On Sex and C. S. Lewis (updated)

I’m in the midst of reading an informative and entertaining volume by Edward Craig:  Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2002).  It engagingly tells me about some things which I know little about (e.g. Buddhism -- though here his exposition rather motivates me to know even less) and Nietzsche (whom I haven’t read  since I was a lad in lederhosen, but the reminder  led me to pull down  off the old shelf   those Goldmanns Gelbe Taschenbücher --  alas, in type too small for these old eyes).  But occasionally he writes of matters I do know something about, and one of these I wish to address:  his digs at C. S. Lewis.

Craig begins (p. 91) by alluding to Lewis marveling at the magnitude of a young man’s sex drive (not limited by periods of rut or oestrus), which, if it had its way, might “populate an entire village” (as indeed has apparently happened in the case of certain potentates of history, and occasionally  in our own day).   Craig then makes noises in favor of Nature, which, decoratively red in tooth and claw, “can be relied upon to ensure that this does not happen very often, to put it mildly.”

(Craig’s mild irony, which he puts forward as self-evident, requires some sympathetic interpretation if it is to make sense.   After all, something very much like that male hyperfecundity does regularly happen in some species, such as the elephant seal.  All Craig can really mean is that we can’t all be alpha-males  -- an arithmetic tautology  well within the grasp of C.S. Lewis.)

He concludes (p. 92):

            C. S. Lewis’s imagination was floating well clear of the facts.

(If you read that too hastily, you might miss the insinuation in that choice of word, imagination :  the image that epithet covertly  evokes  is that of sexual fantasizing, the frustrated dreams of potency by a celibate Oxford don. )

Well, let us be clear about what the facts actually are, before we go floating off.

Right off, if the author’s intention was to present a gleaming uncontroversial example of Natural Selection, versus a yahoo’s failure to appreciate it, it was a singularly unhappy choice.  Sex has always been a puzzle, precisely for students of Natural Selection, and Darwin himself was the first to notice this.   In a remarkable display of intellectual integrity, no sooner had Darwin achieved renown for his theory of Natural Selection, than he maintained that that very theory was inadequate in an important respect:  Sex just did not fit in with the established pattern of facts.  So far from dismissing this as a mere anomaly, he set up a second and parallel hypothesis of Sexual Selection.   (Sidenote:  Darwin’s reticence and self-critiques are exemplary in the history of public thought.  More typically, an intellectual or semi-intellectual comes up with a single Neat Idea (“soft power”!  “themata”! “the world is flat”!) and attempts to dine out on it for the rest of his career. )

In Darwin’s time, the puzzle was insoluble, since he lacked -- and was candidly aware that he lacked -- knowledge of the mechanism of the rise and maintenance of variation:  the world awaited Mendel, laboring obscurely in his monastery.   Once the algebra of genes was sorted out, for a while some scientists thought they had the key:   Sex dumps two separate sets of genes into the tombola, shuffles well, and voilà, all the variation you could ever wish for, a bonanza for Selection to work on.   That seems so sensible, many of us believed it for years, never giving it a thought.   So I was startled to learn that this account is now quite controversial -- having to do with such matters as the status of group-selection and the game-theoretic view of gene propagation.  The subject deserves a separate essay (or a separate book), but a thumbnail summary might go:  from the standpoint of the Selfish Gene, the world appears as it does to Donald Trump:  “I’m already perfect, just as I am !  Just make more clones of me-e-e-e-e-e ! ! !”

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We thus leave the evolutionary mystery of sex to its able investigators, and return to C.S. Lewis.

Since Craig didn’t source his paraphrase, nor provide a googlable direct quotation, I had to hunt a bit.   And in riffling through a stack of CSL’s writings on my desk, in search of the passage in question, I was reminded that he actually wrote very little about sex itself (as opposed to love: beautifully in The Four Loves), so it is difficult to come up with passages illustrating the range of his thought.   Most of these volumes lack subject-indexes, alas;  and in those that have them, like the essay-collection God in the Dock, the word “sex” does not even appear.  I finally came upon the passage Craig was paraphrasing  in the chapter “Sexual Morality”, originally a wartime radio-talk, collected in the volume Mere Christianity.  Lewis continues the analogy with food, in a sort of parable:

Or take it another way.  You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act -- that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage.  Now supposed you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage  and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that, in that country, something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

The flavor of that passage is probably enough for you to surmise that C.S. Lewis was neither a prude nor a suppressed lecher.   The whole chapter is wonderfully rich and subtle, and it seems Craig must have read it, yet he offers a bonehead summary:  “Before you castigate yourself a sinner and start bewailing the lost innocence of the human male…”   Lewis’ actual emphasis is quite otherwise:

The old Christian teachers said that if Man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. … Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body … If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once.

Lewis never hectors his audience about sinfulness and sex; in fact, reminiscing about his talks with the troops, he noted that he soon gave up even mentioning fornication in such a connection, since the troops themselves simply had no conception of sinfulness in that regard;  a much more fruitful subject was always “a sin that I myself had committed the previous week”.   Nor did he much regret this loss of subject-matter, for as he concludes his chapter:

Though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it as clear as I possibly can  that the centre of Christian morality is not here.  If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong.  The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins.

Incidentally -- lest you imagine that Lewis is idiosyncratic on this subject, compare this, from a prominent Jesuit:

Pleasure itself is never wrong.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 102

~

So.  I believe I have successfully defended C.S.Lewis against any suggestions that he was either a prude or a scold;  but what of his original suggestion that the sexual instinct in modern man has somehow gone wrong ?  That is indeed a startling thesis -- and utterly at variance with the  contemporary climate of right-thinking opinion that anything goes and that’s just dandy.  Gone wrong, not in the matter of excess of appetite (his parable about the village-populator was indeed not happily chosen, for the reason Craig notes), but almost the opposite -- in its perversion to ends having nothing to do with procreation.  And in this, I believe he was right -- even prescient, for matters have grown publically worse than in his day.   In his day there were no pressure-groups for the “transgendered”, nor for the sad souls who can find no psychosexual relief until they have their own leg amputated. 

By chance -- though not a long-shot, for the media brim with such things -- upon putting down the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay, I picked up a newspaper, and happened upon an article telling of a local man being sentenced to a long prison-term for possession of child pornography.  But what struck me was this detail:  When the police raided his home, they found over seventy-five thousand photographic images.  Now, surely even a naturalist who roams the globe documenting a variety of species in a panoply of ecotones, would not be so dedicated as to accumulate a (much more variegated) cache of that size.   For, all of this sad man’s photos presumably make the same, identical point.  See:  little girl;  no wee-wee.  Granted, every lad needs to learn that, and it’s surprising at first.   But why does he need to be told that, seventy-five thousand times?

Nor is the problem  that of just a few fringe deviants.  Such musically talentless divas as Madonna and (the pen recoils at even spilling its ink  to write this name) Lady Gaga,  have garnered their mass appeal -- among your sons and daughters and mine -- precisely by exploiting the lure of perversion, and the Satanic aspects of fallen sex. 

And even among the generality who do not indulge in such things, the fibre has somehow slackened, so that all we can do is mumble “Not that there’s anything wrong with that”.

But there really is something wrong with that;  and there is no limit to the depths to which depravity will go, if given a leash long enough:  In 2001, a German homosexual named Armin Meiwes posted an online ad for a well-built young male to volunteer to be slaughtered and eaten.  He received numerous replies to this tempting offer;  the lucky winner was a 43-year-old engineer.   Let Wiki tell the rest, in mouth-watering detail:

As is known from a videotape the two made when they met on 9 March 2001 in Meiwes's home in the small village of Rotenburg, Meiwes amputated Brandes' penis and the two men attempted to eat the penis together before Brandes was killed. Brandes had insisted that Meiwes attempt to bite his penis off. This did not work and ultimately, Meiwes used a knife to remove Brandes' penis. Brandes apparently tried to eat some of his own penis raw, but could not because it was too tough and, as he put it, "chewy". Meiwes then fried the penis in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic; he then fried it with some of Brandes' fat but by then it was too burned to be consumed. He then chopped it up into chunks and fed it to his dog.

Which wine they had set aside to accompany this spicy delicacy is not recorded.

Bad enough;  but again, the supine impotence of the broader society before such atrocities must be noted.  Cannibalism was not even a crime in Germany (it being, after all, the traditional practice of those differently-cultured); nor could a straight case of murder be made out, since the entrée had voluntarily entered into this little intimacy between consenting adults.   They finally charged the gourmand with the archaic charge of “desecrating a corpse”.   This could not refer to the grotesque  and protracted emasculation described above -- the law was cool with that -- since the celebrant was then still living.   It was only because Herr Meiwes chopped up the rest of him and popped it in the pantry, that this ludicrous mini-charge could be brought.

C.S. Lewis was right on target.  There is indeed something amiss in the modern mechanism of sex.  Something is truly out of kilter, in a way that Darwin, despite his many merits, does not begin to explain.

That our philospher can dismiss him offhandedly is probably due, not to any deficiencies in Lewis' arguments, which are closely-reasoned always, but to the unspoken assumption that any out-and-out Christian must be an intellectual lightweight.   But a similar diagnosis was arrived at by the atheist Sigmund Freud:   "The sexual life of man is seriously disabled;  it sometimes makes the impression of being a function in process of becoming atrophied."  (Quoted in E. Jones, Freud, III 341)

(Note:  To keep your own healthy instincts from atrophying, simply click here:
  Dames, dames, dames )

[Update 31 May 2012]  Herr Meiwes is not without his acolytes:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/05/necrophilia-not-that-theres-anything.html
This is not Darwinian.  This is Satanic.

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Re-reading, I notice another sidewise swipe at CSL:  Craig identifies him as a “popularist Christian theologian”.   (Sorry, professor:  You mess with my dawg, I mess with you.)  I am unsure what that “popularist” is supposed to imply -- is it a sly way of saying “pop”?  Is it a misspelling of "populist" (something Lewis emphatically was not)?  Or is it an awkwardly-worded reference to Lewis’s thoroughly honorable work -- much of it in the service of British troops in wartime -- in conveying some ideas of philosophy and of Christianity to the general public, much as Craig himself (in Oxford’s cleverly conceived and slickly marketed series of uniform Livre-de-poche-style mini-volumes or maxi-pamphlets) has done for philosophy, minus the Christianity?    Or can he possibly mean that Lewis ‘played to the populace’, watering solid doctrine down into milksop for the masses?  If that be the meaning, he has stood truth on its head.  -- In any event, Lewis never claimed to be a theologian, so far as I know  (In his public talk at Oxford, printed as "The Inner Circle", he describes himself merely as "a middle-aged moralist".)    He claimed to be a professor of literature, and he claimed to be a Christian -- a “mere” Christian, in fact.

~

But let us turn from these perhaps impalpable ethical/sociological observations, and return to the lab-last of exact and unforgiving Science.

Biologically, there is more to reproduction of  kind  than merely impregnation.    Of late, indeed, statistical medical investigations have increasingly stressed developmental (intra-uterine) environmental factors apart from strict Mendelian genetics -- an area that blurs the line between Nature and Nurture.   We shall briefly examine these, note their application to the species Homo sapiens, and conclude that, here as well, there are trends that raise Lewisian concerns.  Darwin, rather than puffing on his pipe and chortling “Just as I predicted !”, would probably recoil in horror.

The three basic stages in the reproductive cycle are:

            (1) Fertilization (impregnation)

            (2) Gestation (pregnancy)

            (3) Post-natal care.

This last, for familiarity and concision, we shall call simply “parenting”, although the behaviors it covers, in this species or that, may be remote from those conjured in any issues of Family Circle.   The mommy ichneumon fly, who unfortunately will be elsewhere engaged when her little ones emerge, thoughtfully provides for them after she is gone, by laying her eggs inside a paralyzed wasp, so that the hatchlings will have something to chow down on right from the get-go.

We have touched above on the paraphilias, in which activities are somehow powered by energy diverted from the sex-drive -- rather like stealing electricity from a power-line -- which do not lead to impregnation.   These need not be floridly deviant to qualify from an impartial Darwinian perspective:  simple contraception falls under this head.

[... tbd ?]

The Challenge of Darwinism, updated for Lent (and further updated for Advent)

In the post below, originally published during the Lenten season of this year, we locked horns with the Darwinist défi, from a mathematical/philosophical/theological point of view.  Herewith, by way of preface, a brief companion-piece, which abjures all those disciplines, and sticks to biology and sociology.

Characterizing Freud’s stance in 1908, in an article published in Mutterschutz  (“Defense of Motherhood”), his admiring biographer Jones writes:

The glorifying of monogamy  paralyzes the process of selection, which is the only hope of improving the human constitution, a hope which humanitarianism and hygiene  has already reduced to a minumum.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of Maturity (1955), p. 293

This passage may be difficult for today’s young people to understand.  By selection he means Darwinian Natural Selection, nowadays mostly known as “Evolution” -- Nature’s ruthless culling of the unfit.  Constitution here means ‘genome’.   Humanitarianism refers to welfare payments and the like, which provide survival -- and opportunities for further procreation -- to individuals who would, in an earlier age, have gone by the board without issue.   Hygiene refers to state-sponsored measures of Public Health,  which, reducing mortality across the population, again nurtures the frail along with the rugged.

Such thoughts are no longer publically expressed these days, let alone in such old-fashioned words.  In earlier decades, such qualms were mainstream:  though seldom was monogamy singled out  as a factor in devolution.  Yet the thrust is meet, and must be met.

Jones’ preceding paragraph  reports, from the same article, Freud’s view that “the prevailing sexual morality of civilization  is characterized by the transference of feminine demands  on to the sexual life of the man” (though on the next page he avers that “women suffer more than men from the prevailing morality” -- the apparent contradiction  is never addressed), which “leads to a double moral life, with evil consequences”.  In that context,  I at first assumed  that Freud was referring to garden-variety marital fidelity.  And that, surely, is immune from Darwinian attack:  the appalling consequences of agamy in our barrios and ghettoes  are apparent to all.  Now, I have not actually read Freud’s article -- unaccountably, that issue of Mutterschutz is missing from my shelves (probably one of the pesky neighborhood boys  has made off with it) -- but I venture to suggest that he may have had in mind an idea that grew to prominence in his later years, the years of Totem und Tabu:  the scenario of the alpha male, lording it over his harem, infusing their wombs with his übermensch übergenes, while his less-fit cousins and brothers circle, snarling, just outside of the firelight.

Now, if the highest pitch of your ambition  is to hunt the mastodon,  such a scheme might well work;  certainly, it works for walruses.  But if you set your sights higher -- on the Gospels, on Paradise Lost, on the Riemann Hypothesis -- you need a system maximally protective and nurturing of each individual offspring, since the monogamous couple’s offspring are so few;  a goal favored in that now each child has both a dedicated-mommy and dedicated-daddy, schooling him daily in Scripture and in analytic number theory.   This happy scenario  does not refute the truths of Darwinism, but simply sublates them, or transcends them:  for we, cognitively alert and free-willed beings, have other goals, not shared by the newts and toads, for whom Darwin is surely good enough.

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[And now to the original essay.]

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It would ill become me, as if I were afraid of truth of any kind, to blame those who pursue secular facts, by means of the reason which God has given them, to their logical conclusions;  or to be angry with science  because religion is bound to take cognizance of its teaching.

-- John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864)

In Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (2002), Edward Craig writes (p. 92):

 For Descartes, human reason was a faculty  given to us  and guaranteed by God … and that was why he could rely on it to tell us about the essential nature of mind and matter ... What if, instead , he had thought of it as a natural instrument which had developed because, and to the extent that [emphasis in original], it gave its possessors a competitive advantage over those without it?  Would he then have supposed that what it appeared to tell us on such matters could, with complete confidence, be taken as the truth?

This challenge is absolutely valid.  On this basis, we should, indeed, do as Descartes did, and call everything -- all our beliefs, absolutely everything -- into question.  Yet alas, now without the Cartesian certainty that our Idea of the Perfect must come from The Perfect, Himself.  Epistemologically, we are much humbled. We are sweaty, dust-caked survival machines -- that has been shown -- much like the cockroach and the rat.  Are we anything else as well ?

At this point, some despair, and take to drunkenness or drugs or Postmodernism (I cite these in descending order of worthlessness).

And yet, when we look about the landscape, we find something unexpected, unexplained, and entirely surprising:

  =>  ~ ~ ~  the Urysohn Metrization Theorem ~ ~ ~ <=

along with all the other truths of abstract mathematics: truths that are seen to be true, by anyone with wit enough to see them; truths not relativized to space or to time, to culture or to … species.  If the Humble Woodchuck should ever make it as far as point-set topology, he too will discover , and celebrate,  this truth.

Its survival value:   Zero.

What gives?

Well, we don’t know what gives, but something does.   We have a stark staring ideational miracle in our midst, something no-wise selected for, something simply True.

Now, it is no contradiction to Darwinism to posit that, quite independently of the brute world ever evolving and evolving, to no purpose and upon no plan, there might be a world apart, of Platonic forms, or celestial calliopes, or whatever you will.   What does contradict Darwinism -- fly in the face of it, knock its socks off -- is our repeated and reliable ability to discover this World of Forms, again and again struggling through jungles of calculation and conception, to arrive, from different directions, at the same ice-crowned mountain.  A World of Forms of no use at all  in escaping the sabre-tooth, whose bite is so fierce, or in hunting the mighty mastodon.

Though, let us hasten to add, among the facts that attest to the reality of these abstract truths, is that, in recent times, these have manifested themselves, not only in the clear understanding of minds suitably prepared, but in sheer physical engineering :  our spacecraft land where we want them to, and our nuclear power plants generate useful energy, owing to applications of our understanding of these Forms.

And if this be true, might it likewise be, that our insights and intuitions about our Maker, at first dimly conceived, but gradually taking form across the millennia, and finally developed to a state of great excellence by the finest minds in Christendom -- might it be that  these too  contain their share of truth?

~

Notice that, despite what we repeatedly read about the advance of science undermining the foundations of faith, we are now intellectually in a much better position to appreciate what it might mean for there to be a God who is the maker of

     visibilium omnium et invisibilium

-- all things visible and invisible -- than was Aquinas. 

[Update:  I had the sense, writing this, of committing a certain hardihood;  yet just now  happened upon the following passage, by a Jesuit of impeccable credentials:

Intellectual virtues may be an essential aspect of our existence, and prepare us for what is revealed.

-- James Schall, S.J., The Order of Things (2007), p. 198 ]

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Note:  Despite possible appearances to the contrary, nothing on this blog should be taken as an attack upon Darwinism, or even a critique.  Charles Darwin himself is  for me  an intellectual and even a moral hero, who just gets better  the more you learn about him.  The whole field of evolutionary biology has been characterized by remarkably brilliant practitioners, who in addition are often philosophically alert.  The appearances-to-the-contrary stem from the accidental facts that,

            (a) You don’t need me to expound the findings of this fine science, since there are easily available volumes from writers far more professionally qualified, and who, by happy circumstance, are in many cases quite gifted writers, simply as writers:  Darwin himself, Steven Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, H. Allen Orr, in writings too numerous to mention, along with excellent though lesser-known figures like D’Arcy Thompson, George Gaylord Simpson, J.B.S. Haldane, Ernst Mayr, Matt Ridley, Paul Colinvaux, Richard Fortey, George Williams, and John Maynard Smith.

            (b) With Darwinism, just as with any scientific idea in fashion, starting with atomism, magnetism, radiation, vortices, relativity, quantum mechanics, and even some mathematical ones like point-set topology and nonlinear dynamics, there have been some fanciful overreaching and stupid abuses  in attempts to apply these ideas to things to which they do not apply, mostly in the popular media.   With these I feel the need to break a lance, particularly when their agenda is to reduce those created in the image of God, to the level of cockroaches.  But the tick that feeds upon the rump of Pegasus, in no wise lessens the majesty of that noble steed.

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A word on the … evolution (not by natural selection) of our ideas about science and about theology.

In both cases, if, naïvely, we thumb through some books and behold what our distant ancestors used to believe, we gape and gasp.   And in the perspective -- long regnant, but by now adequately criticized -- of the Whig Theory of History, those poor old dotards were simply clueless.

If, however, we examine the matter with more study and attention, we learn that the best minds of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages  were a lot smarter than our shallow understanding of their doctrines  would imply. 

For science, this post-Whig re-evaluation has been ably and painstakingly carried out by a distinguished body of historians and philosophers.  For theology -- I really don’t know;  but I do recall  that C.S. Lewis says somewhere that the old folk-images  tended to be held until some historical juncture causes them to be actually examined:  in which cases the Historical Church proved generally capable of refining its conceptions and language. Yet -- a subtle point, but crucial -- this replacement of the traditional image  is a dialectical sublation, and no mere negation.  Even from the standpoint of our modern and more nuanced understanding, the original idea, while dethroned, is yet in a sense  preserved -- aufgehoben.  Thus, the image of Jehovah as a tribal patriarch with a long white beard, sending down laws on stone tablets  and speaking, should occasion demand it, from a burning bush, remains yet a more faithful and more fruitful symbol, a more adequate gateway to eventual fuller comprehension, than would the alternative representation, as, say, a black-face minstrel, or a used-car salesman in a bow tie.  True, He is ultimately none of these three; but he participates of one of them  more than he does the others (proportionate to our understanding).

In science, it is the same.  You’ll hear it said that the Copernican heliocentric theory was resisted because

            (a) it “demoted the earth from its privileged position at the center”;

            (b) the Bible declares that Earth is stationary.

The efforts of the debunkers have decisively refuted (a) -- Craig himself has a good short summary of their findings -- but just a word about (b), since for some reason, philosophers of science are less eager to come to the rescue of the Bible.  True, it takes the Earth as stationary.  And so, by the bye, does any modern scientist in his right mind, when solving any practical problem such as the trajectory of a shell or a baseball:  the pitcher lobs it due south at x miles per hour;  the bat strikes it, traveling due north with such&such momentum; the wind is from the northeast at eighteen miles per hour, and the Earth… is stationary.  You do not factor in the sweep of this green planet round the Sun, nor Sol’s more stately wheeling along the rim of our spinning galaxy, nor that nebula’s proper motion through the celestial void, a vagrant among the observing unspeaking witness of the Fixed Stars -- which, as we now know, are not fixed in the least;  it’s just a manner of speaking.

~

A note on that last proviso, “proportionate to our understanding”.  This is actually a key idea.

By chance, I just now happened to re-read a most amusing poem from 1913, by Rupert Brooke, entitled “Heaven”.  Here he depicts fish, contemplating the afterlife:

somewhere, beyond Space and Time,

is wetter water, slimier slime!

and they imagine their unimaginable Maker,

immense, of fishy form and mind,

squamous, omnipotent, and kind

-- along with much more in this vein.

Now, this is satire, possibly even intended to be offensive;  yet let us take no offense.  Rather, the poem expresses a truth, from whatever base motivations.  For we are each, each species, but a small and finite part of the visible Creation;  which in turn is only an infinitessimal part, of the Creator.   We each receive, and cherish, such tatters and fragments of truth as we may.  And let Saint Francis be my witness: I doubt not, indeed, I do not doubt, that whither those fishes are destined, they shall find water  wetter than wet; that the celestial penguins shall throne upon ice-floes frozen to perfection, immutable; and that the sweet small vole, that dwelleth in the fields, shall … dwell there forever:  World without end.

On Miracles

C. S. Lewis’ slim volume Miracles (1947, 1960) is a superbly-written, clear-headed piece of argumentative philosophy.   I’ll not rehearse his arguments, but simply urge you to buy the book.  Or if you like, I transposed his central argument into the key of Penguin, which you can read here.

For those who have consumed the main meal, here are some bits and snips  for dessert.

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In the first paragraph of the chapter “Of Miracles”, in the celebrated Enquiry of Hume, we meet an argument ascribed to Anglican Archbishop Tillotson, which Hume summarizes thus:

Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion, is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses;  because, (1) even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater;  and (2) it is evident  it must diminish in passing from them  to their disciples.

To this we reply with remarks, not theological, but purely logical.

(1)  Whether the evidence of the Apostles for all that they saw and sensed and heard, was indeed no greater than that whereby we announce, “Hullo!  A penny-bun upon the table.” -- the testimony of the senses, the notoriously wayward senses -- I cannot say.   Wasn’t there; only read the book.  Certainly there are other means to knowledge than mere gross perceptions and “feels”, of the sort beloved of the Materialists -- witness the sterling and immutable truth of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, for which sensory evidence is absolutely nil.  So:  Not Proved;  I have nothing to add.

(2) Here Hume presents a peculiarly degraded picture of the epistemological-scientific enterprise over the span of unfurling centuries, as though it were simply a game of Chinese whispers, in which information can only deteriorate.

Consider the “evidence” for atoms, of the earliest atomists.  They had none -- certainly no sensory evidence.   And the nineteenth-century physicists who did bring forward evidence -- though evidence at a remove or two, again not directly sensory -- so little carried the day that, on into the twentieth century, physicists like Mach could profess themselves unconvinced.  And yet -- experience and analysis, coherence and consilience, have so developed, that today these still-unseen creatures are an article of faith.

Whether the many who have claimed that, as they lived their lives, the truths of the Christian religion became eventually apparent, even overcoming original atheism, so claim aright, we ourselves obviously cannot settle.  But they do not rely on a sort of game-of-Telephone Islamic isnâd (chain of traditionaries), Abu-X heard it from Ibn-Y who … who heard the Prophet say, “Eat no beans.”

Lest you imagine that Hume’s argument, which now stands threadbare in a winter wind, be a mere straw-man, know that I did not dig it out of some dusty volume, but met it re-presented in a popular pamphlet by Edward Craig (Philosophy: A very short introduction, 2002, cannily marketed by Oxford University Press); a writer who, moreover, professes deep admiration for Hume.  -- Craig (p. 27)  also usefully alludes to the marketing value of the “Tillotson connection”:

Hume’s public, most of them in varying degrees hostile to Catholicism, would feel a comfortable warm glow…and read on.

~

Edward Craig, now arguing in his own person (Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2002), p. 34):

We can, and do, demand that scientific results be replicable;  we can’t demand a rerun of a miracle.

A surprisingly lax use of “scientific”, coming from a philosopher.  We all know that there is more to science than laboratory physics, and more to physics than what the positivists once thought.

There is very little in science that can be “rerun”.  In geology, cosmology, astronomy, evolutionary biology -- almost nothing.  And even in physics:  If they ever do, after many years of patient watching, finally spot a Higgs boson or a magnetic monopole, they won’t be able to re-run that result.  Unless someone thinks of a new technique (in which case it wouldn’t be a rerun, but a qualitatively new experiment), they’ll just have to sit and watch and wait all over again.  Maybe they get lucky this time, maybe they don’t.

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The term miracles is sometimes used in philosophical polemics against the far-fetched explanations of secularists  for whom the very idea of miracles would be a scandal:

The Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life.  It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that it is based on a miracle -- a complex mind arising out of nothing -- is not held against it.

-- Steven Pinker,  The Blank Slate (2002), p.  3

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Miscellaneous epigrams:

Oliver St. John Gogarty, I Follow Saint Patrick (1938), p. 165: “I believe in miracles because I am a miracle.”

Oliver St. John Gogarty, I Follow Saint Patrick (1938), p. 255: “As for smiths, they controlled fire and bent the stubborn metal to their will.  It was miracle enough in those days;  to me it is a miracle still.”