Hume on Miracles

I began writing this as a comment on this blog post, but it quickly achieved a length that I am pretty sure would seriously violate blog comment etiquette. So, I am posting it here. But, as it is a reply to the aforelinked post, it may be a good idea to read that before checking out what I have to say.

To very briefly summarize, Andrew Bremmer suggests that perhaps Hume's various claims/positions in "Of Miracles" are contradictory in the sense that Hume equivocates or otherwise alternates between different 'central' theses about miracles. While I think it is fair to charge the discussion with being somewhat slippery, I don't see it as an act of interpretive acrobatics to avoid treating Hume as contradicting himself. And to frame my response in terms of Andrew's central questions: I interpret Hume's argument in "Of Miracles (Part 1)" to be an argument against the possibility of any testimony (no matter how strong) serving to justify belief in a miracle, and also establishing the condition which would need to be met for testimony to justify belief in a miracle: namely, for it to be sufficiently more contrary to one's experience that the testimony is innaccurate than that the attested event occurred. As I read him, Hume clearly does not think that any testimonial evidence for a miracle can be stronger than the experiential evidence against it (evidence one is guaranteed to have in virtue of the event in question being a miracle). Hume then proceeds, in "Of Miracles (Part 2)" to argue that the actual situation for purported miracles is much worse than it may have seemed from the discussion in part 1, since no purported miracle attested in actual human history enjoys testimonial evidence anywhere near as strong as that which was supposed for purposes of part 1. Let me also be clear up front that I am not (at least not in this post) defending the substance of Hume's arguments; I don't intend to defend the principles Hume invokes in offering his argument, but simply to draw out what I take to be his argument.