Like a Dream That Vanishes transcript of John Davis dialogues

The miracle. The miracle controversy that Hume is dealing with is part of a long standing debate over 50-60 years, and the best known article or discussion to come out of it is Hume on miracles. It's very important to bear in mind that what we're talking about is not the fact of miracles, whether they did nor did not occur. Hume does not deny the possibility of miracles. What he denies is that there is sufficient evidence from human testimony to preserve them.

Now, a miracle is something I believe and I recommend it to you to believe. Now he doesn't explicitly say that, but the claim of a miracle is, not only that the individual believes it, but he wants you to believe it as well. I think maybe there's the rub, because what you have to have is a system of laws of nature which are strong enough to sustain the idea that one of them can be broken. Well, I'm not sure we know enough about the laws of nature to ever be in a position to say such and such is a violation, except in some obvious cases, but the interesting cases do not involve the example Hume uses in the ship going into the air or the feather being blown up or whatever. Those are commonplace enough occurrences, but a dead man raised to life or somebody growing an arm, that really is a shocker.

In the dialogue concerning natural religion, he comes to the Deist conclusion. The Deist conclusion is that yes, there is a god, but the way Hume phrases it and the way he puts it, it's not a god to whom men would bend the knee. It's difficult to see how one would worship a Deist god, that is a god who created the universe, set up the laws by which the universe runs, and then stands back and lets the thing run its course. He, in other words, does not really believe in a god of tenderness and mercy and compassion. Hume's god is more or less like a clockmaker. It's very similar to the description of the great clock at Strasbourg which runs every hour and all these saints and all the rest of it come out, and it's really a marvelous show, but subsequently what is it. We don't know.

Well, I think it's a word game, but if you mean if that's all it is, I think the answer to that is no. It's more than a word game. When you say it's a word game, you mean it's in some way frivolous or useless, I think the answer to that is no. I think we have built into us, along with mathematical ability and artistic ability, I think we also have this urge to make sense of the whole thing, and philosophy is one way that people have tried to make sense out of the whole universe. Why are we here? What it's for? What's the fundamental character of it? All those kind of questions are philosophical questions, and they've been raised by all cultures at all times that we have any record of in some way or another. There's no culture that we know of which does not have built into its very structure some urge to understand the whole thing. What's it for? What are we here for? We don't rule out as much as 25 years ago we ruled out. When I first started studying philosophy seriously, everyone was more or less a positivist. If you couldn't sense it, you couldn't smell it, you couldn't touch it, you couldn't taste it, it didn't mean anything. We now realize that's much to narrow a view.

Well, the other thing that has influenced people so strongly is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Godel showed beyond any question of doubt that you cannot have a formalized language for a reasonably small part of mathematics that can be proven to be consistent. So the hope of solving some of the semantic paradoxes, like the Liar Paradox and others, is not only impossible but it's stated in such a way that really the hope is incoherent that we can ever solve this. So when it first came out, people were very shaken up by it, but we're not shaken up by it now very much. I can remember Professor Quine talking about this as though it still was a big shock, that there were possibly contradictions in mathematics, and to him that was just a horrible situation. I mean, to my generation and present generations, so what? I mean, so it's not consistent. So what's so bad about that? Well, I guess that our present condition is perhaps more like the ancient condition of philosophy as beginning in wonder, and I don't know whether you can get much beyond that or do you need to. The world isn't a very tidy place. Nature's not very tidy. It's thought to be, but in fact it's pretty messy.