AS137: David Hume, Of Miracles

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:31 Thomas: Hello and welcome to episode 137 of Atheistically Speaking with your host, Thomas Smith. Okay, so, I always make plans and then God laughs at them, according to the old saying. So here was my plan for this week. You ready for this one? This'll be funny. I wanted to do a portable atheist, and then I wanted to talk about comments on Christina Hoff Sommers that I promised I would get to. Well, in going over today's portable atheist, I found that it's actually incredibly long, and it may take a while, and I don't know that I'll have time for both those things.

0:01:22 Thomas: So I'm going to see. We'll see. Those are my I'm stating my plans ahead of time. Maybe you and God will both laugh at them. Maybe life will be what happened to me while I was busy making other plans, as someone said. Or maybe I'm a genius and it'll work out. But I'm going to do Of Miracles by David Hume from The Portable Atheist. The reason I'm doing this, you may say, oh, we just did A Portable Atheists. Well, kind of.

Three weeks ago, I think it was. I had said I wanted to do it once a month. And then what would happen is I would let like two, three, four, five months go by and then not do it. So instead of doing that, I'm gonna do the opposite of that, which is to do before it's even been a month, I'll do it after a month or so. On this, because I really like The Portable Atheist, because it's a chance to do some learning, some book learning. Speaking of book learning, the Atheistically Speaking Book Club is going very strong. We've got, I think, 29 members in the book, the Good Reads is the website, Good Reads. So go to Good Reads and search Atheistically Speaking, maybe, in the groups. I think that's how it'll work. Or if you still want to join, there's still time. We've started our book. It's Pale Blue Dot.

We've started that, but it's still very early on, so you could join and catch up easily if you want to. You don't have to. We've already got plenty of people. I'm really excited about it. People are sharing their stories, their personal stories and books they've read and everything.

0:02:58 Thomas: It's been really good. I want to thank Danielle again for taking that on. She's managing the Goodreads Club, and it's awesome. So you can always email me at atheisticallyspeaking@gmail if you'd like me to send you the link to the group, or just go to goodreads.com and search Atheistically Speaking. I also want to take a brief moment before I get into the reading to address the book club. I'm going to hope that of the 29 book club members, one person is listening, at least. And if one is listening, then that saves me some time. Here's my plan. I mean, I'm not just, this isn't just just for book club members, I wanted to tell everybody this. I've got my idea for what I want to do with the book club, how I want to incorporate it into the show.

0:03:44 Thomas: Because that was my intention from the start. We'd have people, I'd do some sort of episode involving the book that we're reading when we finish it. We're going to try to do like a book a month, roughly. And then I wanted to do some episode involving that book. Here's what I thought of. Here's what I've come up with. And feel free to give me feedback, but I think this is a great idea. I want to take as many people as are interested in, okay, maybe not as many, but let's say as many as are interesting up to a certain point in the book club, let's say maybe like eight, I'll just go with the number eight, something like that. Some number of readers each to pick a little part of the book that they got something out of, that they learned something from, that they want to share, that that they want to summarize, and then they'll come on and do a short segment where I'll just very quickly, it won't be like a long involved interview.

0:04:39 Thomas: It'll be like, okay, here's reader X, here's this person. What was your part of the book? And we'll talk about it and I can ask a few questions. I can talk about It too. I'm going to read the book as well. So I'll talk about it as well and then we'll do a number of short segments that really get, instead of one long kind of trying to summarize the entire thing, which I don't, I mean, you might as well just read the book if I'm going to summarize The Whole Thing. Instead of doing that, let's talk about some individual things that people really liked. And let's get into those little individual points. So I think that's my plan. Feel free, book club people, feel free to post in the comments for the book, The Goodreads Club, what you think about that. And I'll do that as well. And we'll we'll get that going.

0:05:25 Thomas: So that's my thoughts. Listeners and book club readers alike, I think will benefit from that. I think that'll be the cool way to bring knowledge to everybody, to me, to the listeners. We'll all have a chance to learn something from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, and then whatever we pick next. So thank you for everyone who's joined, and I'm really excited about this project. I think it's going to be great. Okay, so the reading for this episode of The Portable Atheist is of miracles, and it's from, it's actually a chapter, or maybe is it two? I don't know. It's a chapter or two from An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume. Now, I've already summarized and give kind of a biography of David Hume a little bit, so I don't have to do that again, so that'll cut out some of the time.

0:06:15 Thomas: But um, I also could talk about very briefly about this work. Now, this was, I referenced in the last episode about Hume, that he took out some of his more anti-religious parts of his books because he didn't want to offend people, and this was one of them. It looks as though this was first published in 1748, and this chapter of miracles was not originally in it. He took it out to try to appease people. It was later, of course, put back in, and all his work was, all his controversial work, he knew he was going to die, so he arranged to have it published posthumously, and hence here we are. So, let's see. Yeah, that's all I need to say about the work.

0:07:01 Thomas: I won't go in too big of detail and waste too much time talking about the Work itself. So here it is, Of Miracles. All right, he begins, it's really weird, he references a Dr. Tillotson. He says, Tillotson has in his works an argument against transubstantiation. That's a far better argument, he says something like it's a much better argument than is even warranted by such a stupid claim. He doesn't, I don't think he uses the word transubstanciation, actually. I think that came from me looking into to it. He uses the word real presence, which I read that and I was like, what's a real presence? But then I googled Tillotson and I thought, okay, Tillotsons must be some other philosopher, maybe an atheist at the time who had an argument against.

0:07:52 Thomas: No, it turns out he was the Archbishop of Canterbury. So very interesting. So in reading about it, I'm not that great. I'll admit I'm I'm not that great at keeping track of kind of the minute, unimportant differences between different religious sects. I can't really keep those straight, you know, like which little thing believes what. But this seems to be the classic Catholic versus Protestant thing. And it all has to do, and I can't believe how much controversy there was with this. But it all has to do with whether or not Jesus, the wafer, you know, the communion, all that, the wine, if it actually turns into Jesus or not. So you probably already knew that when I said transubstantiation, but I'm not sure you would have instantly known that when he said real presence.

0:08:44 Thomas: That's kind of a, I guess that was what he called it, and the terminology transubstanciation must have come later. Anyway, so yeah, it's kind of interesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is the one he's referencing. And so he summarizes this argument by saying the only evidence of transubstantiation is the testimony of the apostles. It's probably, I'm guessing, he doesn't get into it, but I'm guess it comes from when Jesus says that this is my body, blah, blah. That's the only evidence. However, our senses give us testimony all the time that the wafers and the wine and all that don't actually turn into Jesus. So it's really interesting that this argument ends up being pretty much a good portion of Hume's argument.

0:09:33 Thomas: Like he, I don't want to say he's copying it, but it's, he says he has a related argument. He discovered an argument that's similar to Tillotson, which he believes will help against supernatural phenomena, argue against supernatural phenomena for years to come. So it's kind of interesting there. I'd be curious in looking more into what Tillotson actually wrote and seeing if like, you know, Hume borrowed from it extensively or, you know, to what degree he did. So kind of interesting there, but it's by his own admission. So, you know it's not like he was obviously, I probably wouldn't have discovered it otherwise. Otherwise, I wouldn't have discovered this rare, like, Tillotson text about, you know, communion wafers. Anyway, in, so let's see.

0:10:21 Thomas: So in paragraph two, like I said, Hume just says, well, I've discovered, he makes kind of a bold statement. He says, this argument I've recovered, if it's right, if I'm right, and I'm always right. No, he didn't say that. But he says, it will, for years, help to argue against supernatural stuff.

0:10:41 Thomas: Here we go. So here it is. Let's just see. I think I'm just going to read this paragraph. This is paragraph three. I like to go in. That's how I like do it, because these technical philosophy readings, you really need to get down and dirty with the reading. So I go paragraph by paragraph and try to summarize for you guys what the argument is so that we can all kind of learn from it. So here's paragraph three, I'm going to read this one because when I tried to summarize paragraph three, it ended up just being as long as paragraph three. So I'm going to go ahead and read it. "Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact, it must be acknowledged that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors."

0:11:29 Thomas: "One who in our climate should expect better weather in any week of June than in one of December would reason justly and conformably to experience, but it is certain that he may happen in the event to find himself mistaken." So he's saying like, well, you probably understood that, so I won't summarize that. "However, we may observe that in such a case, he would have no cause to complain of experience, because it commonly informs us beforehand of the uncertainty by that contrariety of event of events which we may learn from a diligent observation. All effects follow not with like certainty from their supposed causes. Some events are found in all countries and all ages to have been constantly conjoined together."

0:12:17 Thomas: "Others are found to have been more variable, and sometimes to disappoint our expectations, so that in our reasonings concerning matter of fact there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence." So, uh, I think I'm guessing you guys understood that, I think it was pretty reasonably written. I found Hume to be just the right amount of readable. Like, it's pretty complicated at times, but I like him because I don't think he was trying to be complicated. I don't think he was trying to be, it seems like he wants to be understood, which is really important for philosophy. For anyone who's read some real technical stuff, I've read a little, of course, and not vastly experienced, but it can be very unpleasant to try to sift through very, very technical or just purposefully obscure writing.

0:13:12 Thomas: Anyway, I like Hume's writing. And he's saying here that, you know, testimony, sorry, no, experience can lead us astray. There are some things we experience that we'd be willing to bet on like a hundred percent. And there are some things that, like the weather example he brought up, we would say, I imagine any week in May is going to be better than a week in December, or I think he said June. Any week in June will be be better than December. But if a week in June comes along that's worse weather than a week in December, we're not flabbergasted. It's weird, but we weren't 100% sure on that. We were just pretty sure. Other things, we are 100% Sure. Other Things, we were even less sure.

0:13:58 Thomas: So that's what he's established here. So paragraph four, here's a great quote and one that I'm guessing has spawned many a meme. In fact, I think I've seen this meme. Quote, a wise man therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence, end quote. So there we go. It's hard to imagine anyone arguing with that. In fact, I think Christians would just say, yeah, I'm proportioning my belief to The Evidence. I just think I have different evidence. But anyway, for most common things, things that we witness every single day, we regard our experiences as just about 100% solid proof. But for other things, we proceed more cautiously. So with more questionable things, things, we examine the occurrences on either side of our experience, and after that examination, we sort of assign a probability to the event.

0:14:47 Thomas: So let me give an example that I just made up, just to make sure we're all on the same page with what Hume is arguing here. So if I take a ball and hold it in my hand and then just let go, I'm virtually certain, about as certain as I could get, that it's just going to fall straight down to the ground, because I have just countless experience of other objects doing that exact thing. And it's just the quantity of experience I have for that is vast.

0:15:17 Thomas: But let's say I'm trying to evaluate if I believe that my flight is going to arrive at a certain time. Well, the evidence I have is the flight schedule. It says it's going to arrive at this time. But I have my experience of flights arriving on time. And I also have a lot of experience of flights being delayed, so it could even be that I have more experience of delay than I do of flights arriving on time, so I proportion my belief. Hume's saying here that we should proportion our belief in the proposition appropriately and say, well, I'm not entirely confident that my flight will arrive on time. I wouldn't bet, you know, vast sums of money on it. He doesn't say that, this is just me, but I proportion it.

0:16:02 Thomas: And that makes sense. I would say, well, I'm somewhat confident the flight will arrive on time because I think it does a good portion of the time, but I, you know, I would not be very surprised if it was delayed.

0:16:17 Thomas: Now, this next paragraph has something incredibly interesting. It references Hume's view on causality, which I find fascinating. I'm pretty sure Hume, whom I think it was pretty revolutionary at the time, though I did a little research, and again, I mean, we got a lot to cover here, so I didn't get too much into it, but here's the sentence where he references his view on causality. It being a general maxim that no objects have any discoverable connection together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction. So that's the end of the quote.

0:17:04 Thomas: So I could talk a lot about this, and it may be a topic for another day. It's a really interesting philosophy thing. But he's saying there's nothing we can actually observe that... And I'd be curious if anyone has a contrary opinion or, or if, if there's any, like, I don't know, physicists, I think I have a couple of people who are adept in physics that listen to this. If, if this, uh, if Hume's, um, contention here has been disproven, but he's saying we, we don't actually observe causality, like the core of, like there's no real connection between matter that we can point to and assign and say, ah, that's what causes this. It's just from consistent experience. So cause and effect, all we've done throughout our lives and throughout humanity is observe things that always go together.

0:17:55 Thomas: It's not that we can actually infer a priori what will happen when a ball hits a ball. It is that we've observed a ball hitting a ball and what happens when that happens so many times that we formed expectations. And this kind of makes sense to me, especially to go on a slight tangent as it relates to quantum mechanics.

It makes sense to think that this is true, because there's all kinds of weird stuff and cause and effect in quantum mechanics that it makes no sense to us. We look at it and it's just like, I don't understand. It doesn't really comport with my views, but we have experimental evidence and data that backs it up.

And this makes sense, because all the quantum stuff is in a world that we're not, we didn't evolve in, you know, we didn't evolve in the micro world, we evolved in the macro world, at least by our definition, and that's where all experience is, and that's where all our intuitions about causality come from, the big, you know, or at least the moderately big, but the tiny things, when we get down to the very nitty-gritty of tiny, tiny things it doesn't necessarily follow our intuition because we don't have, our intuitions were not formed there. So it's, that to me does seem like evidence that what Hume is saying is true, that there's not really, we can't really observe the core of the causality. You know, we Can just say that this always happens after this or because of this or whatever, you know, so it's interesting.

0:19:30 Thomas: So let's get back to the reading, the miracles here, of miracles. Hume brought up this causality thing to say there's no inherent connection between testimony and truth. So it's kind of something that's like, oh, no, duh. But it's also, it's interesting. And it's important later that we establish this. So there's not the only connection between testimony and proof that we have is that we've experienced it. Sometimes when people tell us something, or maybe a good percentage of the time, someone tells us, hey, hey, there's a car accident over there. And we walk over there and we see a car accident. So we have experience of it being related to truth, testimony being related directly to the truth. But the important part he's bringing up is there's no inherent connection.

0:20:18 Thomas: He says, if it weren't for the fact that people are pretty reliable in general and that people who speak falsehoods are subject to shame, we wouldn't put any weight in testimony. And the evidence he gives for this is that when someone has no credibility, they're dodgy, they've proven themselves to be not trustworthy, we don't give their testimony any weight. There's nothing inherent about testimony that gives us truth regardless of who's telling it. It's dependent on who's selling it to us. I'll just read this sentence for the next paragraph that does a good job of paraphrasing the entire paragraph. Quote, We frequently hesitate concerning the reports of others. We balance the opposite circumstances which cause any doubt or uncertainty, "And when we discover a superiority on any side, we incline to it, but still with a diminution of assurance in proportion to the force of its antagonist." End quote. And that's, diminution just means, um, just a reduction, um, like, you know, diminutive, or it's a word that I'm not really familiar with, but it kind of, you kind of already know what it means but not really. Um, yeah, just a deduction of assurance.

So we he's, he's just saying that we do this all the time when someone tells us a story or tries to get us to believe something, thing, we proportion it. We say, well, how trustworthy is this person? What's he telling me? And then if there's a superiority on either side of that, well, he's really trustworthy or he's not, we portion our assurance to it.

0:22:02 Thomas: So next paragraph, he's basically just saying there are a variety of factors that lead us to doubt testimony. I don't need to go into everything He says, but roughly speaking, it's like if someone's too sure, if they're not, if they're too nervous when they talk, if there's, you know, just, I guess he didn't call it this, but I guess it would be like interpersonal cues about someone's trustworthiness. So that's, that's how we, we, there's a lot of factors that go into how we judge testimony. In this next paragraph, I think we got the crux of the argument. So, despite the fact that we still have quite a ways to go in the reading, this is pretty much mostly the crux of the argument. So, he says, let's suppose that the testimony we're talking about seeks to convince you of something that is extraordinary.

0:22:53 Thomas: According to what he's already established, we need to reduce the weight of the testimony in proportion to how unusual the fact is. So someone tells us, for example, this is obviously my example again, that they drove to work yesterday. Well, this claim is totally ordinary. I mean, we have plenty of experience and the evidence that we have is vast that people can drive to work. It happens all the time. So we're not inclined to doubt their claim that much. I mean it's not 100% of course, but there's no reason to really doubt it because we have all that experience. Um, now let's say someone claims they flew to work completely unaided. Well, this is a completely marvelous claim to use Hume's words.

0:23:40 Thomas: He says it's marvelous. This, this, well, not that claim, obviously not that one, but he uses the word marvelous to describe a claim that we would have a hard time believing. So we need to discount this claim in proportion to how unusual it is. So this also works for something in the middle, I think. So if someone claims they drove to work, which was 10 miles away, and they made it in like seven minutes, well, this speed is possible. It's very possible to drive at that speed by current car technology, maybe not back in Hume's day. But, you know, it doesn't violate physics. But it's also contrary to our experience a lot of times that you're able to drive a car that fast for other reasons, like traffic, you now, police, safety, just general, you know, control of the car.

0:24:27 Thomas: So if it were me, I wouldn't be 100% sure that this person was wrong, but I would definitely probably not be convinced. I would want to see a little more evidence because they're making a claim that's somewhere in the middle. Not impossible, but it's pretty difficult to imagine.

0:24:47 Thomas: But going back to the extreme example of unaided flight, there's another nuance that I need to make sure I hit. It. So this is important to his argument, I think to the technical parts of his argument. So it's not just that Hume's saying it's testimony versus experience. It's not just that. It is more than that. Since Hume has established that testimony has no inherent connection to truth, it's just our experience that it sometimes comports to the truth, truth, we're actually evaluating experience versus experience. So this is because our trust of testimony, like I said, it's based on our experience of it going along with the truth. So we're kind of comparing apples to apples now.

0:25:36 Thomas: We're saying, I have tons of experience of people not being able to fly unaided. I have only a little bit of experience, of testimony being true. Or maybe I have a lot, but I have not as much as the other thing. So the bigger quantity wins. Wins. I have no experience of someone being able to fly unaided. I have some experience of testimony being true. You evaluate it and the bigger quantity wins. So next he references a saying from ancient Rome which essentially said that some facts are so incredible, it's weird to say fact, but I guess it's a claimed fact or like a claim I guess would be a better word. It's weird to say like a fact is not true, a false fact. But no, some claims, I'll change it to claims, claims are so incredible that they invalidate even the greatest authority that you could, that you Could Claim.

0:26:30 Thomas: So that's the ancient saying, kind of cool. Then he also references an Indian prince, and I don't know if this is a true story or not. He doesn't really give any info, but he just says like, oh, and then there was the Indian prince. So maybe this is some well-known story. Maybe it was in the papers at the time and everyone reading was like, I remember that. That was weird. Anyway, there is he references an Indian prince and he says this prince was told about the effects of frost and didn't believe it. So I guess he had presumably only ever lived in a hot climate. And so someone said there's this thing called frost and he's like, that doesn't make any sense. And it was it's completely alien to him. So he required a lot of evidence.

0:27:17 Thomas: And so Hume is saying this makes sense because his experience, you know, this is not in his experience. It's not contradicted by his experience, so he's not going to be 100% certain that it's not true, but it just doesn't have any, he has no experience of it. It's conformable to it, I guess, is the word he uses. So now that we've covered this, he's taking it to a further extreme. He says let's not say it's something marvelous, which is the word he used before.

It's not just marvelous, it's nothing that's actually miraculous and is a violation of the laws of nature. Okay, so now I'm just realizing maybe my unaided flight example from before, maybe that was a bit premature, I should have just said, like he let's revise it, everybody retroactively pretend I changed that to, instead of flying unaided, he jumped just like incredibly far, not so far as to be physically impossible, but way further than anyone we've ever experienced. And that'll be my example, because I guess I should have saved something that was literally a violation of nature. I should've saved that for later because Hume was. Sorry about that. My fault. My fault, everyone. Won't happen again. So he's saying, let's imagine it's something that just is actually a violation. Of nature. So now he says a miracle by definition is something that has 100% proof against it in our everyday experience.

Hume is saying we would not call something a miracle if it wasn't something that we never observed. If it was something that just, it happened, you know, occasionally, very rarely in nature, such and such happens. We would not called a miracle when it happened because it's, it is, even though it's rare, it's in our experience.

0:29:04 Thomas: He's saying by definition, definition, it has to be impossible to call it a miracle. Now, I want to point out that there, in my research I did for this show, there are people who disagree with that definition of a miracle. They think that this is, I'm guessing it's religious apologists, if I were to guess, and this is too big of a tangent for today's reading, but they define a miracle differently. You know, I've heard in a debate where someone says if an object is falling, if someone's falling and God, you know, like provides something for them to land on, they didn't fly. It's not like it violated physics. And I think it's still kind of just word games, because in order for something to happen that way, it's presumably the laws of nature were broken.

0:30:00 Thomas: And although maybe people take a view that, like, no, God just engineered it from the get go, like from the beginning of the universe, he made it such that this would happen. Um, like a tree would blow a certain way to prevent someone's fall. It wasn't a miracle. It wasn't, well, it was a miracle, but it wasn't unnatural. It didn't go against the laws of physics. So that's, but again, sorry, I'll save that for another day. But I just wanted to note that there is this objection to his definition, but for Hume's definition, a miracle is something that literally violates nature, and I think that's, that's a fair definition, I don't think it's like that uncommon that that's someone's definition. So Hume says for us to even name it that, it can't be anything that happens, and the example he gives is a man coming back to life, lead hovering in midair, although you could come up with some circumstances, but that was one thing I was doing.

0:30:54 Thomas: I was trying to come up with circumstances where these things would happen, but I guess that's not really the point. Well, okay. We are not yet halfway done, but this is the end of part one. There's two parts to this reading. I'm going to try to do part two in an episode because we're already, I mean, by the time I finished part one here, we're not quite done. I mean that's why he put a part one there, um, but I'll try to do part two a little faster. I think I guess even though there's so much to cover, maybe uh, Thursday's episode will just be a little longer, but it's looking like I may not be able to do the comments I wanted to do. It's tough, guys, there's such a lot to do and I'm not going to so much the cover. And I do know that a lot of people don't like hour-long episodes and my last episode was really long, over an hour.

0:31:48 Thomas: So I try to, I know a lot of people lose focus and I really don't blame them because that's kind of long. So anyway, all that aside, here's the last chapter of part one. I'm going to read it because it's relatively brief and it gives a good summary of part one, I think. The plain consequence is, and I think it is a general maxim worthy of our attention. That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle. That's a big claim. Sorry, that was me. That wasn't the quote. Unless the testimony be of such kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. And even in that case, there is a mutual destruction of arguments. And the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to the degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior. That's odd. That was in quotes, by the way.

0:32:45 Thomas: That's kind of weird. I don't know if he's quoting someone or I mean, it seems like he's not, but maybe that his quotes or maybe the translation or not translation, but you know, however it got edited into this book, maybe that's like just he's setting it aside as like this is a principle. I'm setting this aside. I dunno. But anyway, I'll continue. When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should be either deceived or deceiving us, I read that wrong, so it should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other, and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision.

0:33:49 Thomas: So that's the end of part one. Very interesting. I, like I said, not halfway done. That's actually like maybe 40% done with this, but I'll try to go through part two a little faster. I, again, like I said, when we do the Portable Atheist, it's actually probably the hardest episodes that I do because I research them really hard. And one thing I came up with, I've been, when I read this, I know in the back of my mind, I have heard this somewhere. I've heard someone say, and it was a respectable source, otherwise I wouldn't have cared that much about it. That Hume's Of Miracles has been sort of disproven or is not really regarded as a powerful argument anymore.

0:34:38 Thomas: And maybe, I don't know who said it, but it stuck in my mind. So I searched around a little bit and I found a paper that someone, actually it might be a whole book, but it's available online, about why the argument isn't good and it doesn't. So I may at a later or date. I'll see if you guys are interested in this, but I'm very interested in this argument because I find it fascinating. And I may do another episode later on about someone's objections, or actually, maybe I will email this person and see if I can find someone to come on and talk about their objections to Hume's Of Miracles. Actually, that's a better idea. I will do that. I'm going to try to find a guest, someone who's actually a philosopher, to come, come on and talk about Hume's Of Miracles and see if it really holds up.

0:35:25 Thomas: But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Next episode, we are going to take on part two of Of Miracles. And it's good. I think the argument's really cool. I could imagine some objections, but I'm not convinced either way yet. But I think it's fascinating, and I know it was really interesting at the time, and I think It was quite influential at the times. So, yeah, that's that's it for today. I think I'll cut it off there. Thank you as always. And I know this is a little soon, like I said, for the Portable Atheist, but I wanted to get ahead of it because I was so behind before. And to be honest, it would be kind of a relief if people didn't like these because they take the most work.

0:36:12 Thomas: But I don't think that's true. I mean, I think people do like these ones. I do anyway, because we both learn a lot. And that's where I want to take the show. I want to learn things from the show. So I just want to say thank you to my patrons. I'll thank you more on Thursday, of course. But you can hear Thursday's episode early if you go on to patreon.com/atheist. And you can also hear the next two bonus contents with Jake there every week.

Every week, my patrons get bonus content of entirely different podcasts. And this week, they're a little bit longer because we had really good conversations and couldn't stop, so instead of the 30 minutes that they have been, they're actually like 45 each or 40 or something like that, and it's like it's so good for bonus show, and I, I really hope people take advantage of that. You can go contribute a dollar an episode. It's not, you won't know, it's a couple of cups of coffee a month, and uh, you can get access to that bonus material, uh, topics. The next couple topics are Tsarnaev and the death penalty, and actually one that I found was really interesting, which was the Sam Harris-Noam Chomsky exchange. That one, oh man, I could talk about that for a while. So check those out. Go to patreon.com/atheist. Take advantage of that. Thank you to all who do, and I will see you for part two of this Of Miracles by David Hume on Thursday. See you guys later.