Matthew Parris: Atheists deserve better opposition

I wish I were a religious conservative: the field’s wide open. It must be dispiriting for believers to encounter so little intelligent support for belief. It’s certainly infuriating for us non-believers, because there’s hardly anyone left who seems capable of giving us a good argument. In search of a stimulating conversation about religion, we are reduced to arguing with ourselves. Which, still seething at a Spectator article purporting to be a serious examination of the case for miracles, I shall now do. I cannot argue with Piers Paul Read because he never produces an argument to answer. The magazine tagged his piece ‘I believe in miracles’, which was accurate because the essay was not a reasoned case; it was simply an attestation.

What drew me into it was the implicit boast thatMr Read was about to answer the greatest British philosopher of all time, the 18th-century Scot David Hume. Indeed he refers to Hume’s essay ‘On Miracles’ as the leading case against the veracity of miraculous occurrences. But he doesn’t explain Hume’s argument. He simply asserts that it has been ‘refuted’ (he means ‘challenged’, or ‘countered’) by philosophers like Anthony Flew and the Catholic G.E.M. Anscombe. He adds that C.D. Broad ‘made mincemeat’ of it.

Mincemeat of what? I cannot suppose that Piers Paul Read does not understand Hume’s ‘On Miracles’, because its reasoning is stunningly simple and can be summarised in three sentences. So let me do Read’s job for him: 1 A ‘miracle’ claims to be a divine intervention which temporarily overturns a law of nature, so faced with such a claim we must weigh our habitual assumption — massively and anciently supported — that the laws of nature always hold, against a single report that they have been overturned.