Abstract:

By the time Shepherd developed and published her views on religious miracles in the early nineteenth century, the topic had received significant attention. In his Discourse on Miracles, published posthumously four years after it was written in 1702, Locke defines a religious miracle as “a sensible operation, which, being above the comprehension of the spectator, and in his opinion contrary to the established course of nature, is taken by him to be divine.” For an extraordinary event to count as a religious miracle, on Locke’s view, the spectator-witness must believe that a violation of the established course of nature has taken place, and that the cause of this violation is God. A half-century later, Hume rejected belief in religious miracles, claiming that a miracle, understood as a “violation of the laws of nature” could never serve as the foundation for a system of religion. Hume argues that, when the event the testimony seeks to establish is extraordinary, the testimony must be weighed against our past experiences, and will always fail to outweigh this larger and more significant body of evidence.

In her writings on miracles, Shepherd sets out to undermine Hume’s view that miracles are violations of natural laws, instead claiming that miracles are apparent but not actual exceptions to the course of nature, a class of phenomena for which explanations appealing to known causes are inadequate. This paper argues that, in laying out her response to Hume, Shepherd underscores key aspects of her own conservative and distinctive epistemic methodology. For Shepherd, anyone wishing to learn about the natural world ought to view miracles as a significant body of empirical evidence. Furthermore, Shepherd’s account of miracles tells us about her social epistemology; the existence of miracles is simply a natural consequence of our limited epistemic positions, and testimony must play a central role in allowing us to expand our understanding of nature. Yet, remarkably, by conceiving of miracles as a mere subset of exceptional and instructive occurrences, Shepherd does not undercut support for Christianity. On the contrary, Shepherd’s naturalistic approach to miracles allows for important continuity between knowledge of nature and knowledge of God. Even religious doctrines, on Shepherd’s view, are empirically grounded in observations of a lawful universe.