HCJ - Lecture 5.

Yesterday's HCJ lecture was about David Hume.

The theory of causation goes back to 'cause and effect', this is similar to the argument for God's existence.  This is called the ontological proof because if we doubt the existence of God, we in turn doubt the first cause (that caused all other later events) and if there was no first cause, the universe can not exist, however it does exist.

The philosopher Kant said that there is no causal connection between 2 objects, we just percieve the connection to be there.  In this method of science, nothing is certain, but a lot of things have a high level of probability.

David Hume would say that it is impossible to prove the causal link between for example a tennis ball will move when hit by a tennis racket, it will always be just a guess. But we can use inductive reasoning to try and figure out how likely this is to happen.  The purpose of science is to find patterns of apparent causality, but these patterns are not central to the events themselves and causality can't be directly seen.

Hume’s law in 'The Treatise of Human Nature': It is impossible to derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.  For example: 'the train ought to be on time', we can never know this for sure, (or beyond reasonable doubt) even if all of the factors involved say that the train will be on time.  He wrote, that it seems 'altogether inconcievable that this relation (ought) can be derived from others, which are entirely different from it'.

Chapter 10 of Hume's work 'An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding' deals with miracles.  The Wikipedia page about the chapter can be found here.

The argument is basically this: The evidence for a miracle is always limited, because miracles are single events, occurring at particular times and places, the evidence for the miracle will always be outweighed by the evidence against.  Hume lays down some of the reasons why humans lack complete reliability when it comes to miracles:

People are very prone to accepting the unusual and incredible, which excite passions of surprise and wonder.

Those with strong religious beliefs are often prepared to give evidence that they know is false, 'with the best intentions in the world, for the sake of promoting so holy a cause'.

People are often too naive when faced with such witnesses, whose apparent honesty and eloquence may overcome normal scepticism.


Sources

Wikipedia
Winchester Journalism


TB 2011