David Hume's argument is that you
should never believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony.
Lots of ways you can challenge Hume's argument.
One way you could challenge it, you could challenge his definition of miracle.
You could say he's got that wrong.
But I think there's another interesting way to challenge the argument.
Challenge the assumption.
You should only trust testimony when you've got evidence.
Testifier is likely to be right.
And that's the premise of Hume's argument that his most important contemporary
critic, Thomas Reid took issue with.
So, Reid was a minister in the Church of Scotland and
a professor at the University of Aberdeen in Glasgow.
And he challenged this assumption of Hume's in a book called Inquiry into
the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense which was first published in 1764.
And the challenge comes in a section that Reid entitled,
of the analogy between perception and the credit we give human testimony.
So, Reid argued that trusting testimony is just like trusting your senses,
trusting what you see around you.
To believing something on the basis of what someone else says is just like
believing something on the basis of seeing it with your own eyes, Reid thought.
So, here's the interesting thing.
We don't only trust our senses when we've got evidence that they're likely
to be right.
Hume and Reid, one of the few things they agreed on was that we don't have any
kind of good evidence that our senses are likely to be right.
So, Hume and Reid both thought,
we don't trust our senses on the basis of evidence that they're likely to be right.
So, what Reid's gonna challenge is Hume's assumption that we should only trust
testimony on the basis of evidence of the testifier is likely to be right.
So, why does he think, you know, why does he think that?
What's his argument?
Well, Hume and Reid both thought,
there were innate principles that governed how we think and how we feel.
They wouldn't put it this way, but
they both thought that we were hard wired to think in certain ways.
So, they both thought, for example, that we were hard wired to trust our senses.
We're hard wired to believe what we see before our eyes, but
here's what Reid thought that Hume didn't think.
Reid thought that we're also hard wired to trust testimony.
He said there's a innate principle of credulity, he called it, and
here's what that principle was.
It's a disposition to confide in the veracity of others and
to believe what they tell us.