Hume’s Maxim and Accepting Testimonies of Miracles

David Hume’s well known argument against miracles has its culmination in the so called Hume’s Maxim. According to the maxim “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish: And even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments, and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force, which remains, after deducting the inferior.” In this paper I present and give a critical assessment of the attempts at a formalization of Hume’s Maxim made by representatives of contemporary analytic philosophy. On this basis I will put forward my own formalization of Hume’s Maxim. The formal analyses carried out I employ in an assessment of Hume’s argument against miracles as it is traditionally interpreted. I also point out four circumstances that favour credibility of a miracle’s testimony. The analysis leads to a conclusion, that the formalization of Hume’s Maxim allows us to reject Hume’s argument against miracles in its traditional interpretation as invalid and leaves open, under certain conditions, a possibility of accepting a testimony of a miracle.