What The Comparison Is About

Hume and Wiles both make miracle claims difficult to defend, but they do so for different reasons. Hume asks an epistemological question: what evidence could make it reasonable to believe that a miracle happened? Wiles asks a theological question: what would it say about God if God sometimes intervened in the world and sometimes did not?

That difference is the heart of the comparison.

The comparison is not simply "atheist Hume versus religious Wiles". Hume is a sceptical empiricist, and Wiles is a Christian theologian, but both challenge a realist, interventionist view of miracles. Hume thinks miracle reports fail as evidence. Wiles thinks interventionist miracles create a problem for belief in a good God.

The useful essay distinction is:

Hume's Key Ideas

Hume's argument appears in Section X, "Of Miracles", of An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. He treats a miracle as a "violation of the laws of nature". For Hume, laws of nature are not private guesses. They are grounded in firm, repeated experience of how the world works.

Hume's basic reasoning can be put like this:

Hume is not saying that unusual events never happen. A sudden death, an unexpected recovery or a rare natural event may be surprising without being a miracle. His point is that a miracle, if defined as a violation of natural law, is not merely unusual. It is contrary to the kind of regular experience on which our understanding of nature depends.

Hume then gives several reasons why miracle testimony is usually weak:

This makes Hume's challenge mainly about public rational belief. He asks whether a person who weighs evidence carefully should accept testimony that something happened contrary to the strongest patterns of experience.

Wiles's Key Ideas

Maurice Wiles discusses miracles within the wider question of God's action in the world. In God's Action in the World, he rejects the idea that God performs occasional special interventions in the natural order. His concern is not first of all that witnesses are unreliable. His deeper concern is what intervention would imply about God.

Wiles's argument is often taught through the problem of arbitrariness.

Wiles therefore proposes a different way of thinking about divine action. Instead of treating God as a being who occasionally steps into the world to alter particular events, Wiles sees God's action primarily in relation to the world as a whole. Creation is the fundamental divine action: the whole order of reality depends on God, but particular events should not be explained as direct divine interruptions.

That gives Wiles a distinctive position:

Wiles does not need to say that all miracle language is meaningless. A religious community might still see an event as expressing God's purpose, deepening faith, or carrying symbolic meaning. What Wiles resists is the claim that God directly causes some special events while leaving other, worse situations untouched.

Similarities And Differences

Hume and Wiles are easy to confuse because both make traditional intervention miracles harder to defend. The comparison becomes sharper when you separate their shared pressure from their different assumptions.

Similarities

Differences

The comparison can be summarised in one sentence:

Evaluating The Comparison

A strong AO2 response does not just say "Hume and Wiles disagree with miracles". It asks which challenge is stronger, and against what target.

One useful judgement is that Hume and Wiles are strongest against different uses of miracles:

This helps avoid a flat comparison. Hume is not mainly asking whether God would be fair. Wiles is not mainly listing weaknesses in witness testimony. Their arguments meet at the conclusion that intervention miracles are difficult, but they get there by different routes.

Paragraph Craft And Links

A weak comparison paragraph says:

Hume and Wiles both disagree with miracles because miracles break natural law and God does not do them.

This is too blunt. It misses Hume's focus on evidence and Wiles's focus on theology. It also makes the two thinkers sound identical.

A stronger paragraph would say:

Hume and Wiles both challenge interventionist miracles, but their reasoning is different. Hume's argument is epistemological: since a miracle is understood as a violation of natural law, testimony for it must outweigh the very strong evidence of regular experience, and Hume thinks ordinary miracle reports fail to do this. Wiles's argument is theological: if God intervenes in some cases but not in others, especially where much greater suffering is left untouched, divine action appears arbitrary. Therefore, Hume is strongest against miracles as public evidence, while Wiles is strongest against miracles as a coherent expression of divine goodness.

Why this improves:

Useful synoptic links later:

• Differing understandings of miracle: Hume and Wiles both put pressure on realist, interventionist miracles, but they do not settle every anti-realist or symbolic understanding.
• The significance of these views for religion: Hume threatens miracles as evidence for religion; Wiles threatens miracles as signs of a loving interventionist God while preserving a creator-focused theology.
• Problem of evil and suffering: Wiles's arbitrariness objection links naturally to the question of why an all-good God does not prevent severe suffering.

Keep the building block clean: Hume challenges the rational credibility of miracle reports; Wiles challenges the theological coherence of selective divine intervention. The best comparison explains both the similarity and the difference.