From such examples philosopher Karl Popper concluded that no scientific law can, in a positive sense, claim to prove anything at all. Science cannot verify theories, it can merely falsify them. When we have subjected a theory to expansive testing, and it has not been falsified, we can provisionally believe it to be true. This is not, however, because the theory has been proven, or even because it is likely to be true. Rather, we proceed in this way because, practically speaking, we don’t have a better way to proceed. We give a theory the benefit of the doubt until we find out otherwise. There is nothing wrong in all this as long as we realize that scientific laws are not “laws of nature.” They are human laws, and they represent a form of best-guessing about the world. What we call laws are nothing more than observed patterns and sequences. We think the world works in this way until future experience proves the contrary.
I am laying out the skeptical case here not because I want to endorse without reservations Hume’s (or Popper’s) philosophy. Rather, my goal is to overthrow Hume’s argument against miracles using his own empirical and skeptical philosophy. Hume insists that miracles violate the known laws of nature, but I say that Hume’s own skeptical philosophy has shown that there are no known laws of nature. Miracles can be dismissed only if scientific laws are necessarily true—if they admit of no exceptions. But Hume has demonstrated that for no empirical proposition whatsoever do we know this to be the case. Miracles can be deemed unscientific only if our knowledge of causation is so extensive that we can confidently dismiss divine causation. From Hume we learn how limited is our knowledge of causation, and therefore we cannot write off the possibility of divine causation in exceptional cases.
