Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Creation, Part 18.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been looking at Hume's in-principle argument against the identification of a miracle, and we saw

that it involves two claims.

First of all, that by definition, any miracle is utterly improbable, and secondly, that no amount

of evidence could possibly demonstrate a miracle.

Now, last week, we examined the second of those claims and saw that it was demonstrably fallacious.

Because Hume, at that time, ignorant of the probability calculus, considered only the probability of the resurrection

on the background information alone, the intrinsic probability of the resurrection. And he neglected

the other crucial factor, which is the explanatory power of the resurrection hypothesis.

How well does the resurrection explain the evidence

as opposed to the denial of the resurrection?

Now today we want to turn to Hume's first claim

that the evidence for a miracle is by definition utterly improbable.

In order to show that no evidence could possibly establish the historicity of a miracle,

Hume needs to show that the intrinsic probability of a miracle, like the resurrection,

is unacceptably low. And that takes us to the first claim of Hume's argument, that miracles are by

definition so utterly improbable.

Why did Hume think this?

Well, he claimed that the uniform experience of mankind

supports the laws of nature

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