Inferring and Explaining

83 it is easy to shew, that we have been a great deal too liberal in our concession, and that there never was a miraculous event established on so full an evidence. 2 Let’s beginwith themiddle paragraph. Some- one reports seeing a deadman restored to life. If we treat this report as potential evidence a gen- uinemiracle has occurred, wewould schematize this testimony as follows. e 1 . Linguistic statement—“I saw a dead man restored to life.” e 2 . Context—where, when, and how we were told e 3 . Relevant biography—whatever we know about the person who tells us this t 0 . He genuinely believes that he saw a dead man restored to life. t* 0 A dead man was restored to life. Hume now considers two rival explanations, one for each of the inferences: “Tis person . . . deceive[s].” t 1 . He does not really believe that he saw a dead man restored to life. Or “this person . . . [was] deceived.” t* 1 . He was mistaken in thinking he saw a dead man restored to life. Hume proceeds to combine t 1 and t* 1 into what logicians call a disjunction—“t 1 or t* 1 ”—“he deceives, or he was deceived.” Although he was not explicitly using inference to the best explanation, we can take Hume as proposing a rival explanation. testImony t* 2 . He does not really believe that he saw a dead man restored to life, or he was mistaken in thinking he saw a dead man restored to life. Hume then implicitly moves to step 3 in the recipe and ofers a rank ordering of the origi- nal explanation of the testimony regarding a miracle and the disjunctive rival explanation. Teory t* 2 is a better explanation of what was said than t* 0 . Why is he so confdent of this ranking? Te answer is what Hume, and almost every philoso- pher and theologian since, means by something being a miracle . Miracles are violations of laws of nature. Given the laws of physics, biochemistry, and biology, the natural world dictates that death is permanent. Te very evidence that estab- lishes these laws of nature automatically counts against the reportedmiracle. For Hume, it’s obvi- ous that the various law of nature hypotheses are so much better explanations than rivals that allow for exceptions to these laws that miracles are doomed to be exceedingly implausible. I agree with Hume about this so far. If a casual stranger tells me that she has witnessed a miracle, I would almost certainly judge that she is either lying or honestly mistaken and not that there has been an interruption in the operations of the natural world. But my judgment is based on a subjective assessment of the plausibility of difering explanatory accounts—classic appli- cation of the inference-to-the-best-explanation recipe—and not the meaning of the term mira- cle . Teists are not claiming, in my judgment,