Christian Dreams (Part II): Hume Was Wrong

I (don't really) regret to inform you

This post is for paid subscribers, but the topic is important, so I will suggest a few free resources upfront for anyone interested in further reading/exploration.

“Miracles,” by Tim McGrew, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

“Hume’s Critique of Reported Miracles,” recorded lecture by Tim McGrew

A Dissertation on Miracles, by George Campbell

Lecture series on the Deist Controversy

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My friend Ben Sixsmith is writing a book about God. Ben doesn’t believe in God, personally. But he wants to take his non-belief seriously. In particular, he’d like to introduce his readers, gently, to the idea that there just might be some serious philosophical arguments for God’s existence. Accordingly, the other day we spent a happy couple of hours together with my dad, a philosopher, talking about some of them. We talked about the Kalam cosmological argument, about miracle claims and how to filter them, about the uses and abuses of Bayes’s Theorem as a tool for modeling evidence, and much more.

As the conversation wound down, Ben asked us a question: In our experience, how many people become Christians through this sort of thing—that is, through philosophy, through intellectual arguments? Because from what he’s gathered, for most people, it seems to be a whole mix of things, some intellectual, some not. And for lots of people, mostly not.

We agreed that it does, indeed, tend to come down to a whole mix of things. Being intellectually convinced of Christianity as a collection of truth claims does not a Christian make, in itself. “Being a Christian,” after all, is much more than giving assent to a proposition. That assent must be embodied. It must be lived out, in prayer and word and deed. This is what people mean when they speak of “acting like a Christian”—which, for some restless souls, might feel more like “acting as if.”

But for others, the integration between mental assent and embodied action is so seamless that they’ve never really given it a second thought. If you were to ask them why they’re Christians, they would give you a quizzical look. They’re Christians because of course they are. Because they couldn’t be anything else. Because to love and be loved by God is the most natural thing in the world, like breathing in and breathing out.

It wasn’t like that for Ben. It was for people he knew and loved, like his late mother. But for himself, he could never just believe, like flicking on a light switch. Maybe he had the wrong personality. Maybe he didn’t have enough faith. The particular charismatic strain of Christianity where he grew up was indistinguishable from Mormonism, epistemically speaking. Open the Bible/Book of Mormon. Is the Spirit moving/your bosom burning? If yes, great! If no, well, try again later.

Ben never felt the Spirit move. Whatever was supposed to happen when he opened the Bible, it didn’t. It still hasn’t.