Abstract

When, if ever, is it reasonable to claim that an absurd event is a miracle? Hume famously says that claims like these are never reasonable. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, says that one is free to do so whenever one can feel an event’s divine origins, but confines himself to these subjective assessments and not claims about the actual causal processes leading to the event itself. In this paper, I argue that there are some cases where particular believers, using abductive reasoning in traditionally induction-reliant objectivist accounts of miracle recognition, can reasonably accept claims about the miraculosity of particular events. I show that this account responds to the problems faced bothby the induction-reliant objectivists and the subjectivists, and that it also more closely corresponds to how we actually reason about claims to miraculosity.