No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
In two recent papers, Mr Robert Young maintains that all attempts by philosophers to bolster the-violation-of-law concept of miracles are bound to fail and propounds what he claims to be a novel non-reductivist concept of miracles which avoids the conceptual difficulties of the violation-model. His view of miracles is of god being ‘an active agent-factor in the set of factors (out of perhaps several sets sufficient for the event's occurrence) which actually was causally operative’ [p. 123] in an event dubbed a miracle. God is put in among ‘the plurality of causes’ [p. 122, S p. 33] that could determine the event, but if he acts in a miracle, then ‘his presence…alters the outcome from what it (perhaps) would have been if, contrary to fact, he had not been present’ [p. 122]. Young claims that his concept ‘is neither a violation of … laws nor is it a coincidental occurrence religiously interpreted’ [p. 122, S p. 33], and so it avoids the difficulties, which he thinks are faced by the violation-model, of having an intelligible notion of an occurrence of the physically impossible, and also the reductivism inherent in taking mere coincidences as miracles. He also suggests a procedure of settling the epistemological issue regarding particular alleged miracles, an inquiry he thinks he has made possible by having first given a sense to miracles. [p. 126]
page 333 note 1 ‘Miracles and Epistemology’, Religious Studies, June 1972.Google Scholar ‘Miracles and Physical Impossibility’ Sophia, October 1972. Young's thesis is stated more fully in the former and so most of the references in the present discussion are to Religious Studies. References to Sophia are prefixed with S.
page 334 note 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans, Green & Co., 1941, pp. 511–15.Google Scholar
page 335 note 1 The problems would arise, though, if all we had was a notion of violation of natural laws which is not ascribed to supernatural conscious agency. For our natural laws are precisely mere descriptions of how nature ‘left on its own’ behaves. Philosophers who think the concept of miracles is unintelligible might therefore note that miracles are not mere violations of nomologicals but are such violations ascribed to God.
page 335 note 2 See Flew, Antony, ‘Miracles’, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edwards, Paul, and my account of Flew's enlargement of Hume's views in ‘Recent Discussions On Miracles’, Sophia, October 1972.Google Scholar
page 336 note 1 My emphasis.
page 336 note 2 My emphasis.
page 337 note 1 See Antony Flew, op. cit., and my ‘Recent Discussions on Miracles’, op. cit.
page 337 note 2 Op. cit.