HM: one should not believe a miracle unless it is greater than 50% probable in light of the evidence. Thus, according to Earman, Hume’s maxim sets forth the following necessary and sufficient condition for accepting a miracle: That is, testimony cannot establish a miracle unless the testimony renders the miracle to be more probable than not. In his essay “Of Miracles,” David Hume articulated his famous maxim that “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.” In Hume’s Abject Failure, philosopher John Earman offers the following interpretation of Hume’s maxim: if M = the hypothesis that a particular miracle has occurred, t = testimony that M occurred, and K = our background knowledge, then Hume is saying that no testimony can establish M unless P(M|t&K) > P(~M|t&K), and therefore P(M|t&K) >. In this paper I will first survey the attempts of contemporary Christian apologists to defend the miraculous resurrection of Jesus, and then demonstrate that all of these attempts fail to satisfy Hume’s purportedly obvious conditions. A survey of contemporary Christian apologetic literature, however, reveals that even if Hume’s maxim was once obvious, it has been forgotten in modern times. In Hume’s Abject Failure, philosopher John Earman argues that David Hume’s famous maxim concerning the credibility of miracle reports amounts to no more than a trivial tautology, one that was already agreed upon by all parties to the 18th-century debate on miracles.
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