More recently, we have Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and George Washington Carver-the list could go on. Examples include Blaise Pascal, the mathematician who developed the precursor of the modern computer Andreas Vesalius, the founder of the modern study of human anatomy Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the founder of microbiology William Harvey, who described the circulatory system Gregor Mendel, a monk and early leader in genetics Francis Bacon Nicolaus Copernicus Galileo Galilei (despite conflicts arising from contemporary academic and ecclesiastical politics) Johannes Kepler. Most early modern scientists worked from a Christian worldview. Mathematician Charles Babbage, designer of the first mechanical computer, also issued a refutation of Hume’s probability argument against miracles. Hume himself acknowledged the force of that argument, though he did not adequately revise his essay in light of it. His close friend Richard Price, also a mathematician and minister, published it and then used Bayes’ theorem to refute a probability claim Hume had made in his essay about miracle witnesses. Mathematician and Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes originated the theorem but died before publishing it. One of these counterarguments was history’s first public use of Bayes’ theorem, today an essential staple in statistics. Moreover, Hume’s essay has generated serious intellectual counterarguments since the time it was first published. Hume’s essay on miracles also contradicts his own approach to discovering knowledge. Although an appeal to natural law might sound scientific, Hume was not a scientist in fact, some of his views on causation would make scientific inquiry impossible. In this essay, Hume dismisses the credibility of miracle claims, appealing to “natural law” and uniform human experience.
Hume’s intellectual stature, earned from other works, eventually lent credibility to his 1748 essay on miracles. He wrote on a wide variety of topics, sometimes very insightfully but sometimes (as with his ethnocentric approach to history) in ways that would not be accepted today.
Hume was probably the most prominent philosopher of his generation, and surely the most influential from his time on subsequent generations. Knowingly or unknowingly, many people have followed the thesis of Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711–1776).
Why do many people embrace a worldview that won’t even consider evidence for miracles? Sometimes they assume that science opposes miracles, but that assumption goes back not to scientific inquiry itself but to an 18th-century philosopher.
0 kommentar(er)
