While many people justify their belief in God with some version of the argument from design, they know, intuitively, that this only gets them so far. At best, teleological arguments imply an intelligent, creative force behind the operations of nature. But to make the jump from this mysterious grand designer of the universe to the God of revealed religion, you need miracles. 

The regularity of the natural world seems to imply a designer (although we’ll argue, later, the opposite). But it is the suspension or alteration of the natural order that, supposedly, lifts the curtain to reveal the existence of a personal God. In other words, design arguments, at most, get you to Deism; miracles—such as the parting of the sea or the resurrection of the dead—take you the rest of the way to the personal God of the Abrahamic religions. 

What topic, then, could be more important? If we can discredit the possibility of miracles, or, rather, the justification for believing in them, then we can strike at the very foundation of organized, revealed religion. For the sake of focus, we’ll confine our discussion to Christianity, while recognizing that much of what follows applies, with little modification, to revealed religion more broadly. 

The Christian faith, after all, seems to depend not merely on the possibility of miracles, but on the truth of one miracle in particular: Christ’s resurrection. And this is hardly the misguided assertion of a confused nonbeliever—it comes straight from the mouth of St. Paul himself. 

According to Paul, belief in the resurrection is non-negotiable: “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Corinthians 15:14). To deny the resurrection, Paul insists, is to concede at once that the apostles were false witnesses, Christian preaching is untrue, faith is futile, and believers remain in their sin. It’s no wonder, then, that Christians defend Jesus’s return from the dead so vociferously. In fact, if Jesus did not return from the dead—and is therefore not in any way connected to the divine—then what authority could he possibly hold over us?

The main facts of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are recounted in all four Gospels (although some details vary). It goes like this: Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, died on the cross, and was subsequently buried in a tomb. Three days later, Jesus was raised from the dead by God, appearing to his disciples over a period of time before ascending to heaven. These acts—the crucifixion and resurrection together—were integral parts of God’s plan to save humanity from both sin and death, promising eternal life for all those who believe. 

This is the core of the Christian faith. Yet it rests on the acceptance of miracles—and on the conviction that, in at least one extraordinary case, a miracle actually occurred. Whether we are justified in believing this—or in any miracles whatsoever—is the question to which we now turn, with the help of the great eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume.

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David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher and historian widely regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment and the foremost philosopher of empiricism and skepticism. He challenged traditional ideas about knowledge, causation, free will, morality, and religion, arguing that human reason is far more limited and dependent on experience, habit, and sentiment than philosophers had traditionally assumed. 

Hume’s writings on religion, in particular, are among the most insightful ever composed. His Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, offered a devastating critique of the traditional arguments for God’s existence. But it is his tenth section of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, titled “Of Miracles,” that is most relevant here. In it, Hume provides the skeptical framework through which we can assess the credibility of any alleged miracle—including the Resurrection.

Before we can ask whether belief in miracles is justified, however, we must first establish what counts as a miracle. Hume defines one as “a violation of the laws of nature.” For him, this definition is self-evident, as “there must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.” 

If an event can be explained by known natural laws or accounted for by ordinary experience, there is little reason to call it a miracle. A miracle derives its significance precisely from its departure from the ordinary course of nature—an event that, at least as presently understood, cannot be explained by natural causes, in practice or in principle. If an event can ultimately be reduced to known physical laws, then it may be rare, extraordinary, or unforeseen, but it is not miraculous in the traditional sense: it does not require the intervention of a force external to, or independent of, the natural order. 

This understanding of miracles is consistent with the role they play in religious belief. Miracles are invoked as evidence of supernatural intervention, typically by God, either as proof of his existence or as demonstrations of his power to intervene in the world at will, unconstrained by the ordinary laws of nature.  

Under normal circumstances, we expect “that all men must die, that lead cannot, of itself, remain suspended in the air,” and that “fire consumes wood, and is extinguished by water,” Hume writes. So if a man were to be raised from the dead—or heavy metals rose spontaneously into the air—it would be bizarre to call these events “rare,” rather than miraculous. Miracles, in this way, act as evidence for God’s existence, as they have no other natural explanation. 

But when miracles are defined this way, we run into a problem. How many of us have actually witnessed a genuine miracle—say, someone returning from the dead—that has no other possible natural explanation? My guess is not a single person reading this. Even the number of historical claims to such events is vanishingly small. Our belief in miracles, then—and especially in the reversal of death—rests not on personal experience but on the testimony of others, often transmitted to us at second or third hand.

This is a big problem for Hume. “A wise man,” Hume tells us, “proportions his belief to the evidence.” That is, the wise man ought to weigh the evidence for or against any given proposition, assenting only to the side with the preponderance of evidence. Yet if a miracle is defined as a violation of the uniform laws of nature, then “the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.” 

Let’s make this more concrete. Suppose you were told that God had stopped the Sun dead in its tracks—or, more precisely, halted the Earth’s rotation—for a period of time, as is recounted in the Book of Joshua. You would have to weigh that testimony against the totality of your experience observing the Earth’s regular and continuous rotation about the Sun. You might then ask which is more likely: that the normal course of planetary motion was interrupted, or that those giving the testimony were mistaken, deceived, or simply lying. If, as Hume argues, “a weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger,” reason compels you to prefer the latter explanation. It is simply more probable that the testimony is false than that the laws governing the physical world were temporarily suspended.  

Hume formulated this idea into a general maxim: 

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 endeavors to establish.

Hume is not denying that miracles are possible; rather, he gives us a framework for judging whether the evidence for any particular miracle is strong enough to justify belief in it. And with that framework in hand, we can now turn to the central question: what rational basis, if any, do we have for believing that Jesus was resurrected from the dead? 

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Since the resurrection of Christ is based entirely on the testimony of others, we need to determine whether the falsehood of this testimony would be more miraculous than the resurrection itself. Hume, as expected, gave us the criteria for making that determination:

We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or of a doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent asseverations.

Now, consider the Gospels. All four authors (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) claim that Jesus was raised from the dead. But there are at least five reasons to be suspicious of their testimony:

1. The Gospel authors were writing about the events of Jesus’s life anywhere from 35-70 years after Jesus died. In other words, these were not eyewitness accounts, but second-hand accounts written decades after the fact. Paul, too, makes the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead, but he’s also writing about the event decades later and provides little in the way of details.
2. The authors are anonymous. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to the Gospels by the early church. We therefore have no way to evaluate their objectivity, credibility, education, biases, interests, or sources. 
3. There are very few sources for Jesus’s resurrection outside of the New Testament, a book in which the authors have an obvious interest in propagating the faith above the objective reporting of facts.
4. The Gospel writers contradict each other in important ways. The discrepancies include the number people who went to the tomb (from two or three to a larger group), the number of angels present (one or two), where the disciples were supposed to go (Galilee or Jerusalem), and who Jesus first appeared to (no one in Mark, the women in Matthew, Mary Magdalene in John). 
5. Belief in supernatural events, including resurrections, was common in the ancient world, and several figures, including the founder of Rome, were said to have returned from the dead. 

Considering these complications—none of them decisive on their own—we can ask which of the following is more miraculous:

1. That a man named Jesus actually died and three days later was raised from the dead.
2. That four anonymous ancient authors—writing decades after the event and providing conflicting details—were either honestly mistaken, deceived, or lying to propagate the faith. 

It’s hard to argue that the second conclusion would be more miraculous than the first, since we’ve experienced innumerable instances of people making mistakes or lying, whereas we’ve never experienced, not even on a single occasion, a person being revived from death. We therefore have no rational basis to believe in the resurrection or, by extension, to adopt the Christian faith. 

Christians intuitively understand this, because they use the same process to reject the miracles of other religions. “In destroying a rival system,” Hume writes, “it likewise destroys the credit of those miracles, on which that system was established.” Your rejection of miracles in one religion, in other words, discredits them all.

If the resurrection of Jesus has no rational justification, then neither does, for instance, the resurrection of Aristeas or Romulus, or the divine revelation of the Quran to Muhammad. Truly, it makes no logical sense to apply different standards to your chosen religion when the evidence in support of competing miracles is not materially different. 

All religions based on miracles are therefore shown to be intellectual dead ends. But if that’s the case, then how do they ever gain historical momentum? Hume had an answer: 

In the infancy of new religions, the wise and learned commonly esteem the matter too inconsiderable to deserve their attention or regard. And when afterwards they would willingly detect the cheat, in order to undeceive the deluded multitude, the season is now past, and the records and witnesses, which might clear up the matter, have perished beyond recovery.

Hume observed that “supernatural and miraculous relations…are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations…or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors.” In other words, the intellectual elite largely ignore incipient religions based on lack of evidence, intervening only when the passage of time obscures the fact that the evidence was ever so thin. 

“It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days,” Hume writes. “But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages.”

That men should lie. There is certainly nothing miraculous about that. When we weigh the testimony of miracles against the well-established human propensity to deceive—especially when those miracles are no longer witnessed—it hardly seems difficult to determine which side of the balance reason should favor. 

References and Further Reading

Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don’t Know About Them). New York: HarperOne, 2009. 

Harris, James A. Hume: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. 

Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012. (includes the essay “Of Miracles”) 

Martin, Dale B. New Testament History and Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.