It can't hurt to back up a bit to examine some definitions, make some distinctions, nail down some terminology, and catalog some questions. See how much you agree with.
1) A little girl falls into a mine shaft but is pulled out three days later alive and well. People call it a 'miracle.' That is a misuse of language because the unlikelihood of an event does not justify labelling it miraculous.
2) David Hume's two-part definition has dominated subsequent discussions. The gist of his definition is that a miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity . . . ." (Enquiry, sec. x, part i)
3) Hume's definition raises a number of questions. What is a law of nature? What is it to 'transgress' or violate a law of nature? Could a violation of a law of nature occur without supernatural agency? If so, would it count as a miracle? If a supernatural agent such as God brings about something by an act of will, but without violating any natural law, is that a miraculous bringing-about? If God ("the Deity") is involved in every miracle, what attributes must God have to be so-involved? The God of Aquinas could be a miracle worker, but what about the deus sive natura of Spinoza?
4) Laws of nature must not be confused with laws in the political-legal realm. And this despite the use of 'transgression,' 'violation,' and 'law' with respect to both kinds of law, and despite talk of laws of nature 'governing' this or that phenomenon and of phenomena 'obeying' laws. Two differences come immediately to mind: legal laws, unlike laws of nature, are enacted by legislatures and need enforcement. Kepler's laws of planetary motion, for example, were neither enacted by a legislature nor do they need enforcement. There is no need for an 'astro-cop' to make sure that the planets keep to their elliptical orbits, or to ensure that no signal exceeds the cosmic speed limit, 186,282 mi/sec. This ties in with another apparent difference. Legal laws are prescriptive, permissive, or proscriptive statements; statements of laws of nature are merely descriptive: they merely codify what happens. And even if they codify what must happen, the necessity involved is not legal but nomological or nomic. This point leads to a further distinction.
5) A legal law is just a statement that states either what is legally required, or legally permitted, or legally prohibited. There is no distinction between a legal law and something in the world of nature that makes its true. But in the case of laws of nature we need to distinguish between law statements and the laws themselves. Let me explain.
On one theory of laws, the regularity theory, a law is just an exceptionless regularity, a repeatable pattern of event sequences. A sample of pure water at sea-level is heated to 212 deg. Fahrenheit. That is one event token. It is followed by a second spatiotemporally contiguous event token: the beginning to boil of the same sample of water. The two event tokens make up an event sequence. What makes it a causal sequence is its instantiation of a pattern which, formulated in a statement, would go like this: "Whenever pure water at sea level is heated to 212 Fahrenheit, it boils." What makes this universal generalization true is the underlying pattern of heating-boiling events 'out there in the world.'
A statement of a law of nature, therefore, must be distinguished from the law that it states. The latter exists whether or not the former does. If Coulomb's law is true it was true long before the birth of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.
6) Now what is a transgression of a law of nature? I should think that a law of nature is more than an exceptionless regularity in that laws support counterfactual conditionals. But without going into this, we can confidently say the following. Whatever a law of nature is, it either is or entails an exceptionless regularity. A transgression/violation of a law would then be an exception to the regularity, i.e., a counterexample thereto. But then it would seem to follow that miracles as Hume understands them are not just impossible, but logically impossible. Try this argument on for size:
1) A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2) Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
3) A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity. But:
4) An exception to an exceptionless regularity is logically impossible.
Therefore
5) Miracles are logically impossible.
This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible, then they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood? Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity. Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities. The idea is that any theory of (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.
Interim conclusion: If miracles are possible, then they cannot be construed as Hume construes them. And now: modus ponendo ponens? Or modus tollendo tollens?
(To be continued)
7) Humean miracles are violations ("transgressions") of laws of nature by divine agency. But are miracles Humean? William Lane Craig thinks not:
That is, I think, an untenable definition of what a miracle is . . . . Miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. The laws of nature describe what would happen in a particular case assuming that there are no intervening supernatural factors. They have what are called ceteris paribus clauses implicit in them – namely, all [other] things being equal, this is what will happen in this situation. But if all [other] things are not equal, the law isn’t violated. Rather, the law just doesn’t apply to that situation because there are other factors at work. In the case of a miracle, God doesn’t violate the laws of nature when he does a miracle. Rather, there will be causal factors at work, namely God, which are supernatural and therefore what the laws of nature predict won’t happen because the laws of nature only make predictions under the assumption that there are no intervening supernatural factors at work. So a miracle, I think, properly defined, is an event which the natural causes at a time and place cannot produce at that time and place. Or, more succinctly, a miracle is a naturally impossible event – an event which the natural causes at a certain time and place cannot bring about. It is beyond the productive capacity of nature. (Emphases added)
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