"Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived, implies
no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any
demonstration, argument, or abstract reasoning _a priori_."--(IV.
p. 44.)
So wrote Hume, with perfect justice, in his _Sceptical Doubts_. But a
miracle, in the sense of a sudden and complete change in the customary
order of nature, is intelligible, can be distinctly conceived, implies
no contradiction; and, therefore, according to Hume's own showing,
cannot be proved false by any demonstrative argument.
Nevertheless, in diametrical contradiction to his own principles, Hume
says elsewhere:--
"It is a miracle that a dead man should come to life: because that
has never been observed in any age or country."--(IV. p. 134.)
That is to say, there is an uniform experience against such an event,
and therefore, if it occurs, it is a violation of the laws of nature.
Or, to put the argument in its naked absurdity, that which never has
happened never can happen, without a violation of the laws of nature. In
truth, if a dead man did come to life, the fact would be evidence, not
that any law of nature had been violated, but that those laws, even when
they express the results of a very long and uniform experience, are
necessarily based on incomplete knowledge, and are to be held only as
grounds of more or less justifiable expectation.
To sum up, the definition of a miracle as a suspension or a
contravention of the order of Nature is self-contradictory, because all
we know of the order of nature is derived from our observation of the
course of events of which the so-called miracle is a part.
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