Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Once we think of the theology of miracles, things become even worse. For a deity that sets the laws of nature into motion and never relents at least has a certain dignity. One that occasionally allows hiccups and intermissions, glorified conjuring tricks, is less impressive. Why just those miracles, just then? It is not what you would have expected. A little miracle or two snuffing out the Hitlers and Stalins would seem far more useful than one that changes water to wine at one particular wedding feast. It is no doubt very good of God to let St Giuseppe levitate in front of pictures of him, but other things being equal, one would have preferred, say, the miraculous quarantine or destruction of the Aids virus. It is what one might have expected antecedently, knowing that the world was under the regime of a good God. But the world as we know it does not confirm it. We soon see how this piece of reasoning too can be analysed in a Bayesian way. Here the weak card is the degree of fit between the evidence and the hypothesis, the second of the three crucial figures in Bayes’s theorem.