Miracles and testimony: does Hume's rule for weighing evidence refute miracle reports, or does it prove too much?

George Campbell, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Testimony is not derived from experience but is an original principle of belief — children credit what they are told before they have any experience of testimony's reliability. Mr Hume's rule, which sets testimony against experience and always prefers experience, therefore misdescribes the very faculty it is weighing.1234

Sources

  1. Certain 'it is that the defedts.and mifreprefentations of memory are oftety Corrected by experience. Yet should: any person hence infer, that memory derives-all its evidence from experience, he would fall into a manifest absurdity.
    A Dissertation on Miracles, pp. 38–40
  2. Testimo'.iy is capa- ble of giving us absolute certainty (Mr. Hume himself being judge) even of the most miraculous fact, or of what is con- trary to uniform experience; for, perhaps, in no other in- stance can experience be applied to individual events with so much certainty as in what relates to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  3. It is presumable that tiie former of these ways has the earliest influence, when the mind, unaccustomed to reflection, forms hut a weak association, and, consequently, but a weak expectation of a similar event from a weak re- semblance. The latter seetns more the result of thought, and is better adupted to tiie ordinary forms of reasoning.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric
  4. Accordingly, experience is the foundation of philosophy, which consists in a collection of general truths, systematically digested. On t I had occasion to make some reflections on this subject formerly. See Dissertation on.Miracles, part i., sect. i. There are several ingenious ob Bervations on the same subject in Reid's Inquiry, ch. vi., sect, xxiii THE PHILOSOPHY OF RIIETORIC.
    The Philosophy of Rhetoric

Where the argument is made

  • A Dissertation on Miracles (1762), Part I §1-2 and Part II
  • The Philosophy of Rhetoric I.5 (the species of moral evidence, and testimony as an original principle)

How the argument was received

Argued at length against the most formidable philosopher of the age, and maintained.