Mark Gagnon

The Hebrew Bible is packed with miracles, burning bushes and plagues and manna from heaven.

The New Testament is basically centered on miracles, literally like Jesus healing the dead.

walking on water, rising, resurrecting from the dead.

The Quran also describes a bunch of miracles and Hindu epics have miracles.

For most of human history, miracles have been the mainstream explanation for things that we can't explain or other extraordinary events.

If something remarkable happens, God is the obvious framework.

Though, you know, like skepticism of God or divine intervention is not purely modern.

A lot of ancient Greeks would question supernatural claims and stuff like that.

But still, for the vast majority of people across the majority of history, miracles were just kind of how the world was.

It's like there's things we can explain it for everything we can't explain.

It's God.

Now, all that started to change during the Enlightenment and like the 16 to 1700s.

So you guys are familiar with the Enlightenment.

This is when thinkers largely began insisting that the world operated according to laws that were discoverable, the kind of natural laws or an underlying order.

And no one really spearheaded this whole enlightenment ideology more than the Scottish philosopher David Hume.

So in 1748, Hume published an argument against miracles that is still debated to this very day.

His core claim is really quite elegant.

A miracle is, by definition, a violation of the laws of nature.

And the laws of nature are established by this enormous, consistent body of evidence.

So, the evidence against any particular miracle, namely, literally everything that's ever been observed in natural law, is always stronger than the testimony for it.