Abstract

The principal aim of my dissertation is to present a new interpretation of David Hume's "Of Miracles," section X of his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It is my thesis that Hume's essay is addressed to a particular line of classical reasoning in which miracles are said to justify the belief that the bible was divinely inspired. This kind of theological argument is illustrated in a number of classical sources, such as Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica and William Paley's Evidences of Christianity. For my purposes, however, the spokesman for the classical tradition is George Berkeley. The first two chapters of my dissertation are thus devoted to clarifying the logical structure of a theological argument on miracles and revelation that appears in the Sixth Dialogue of Berkeley's Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher. In the first chapter I try to reconstruct Berkeley's argument from his text, which is in dialogue form. In the second chapter I probe his argument further, using it as a background against which to examine some assumptions about miracles and the laws of nature that have been important in the secondary literature. I argue that Berkeley was correct in thinking that his argument does not require the premise that the biblical miracles could not have resulted from solely natural causes operating in accordance with the laws of nature. I do not try to defend Berkeley's argument. I argue about which conclusions follow from Berkeley's assumptions, but I do not claim that Berkeley's assumptions are true. By exposing and clarifying the details of the logical structure of Berkeley's argument, my first two chapters furnish the proper setting in which to examine Hume's essay. In my third and final chapter I argue that Hume's essay is best interpreted as a critique of an argument such as Berkeley's, i.e., of a classical, theological argument that centers on the assertion that miracles justify the belief that the bible was divinely inspired