From Rory Allen
Hugh McLachlan is right to raise fundamental issues about Richard Dawkins’s and David Hume’s arguments against miracles (8 August, p 26), which are, as he suggests, weak if not circular.
Unfortunately, he mars his own case by making the same mistake as Hume and other philosophers in assuming that scientific laws are statements of the form “if A, then B”, and that these represent “universal laws”.
As Bertrand Russell pointed out over 60 years ago in his book A History of Western Philosophy, almost no scientific theories consist of causal statements of the form “if A, then B”. Rather, they usually comprise complicated systems of partial differential equations that describe and predict the behaviour of phenomena in time and space given certain initial and boundary conditions.
McLachlan’s ideas seem to be based on a persistent misunderstanding of science by philosophers dating from the time of Kant, who was so impressed by Newton’s laws of motion that he imagined that they must embody universal, eternal truths.
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I suspect that very few scientists today would claim to be in search of “laws of nature” in this sense. Ever since Karl Popper’s writing on the philosophy of science, we have been used to the idea that all theories are wrong, but that some are less wrong than others and that science advances by a process of improving the way our theories describe the world.
McLachlan’s arguments about miracles miss the mark. Instead, I suspect the importance of miracles, if they could be shown to happen, is not that they violate some “law of nature”, but that they demonstrate that a mechanistic view of the universe is insufficient to account for what happens in it.
London, UK
