But when, instead of such evidence, nothing is produced but two sets
of discrepant stories, originating nobody knows how or when, among
persons who could believe as firmly in devils which enter pigs, I
confess that my feeling is one of astonishment that any one should
expect a reasonable man to take such testimony seriously.
I am anxious to bring about a clear understanding of the difference
between "impossibilities" and "improbabilities," because mistakes on
this point lay us open to the attacks of ecclesiastical apologists of
the type of the late Cardinal Newman; acute sophists, who think it
fitting to employ their intellects, as burglars employ dark lanterns
for the discovery of other people's weak places, while they carefully
keep the light away from their own position.
When it is rightly stated, the Agnostic view of "miracles" is, in my
judgment, unassailable. We are _not_ justifiable in the _a priori_
assertion that the order of nature, as experience has revealed it to
us, cannot change. In arguing about the miraculous, the assumption is
illegitimate, because it involves the whole point in dispute.
Furthermore, it is an assumption which takes us beyond the range of
our faculties. Obviously, no amount of past experience can warrant us
in anything more than a correspondingly strong expectation for the
present and future.
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