Abstract

I analyze David Hume’s "Of Miracles". I vindicate Hume’s argument against two charges: that it (1) defines miracles out of existence; (2) appeals to a suspect principle of balancing probabilities. He argues that miracles are, in a certain sense, maximally improbable. To understand this sense, we must turn to his notion of probability as ’strength of analogy’: miracles are incredible, according to him, because they bear no analogy to anything in our past experience. This reveals as anachronistic various recent Bayesian reconstructions of his argument. But it exposes him to other charges, with which I conclude