“Locke on Competing Miracles” Travis Dumsday
Faith and Philosophy, volume 25, number 4 (October 2008), pages 416-424
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Main authors discussed: John Locke
An issue receiving much attention in contemporary philosophy of religion is how to think about the justification of belief in any particular religious doctrine given the fact of religious pluralism. Travis Dumsday sheds some light on one aspect of this topic by drawing our attention to arguments Locke formulated in A Discourse of Miracles to address the problem of competing miracles that support incompatible religious traditions. Dumsday’s article begins with an overview of Locke’s position, followed by a brief assessment.
Locke’s first move is to argue that competing miracles are a very rare phenomenon. For one thing, he thinks that the only miracles that properly conflict are those explicitly connected to claims of divine revelation. He has in mind cases where individuals claim to have a message from God and produce some miracle as evidence of their credibility. Occurrences of this kind, he argues, are simply not to be met with in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome nor in modern polytheistic religions. Dumsday tells us that Locke even thought claims of revelation backed by miracles only made sense within a monotheistic context, thought he does not give us enough of Locke’s argument for it to be entirely clear why. It would seem that Locke thought polytheistic religions simply don’t make the kinds of claims–such as exclusivity–that require revelation Thus confining the field to monotheism, Locke narrows the range of potential conflict to Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The first, according to Dumsday, he dismisses out of hand while the founder of Islam, Mohammad, did not claim to have performed any miracles. That leaves Judaism and Christianity, but the miracles alleged by each do not support conflicting revelations, but mutually supporting ones. Locke concludes there are no conflicting miracles in fact.
Like any proper philosopher, however, Locke is interested in the hypothetical case: suppose there were conflicting miracles? He suggests we apply two rules. First, any supposed revelation (and hence the miracle that backs it up) can be dismissed if it conflicts with reason or with morality. Should a conflict remain, the second rule is applied: accept the revelation supported by “the evident marks of a greater power” (418) In other words, go with the bigger miracle. Locke thinks this is a reasonable procedure if one assumes both that the true God is omnipotent, and hence always able to produce the more powerful miracle, and also that God is benevolent, and hence unwilling to allow individuals to be misled by deceptive miracles.
In his evaluation of Locke’s argument, Dumsday focuses chiefly on Locke’s efforts to show that the actual incidence of conflicting miracles is very low. He agrees with the general point that any particular miracle, in order to conflict with another, must be connected explicitly with claimed revelation. However, he does concede that a general pattern of well-attested miracles associated with a particular religion tends to confirm the truth of that religion, even if the individual miracles are not connected to claims of revelation. He also points out that Hinduism, a polytheistic religion, is thought by some of its adherents to incorporate revelation supported by miracles. In this case he thinks the conflict between these miracles and those claimed by Christianity can be helpfully addressed by applying Locke’s rule that the more significant miracle wins.
Dumsday concludes by suggesting that Locke gives an account that looks persuasive in the context of his day, but that might appear much more problematic in our own. The key liability that Locke faces, he thinks, is his reliance on a robust natural theology to establish claims such as monotheism and the benevolence of the creator. For Locke uses the first of these conclusions of natural theology to immediately discredit supposed miracles in behalf of polytheistic revelations and the second as a key premise in his argument for always preferring the more significant miracle.
Reviewed by John Milliken
Bowling Green State University
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Tags: Religion
