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Miracles and Credibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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Tan Tei Wei in ‘Mr Young on Miracles’ (Religious Studies, X (1974), 333–7) takes me to task over certain contentions of mine regarding the best understanding of ‘the miraculous’. I claim that the notion of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature by a particular interposition of a god, founders on the difficulty of rendering such a notion coherent. I offer instead the following account which is not subject to such a difficulty. Namely, that a miraculous event would be one brought about by God acting as a factor in the causally operative set of factors (out of the perhaps several possible sets sufficient for the event in question's occurrence), such that his activity alters the outcome from what it perhaps would have been if, contrary to fact, he had not been actively involved. It is open to a theist employing this account to say as well that had God not thus actively involved himself as a (specifically rather than just generally) active agent-factor, the (miraculous) effect would not have come about.
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References
page 465 note 1 Cf. ‘Miracles and Epistemology’, Religious Studies, VIII (1972), 115–26Google Scholar; ‘Miracles and Physical Impossibility’, Sophia, XI, 3 (1972), 30–5Google Scholar; ‘Petitioning God’, American Philosophical Quarterly, XI (1974), 193–201.Google Scholar
page 466 note 1 Cf. Penelhum, T., Religion and Rationality (New York, 1971Google Scholar), ch. 19.
page 468 note 1 Cf. Broad, C. D., ‘Hume's Theory of the Credibility of Miracles’, reprinted in Sesonske, A. and Fleming, N. (eds.), Human Understanding (Belmont, California, 1965Google Scholar); Langtry, Bruce, ‘Hume on Miracles and Contrary Religions’, Sophia, XIV, 1 (1975), 29–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Penelhum, , op. cit.Google Scholar; Swinburne, , op. cit.Google Scholar ch. 4.
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