The Irrational Mr. Hume and the Sagan Standard
Extraordinary Claims Demand Satisfactory Evidence
What does the modern Christian or other believer in the supernatural do with contemporary claims of the supernatural? Modern skeptics often repeat the aphorism that, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. This is referred to by some as The Sagan Standard or ECREE, after Carl Sagan popularized it in his Cosmos televisions series. But do they, really? For example, if a skeptic living in some out-of-the way place in late August of 1945 heard an account that not one but two cities in Japan vanished from the face of the Earth in a flash of light and heat, he should have, by the logic of the Sagan Standard, dismissed that account, because such events would have been extraordinary and our hypothetical backwoods skeptic would have had no such evidence available. Similarly, no one should have believed the accounts of passenger jets being deliberately flown into the World Trade Center buildings prior to September 11th, 2001. Such historical events are unique and they were not part of that body of common experience. Until they became that. The assumption of skepticism toward the extraordinary event, and the supernatural specifically, was once given the moniker “the Hume Hangover” by astronomer and apologist Dr. Hugh Ross. Ross was referencing the influence of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, David Hume, who did more than any other figure to advance empiricism and naturalism in philosophy in the English-speaking world.
Canadian Christian apologist Wesley Huff quite disagrees with the Sagan Standard, and by extension, Hume’s view that skepticism is the proper default setting in evaluating experience. He posits instead that:
“Extraordinary claims do not require extraordinary evidence but sufficiently valid evidence.”
C.S. Lewis, writing in “Miracles”, would certainly agree with the requirement of “sufficiently valid evidence” with the testimony of miracles. Supernaturalism, he argued, is ineluctably part of Christianity. As he put it:
So far as I can see Christianity is precisely the one religion from which the miraculous cannot be separated. You must frankly argue for supernaturalism from the very outset.
The Christian faith in the modern world often faces interlocutors–whether materialist skeptics or liberal Christians who have abandoned belief in the supernatural– who posit as an a priori to any discussion of any claim of the supernatural, that the burden of proof cannot be satisfied because there can be no proof of anything which is not part of what Hume variously called “unalterable”, “infallible” or “uniform” experience.
This amounts to saying that, since miracles do not occur every day everywhere in front of everyone, we can rightly assume such events never occur anywhere in front of anyone at any time. To put it another way, the sum total of the subjective impressions of humanity- or what Hume’s modern disciples assume to be the unanimous verdict of the sum total of subjective impressions of humanity- must, absolutely must, share in the subjective impressions of the Humean skeptic in order for that verdict to be valid. If those impressions do not agree with the impressions of the skeptic, they, not those of the skeptic, must be deemed invalid. And that determination must be made before and in spite of testimony to or material evidence of a supernatural –or merely unusual–event.
The Gauge of Experience
Appealing to “infallible experience” raises problems quite naturally when there is a conflict between persons who have uncommon or extraordinary experiences and give testimony to others who have not shared those experiences, as Hume admits:
Suppose, for instance, that the fact which the testimony
endeavors to establish partakes of the extraordinary
and the marvellous—in that case, the evidence
resulting from the testimony admits of a diminution,
greater or less in proportion as the fact is more or less
unusual. …But when the fact attested
is such a one as has seldom fallen under our observation,
here is a contest of two opposite experiences,
of which the one destroys the other as far as its force
goes and the superior can only operate on the mind
by the force which remains.
The whole of the argument that Hume posits here is that common, subjective human experience defines the possibility of the supernatural or miracles out of existence. This clearly begging the question, since he by definition is disqualifying counter-testimony without weighing any objective evidence. So much for his vaunted empiricism. The problem here is that the assertion at the foundation of this particular case of petitio principii is completely wrong. The common human experience of the type to which Hume appeals, one excluding the possibility of the supernatural or miraculous intervening in the observed, lived world, does not exist. The record of history presents us with what G.K. Chesterton once called a “crushing torrent of evidence” in favor of claims of supernatural and miraculous events, claims coming from hundreds of millions of witnesses from all walks of life and all languages, nations and tongues. Accounts of the miraculous that have been deemed credible by generations of humans just as possessed of the rational faculty as the hidebound dogmatists of the International Church of David Hume. Such accounts abound in Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Islamic, Christian and Jewish civilizations. That is to say, credible testimony of supernatural events- everything from healings to demonic possession, from prophetic premonitions to resurrections from the dead- comes not from some negligible sub-set of all humans who have existed, but the crushingly overwhelming majority. A recent survey by the Barna Group provided evidence that, not only do most Americans believe in the mere possibility of supernatural healing, but 1 in 4 of them claim to have experienced it.
Claims Credible and Otherwise
If common human experience is the determiner of whether claims of the supernatural are credible or not, then the verdict of human experience is indisputably in favor of such claims. Most of the accounts from these and other easily available sources—you can find thousands online in just minutes of searching, trust me—are backed with medical documentation of before/after and eyewitness testimony. There have been numerous studies documenting such events, one of which can be consulted here. And though I could add pages more of such accounts, the point is made.
And what is it that subjective experience is supposed to evaluate, anyway? Why, the common course of nature.
It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health,
should die all of a sudden, because such a kind of death,
though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently
observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man
should come to life, because that has never been observed
in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a
uniform experience against every miraculous event;
otherwise, the event would not merit that appellation.
And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof,
there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature
of the fact, against the existence of any miracle, nor
can such a proof be destroyed or the miracle rendered
credible but by an opposite proof which is superior.
This particular paragraph begins innocently enough: One does need a solid grasp of the “common course of nature” in order to identify a miracle or a supernatural event as such. Such as the grasp that a fisherman, a tax collector, or physician might be reasonably assumed to have. Or, say, the 1/3 of non-charismatic Christians who report first-hand experience of (i.e. Hume’s „uniform experience“) that is precisely opposed to the a priori, evidence-free assertions that were made by Hume and are being made by his modern disciples. Just to use the example of healing in the context of a Christian understanding, one can easily find thousands of such accounts from the Sanctuary Our Lady of Lourdes, from the testimonies from the Medjugorje pilgrimage site, from Bethel Church of Austin, Texas. Then there is this one from The Asbury Collegian. Do we accept them as valid or dismiss them out of hand?
Then there is Hume’s claim that a dead man coming to life “has never been observed in any age or country”, is easily refuted nowadays by accounts such as these from Wales, these from Australia, or those among the 7,560,000,000 search results I got when entering “man comes back to life” in Google. Of those I researched, most had video interviews with both the formerly dead man and his doctor. Then this one, referred to at the outset of my discussion here, rather the best-known resurrection account in human history, the resurrection on which Christianity stands or falls. It is clear that Hume’s “uniform experience” is nothing of the kind. An “opposite proof which is superior”, in terms of sheer volume and international scope of testimony, exists and speaks in favor of the reality of supernatural events. And a great wealth of it comes in the form medically-verified objective evidence. Like X-ray films, MRI images recorded on CDs, and written medical reports.
Can some of the accounts of, supernatural healing like those I referred to above be disputed? Of course, they can. Can some even be revealed to be frauds? Of course. Some have been. Most Americans can recall famous cases in which exactly that occurred. There are however vastly more reports of the miraculous that have been attested beyond anything that can be called a rational doubt. The Catholic sites I mentioned, for example, require medical documentation in order for a healing to even be included in their records.
Common experience, it is clear, differs drastically from the claims on which the modern Hume-influenced skeptics base their rejection of the supernatural. Their view, like Hume’s own, is not based on any rational consideration of evidence, but on a priori assumptions of an anti-supernaturalist philosophy. Skeptics following this pattern are evincing a commitment, not to dispassionate and objective evaluation of testimony and evidence, but to irrational prejudice. So, if the gauge of the reliability and credibility of a claim is “common human experience,” it is clear that Hume and his modern disciples were not and are not providing credible accounts of reality, but an account of reality that is “extraordinary and marvelous”, in the sense of “not worthy of believing".
All references to David Hume’s “On Miracles”. Section X of his An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding(1748) as accessed on the Philosophy Faculty website of the University of California, San Diego accessed here.