Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles

By situating Hume's famous work Of Miracles (which notoriously argues against the possiblity of miracles) in the context of the 18th-century debate on miracles, Earman shows that Hume's argument is largely unoriginal, and largely without merit where it is original. On the positive side, he shows how progress can be made on the issues, so provocatively posed in Hume's essay, about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous and miraculous events. Earman's work is simultaneously a contribution to the history of ideas, the philosophy of religion, and to probability and induction.