has ever been reported by witnesses who satisfy the required standard of credibility. On the alternative reading, Part 9 is redundant; If Hume had shown at the first stage of the argument that no testimony could possibly be compelling enough to prove a miracle, then he would have had no need to go on to show that all such testimony is in...