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Knowledge, Belief, and God
Knowledge, Belief,
and God
New Insights in Religious
Epistemology

edited by
Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne,
and Dani Rabinowitz

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© the several contributors 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Contributors ix

Introduction1
Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz

Part I. Historical
1. Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports 13
Charity Anderson
2. Testimony, Error, and Reasonable Belief in Medieval
Religious Epistemology 29
Richard Cross
3. Duns Scotus’s Epistemic Argument against Divine Illumination 54
Billy Dunaway
4. Knowledge and the Cathartic Value of Repentance 78
Dani Rabinowitz

Part II. Formal

5. Infinite Cardinalities, Measuring Knowledge, and Probabilities
in Fine-Tuning Arguments 103
Isaac Choi
6. A Theological Critique of the Fine-Tuning Argument 122
Hans Halvorson
7. Fine-Tuning Fine-Tuning 136
John Hawthorne and Yoaav Isaacs
8. Reasoning with Plenitude 169
Roger White

Part III. Social

9. Testimony amidst Diversity 183
Max Baker-Hytch
10. Testimonial Pessimism 203
Rachel Elizabeth Fraser
vi Contents

11. Experts and Peer Disagreement 228

Jennifer Lackey
12. Know-How and Acts of Faith 246
Paulina Sliwa

Part IV. Rational

13. Pragmatic Encroachment and Theistic Knowledge 267
Matthew A. Benton
14. Delusions of Knowledge Concerning God’s Existence 288
Keith DeRose
15. Moderate Modal Skepticism 302
Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri
16. Phenomenal Conservatism and Religious Experience 322
Richard Swinburne

Index 339
Acknowledgements

The editors and contributors gratefully acknowledge the support of the John Templeton
Foundation for a three-year grant for the New Insights and Directions in Religious
Epistemology project. (The opinions expressed in this volume are those of the con-
tributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.)
We are also grateful to the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where the
grant was based; and to Somerville College, Oxford, at which several of the contributors
were junior research fellows. Thanks also to St Anne’s College, Oxford, which hosted
the project’s final conference.
In addition, we are grateful to Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for his
helpful advice and guidance, and to three anonymous referees for the Press. We also
thank the following for reviewing and commenting on several of the chapters herein:
Charity Anderson, Max Baker-Hytch, Isaac Choi, Richard Cross, Dominic Gregory,
Stephen Grimm, Samuel Lebens, Robert Pasnau, John Pittard, and Christopher Tucker.
Contributors

Charity Anderson is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Baylor University.

Max Baker-Hytch is Associate Tutor in Philosophy at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and
Senior Tutor at the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics.

Matthew A. Benton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Seattle Pacific University.

Isaac Choi is a visiting fellow of the Rivendell Institute at Yale University and
adjunct instructor of philosophy at Sacred Heart University.

Richard Cross is Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University

of Notre Dame.

Keith DeRose is Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.

Billy Dunaway is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri—

St. Louis.

Rachel Elizabeth Fraser is Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy, University of

Cambridge.

Hans Halvorson is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.

John Hawthorne is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern

­California, and formerly Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the
­University of Oxford.

Yoaav Isaacs is Research Assistant Professor in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics

at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Jennifer Lackey is Wayne and Elizabeth Jones Professor of Philosophy at

Northwestern University.

Dani Rabinowitz is a trainee solicitor at Clifford Chance, LLP, in London.

Paulina Sliwa is University Lecturer and Fellow in Philosophy, Sidney Sussex

­College, Cambridge.

Margot Strohminger is Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow in Theoretical

Philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
x Contributors

Richard Swinburne is Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion

Emeritus at Oriel College, University of Oxford.

Roger White is Professor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Juhani Yli-Vakkuri is Professor of the Philosophy of Language at the University

of Tartu.
 Introduction
Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz

Mainstream epistemology has enjoyed a fertile period of intense theorizing in the past
few years. Several of the nascent views have challenged orthodox methodology in the
field whereas others shifted the direction of momentum. In the decades following
Gettier’s (1963) influential paper, work in epistemology focused largely on theorizing
about knowledge and epistemic justification. Defeasibility analyses of knowledge were
refined while causal, reliabilist, virtue theories, and other externalist accounts of
epistemic justification developed as rivals to internalist approaches.1 Insofar as these
­topics touched on skeptical considerations, epistemologists showed renewed interest
in arguments for skepticism, and considered their relation to the structure of epistemic
justification, debating over foundationalist, coherentist, and even infinitist2 theories.
These topics have given way to lively new epistemological interests, many of which
bear on and are influenced by issues in philosophy of language, social philosophy, and
formal philosophy. In addition, many central questions in epistemology proper have
been given some revolutionary answers. While we cannot hope to offer an exhaustive
overview, some highlights are worth covering.
Much recent work in epistemology is influenced by or critically engages with Timothy
Williamson’s (2000, 2009) “knowledge-first” epistemology, which makes knowledge
itself the primitive notion on which all other epistemological theorizing is based.
Importantly, and quite tantalizingly so, Williamson argues for the equation of one’s
evidence with one’s knowledge (E = K), an iconoclastic reversal of methodology and
theorizing. Williamson further undermines several other fundamental tenets of main-
stream epistemology, for example the luminosity of the mental and the implicit, but
arguably false, “sameness of evidence” premise in arguments for skepticism. When crafted
in a knowledge-first manner and with more humble epistemic aspirations, epistemology
emerges stronger, more resilient to skepticism, and open to informing neighboring
fields in an interesting and provocative manner.

1
See Shope (1983) for a nice overview.    2
See Klein (1999) and Turri and Klein (2014).
2 Introduction

Central to much recent epistemology are the semantics and pragmatics of knowledge
ascriptions and knowledge denials. Contextualists and relativists offer a semantics of
“know(s)” and its cognates on which it is importantly sensitive to either its context
of use or its context of assessment.3 By contrast, some “shifty” invariantists endorse a
semantics of “pragmatic encroachment” on which the practical interests of the would-be
knower, can affect the truth of a knowledge ascription or its denial.4 Each of these
approaches depart from the more traditional stable invariantist semantics5 for
“know(s)”; but each also claims to better explain the full linguistic data concerning our
use of “know(s).”
Social epistemology emphasizes how reliant we are on our social interactions with
others for our epistemic situation, and relates these issues to our individual roles
as believing subjects. Significant topics in social epistemology include the following:
(a) How is knowledge transmitted or gained by believing the testimony of others?6 In what
way can social factors (such as gender, race, class) contribute to a person’s or a group’s
credibility as testifiers, or to whether a person (or group) can believe, or learn anything
from, the testimony of others?7 (b) How can the existence or acknowledgement of dis­
agreement, especially between those one regards as peers, affect what one knows and
how one should revise one’s beliefs?8 (c) What is the nature of expertise or epistemic
authority, particularly as they may arise in specialized domains such as empirical science,
law and public policy, or religious matters?9 Finally (d) the epistemology arising from
groups and group-like agents, including institutions. Can groups have beliefs, and if
so, do ordinary methods of epistemic evaluation transfer smoothly to them?10
Additionally, epistemologists have increasingly begun to deploy a wide range of
intellectual tools including formal models developed for the understanding of scien-
tific inquiry, scientific work on the nature and limits of human cognition, and work in
the life sciences on the etiology of various forms of belief. A shift to credences that are
represented using the probability calculus (as opposed to outright beliefs, including
outright beliefs about probabilities) has proved a fertile ground for reconsidering a
number of central questions in epistemology and has provided a mechanism for proving,

3
See Unger (1984, Ch. 2) for early labeling of contextualism and invariantism. See Cohen (1986,
1998) and DeRose (2009) for contextualist treatments; and MacFarlane (2005, 2014, Ch. 8) for a relativist
treatment.
4
See Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Fantl and McGrath (2009, 2012), and Roeber (forthcoming a, b),
though they label the pragmatic encroachment view “subject-sensitive invariantism,” “interest-relative
invariantism,” “impurism,” and “anti-intellectualism,” respectively.
5
For discussion, see Brown (2005), Williamson (2005), and Reed (2010).
6
See especially Goldman (1992, Chs 10–14; and 1999), Lackey and Sosa (2006), Goldberg (2010), and
Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard (2010), among many others.
7
See Mills (2007), Fricker (2007), and Medina (2012) for influential work on epistemic injustice.
8
For recent work on the epistemology of disagreement, see the collections Feldman and Warfield
(2010), and Christensen and Lackey (2013); for discussion of religious disagreement, see Pittard (2015)
and Benton (2018).
9
For work on expertise and authority, see Zagzebski (2012) and Goldman (forthcoming); for some
applications to specialized domains, see Goldman (1999, Chs 8–11).
10
For important recent work, see Lackey (2016) and Brady and Fricker (2016).
 Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz 3

in a more formal manner, some interesting results. Additionally, much time has been
spent examining the etiological pedigree of our doxastic states, both in mainstream
epistemology and moral philosophy. Suspicious origins that bear little tie to traditional
evidential considerations have had many worrying about the epistemic status of a fair
chunk of our doxastic homes.
Another lively area of discussion where a range of views has been proposed con-
cerns the nature and scope of the phenomenon called defeat, wherein knowledge that
is in place gets destroyed by the acquisition of misleading evidence against the prop­
osition believed or against the propriety of the method whereby the relevant belief was
formed. Different views have proposed different explanations of what is virtuous about
open-mindedness and what is non-virtuous about dogmatism. The defeat literature
has in turn been influenced by the shift towards formal epistemology.
Yet there has been surprisingly little infiltration of these new approaches or ideas
into philosophy of religion. In the epistemology of religion, the “Reformed epistemol-
ogy” of Alvin Plantinga (1967, 2000), William Alston (1991), and Nicholas Wolterstorff
(2010) remains the dominant perspective.11 Reformed epistemologists argue that reli-
gious belief can be rational, or count as warranted, without the believer needing to
appeal to evidence or arguments for theism. Reformed epistemologists offered parity
arguments to suggest that religious belief is just as basic to a subject’s cognitive life as
the deliverances of perception, memory, or a belief in the existence of other minds or
the external world (Plantinga 1967, Alston 1991). Plantinga argued at length that reli-
gious belief is in this sense properly basic. On his proper function account of epistemic
“warrant” (that which turns a true belief into knowledge), a belief that is true and reli-
ably produced by a cognitive faculty in the environment for which that faculty was
designed counts as knowledge (Plantinga 1993). Plantinga supplemented his proper
function theory of knowledge with a Reformed account of the sensus divinitatus, the
special cognitive faculty with which, Plantinga argues, God has endowed humans so
that they may gain immediate and non-inferential knowledge that God exists. Alston,
for his part, argued that religious belief is, or at least can be, on similar footing with
sensory-perceptual beliefs: religious belief is rational, justified, and a candidate for
knowledge if it is the product of a “mystical perceptual doxastic practice” which, he
argues, bears similar marks to the practice of sense perception.
Without denying the importance of these figures to recent developments in philoso-
phy of religion, the contributors to this volume wish to bring new insights to bear on
issues in religious epistemology. The ideological shifts in recent epistemology are by no
means at the level of small detail. Recent investigations into, for example, contextualist
and pragmatic dimensions of knowledge suggest radically new ways of meeting skepti­cal
challenges and of understanding the relation between the epistemological and prac-
tical environments. New ideas about defeat, testimony, disagreement, probability,

11
For the early definitive discussion, see Plantinga and Wolterstorff (1983). For overviews and criticism,
see Zagzebski (1993), McLeod (1993), and Beilby (2005), among others.
4 Introduction

the a priori, knowledge-how, and the nature of evidence (among others) all have a
potentially revolutionary effect on our understanding of our epistemological place
in the world. The epistemology of religion is a place where such rethinking can find
­fertile application.
The contributions to this volume draw on many of these topics in order to generate
new directions for religious epistemology, and to reinvigorate interest in questions that
have historically enjoyed much attention from philosophers of religion. Though chap-
ters are grouped into four broad categories—historical, formal, social, and rational—
most of them span more than one of these areas.
Charity Anderson, in “Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports,” investigates the ration-
ality of failing to believe miracle reports. For the religious and non-religious alike, it is
common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is also common to dismiss such
testimony outright. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to believe that a miracle
has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain aspects of Hume’s argu-
ment have received extensive discussion, other features of his argument have been
largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, Anderson
argues that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument; she then explores the
aptness of, as well as some limitations to, Hume’s reasoning.
In “Testimony, Error, and Reasonable Belief in Medieval Religious Epistemology,”
Richard Cross considers epistemological issues taken up by some medieval theolo­
gians. Medieval epistemology was not greatly exercised by skeptical worries; but it was
centrally concerned with grades of credence, ranging from Aristotelian science (high-
est degree), through faith, to opinion (lowest degree). Discussion generally focused on
the nature of science, but accounts of faith and opinion are found in specifically theo-
logical contexts. Cross evaluates both the general epistemological theories that emerge,
and their application to religious faith, focusing on disagreements between the two
greatest thinkers, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Aquinas generally adopts a falli-
bilist epistemology, according to which it is often impossible to have good internalist
justification for a belief. In line with this, Aquinas adopts a fully externalist account of
the reasonableness of divine faith: faith is justified if and only if it is caused in the
believer by God. Scotus is more optimistic about the prospects for internalist justifica-
tion generally. Hence, Scotus believes that it is possible to have justified belief even on
the basis of merely human testimony. Thus Cross suggests that the views that the two
thinkers adopt on the theological question are thus wholly parasitic on prior epistemo-
logical commitments.
Billy Dunaway, in “Duns Scotus’s Epistemic Argument against Divine Illumination,”
explores epistemic risk and safety in a late medieval debate over divine illumination
between Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus. Both Henry and Scotus agree that beliefs
that are at risk of being false are not knowledge. For Henry, this condition applies to all
of our beliefs formed by purely natural processes, and he takes this to be an argument
for the conclusion that a kind of divine illumination occurs: we avoid ignorance only
because God intervenes and illuminates our minds with materials that aren’t susceptible
 Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz 5

to such risks. Scotus replies that illumination isn’t the answer to Henry’s skeptical
­worries. Dunaway interprets Scotus as claiming that Henry’s theory aims, but fails, to
avoid skepticism—the conclusion that we can’t have any knowledge on the basis of
sensation. Dunaway shows how this argument can be understood formally on the
basis of an analogy with modal logic, which Scotus explicitly calls attention to.
According to Dunaway, this way of understanding Scotus’s argument points toward
some important refinements that contemporary anti-risk principles in epistemology
will need to account for.
Dani Rabinowitz, in “Knowledge and the Cathartic Value of Repentance,” notes that
the psychology of repentance has dominated the attention of both Jewish scholars and
Western philosophers at the expense of the epistemology of repentance. Rabinowitz
rectifies this lacuna by applying current analytic epistemology to the system of legalism
and clemency found in Judaism. Apart from a limited set of exceptions, every adult Jew
is required to observe the full gamut of relevant biblical and rabbinic laws. Success in
this endeavor is handsomely rewarded and failure severely punished. Despite the appar-
ent bleakness of this legalism, the system licenses a divine pardon in cases where the
offending individual repents. Rabinowitz begins by discussing this clemency, as under-
stood by Moses Maimonides, before moving on to a reading of a Talmudic debate that
introduces an epistemic puzzle regarding repentance. With the epistemic contours of
repentance thus exposed, Rabinowitz then evaluates how Timothy Williamson’s work
on knowledge might undermine the cathartic value of repentance. The results reached
naturally generalize to the cathartic role of repentance in Christianity and Islam.
Isaac Choi, in “Infinite Cardinalities, Measuring Knowledge, and Probabilities in
Fine-Tuning Arguments,” investigates the role that infinities play in two problems:
first, the problem of how to measure how much someone knows, and second, as they
apply in objections to fine-tuning arguments. Choi first answers an objection to the
view that we can measure how much we know by counting true beliefs. Given the two
different ways one can compare sizes of infinite sets, based on the one-to-one cor­
respondence principle and the subset principle respectively, Choi argues that when it
comes to knowledge we should opt for the subset principle. Then he considers the nor-
malizability and coarse-tuning objections to fine-tuning arguments for the existence
of God or a multiverse. Such objections trade on the fact that an infinite range of pos-
sible values for a constant in a law of nature causes problems for talking about the
epistemic probability of that constant falling within a finite life-permitting range. By
applying the lessons learned regarding infinity while discussing the measurement of
knowledge, Choi aims to blunt the force of the normalizability and coarse-tuning
objections to fine-tuning arguments.
Hans Halvorson, in “A Theological Critique of the Fine-Tuning Argument,” presents
a challenge to the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence. The fine-tuning argument
attempts to use data from contemporary physics as evidence for God’s existence. In
particular, contemporary physics suggests that—in absence of any divine intervention—
there was little chance that a universe like ours would come into existence. Halvorson
6 Introduction

raises a theological problem with the fine-tuning argument: since God can choose the
laws of nature, God can set the chances that a universe like ours would come into exist-
ence. He argues, however, that if God could be expected to create a nice universe, then
God could also be expected to set favorable chances for a nice universe. Therefore, he
argues, the fine-tuning argument defeats itself.
In “Fine-Tuning Fine-Tuning,” John Hawthorne and Yoaav Isaacs argue that the
fine-tuning argument is a straightforwardly legitimate argument. The fine-tuning
argument takes certain features of fundamental physics to confirm the existence of
God because these features of fundamental physics are more likely given the existence
of God than they are given the non-existence of God. And any such argument is
straightforwardly legitimate, as such arguments follow a canonically legitimate form
of empirical argumentation. Hawthorne and Isaacs explore various objections to the
fine-tuning argument: that it requires an ill-defined notion of small changes in the laws
of physics, that it over-generalizes, that it requires implausible presuppositions about
divine intentions, and that it is debunked by anthropic reasoning. In each case they
find either that the putatively objectionable feature of the fine-tuning argument is ines-
sential to it or that the putatively objectionable feature of the fine-tuning argument is
not actually objectionable.
Roger White, in “Reasoning with Plentitude,” evaluates the epistemological ramifi-
cations of religious diversity in an infinite universe. Given the wide variety of religious
opinion in the world, and the way these opinions conflict, at most only some fraction
of them can be true. Some see this fact as raising a skeptical problem for religious belief:
after all, given widespread religious disagreement, how can you tell that you are among
the lucky few whose religious views are right? And some may naturally think that if the
universe is infinitely large, this skeptical problem from disagreement only gets worse:
in an infinitely large universe, there are an infinite number of very smart people out
there somewhere who disagree with your views. Yet White argues that the epistemo-
logical impact from the problem of infinite religious diversity is in fact very small.
Max Baker-Hytch, in “Testimony amidst Diversity,” considers the epistemological
credentials of religious beliefs based on testimony given the plurality of religious
traditions. Testimony is a primary means by which many people hold their religious
beliefs; but our world contains an array of mutually incompatible religious traditions
each of which has been transmitted down the centuries chiefly by way of testimony. In
light of the latter it is quite natural to think that there is something defective about
holding religious beliefs primarily or solely on the basis of testimony from a particu-
lar tradition. Baker-Hytch takes up the question of in what that defect might consist:
he first considers whether religious diversity entails that a religious believer’s testimony-
based beliefs are not formed in a suitably epistemically reliable manner even condi-
tional upon the truth of her religion. After casting doubt on this thought, he turns to
the idea that testimony-based beliefs are subject to defeaters in light of awareness of
religious diversity; but he suggests that many such beliefs are not obviously subject
to defeaters. Baker-Hytch’s diagnosis of the problem, rather, is that believers who base
 Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz 7

their ­religious beliefs merely on testimony will be very unlikely to have reflective (that
is, second-order) knowledge even if they possess first-order knowledge; he then
explains why this is a notable shortcoming.
Rachel Elizabeth Fraser, in “Testimonial Pessimism,” explores the varieties of
­testimonial pessimism that are often espoused when it comes to testimony about the
moral, mathematical, aesthetic, or religious domains. Such testimonial pessimisms
maintain that beliefs formed about these domains solely on the basis of testimony
are somehow epistemically defective. Fraser calls testimonial pessimism about the
religious domain—that certain ‘unprepared’ audiences are incapable of epistemically
proper responses to religious testimony—epistemic calvinism. Fraser’s interest is in
exploring (rather than defending) how the epistemic calvinist, and the testimonial
pessimist more generally, might make theoretical space for her view. Fraser argues
that looking at the tacit commitments of some mystical authors suggests a novel way
of making sense of testimonial pessimism: that epistemic calvinism in particular
results from tacit commitments in philosophy language, namely to ‘emotionism’ and
to strong readings of the de re.
In “Experts and Peer Disagreement,” Jennifer Lackey considers the view that
­widespread disagreement among epistemic peers in a domain threatens expertise in
that domain (arguably such a view that has telling consequences for the religious
arena). Lackey sketches the expert-as-authority and the expert-as-advisor models of
expertise, and then argues that the former approach, widely endorsed by philosophers,
renders the problem posed by widespread peer disagreement intractable. Lackey pro-
vides independent reasons for rejecting both this model of expertise and the central
argument offered on its behalf. She then develops the model of expertise in terms of
advice, which not only avoids the problems afflicting the expert-as-authority model,
but also has the resources for a much more satisfying response to the problem of wide-
spread peer disagreement. The notion of expertise at work can affect the epistemic
­status of religious (or irreligious) beliefs acquired by treating experts as advisors rather
than authorities.
Paulina Sliwa, in “Know-How and Acts on Faith,” suggests that practical knowledge
is significant for our understanding of religious belief and the nature of faith more
generally. When we have faith in others, Sliwa argues, we perform acts of faith: we
share our secrets, rely on others’ judgment, refrain from going through our partner’s
emails, or we let our children prepare for an important exam without our interference.
Religious faith, too, is manifested in acts of faith: the practices of attending worship,
singing the liturgy, fasting, embarking on a pilgrimage. Drawing on an analogy in
moral philosophy between morally admirable actions and the nature of virtue, Sliwa
argues that examining what makes a given action an act of faith can tell us about
the nature of faith. This approach reveals that faith is a complex mental state whose
­elements go beyond doxastic states towards particular propositions. It also involves
conative states and—perhaps more surprisingly—knowledge-how. Sliwa draws out
the implications of such know-how for the epistemology of faith: the role of testimony
8 Introduction

and experts, the importance of practices, and what we should make of Pascal’s advice
for how to acquire faith.
Matthew Benton, in “Pragmatic Encroachment and Theistic Knowledge,” draws on
pragmatic encroachment views in epistemology and evaluates their consequences for
knowledge of whether theism or atheism is true. Philosophers endorsing pragmatic
encroachment on knowledge suggest that knowledge is sensitive to practical stakes:
that is, whether one knows can depend in part on the practical costs of being wrong.
When considering religious belief, the practical costs of being wrong about theism
may differ dramatically between the theist (if there is no God) and the atheist (if there
is a God). Benton explores the prospects, on pragmatic encroachment, for knowledge
of theism (if true) and of atheism (if true), given two types of practical costs, namely by
holding a false belief, and by missing out on a true belief. These considerations set up a
more general puzzle of epistemic preference when faced with the choice between two
beliefs, only one of which could become knowledge.
In “Delusions of Knowledge Concerning God’s Existence,” Keith DeRose suspects
that very few people, including very few who would claim to know, actually do know
whether God exists. More generally, according to DeRose, very few controversial philo-
sophical positions are ones concerning which anyone knows whether they are true.
These areas DeRose calls “knowledge deserts,” and he suggests that many people suffer
from delusions of knowledge when they purport to know truths in these domains. But
the religious domain brings special considerations of its own, and DeRose argues that a
variety of factors particular to the religious context contribute support to his suspicion
that few people know whether God exists.
Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri examine “Moderate Modal Skepticism,”
a form of skepticism about metaphysical modality defended by Peter van Inwagen
(1995, 1998) in order to blunt the force of certain modal arguments in the philosophy of
religion. Van Inwagen’s argument for moderate modal skepticism assumes Stephen
Yablo’s (1993) influential world-based epistemology of possibility. Strohminger and
Yli-Vakkuri raise two problems for this epistemology of possibility that undermine van
Inwagen’s argument. They then consider how one might motivate moderate modal
skepticism by relying on a different epistemology of possibility, which does not face those
problems: Williamson’s (2007: ch. 5) counterfactual-based epistemology. Strohminger
and Yli-Vakkuri find that two ways of motivating moderate modal skepticism within
that framework are unpromising; yet they also find a way of vindicating an epistemo-
logical thesis that, while weaker than moderate modal skepticism, is strong enough to
support the methodological moral which van Inwagen wishes to draw.
Finally, the “principle of credulity” is the claim that every belief with which a person
finds himself is a justified belief (one which the believer is justified in having) in the
absence of any evidence that the belief is false (which might take the form of evidence
that the belief has been produced by an unreliable process). Richard Swinburne, in
“Phenomenal Conservatism and Religious Experience,” investigates the senses of
‘belief ’, ‘justified’, and ‘evidence’, in which this principle of credulity is true, and the
 Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne, and Dani Rabinowitz 9

senses in which it is false. He concentrates in particular on the many different senses

in which a belief can be said to be ‘justified’ or ‘rational’; and he applies these results to
religious claims concerning religious experience.

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DeRose, Keith. 2009. The Case for Contextualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Epistemologies of Ignorance, 13–38. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PA RT I
Historical
 1
Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports
Charity Anderson

No one believes every miracle report they hear. At least, no one I know. For religious
and non-religious alike, it is common to disbelieve testimony to the miraculous; it is
also common to dismiss such testimony outright. This chapter investigates the ration-
ality of failing to believe miracle reports. Hume famously argued that it is irrational to
believe that a miracle has occurred on the basis of testimony alone. While certain
aspects of Hume’s argument have received extensive discussion, other features of his
argument have been largely overlooked. After offering a reconstruction of Hume’s
argument, I will argue that epistemic defeat plays a central role in the argument and
explore the aptness of as well as some limitations to Hume’s reasoning. Section 1.1 is
devoted to this task. In section 1.2, I discuss the relevance of the prior likelihood of an
event when evaluating the evidential strength that testimony to such an event p ­ rovides.
Section 1.3 explores some ways the argument is altered if we adopt a non-traditional
picture of evidence and defeat.

1.1 Hume’s Argument

1.1.1 Evaluation of miracle reports
To begin, we need a gloss on the notions of ‘miracle’ and ‘miracle report.’ I will follow
Hume in taking a miracle to be a violation of a law of nature by a divine agent.1 I will
also assume that in general miracles are unlikely events. Miracle reports, as I shall
understand them, are reports that have two components as part of their content: that
an event has occurred and that the event was a miracle. One could be mistaken about
one part of the report without being mistaken about the other. For instance, one might
1
I am aware that there are difficulties involved in formulating a definition of ‘miracle.’ As this issue has
been discussed at length in the literature, and as I have nothing new to add, I will not enter into the nuances
of various conceptions here. Nothing in this chapter depends on any particular definition. For relevant
discussion, see Earman (2000), Fogelin (2003), Flew (1961), and Swinburne (1970). Those concerned
about Hume’s definition of a miracle as a violation of a law of nature may also want to consider Hume’s
footnote (Hume 1975, Enquiries into Human Understanding (EHU), Sec. X, 90), where he claims that if a
feather is raised to the ground with insufficient wind, this counts as a miracle.
14 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

report that a formerly deaf man can now hear, and this might be true, but the event
may not have been the result of a divine agent (perhaps unknown to the reporter the
man underwent ear surgery). Or, suppose a farmer reports an event such as rain in a far
off field. And suppose further that the natural conditions were not right for rain; rather,
God directly brought about the rain, though the farmer is insensitive to this fact. In the
proposed terminology, his report is not a miracle report, even though he reports an
event that is in fact miraculous.
Two lines of reasoning are often appealed to in support of dismissing miracle
reports. The first proceeds along the lines of asking, ‘what are the chances of that
­happening?’ The second relies on an expectation that the testifier is either lying or
­mistaken. Both lines of reasoning play a role in Hume’s argument. In what follows,
I outline Hume’s argument. In order to avoid getting caught up in interpretive details,
I will not insist that my favored interpretation of Hume’s argument is the only coherent
interpretation of the text. Hume is unclear on some points, and this leaves his argu-
ment open to multiple readings. Nevertheless, while I think there is some room for
variation, certain reconstructions strike me as incorrect. For example, any reading of
Hume that takes him to be defining his way to his conclusion (by assuming that
­miracles are by definition impossible and that it is therefore irrational to believe
­miracle reports) is a misreading of the text.2 Unfortunately, it is common to find such
interpretations in the literature.3 A detailed defense of my favored reconstruction
of the text is advanced by Robert Fogelin (2003). Alan Hájek (2008) also offers an
excellent treatment, in my opinion, though neither consider the reasoning in terms of
defeat, as I will here.
Towards the beginning of ‘Of Miracles,’ Hume draws attention to a number of
­factors we take into account when we evaluate testimony:
We entertain suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each
other; when they are but few, or of doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they
affirm; when they deliver their testimony with hesitation, or on the contrary, with too violent
asseverations. (EHU, Sec. X, 89)

This first set of considerations fall into what Fogelin calls the direct test. The direct test
evaluates the quality of the report. The character of the testifier, the manner of his or
her testimony, the number of witnesses, and so on, are all features of the testimony
relevant to our assessment of it by the direct test.4 (While for the most part Hume’s
remarks here could be thought to constitute plausible and rather mundane observa-
tions about our general sensitivity to particular bits of testimony, he is not altogether

2
As others have noted, if this were Hume’s strategy it is hard to make sense of why Hume even bothers
to discuss testimony to the miraculous, and why he sees the need to argue that we ought to reject such
testimony.
3
For a few examples, see Broad (1916–17), Colwell (1982), Fogelin (1990), and Johnson (1999).
4
One way to explicate the direct test is through ratio of likelihoods. The direct test is a result of compar-
ing the Pr (S testifies that p | p) with Pr (S testifies that p | not-p). Thanks to an anonymous referee for this
suggestion.
 Charity Anderson 15

correct in his observations. It is not the case that we are suspicious of any testimony
delivered by only one witness—quite often one witness suffices to establish an event.)
The second method of assessment Fogelin aptly calls the reverse test. This test
­considers how likely it is that the reported event occurred (the probability that it
occurred apart from the testimony offered for it). A poor score on either test can
diminish the evidential force of a particular instance of testimony.5
Evaluation of a miracle report will involve looking at both tests. As Hume recom-
mends, we need to ‘weigh’ both kinds of considerations. At the end of part 1, Hume
indicates that upon hearing a miracle report one ought to consider both types of
evaluation:
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 either deceive or be deceived, or
that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. (EHU, X, 91)

Much of the literature on Hume’s essay concentrates on part I, and often ignores part II
entirely.6 I will maintain that part II is essential to Hume’s argument. The goal of part I
is to establish that in any case of testimony to the miraculous, the reverse test guaran-
tees that the standard for rational belief is high due to the incredibly low prior prob-
ability of any miracle. However, in part I, Hume does not claim that the standard
cannot be met.7 To establish his conclusion, the argument crucially depends on the
reasoning in part II.
In part II, Hume evaluates miracle reports according to the direct test and offers
various reasons for thinking that this kind of testimony dismally fails the direct test.
According to Hume, no past testimony to the miraculous has been of sufficient force
to warrant acceptance. No previous testimony to any miracle, he contends, has the
­qualities required to make the testimony trustworthy—no miracle has been attested to
by a sufficient number of men of education, integrity, and reputation, who have a great
deal to lose if found out to testify incorrectly.8, 9 Hume further points to a natural
­tendency in human nature to readily believe the absurd—a tendency he attributes to
the agreeable passions of surprise and wonder. In light of this bad track record, Hume

5
Since most events have low prior probability, a poor score on the reverse test will require that the like-
lihood of the event be abnormally low.
6
That part I offers a self-contained argument appears to be the majority view, as Fogelin (2003) notes.
In this regard, my reading is at odds with the mainstream interpretation.
7
This might be a tempting interpretation given Hume’s characterization of the situation as one in which
we weigh ‘proof ’ against ‘proof.’ As Hume indicates, a case of proof against proof does not always end in a
stalemate. One side can prove stronger than the other, as he states plainly. For this reason, it strikes me as
misguided to think that Hume takes a ‘proof ’ to involve insurmountable evidence. Instead, I think Hume
is better read as holding that a ‘proof ’ consists of very strong and exceptionless evidence—but evidence that
can nevertheless be outweighed by stronger evidence. See Hambourger (1980) and Millican (2011) for
­further discussion of this issue.
8
See Hume, Of Miracles, part II, 99.
9
McGrew and McGrew (2009) provide a useful discussion of this section of Hume’s essay.
16 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

suggests that all testimony to the miraculous is tainted and thus provides insufficient
evidential force to make it rational to believe a miracle report.
The overall conclusion of Hume’s essay is that ‘no human testimony can have such
force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any system of religion’
(EHU, X, 98). Parts I and II work together to support this conclusion. Part I sets the
standards for rational belief in a miracle report: due to the reverse test, testimony for
miracle reports must be excellent. Though the standards are high, they are in principle
satisfiable. Part II attempts to show that in cases of miracle reports, these standards
have not been met and will not be met. Testimony for miracles is never excellent. In
conjunction, these two methods of evaluation serve to diminish the evidential force of
any miracle report to such an extent that it is never rational to believe that a miracle
occurred on the basis of the report alone, or so Hume maintains.
It is often overlooked that Hume limits the conclusion of his overall argument in
part II. Testimony to a miracle that does not purport to be evidence for a religion
does not suffer, in Hume’s eyes, from the same sort of unhealthy track record (though
it will still be an exceptionally improbable event). Hume takes pains to emphasize
this point:

I beg the limitations here may be remarked, when I say, that a miracle can never be proved,
so as to be the foundation of a system of religion. For I own, that otherwise, there may possibly
be miracles, or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit proof
from human testimony; though, perhaps, it will be impossible to find any such in all the records
of history. (EHU, 99)

Testimony to a non-religious ‘miraculous’ event, such as Hume’s example of eight days

of darkness, is not discounted in the way testimony to a religious miracle is because
testimony to a non-religious miracle does not suffer the same poor track record. It
would be helpful if Hume had said more about the distinction I am attributing to him
between ‘religious miracle’ and ‘non-religious miracle’. Unfortunately, the best indica-
tion of what he has in mind is that a miracle ‘ascribed to any new system of religion’ or
intended as ‘the foundation of a system of religion’ is of the former sort, and the
­example of the eight days of darkness is of the latter kind. I will not make much of this
distinction (and will hereafter use ‘miracle report’ to refer to a religious miracle),
except to note that it gives further support to the thesis that it is not merely the improb-
ability of a miracle that drives Hume’s argument; rather, it is the combination of the
improbability with the poor track record of testimony to these events.
In all this, Hume does not invoke skepticism concerning testimonial knowledge or
justification. He does not claim, as some have thought, that testimony is in general a
weak source of knowledge. His thought is, rather, that some kinds of testimony are of
better quality than other kinds, and that this particular kind of testimony—testimony
to religious miracles—is manifestly unreliable. Furthermore, Hume does not claim
that in a ‘contest’ between the direct and reverse test with respect to a miracle report
the evaluation will always favor the reverse method.
 Charity Anderson 17

As others have observed, Hume overstates just how excellent testimony to a miracle
must be to offset the high standard set by the improbability of the event. But despite the
many strong reactions his claims about the improbability of miracles have provoked,
his bold claims about the bad track record, however controversial, have been less
­discussed. In section 1.1.2, I investigate how a past poor track record of testimony to
some type of event ought to influence present evaluations of token instances of such
testimony.

1.1.2 Track record defeat

Whether the track record for miracle reports is strong or weak is a matter for empir-
ical investigation. I will proceed on the assumption that Hume is right to think the
track record is fairly poor.10 Yet it is not obvious how awareness of a poor past track
record should affect one’s reception of miracle reports now and in the future. I will
suggest that this aspect of reasoning in part II of Hume’s essay takes the form of an
undercutting defeater. Undercutting defeaters reduce justification for a belief one has
by giving one a reason to lose confidence in the source of that belief. (For example, on
common pictures of defeat, someone telling you that the room is illuminated with red
light ­provides you with an undermining defeater for your belief that an object in the
room is red.)
It will help to clarify, in general, how evidence of past unreliability can provide an
undermining-defeater for (or reason to distrust) a particular instance of testimony.
A first approximation of the reasoning is the following:
TRACK RECORD DEFEAT: If type-X testimony has been unreliable, then one is
not justified in believing p when S testifies that p (where this is an instance of type-X
testimony).
This principle is in need of qualification. First, the reasoning applies only in the absence
of additional evidence for p. The principle is false, for example, in cases where S testi-
fies to p but one already knows p.
Second, as stated, the principle does not require that the recipient of the testimony
know or even believe that testimony to an event of type X has been unreliable. On a
common picture of epistemic defeat, one’s justification for a belief is defeated only
when one is aware of the defeater. It seems that Hume tacitly assumes that most people
are aware of the poor track record for miracle reports (or perhaps that any rational
inquirer will very easily become aware of the track record).
A further issue needs flagging. The principle requires classification of events under
a type. But, as is widely observed, events fall under multiple types. The problem of
the reference class is familiar and, some have claimed, intractable.11 Because of this
10
Even if the track record turns out to be quite a bit better than I am supposing, the assumption is harm-
less, given that many people rationally believe the track record is pretty poor. On many standard views, this
suffices for a belief ’s positive epistemic status to be defeated.
11
See Hájek (2006) and Gendler and Hawthorne (2005) for further discussion.
18 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

­ roblem, the principle will not be true in full generality. I’ll assume that in the case of
p
miracle reports we have a rough-and-ready ability to identify the relevant type—an
ability sufficient to make this kind of reasoning rational.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the reasoning will not apply in cases where
one has special reason to trust the testifier. The mere fact that people often lie about
some subject matter is not in itself always a reason to distrust testimony on the subject.
While the fact that people tend to lie about their age and weight might in general
­provide one with a reason to distrust someone’s report of their age or weight, this fact
will not be a reason for disbelief in all cases. For instance, in a hospital setting where a
­correct diagnosis of a patient’s condition depends on an accurate report of his age, a
doctor is rational to trust the patient’s word. Likewise, given the right circumstances, if
a trustworthy friend tells you that he observed a miracle, the fact that many people give
false testimony about miracles will not in itself determine whether you ought to trust
your friend. Your friend’s testimony falls into a more specific reference class than
merely that of type-X testimony.12
These points motivate the following reformulation of the principle:
TRACK RECORD DEFEAT*: In the absence of evidence for S’s reliability and
­evidence for p, if you justifiedly believe that type X-testimony is unreliable, then
when S testifies to p, where this is an instance of type X-testimony, you are not justi-
fied in believing p.
It is instructive to see how this kind of reasoning compares to what many would take
to be clear cases of defeat. Suppose you know you are in a room of people who have a
strong history of lying (we may suppose they lie roughly 45% of the time). If you know
nothing else about the person you are speaking with or about the content of what he
says, it is natural to think you are not justified in believing what he says, even when he
is telling the truth.13
Track record defeat is also similar to finding out you are in barn façade county.
To put a twist on the usual case, suppose you know that you are entering barn façade
county—an area with a high distribution of fake barns. It is natural to think that even if
you are in view of a real barn, your justified belief that there are fake barns in your
immediate surroundings serves as a preemptive defeater for the proposition that you

12
We need to distinguish special evidence about the testifier from mundane evidence. Typically, when
we receive testimony we get some mundane evidence about the speaker—that he is not insane, he is not at
gunpoint, and so on. The principle allows for the kind of mundane evidence that ordinarily accompanies
testimony.
13
A belief may have defeating force in settings where one simply believes rather than knows the relevant
defeater (in this case, that one is in a room of liars). Likewise, defeat may occur when one merely believes
that the kind of testimony in question has a bad track record, rather than justifiedly believes. There is a
choice point here, and Hume does not clearly indicate which he has in mind. As it is evident that Hume
thinks that the track record is in fact unreliable, I articulate the relevant defeat principles using ‘justified
belief.’ But it is worth noting that one could instead rely on principle that requires mere belief, should one
find the corresponding picture of defeat attractive.
 Charity Anderson 19

see a barn.14 Applied to testimony to the miraculous, the bad track record functions as
a preemptive defeater: even if one were to receive testimony that a miracle occurred
from someone who has knowledge that a miracle occurred, given that one already
­possesses a defeater, one fails to come to know that the miracle occurred. Moreover, it
would be irrational to believe that the miracle occurred. In the case of testimony to the
miraculous, here is the relevant principle:
MIRACLE REPORT DEFEAT: In the absence of evidence for S’s reliability and
­evidence for p, if you justifiedly believe that testimony that reports a miracle is unre-
liable, then when S testifies that p (where p is a miracle report) you are not justified
in believing p.
Already these considerations reveal that Miracle Report Defeat will not apply in every
case and thus Hume’s conclusion, insofar as it relies on this reasoning, will not be as
far-reaching as he seems to have expected.15 The antecedent of the principle will not be
satisfied in all cases. Sometimes the hearer will have more information about the
speaker than the mere fact that she reported a miracle, and in such cases the speaker’s
belonging to a general group of testifiers to miracle reports will not guarantee that the
evidential force of the testimony is defeated. Nevertheless, in the absence of special
evidence, believing that some testimony falls under a tainted reference class does
­provide reason to discount the testimony. In this way, the reasoning in Miracle Report
Defeat can provide one with a defeater for testimony to the miraculous.

1.1.3 Dismissible miracle reports

Hume takes the reasoning a step further and claims not only that miracle reports suffer
reduced evidential force, but that testimony to religious miracles is discredited to
such an extent that the right response to such testimony is outright dismissal. Consider
this passage:
But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been
so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a
full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact,
but even reject it without farther examination. . . . As violations of truth are more common in
testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matter of fact; this
must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and make us form a general
resolution, never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered.
(EHU, X, 99)

14
I am aware that the terminology of ‘defeat’ is typically applied to cases where one loses some positive
epistemic status due to the introduction of new evidence or information. But surely if we reverse the order
of evidence, the phenomenon is similar enough to warrant the name. I shall proceed as if preemptive defeat
is a kind of defeat, and those who are dissatisfied with this terminology can supply an alternative name for
the notion I am exploring.
15
Hume claims his argument will be an ‘everlasting check’ on all ‘superstition’ of this kind, and will
‘silence’ advocates of miracles.
20 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

Testimony to religious miracles, according to Hume, is not only unable to justify

believing the report, but ought to be ignored. According to Hume, the key feature of
such testimony that makes it dismissible is its abysmal track record.16 As Fogelin nicely
summarizes, ‘for Hume, it is an empirical fact, amply illustrated by history, that testi-
mony concerning religious miracles is notoriously unreliable. On the basis of this
­general fact about the quality of such testimony, the wise reasoner has ample grounds
for rejecting it.’17 (In this way, part II could be taken on its own to offer a sufficient
­reason to reject a miracle report. But the argument is strongest when part II is joined
with the considerations of part I, and this is how Hume seems to have intended the
argument to be understood.)
Hume maintains that we are always rational to dismiss miracle reports outright.
This claim is too strong, for the reasons discussed above. Nevertheless, dismissing is
often appropriate. Consider two kinds of dismissing attitudes one might have towards
testimony one receives:

STRONG DISMISSIBILITY: testimony that p is strongly dismissible for S when

the testimony provides no evidence for S that p.
WEAK DISMISSIBILITY: testimony that p is weakly dismissible for S when the
­testimony provides negligible evidence for S that p.

A few observations are in order. Both types of dismissibility are limited to settings
where it is not certain on one’s evidence that p prior to receiving the testimony. (In a
framework where one’s evidence consists of all and only the propositions one knows,
this requires that S does not know p.)18 One setting where p is strongly dismissible for S
is when it is certain on S’s evidence that the testifier speaks falsely. It could be certain on
one’s evidence that a testifier speaks falsely in a number of ways. It might be certain
on one’s evidence that not-p; alternatively, it could be certain before the testifier speaks
that the testifier will speak falsely. (This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of the
circumstances under which strong dismissing is appropriate.) In general, situations
where testimony is strongly dismissible testimony will be rare. Thus, on this model,
most cases of dismissing will be cases of weak dismissibility.
It is important to recognize that even when testimony is weakly dismissible it consti-
tutes evidence for S that p—that is, the testimony raises the probability of p for S. In
normal cases, receiving testimony that p will result in some ‘boost’ in one’s evidential

16
Note that the report in the eight days of darkness example is not outright dismissible, according to
Hume, even though the same inclinations to surprise and wonder are present in this case. This suggests
that the primary motivation for outright dismissal, in Hume’s view, is the abysmal track record for religious
miracles—a track record which ‘natural miracles’ do not inherit.
17
See Fogelin (2003: 29).
18
It may be that even when you know p you can strongly dismiss testimony that p. For example, suppose
you would usually believe p more robustly on finding out that S also believes p; in cases where you have
defeating evidence about S, her testimony may fail to have this strengthening effect.
 Charity Anderson 21

probability for p, however small.19 (Note that this is true on both reductionist and
­anti-reductionist views of testimony. These two pictures disagree on how much of a
boost testimony provides in the absence of a special reason to think the testimony reli-
able—the anti-reductionist maintains that the boost is normally enough to make belief
in the report rational and the reductionist denies this. But for both sides of this divide,
given plausible priors and in the absence of other relevant evidence about the testifier
or concerning p, S will get some boost for p upon hearing testimony that p, even if the
boost is negligible.)
Although an exact analysis of ‘negligible’ is not immediately available, a rough gloss
can be given as follows: evidence that p is negligible for S when it provides S with an
increase in evidential probability that is incredibly small in terms of absolute values.20
It is possible that negligible evidence has the effect of doubling (or tripling) one’s
­credence for p, thus providing a significant boost when considered as a ratio, but in
absolute values this counts as a negligible boost.21
It is worth noting that there may be cases of partial dismissing. If S tells me, ‘P and Q,’
and I believe P but give no or negligible credence to Q, I will have partially dismissed S’s
testimony. When I receive a miracle report I may believe one component—that the
event occurred—while dismissing the other—that the event was a miracle.
Even when we are entitled to strongly or weakly dismiss testimony, we may not be
entitled to stop all inquiry into the matter. Sometimes evidence is easily available
­conditional on which p is very likely. Suppose I have evidence that you are just guess-
ing, but there is a small chance that you are an expert and I could easily confirm
whether you are an expert by asking a friend standing next to me. Conditional on you
being an expert, p receives a significant evidential boost. Thus, even if it is appropriate
for me to weakly dismiss your testimony when you tell me p, if I could easily find out

19
For testimony to be evidence for a miracle, it needs to be the case that the probability of the miracle is
higher given the testimony than the prior probability of the miracle. We can confirm that this is the case
using Bayes’ Theorem. It is safe to assume the probability of T given M is high, since it is likely that S will
report the miracle should S observe a miracle. (To screen off any potential worries about this assumption
we can also stipulate that you just asked S about M. Also, even if T given M were not high, in most cases it
will be significantly higher than T given not-M, which is the relevant comparison.) On natural assump-
tions, the prior probability of receiving the testimony is very low, and thus the PR (T | M) > PR (T). Since
the PR (M | T) = [PR (T | M)/PR (T)] * PR (M) it follows that, on these assumptions, PR (M | T) > PR (M).
Thus, in most cases, the testimony will be evidence for the miracle (in the sense of probability raising).
20
One might also want to add the requirement that one’s initial credence is far from the threshold for
belief, and thereby prevents one from switching from non-belief to belief as a result of a negligible boost.
But it is hard to see how to motivate this addition apart from a gerrymandered account. In any case, this is
unlikely to be an issue in the case of a miracle report because one will not start out close to the threshold
for belief.
21
We might wish to limit this specific construal of ‘negligible’ to our present purposes. I do not mean to
suggest that all cases where one’s credence is doubled or tripled are cases of negligible evidence, nor do I
think that only absolute values are important to evaluating the strength of a piece of evidence; rather, for
the specific purpose of evaluating miracle reports—where our credence generally starts out extremely low
and remains extremely low after it is doubled or tripled—it strikes me as fair to characterize such an
increase as ‘negligible.’ Thanks to Alex Pruss here.
22 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

that you are an expert, then I ought not close the matter by merely weakly dismissing.22
By contrast, sometimes one is entitled to dismiss the testimony and not pursue the
matter any further. Call this robust dismissibility. Testimony can be robustly dismiss-
ible for S when there is no easily available evidence such that conditional on that
­evidence S’s probability for p would get a significant boost. In some but not all cases, it
will be overwhelmingly likely that there is no easily available evidence and thus S could
know that probing will not help.
When a miracle report is dismissible, it will rarely be strongly dismissible. Most
instances of miracle reports will result in a small increase in the hearer’s evidential
probability, even if the increase is small. (This point is especially important for replies
to Hume’s argument that rely on receiving testimony from multiple independent
­testifiers. If all miracle reports were strongly dismissible, there would be nothing
to add up.)23

1.2 The Role of Unlikelihood

I have thus far left to one side the issue of the improbability of a miracle. It should be
clear at this point that the improbability of the event alone does not provide sufficient
reason to dismiss a miracle report. We have seen that even Hume does not think that
the improbability of the miraculous does all the work. Excellent testimony can make it
rational to believe an event of this kind occurred (see again Hume’s approval of belief
in the eight days of darkness case). Hume simply denies that we ever have excellent
testimony in the case of a religious miracle. But this is not to suggest that the improb-
ability of the miracle plays no role at all in the rationality of dismissing testimony.
In this section I’ll explore the role of the reverse test.
The first thing to observe is that very unlikely events can be rationally believed on
the basis of fairly ordinary testimony. Improbable events occur regularly and we
believe reports that they have occurred without hesitation. It is improbable that my
friend sat in seat 324 at the ball game last night, yet when she tells me that is where she
sat, I believe her. Similarly, if you toss a fair coin a hundred times, carefully record the
results and report the sequence, I am rational to trust your report, despite the fact that
any sequence is incredibly improbable. Our practice of believing testimony to improb-
able events is evidence that we routinely assume that testifiers have extremely high
reliability. In this way, even casual testimony can offset the ‘weight’ of the improbability
of the unlikely event. Therefore, the thought that ‘the more improbable an event is, the
more evidence you need to rationally believe someone’s testimony to that event’ is
­misguided if taken to mean that rational belief in improbable events on the basis of

22
Given the availability of information through the Internet, there will almost always be something
f­ urther one can do—namely, a quick web search—to access more evidence. As a result, it will not always be
immediately obvious when one is entitled to close off inquiry. Thanks to Alex Pruss here.
23
See Ahmed (2015), Babbage (1838), Earman (2000, 2002), Holder (1998), and Sorensen (1983) for
discussion of responses to Hume’s argument that involve testimony by multiple witnesses.
 Charity Anderson 23

testimony requires a larger number of testifiers, or that the testifiers have especially
impressive credentials.
This is not to suggest that the improbability of the event does not affect the posterior
probability. To think thus would be to run the danger of committing the base-rate
­fallacy. It is a common mistake in ordinary reasoning to neglect the prior probability of
a proposition. For example, when considering whether a patient has a particular rare
disease, the frequency of the disease within the total population is the base rate.
Holding fixed the reliability of a test (that is, holding fixed the false positive rate and the
true positive rate), the chance a patient has the disease when receiving a positive test
will depend on the base rate. The probability of a miracle is relevant to the credence
one ought to assign to the report, but it does not do all the work.
It is helpful to distinguish cases of testimony to events with sheer improbability from
cases of testimony to improbable events where it is also likely that the testifier either
was deceived/mistaken or is trying to deceive. Most people are generally disposed
to trust others when they report their phone number, despite that for any number, it
is unlikely to have that number. Yet, if you tell me that your phone number is 1-234-
456-6789, I am unlikely to believe you but not because the sequence is more improb-
able than any other sequence. Rather, it is because if you were going to give me a false
­number, you are more likely to pick certain sequences than others, and this particular
sequence indicates deception.24 The same applies if you tell me your name is John
Watson and you live at 221 Baker Street.25
The inverse of the base-rate fallacy might be called the evidence-rate fallacy.
Focusing exclusively on the improbability of an event and neglecting to account for the
likelihood of the evidence is to commit the evidence-rate fallacy. In the phone number
case, the probability of receiving testimony that your phone number is 1-234-456-6789
is higher than the probability of less interesting numbers. The likelihood of receiving
the evidence explains why I can gain knowledge of your phone number in the ordinary
case, but not the interesting case.26 Although the evidence-rate fallacy may be less
common than the base-rate fallacy, those who suggest we cannot trust miracle reports
due to the improbability of the miracle alone fall into this mistaken type of reasoning.
Applied to miracle reports, if the likelihood of receiving testimony to a miracle were
extremely low—close to as low as the miracle occurring—we would be rational to trust
the testimony. But, as Hume notes, the probability of receiving testimony to a miracle
is not nearly so low.

24
It is tempting to think there is a direct relationship between the unlikeliness of the event and the prob-
ability that someone would be mistaken about it. But there seems to be no direct relationship. There are
loads of improbable events that, were someone to witness one, the chance that they would make a mistake
is extremely low. For example, supposing I saw an elephant ten feet away from me on High Street in Oxford,
I would be unlikely to make a mistake about this event, however unlikely it is.
25
A clever liar, of course, would not actually lie in this way (the deception would be so obvious as not to
convince). But we need not attribute malicious intent to the speaker; perhaps they are playing a practical
joke or testing the limits of the listener’s gullibility.
26
Thanks to Miriam Schoenfield for helpful conversation on this issue.
24 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

Additionally, some reports indicate that the testifier is mistaken. Suppose a friend
tells you she passed X number of red cars on her drive from Los Angeles to Dallas. The
actual number of red cars she reports might be very likely the number one might see on
such a journey, but it is also overwhelmingly unlikely that she was able to focus on
counting for such a length of time and thus very likely that she missed at least a few red
cars—or, that in poor lighting she mistook a non-red car for a red car.
The reduction of evidential force in the case of testimony to the miraculous does not
depend solely on the improbability of the miracle—we need to look at more factors
than mere improbability. But considerations regarding the track record will not secure
the conclusion Hume wanted: to make all miracle reports dismissible outright. Hume
does not offer us a path to sweeping dismissal—we must take each report on a case-by-
case basis. Nevertheless, we can often rationally dismiss testimony to a miracle report.
Hume is getting something right, though his argument overreaches.

1.3 An Alternative Picture of Defeat

Although the notion of defeat that I have argued is present in Hume’s argument repre-
sents a familiar and standard notion in contemporary epistemology, recently a chal-
lenge has been put to this traditional conception. In this section, I consider whether
adoption of a non-standard approach to defeat makes a difference to the reasoning
advanced in Hume’s argument. This recent departure from the traditional picture of
defeat delivers a surprising result: on this picture, in principle it can be easier to come
to know that a miracle occurred on the basis of a report. The picture is most naturally
wedded to an account of evidence whereby one’s evidence consists of all and only the
propositions one knows (hereafter, E = K). This view of evidence has a further interest-
ing result: on this view, it is potentially easier to be in a position to be entitled to strongly
dismiss testimony to the miraculous.

1.3.1 Unreasonable knowledge and trusting testimony

The phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a specific challenge to externalist posi-
tions, and to strong safety views in particular. Consider the following cases:
RED ILLUMINATION: At a time t1 Suzy comes to know that a certain object is
red based on perception. There is nothing abnormal about her perceptual abilities
or the lighting in the room. At a slightly later time t2 a highly reliable and trust-
worthy authority tells her that the object is illuminated by peculiar red lighting,
lighting that would make objects of any colour look red.
BLACK MARBLE: Fred places exactly one red and one black marble into a bag.
Based on perception at a time t1 he knows that there is a black marble in the bag. He
then starts making draws with replacement, carefully observing the outcome of
each draw. Throughout, he remains certain that the contents of the bag do not
 Charity Anderson 25

change. By a later time t2 he has made two thousand draws, each of which has
produced a red marble.27
In each of these cases, the subject is presented with misleading evidence that the prop-
osition the subject knows is false. In the presence of this misleading evidence, many
find compelling the idea that the subject loses knowledge. Knowledge defeat raises a
problem for safety theorists because they are hard pressed to explain why the subject’s
belief, which was safe at time t1 (prior to receiving the misleading evidence), must be
unsafe at time t2.
In response to challenges of this kind, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (2010) rejects the
idea that the presence of misleading evidence inevitably defeats the subject’s know-
ledge.28 Roughly, her idea is that in cases where a subject initially has knowledge and
sticks to her guns in the face of misleading evidence, she can continue to use a
safe method to retain her initial belief. Of course, as Lasonen-Aarnio notes, in such
cases the ­subject may be criticized for being unreasonable. After all, she exhibits an
epistemically undesirable disposition—a disposition that, in the long run, is not
knowledge-conducive.
Consider how this approach to defeat, together with a few other plausible assump-
tions, might apply in another case: 29
BLACK MARBLES II: You observe 1,000 marbles drawn at random (with replace-
ment) from a bag. All are black. You know there are only five marbles in the bag
(and you retain this knowledge throughout the case). Then someone tells you that
there is a red marble in the bag. In fact there is a red marble in the bag and the testi-
fier knows this.
First, let us look at how the widely received view regarding defeat would respond to
this case. Assume that you know nothing about the testifier. It is extremely unlikely on
your evidence, prior to receiving the testimony, that there is a red marble in the bag. It
is natural to think that in these circumstances you do not come to know there is a red
marble in the bag, even if you believe the testimony. By contrast, on Lasonen-Aarnio’s
picture, combined with some fairly standard assumptions about the transfer of know-
ledge via testimony, you can come to know that there is a red marble in the bag by
believing the testimony. (We also need to assume that trusting the testimony consti-
tutes a safe method. But this stipulation is quite plausible. Consider that if we reverse
the order of evidence—if you received testimony that there was a red ball in the bag
before you made the black marble draws—it would be odd to deny that you could

27
Both of these cases appear in Lasonen-Aarnio (2010).
28
Of course, should the subject stop believing p in light of the misleading evidence, then all relevant
parties agree that she thereby loses knowledge that p; I am bracketing doxastic defeat for the purposes of
this discussion.
29
One of these assumptions is commutativity—the idea that changing the order of evidence does not
make a difference to the credence one ought to have.
26 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

i­ nitially come to know that there is a red marble in the bag by trusting the testimony.
Therefore, there is considerable pressure to think the method is safe.)
A line of thought that some might find appealing is one according to which a subject
employs a different method when one believes p in the presence of counterevidence.
In this way, even if one originally believes p via a safe method, when the presence of
counterevidence enters into the characterization of the method, the subject’s new
method will be unsafe. For example, the relevant method might be something like
‘trusting testimony while dismissing counterevidence.’ This method would not be
knowledge-producing (since generally such a method will produce false belief).
Although this approach would provide a way out of the current problem, and is ­initially
quite plausible, Lasonen-Aarnio considers and rejects this approach on grounds of the
lack of an explanation for why the original safe method is unavailable. There is no
­reason, she claims, that the method must be characterized so as to include the presence
of defeating evidence. (Lasonen-Aarnio acknowledges that believing in the presence of
counter-evidence normally leads to false beliefs, but she maintains that sometimes
generally unsafe methods result in safe beliefs in particular circumstances.)30
In cases of testimony to the miraculous, this kind of approach delivers the result that
it is possible to obtain knowledge that a miracle occurred in a wider range of settings: if
trusting a particular instance of testimony in fact constitutes a safe method, one can
come to know a miracle occurred even if one believes that this kind of testimony has a
bad track record and lacks special evidence that this testifier is reliable.
Although Hume would be unhappy with this result, it is worth noting a point on
which Lasonen-Aarnio and Hume are in agreement: it is unreasonable in such cases
to believe the testimony. Despite possessing knowledge of the miracle report, on
Lasonen-Aarnio’s picture, one is still in some way criticizable for the belief. Due to this
agreement regarding one kind of epistemic criticism a subject earns in such cases, the
two pictures have something important in common.

1.3.2 E = K and dismissing testimony

I conclude with two observations regarding testimony and E = K. The first is that given
E = K, in a case where one trusts a miracle report and comes to know that a miracle has
occurred, the prior improbability of the miracle is completely irrelevant. All known
propositions have probability one on a subject’s evidence, regardless of the probability
each had on the subject’s evidence prior to coming to know.
A further interesting result of an E = K framework, combined with Lasonen-Aarnio’s
picture of defeat, is that one is rational to strongly dismiss testimony more often.31
Consider that given E = K, if there is widespread knowledge that miracles do not

30
See Lasonen-Aarnio (2010) for comprehensive discussion.
31
It is important to recognize that a knowledge-first picture does not require that one adopt a ‘no-
defeat’ approach, though Lasonen-Aarnio provides reason to think that there is some pressure to do so.
E = K is consistent with the idea that knowledge can be defeated, in fact in Williamson (2000) he suggests
that knowledge can be lost in the presence of misleading evidence.
 Charity Anderson 27

­ appen, then many are in a position to know that a testifier speaks falsely whenever a
h
miracle is reported. Since on this picture epistemic probabilities are a result of condi-
tionalizing on your total body of knowledge at any given time, if you know that
­miracles do not occur then this proposition is certain on your evidence; as long as you
do not lose your knowledge that miracles do not occur when you hear a miracle report,
you are entitled to strongly dismiss the report. (One way knowledge that miracles do
not occur might be widespread is if knowledge that God does not exist is widespread.
Although such knowledge is not ruled out by alternative theories of evidence, because
many common models do not hold that all known propositions have probability one
on one’s evidence, knowledge that God does not exist would not make it rational for
one to strongly dismiss a miracle report, on these views.) In this way, E = K delivers the
result that if there is widespread knowledge that miracles do not occur, the entitlement
to strongly dismiss miracle reports is in general much more common. (Obviously, in
the settings identified above one’s entitlement to dismiss the relevant testimony is
­contingent upon it being known that miracles do not occur or God does not exist. If
these propositions are false or unknown, the corresponding result will be thwarted.)
In conclusion, the improbability of a miraculous event has played too central a role
in many recent discussions of Hume’s essay. Despite its centrality in recent discussions
of Hume’s essay, the mere improbability of a miracle cannot defeat testimonial evi-
dence to such an event. Considerations concerning the reliability of the testimony are
crucial to the argument. Although the argument is unable to establish as sweeping a
conclusion as Hume hoped, the reasoning does explain why so many of us dismiss
many miracle reports. Hume’s argument gets something right but overreaches.32

References
Ahmed, A. 2015. “Hume and the Independent Witnesses.” Mind 124: 1013–44.
Babbage, C. 1838. Ninth Bridgewater Treatise. London.
Broad, C. D. 1916–1917. “Hume’s Theory of the Credibility of Miracles.” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society. Vol. 17: 77–94.
Colwell, G. 1982. “On Defining away the Miraculous.” Philosophy 57: 327–37.
Earman, J. 2000. Hume’s Abject Failure: The Argument against Miracles. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Earman, J. 2002. “Bayes, Hume, Price, and Miracles.” Proceedings of the British Academy 113:
91–109.
Flew, A. 1961. Hume’s Philosophy of Belief. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Fogelin, R. 1990. “What Hume Actually Said about Miracles.” Hume Studies 16: 81–7.
Fogelin, R. 2003. A Defense of Hume on Miracles. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

32
I am particularly grateful to John Hawthorne for extensive discussion of the issues in this chapter, and
to Ofra Magidor and Miriam Schoenfield for providing immensely helpful comments on early drafts.
Thanks also to Trent Dougherty, Julien Dutant, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Alex Pruss, and Jeffrey Russell, for
comments and conversation.
28 Hume, Defeat, and Miracle Reports

Gendler, T. and Hawthorne, J. 2005. “The Real Guide to Fake Barns: A Catalogue of Gifts for
your Epistemic Enemies.” Philosophical Studies 124: 331–52.
Hájek, A. 2006. “The Reference Class Problem Is your Problem Too.” Synthese. 156: 563–85.
Hájek, A. 2008. “Are Miracles Chimerical?” In Jonathan Kvanvig (ed.), Oxford Studies in
Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 1, 82–104. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hambourger, R. 1980. “Belief in Miracles and Hume’s Essay.” Noûs 14: 587–604.
Holder, R. 1998. “Hume on Miracles: Bayesian Interpretation, Multiple Testimony, and the
Existence of God.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49: 49–65.
Hume, D. 1975. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding. L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Third
Edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Johnson, D. 1999. Hume, Holism, and Miracles. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lasonen-Aarnio, M. 2010. “Unreasonable Knowledge.” Philosophical Perspectives 24: 1–21.
McGrew, L. and T. McGrew. 2009. “The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the
Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.” In W. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland (eds), The Blackwell
Companion to Natural Theology, 593–662. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Millican, P. 2011. “Twenty Questions about Hume’s ‘Of Miracles’.” Royal Institute of Philosophy
Supplement 68: 151–92.
Sorensen, R. 1983. “Hume’s Scepticism Concerning Reports of Miracles.” Analysis 43 (1): 60.
Swinburne, R. 1970. The Concept of a Miracle. London: Macmillan and Co.
Williamson, T. 2000. Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 2
Testimony, Error, and
Reasonable Belief in Medieval
Religious Epistemology
Richard Cross

My purpose here is to consider the question of the reasonableness of Christian belief

as it was approached by two medieval theologians, Thomas Aquinas and Duns
Scotus. I choose these two thinkers primarily because they provide strikingly con-
trasting accounts, albeit that Scotus directly targets some of the central theses of
Aquinas’s view on Christian faith. But what is notable about the differences is that
they directly track different general epistemological positions accepted by Aquinas
and Scotus for philosophical reasons quite independent of the theological question.
Basically, Aquinas holds that the only ground for Christian belief is divine testimony;
Scotus, contrariwise, holds that Christian belief can be made fully credible simply on
the basis of human testimony. Both thinkers accept a hierarchy of epistemic attitudes—
doubt, suspicion, belief (opinio—mere belief), faith (fides), and knowledge (scientia).
And both thinkers believe that certain cognitive processes, in certain situations, are
liable to produce the wrong belief. But here is the difference: Scotus is much more
optimistic than Aquinas about our capacity to diagnose such malfunctioning cases,
and thus consciously to correct the initial output belief. He is thus in general far
more optimistic about an internalist account of what it is for a belief to be reasonable.
As we shall see, he is, in line with this, quite optimistic in general that scepticism can
be refuted. Aquinas’s approach is very different. He is far more interested than Scotus
is in the question of error, and adopts a globally fallibilist epistemology, believing
that our natural cognitive processes are sometimes tainted by malfunction that we
can neither be aware of nor prevent. Aquinas in effect moves towards an error theory
that would if successful undermine any attempt at providing internalist justification
for religious faith. Religious faith—specifically orthodox Christian belief—is sup-
posed to have the highest degree of certainty (i.e. is supposed to be formed on the
basis of a process that cannot go wrong), and this is why Aquinas holds that the only
ground for Christian belief is divine testimony: only if the relevant faith is caused by
30 Testimony, Error, and Reasonable Belief

God can the process that causes it be maximally reliable. Aquinas in effect analyses
the different epistemic attitudes externalistically, in terms of the reliability of the
various processes that produce the relevant doxastic output. And the divine origin
of that process is not transparent to us. Scotus’s optimism about the prospects for
internalist justification more generally allows him to adopt a view of reasonable
Christian belief grounded merely on human testimony—on evidence that is internally
accessible to us.

2.1 Thomas Aquinas

2.1.1 Epistemology, cognitive theory, and error
Thomas Aquinas summarizes much of the earlier epistemological tradition in distin-
guishing between various epistemic attitudes: doubt, suspicion, belief (opinio—mere
belief), faith (fides), and knowledge (scientia)—in ascending order of epistemic value.1
For non-theological epistemological purposes, we can ignore faith: this is according to
Aquinas a specifically theological category, and I return to it below. Doubt, suspicion,
and belief (opinio) are grouped together as attitudes that ‘lack firm assent (firmam
assensionem)’. Doubt is simple agnosticism: the mind fails either to assent or dissent;
in suspicion the mind inclines more to one side than the other on the basis merely of
‘some slight sign (aliquo levi signo)’; in belief the mind inclines more to one side than the
other, but ‘with fear that the opposite may be the case (cum formidine alterius [partis])’.
Knowledge (scientia) involves ‘firm assent’.2 Aquinas often speaks as though it is
restricted to what we would label the logically necessary.3 Such propositions ‘compel
assent’: 4 it is not possible to grasp the terms without assenting to the proposition. But
Aquinas also holds that various contingent particulars can be known in this way too:
specifically, ones that are accessible introspectively: ‘Knowledge (scientia) of the soul is

1
For this paragraph and the next, see Aquinas, Summa theologiae [= ST] II-II, q. 2, a. 1 c unless otherwise
noted. In translating ‘opinio’ as ‘belief ’ (rather than the more normal but misleading ‘opinion’), I follow an
excellent practice that I think was explicitly initiated by Pickavé (2012, 317). For an account of Aquinas on
faith that is not hugely distant from what I offer here, see Stump (2003, 361–88). See also M. V. Dougherty
(2005), Barat (1992), and Lamont (2004, 53–73 [on Aquinas], 83–9 [on Scotus]). For a good general overview
of the history of some of the philosophical issues involved, see Serene (1982).
2
The terminology is a little fluid: in non-theological contexts, Aquinas treats faith as synonymous with
belief (see Aquinas, Expositio libri posteriorum [= In post. an.] lib. 1, lect. 1, n. 6, a passage I quote below);
in theological contexts he makes a distinction, and treats ‘faith’ as a term of art for the beliefs of Catholic
Christians. Unless I state otherwise, I restrict the term ‘faith’ in this way in what follows.
3
Strictly speaking, Aquinas would say that first principles—the objects of intellectus or intelligentia—
compel assent immediately; syllogistic conclusions from these principles—the objects of scientia strictly
speaking—compel assent only on the basis of the first principles and syllogistic validity: see e.g. In post. an.,
lib. 1, lect. 7, n. 6. My impression is that Aquinas is using ‘scientia’ rather loosely in the passages under dis-
cussion here, to cover all of these cases. I assume that metaphysical necessity is that the opposite of which
includes a contradiction, and that logical necessity is that subset of metaphysical necessity restricted to that
the opposite of which can be known a priori to include a contradiction.
4
Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 2, a. 9 ad 2.
 richard cross 31

most certain, because each person experiences in himself that he has a soul, and that
the activities of the soul are in him.’5 Indeed, Aquinas thinks that these kinds of object
compel assent, in the sense that it is not possible for someone with access to the objects
not to know them. But the objects of knowledge here are not propositions; so, I sup-
pose, strictly speaking, the only propositions that can be the object of knowledge are
logically necessary ones.
The contrasting cases (belief, suspicion, doubt) have as their objects those proposi-
tions about extramental reality that fail to be logically necessary—that is to say, merely
metaphysically necessary ones and contingent ones. These propositions do not compel
in the way that the objects of knowledge do. In accordance with this, Aquinas claims
that there is a sense in which these latter attitudes are voluntary. I do not think that he
holds us to have a choice in assenting and dissenting. Rather, since the object (the
evidence) does not compel assent, some further causal input is required: and the
only available locus for this causal input is some agency on the part of the subject,
namely the will.6
Should we understand these epistemic attitudes internalistically or externalistically?
There has been some debate about this in the literature, and it is hard to say for sure
(though I will make a proposal in a moment). One thing to be clear about: even though
Aquinas is not always very explicit on this issue, this is not because he is unaware of the
distinction. He makes it, for example, in the context of his discussion of the kinds of
certainty that attach to Christian faith:
Certitude can be thought about in two ways. In one way, [something is certain] from the cause
of the certitude: and in this way that which has a more certain cause is said to be more ­certain. . . .
In another way, certitude can be thought about on the part of the subject. And in this way that
which the human intellect more readily grasps (plenius consequitur intellectus hominis) is said to
be more certain.7

5
Aquinas, De veritate, q. 10, a. 8 ad 8 in opp. See too Aquinas, Sententia libri ethicorum, lib. 3, lect. 3, n. 12:
‘It is not possible to be in ignorance as to who it is who acts, because in this way one would be in ignorance
about oneself, which is impossible.’
6
See Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 1, a. 4 c. In general, Aquinas holds that any conscious human agency is to be
ascribed to the will as the executive power. In the case of assent to knowledge, the intellect turns out to be
passive because coerced. But in other cases—in which some input from the agent is required—it follows
straightforwardly from Aquinas’s action theory that the input must come from the will. Contingency, if it
arises at all, is located not in the will but in the intellect: ‘Reason has a power to opposites in relation to
contingent things, as is clear in dialectical syllogisms and rhetorical persuasions. But particular operations
are contingent, and therefore the judgment of reason is related to diverse things and is not determined to
one’: ST I, q. 83, a. 1 c. I suspect that Aquinas does not mean to suggest here that there is a contingent rela-
tion between this given informational input and this given epistemic output. Rather, what he means is that
an intellect in different circumstances could reasonably respond in different ways to the same informational
input. For example, it might be reasonable to respond positively to the testimony of someone reputable, but
negatively to the same testimony offered by someone dishonest. But I am not sure about this. At any rate, I do
not think Aquinas need be committed to this as a universal rule governing all cases of belief—since, after
all, the only general claim he makes has to do with the causal role of the will, not with the contingency of
reasons. Note that this interpretation of the role of the will in belief is rather different from the one pro-
posed by Stump (2003, 363–4), which seems insufficiently general.
7
Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 4, a. 8 c.
32 Testimony, Error, and Reasonable Belief

The first sense of ‘certitude’ is externalist: it is the epistemic quality attaching to outputs
that reliably track inputs—here, a cause that is more ‘certain’ reliably produces the
appropriate belief-output. The second is internalist and psychological: it is the felt level
of credence attaching to a belief. As we shall see later in the chapter, Aquinas is discuss-
ing here a case in which these two kinds of certitude can come apart: a belief can
be maximally certain in the first way—maximally reasonable from an externalist
perspective—without attracting a high credence level.
Why are certain propositions the objects of knowledge, and others the objects
merely of belief? The reason (the only one Aquinas offers) is that there is always scope
for error in the latter cases. Aquinas explicitly addresses the knowledge/belief distinc-
tion in the context of the possibility of error only in the case of testimonial evidence.8
In this context, he distinguishes two kinds of certainty: the kind of certainty that is had
‘without fear of error’, and what he labels ‘probable certainty’: an epistemic quality
attaching to beliefs that are true ‘in the greater number of cases’, even though they may
turn out to be false ‘in the minority’.9 The context of the discussion is the varying
degrees of credibility attaching to the evidence of greater or lesser numbers of wit-
nesses in a legal case. Human acts are ‘contingent and variable’, and for this reason in
such cases the kind of credibility that attaches to necessary truths—certainty ‘without
fear of error’—is unattainable. But this does not render it unreasonable to adopt a par-
ticular belief—e.g. about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Rather, in such cases
‘the certitude of probability suffices’.10 Aquinas holds that the credibility of witnesses is
increased by (among other things) their number, consistency, moral standing, intel-
lectual capacities, and lack of evident bias or interest.11
It is the fact that the beliefs that are formed on the basis of testimony are true ‘for the
most part’—and thus liable to undiagnosed error in a minority of cases—that gets them
their lower epistemic status. And I think that this explains his views on the lower
epistemic status of all of those sorts of natural cognitive outputs that fall short of scientia.
As Aquinas sees it, the process of forming beliefs merely on the basis of sensation
involves the following stages: sensation; a sequence of sensory ‘judgments’ about the
content of the sensation; (propositional) belief about the content of the sensation.
Aquinas implies that error can occur at all of these stages—and hence that it is not pos-
sible for the deliverances of the senses to have the kind of reliability that attaches to
knowledge in his technical sense. Indeed, operations further along in the causal process
are more apt to malfunction than those earlier in the process. I examine the various
features of the process in turn.
Each of the five external senses has a proper object, the feature of a material object that
explains the fact that it can be sensed under a particular sensory modality—­colour, for

8
For Aquinas on testimony, see Siebert (2010).    9 Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 70, a. 2 c.
10
Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 70, a. 2 c.
11
Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 70, a. 3, c. As a point of terminology: Aquinas does not usually talk about reasonable
(rationabilis) belief, but rather about probable (probabilis) belief. (Later, Scotus is happy to use the term
‘reasonable’, as well as ‘probable’, about beliefs.)
 richard cross 33

example, in the case of sight, and sound in the case of hearing.12 The possibility of error
at this bottom-most step is real but minimal:
A sense is always true with respect to its proper sense objects, or else has little falsity. For just
as natural powers are deficient with respect to their proper operations only on rare occasions
(in minori parte), because of some damage, so too the senses are deficient with respect to a true
judgment concerning their proper objects only on rare occasions, because of some damage to
the organ. This is evident in the case of the feverish, to whom sweet things seem bitter because
of the tongue’s disorder.13

Aquinas talks about ‘judgment’ in this case. But he is evidently not talking about some-
thing propositional. He is talking about a sub-group of what we would call ‘seemings’:
sensory seemings. Aquinas sometimes talks about these kinds of seemings as ‘certain’:
‘we function with certainty regarding some actual object . . . when sensing it.’14 But it
turns out that even occurrent sensations are subject to error. When the organ does go
wrong, the error consists in the object’s form being
received in the sense differently from the way in which it exists in the sense object. (I mean
differently with respect to species, not with respect to matter—for example, if the flavour of
something sweet were received on the tongue as though it were bitter. With respect to matter
the sense always receives differently from the way in which the sense object has it.)15

All cognitive acts, according to Aquinas, consist in the form of the external object
being somehow ‘received’ in the cognizer without making the receiver an instance of
the relevant kind. A form F-ness, that is to say, can be received in two ways: in matter,
such that it constitutes with matter an instance of F-ness; or in some kind of cognitive
receptor, such that it fails to constitute the receptor as an instance of F-ness.16 In the
passage just quoted, the ‘species’ here is something like the content of the perception:
error occurs when the content does not match up to the object.
Now, the five senses are capable of sensing material substances as such, but only
under the senses’ proper objects. As Aquinas puts it, following Aristotle, material sub-
stances are sensible only ‘accidentally’, in the sense that the properties under which the
object is sensed are accidental to it.17 Substances are in this sense the per accidens
objects of the senses. Not only are they the per accidens objects of the external senses;
Aquinas holds that they are the per accidens objects of some inner non-intellectual

12
See e.g. Aquinas, De anima, q. 13 c; Aquinas, Sententia libri de anima [= In de an.], lib. 2, lect. 13 nn.
384–5.
13
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 3, lect. 6, n. 661 (Pasnau 1999, 338).
14
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 3, lect. 6, n. 646 (Pasnau 1999, 331); see too In de an., lib. 2, lect. 13, n. 384.
15
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 3, lect. 6, n. 664 (Pasnau 1999, 339).
16
For discussion of this, see Cross (2014, 33). (For convenience, I ignore here the question of the so-
called species in medio.)
17
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 2, lect. 13, n. 387. In what follows, I ignore the so-called ‘common sense objects’
(see Aquinas, In de an., lib. 2, lect. 13, n. 386), partly for reasons of space, and partly because what Aquinas
says does not add anything much of philosophical interest to what he says about the proper and per accidens
objects of sense.
34 Testimony, Error, and Reasonable Belief

cognitive power responsible for causing an inner representation of the substance

as a particular of a given kind—variously the so-called ‘cogitative’ power18 and the
imagination.19 This kind of cognition is merely perceptual awareness, not a propositional
judgment or belief.
Aquinas discusses the possibility of error in the case both of the per accidens object
of the external senses and of the object of the imagination. On the external senses,
Aquinas at one point concedes that an external sense can sense the per accidens objects
of sense, but that when they do so the sensation is subject to considerable danger of
malfunction.20 Elsewhere, however, Aquinas writes in ways that suggest that the exter-
nal senses, in the absence of any further power, are necessarily incapable of avoiding
deception:

With respect to per accidens . . . sense objects, the senses are deceived. Sight is in this way
deceived if a human being wishes to make a judgment through sight about what that colored
thing is or where it is. Someone is likewise deceived who wishes to make a judgment through
hearing about what it is that makes the sound.21

Aquinas devotes considerable time to malfunction in the imagination. And this turns
out to be important, because the imagination turns out to be centrally relevant to our
intellectual, propositional, beliefs about particulars. He supposes that the imagination
is subject to the following kinds of processes: picturing the proper sense objects in the
presence of such objects; picturing the proper sense objects in the absence of such
objects; picturing substances (per accidens sense objects) in the presence of such
objects; and picturing substances in their absence. In each case, the picturing is causally
dependent on some initial sensation:

The movement of imagination that is brought about by an act of sense different from those . . .
senses [viz. of proper and per accidens objects] in the way that an effect differs from its
cause.22

Because of this causal dependence, the imagination is more prone to deception than
the external senses:

18
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 2, lect. 13, nn. 396–8 (Pasnau 1999, 208). The contrast with non-human
animals is instructive: they sense an individual ‘not in terms of its being under a common nature, but only
in terms of its being the end point or starting point of some action or affection’: Aquinas, In de an., lib. 2,
lect. 13, n. 398 (Pasnau 1999, 208–9).
19
The reasons for this terminological slippage have to do with the context of the discussion, as part of a
commentary on Aristotle’s De anima. Aristotle does not have the cogitative power—this is something
derived by Aquinas from Avicenna—and the imagination (phantasia) in Aquinas’s reading of Aristotle
here does something like the work that the cogitative power does in Aquinas and Avicenna.
20
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 3, lect. 6, n. 662 (Pasnau 1999, 338).
21
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 2, lect. 13, n. 385 (Pasnau 1999, 204). Pasnau helpfully comments: ‘The point
here may be that the senses are liable to deception when they make judgments about per accidens . . . sense
objects. Or Aquinas may be saying something rather different: that the senses will be deceived if they
attempt, without the aid of the higher sensory and intellective powers, to make judgments that go beyond
color and sound—judgments, for instance, about what and where the object is’ (Pasnau 1999, 204–5, n. 1).
22
Aquinas, In de an., lib. 3, lect. 6, n. 664 (Pasnau 1999, 338–9, slightly altered).
Another random document with
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And yet it would take a completely dispassionate observer to tell
which was worse; to ruin a man's body or to ruin a man's life.

The man in question was oblivious to these plans on his future. He

was standing before a complicated maze of laboratory glassware
and a haywire tangle of electronic origin. He looked it over in
puzzlement, and his lack of enthusiasm bothered the other man.
Wesley Farrell thought that his boss would have been volubly glad to
see the fruits of his labor.
"No doubt it's wonderful," smiled Channing. "But what is it, Wes?"
"Why, I've been working on an alloy that will not sustain an arc."
"Go on. I'm interested even though I do not climb the chandelier and
scream, beating my manly chest."
"Oil switches are cumbersome. Any other means of breaking contact
is equally cumbersome if it is to handle much power. My alloy is non-
arcing. It will not sustain an arc, even though the highest current and
voltage are broken."
"Now I am really interested," admitted Channing. "Oil switches in a
spaceship are a definite drawback."
"I know. So—here we are."
"What's the rest of this stuff?" asked Channing, laying a hand on the
glassware.
"Be careful!" said Farrell in concern. "That's hot stuff."
"Oh?"
"In order to get some real voltages and currents to break without
running the main station bus through here, I cooked this stuff up. The
plate-grilleworks in the large tubes exhibit a capacity between them
of one microfarad. Empty, that is, or I should say precisely point nine
eight microfarads in vacuuo. The fluid is of my own devising,
concocted for the occasion, and has a dielectric constant of thirteen
times ten to the sixth power. It—"
"Great Howling Rockets!" exploded Channing. "That makes the
overall capacity equal to thirteen farads!"
"Just about. Well, I have the condenser charged to three kilovolts,
and then I discharge it through this switch made of the non-arcing
alloy. Watch! No, Don, from back there, please, behind this safety
glass."
Channing made some discomforting calculations about thirteen
farads at three thousand volts and decided that there was definitely
something unlucky about the number thirteen.
"The switch, now," continued Farrell, as though thirteen farads was
just a mere drop in the bucket, "is opened four milliseconds after it is
closed. The time-constant of the discharging resistance is such that
the voltage is zero point eight three of its peak three thousand volts,
giving a good check of the alloy."
"I should think so," groused Channing. "Eighty-three percent of three
thousand volts is just shy of twenty-five hundred volts. The current of
discharge passing through a circuit that will drop the charge in a
thirteen farad condenser eighty-three percent in four milliseconds will
be something fierce, believe me."
"That is why I use the heavy busbars from the condenser bank
through the switch."
"I get it. Go ahead, Wes. I want to see this non-arcing switch of yours
perform."
Farrell checked the meters, and then said: "Now!" and punched the
switch at his side. Across the room a solenoid drove the special alloy
bar between two clamps of similar metal. Almost immediately, four-
thousandths of a second later, to be exact, the solenoid reacted
automatically and the no-arc alloy was withdrawn. A minute spark
flashed briefly between the contacts.
"And that is that," said Channing, dazed by the magnitude of it all,
and the utter simplicity of the effects. "But look, Wes, may I ask you
a favor? Please discharge that infernal machine and drain that
electrolyte out. Then make the thing up in a tool-steel case and seal
it. Also hang on busbars right at the plates themselves, and slap a
peak-voltage fuse across the terminals. One that will open at
anything above three thousand volts. Follow me?"
"I think so. But that is not the main point of interest—"
"I know," grinned Channing mopping his forehead. "The non-arc is.
But that fragile glassware makes me as jittery as a Mexican jumping
bean."
"But why?"
"Wes, if that glassware fractures somewhere, and that electrolyte
drools out, you'll have a condenser of one microfarad—charged to
thirteen million times three thousand volts. Or, in nice, hollow, round
numbers, forty billion volts! Of course, it won't get that far. It'll arc
across the contacts before it gets that high, but it might raise
particular hell on the way out. Take it easy, Wes. We're seventy
million-odd miles from the nearest large body of dirt, all collected in a
little steel bottle about three miles long and a mile in diameter. I'd
hate to stop all interplanetary communications while we scraped
ourselves off of the various walls and treated ourselves for electric
shock. It would—the discharge itself, I mean—raise hell with the
equipment anyway. So play it easy, Wes. We do not permit certain
experiments out here because of the slow neutrons that sort of
wander through here at fair density. Likewise, we cannot permit
dangerous experiments. And anything that includes a dangerous
experiment must be out, too."
"Oh," said Wes. His voice and attitude were altogether crestfallen.
"Don't take it so hard, fella," grinned Channing. "Any time we have to
indulge in dangerous experiments, we always do it with an assistant
—and in one of the blister-laboratories. But take that fragile
glassware out of the picture, and I'll buy it," he finished.
Walt Franks entered and asked what was going on.
"Wes was just demonstrating the latest equipment in concentrated
deviltry," smiled Channing.
"That's my department," said Walt.
"Oh, it's not as bad as your stuff," said Channing. "What he's got
here is an alloy that will break several million watts without an arc.
Great stuff, Walt."
"Sounds swell," said Walt. "Better scribble it up and we'll get a
patent. It sounds useful."
"I think it may bring us a bit of change," said Channing. "It's great
stuff, Wes."
"Thanks. It annoyed me to see those terrific oil-breakers we have
here. All I wanted to do was to replace 'em with something smaller
and more efficient."
"You did, Wes. And that isn't all. How did you dream up that high-
dielectric?"
"Applied several of the physical phenomena."
"That's a good bet, too. We can use several fluids of various
dielectric constants. Can you make solids as well?"
"Not as easily. But I can try—?"
"Go ahead and note anything you find above the present, listed
compounds and their values."
"I'll list everything, as I always do."
"Good. And the first thing to do is to can that stuff in a steel case."
"It'll have to be plastalloy."
"That's as strong as steel and non-conducting. Go ahead."
Channing led Franks from the laboratory, and once outside
Channing gave way to a session of the shakes. "Walt," he said
plaintively, "take me by the hand and lead me to Joe's. I need some
vitamins."
"Bad?"
"Did you see that glassblower's nightmare?"
"You mean that collection of cut glass?" grinned Walt. "Uh-huh. It
looked as though it were about to collapse of its own dead weight!"
"That held an electrolyte of dielectric constant thirteen times ten to
the sixth. He had it charged to a mere three thousand volts. Ye gods,
Walt. Thirteen farads at three KV. Whew! and when he discharged it,
the confounded leads that went through the glass sidewalls to the
condenser plates positively glowed in the cherry red. I swear it!"
"He's like that," said Walt. "You shouldn't worry about him. He'll have
built that condenser out of good stuff—the leads will be alloys like
those we use in the bigger tubes. They wouldn't fracture the glass
seals no matter what the temperature difference between them and
the glass was. Having that alloy around the place—up in the tube
maintenance department they have a half ton of quarter-inch rod—
he'd use it naturally."
"Could be, Walt. Maybe I'm a worry wart."
"You're not used to working with his kind."
"I quote: 'Requiring a high voltage source of considerable current
capacity, I hit upon the scheme of making a super-high capacity
condenser and discharging it through my no-arc alloy. To do this it
was necessary that I invent a dielectric material of K equals thirteen
times ten to the sixth.' Unquote."
"Wes is a pure scientist," reminded Walt. "If he were investigating the
electrical properties of zinc, and required solar power magnitudes to
complete his investigation, he'd invent it and then include it as an
incidental to the investigation on zinc. He's never really understood
our recent divergence in purpose over the power tube. That we
should make it soak up power from Sol was purely incidental and
useful only as a lever or means to make Terran Electric give us our
way. He'd have forgotten it, I'll bet, since it was not the ultimate goal
of the investigation."
"He knows his stuff, though."
"Granted. Wes is brilliant. He is a physicist, though, and neither
engineer nor inventor. I doubt that he is really interested in the
physical aspects of anything that is not directly concerned with his
eating and sleeping."
"What are we going to do about him?"
"Absolutely nothing. You aren't like him—"
"I hope not!"
"And conversely, why should we try to make him like you?"
"That I'm against," chimed in a new voice. Arden Channing took
each man by the arm and looked up on either side of her, into one
face and then the other. "No matter how, why, when, who, or what,
one like him is all that the solar system can stand."
"Walt and I are pretty much alike."
"Uh-huh. You are. That's as it should be. You balance one another
nicely. You couldn't use another like you. You're speaking of Wes
Farrell?"
"Right."
"Leave him alone," said Arden sagely. "He's good as he is. To make
him similar to you would be to spoil a good man. He'd then be
neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. He doesn't think as you do, but instead
proceeds in a straight line from remote possibility to foregone
conclusion. Anything that gets needed en route is used, or
gadgeteered, and forgotten. That's where you come in, fellows.
Inspect his by-products. They may be darned useful."
"O.K. Anybody care for a drink?"
"Yup. All of us," said Arden.
"Don, how did you rate such a good-looking wife?"
"I hired her," grinned Channing. "She used to make all of my
stenographic mistakes, remember?"
"And gave up numerous small errors for one large one? Uh-huh, I
recall. Some luck."
"It was my charm."
"Baloney. Arden, tell the truth. Didn't he threaten you with something
terrible if you didn't marry him?"
"You tell him," grinned Channing. "I've got work to do."

Channing left the establishment known as Joe's; advertised as the

"Best bar in twenty-seven million miles, minimum," and made his
way to his office, slowly. He didn't reach it. Not right away. He was
intercepted by Chuck Thomas, who invited him to view a small
experiment. Channing smiled and said that he'd prefer to see an
experiment of any kind to going to his office, and followed Chuck.
"You recall the gadget we used to get perfect tuning with the alloy-
selectivity transmitter?"
"You mean that variable alloy disk all bottled up and rotated with a
selsyn?" asked Don, wondering what came next. "Naturally I
remember it. Why?"
"Well, we've found that certain sub-microscopic effects occur with
inert objects. What I mean is this: Given a chunk of cold steel of
goodly mass and tune your alloy disk to pure steel, and you can get
a few micro-microamperes output if the tube is pointed at the object."
"Sounds interesting. How much amplification do you need to get this
reading and how do you make it tick?"
"We run the amplifier up to the limit and then sweep the tube across
the object sought, and the output meter leaps skyward by just
enough to make us certain of our results. Watch!"
Chuck set the tube in operation and checked it briefly. Then he took
Don's hand and put it on the handle that swung the tube on its
gimbals. "Sort of paint the wall with it," he said. "You'll see the
deflection as you pass the slab of tool steel that's standing there."
Channing did, and watched the minute flicker of the ultra-sensitive
meter. "Wonderful," he grinned, as the door opened and Walt Franks
entered.
"Hi, Don. Is it true that you bombarded her with flowers?"
"Nope. She's just building up some other woman's chances. Have
you seen this effect?"
"Yeah—it's wonderful, isn't it?"
"That's what I like about this place," said Chuck with a huge smile.
"That's approximately seven micro-microamperes output after
amplification on the order of two hundred million times. We're either
working on something so small we can't see it, or something so big
we can't count it. It's either fifteen decimal places to the left or to the
right. Every night when I go home I say a little prayer. I say: 'Dear
God, please let me find something today that is based upon unity, or
at least no more than two decimal places,' but it is no good. If He
hears me at all He's too busy to bother with things that the human
race classifies as 'One.'"
"How do you classify resistance, current, and voltage?" asked
Channing, manipulating the tube on its gimbals and watching the
effect.
"One million volts across ten megohms equals one hundred
thousand microamperes. That's according to Ohm's Law."
"He's got the zero-madness, too," chuckled Walt. "It obtains from
thinking in astronomical distances, with interplanetary coverages in
watts, and celestial input, and stuff like that. Don, this thing may be
handy some day. I'd like to develop it."
"I suggest that couple of stages of tube-amplification might help.
Amplify it before transduction into electronic propagation."
"We can get four or five stages of sub-electronic amplification, I
think. It'll take some working."
"O.K., Chuck. Cook ahead. We do not know whither we are heading,
but it looks darned interesting."
"Yeah," added Walt, "it's a darned rare scientific fact that can't be
used for something, somewhere. Well, Don, now what?"
"I guess we now progress to the office and run through a few reams
of paper work. Then we may relax."
"O.K. Sounds good to me. Let's go."

Hellion Murdoch pointed to the luminous speck in the celestial globe.

His finger stabbed at the marker button, and a series of faint
concentric spheres marked the distance from the center of the globe
to the object, which Murdoch read and mentioned: "Twelve thousand
miles."
"Asteroid?" asked Kingman.
"What else?" asked Murdoch. "We're lying next to the Asteroid Belt."
"What are you going to do?"
"Burn it," said Murdoch. His fingers danced upon the keyboard, and
high above him, in the dome of the Black Widow, a power intake
tube swiveled and pointed at Sol. Coupled to the output of the power
intake tube, a power output tube turned to point at the asteroid. And
Murdoch's poised finger came down on the last switch, closing the
final circuit.
Meters leaped up across their scales as the intangible beam of solar
energy came silently in and went as silently out. It passed across the
intervening miles with the velocity of light squared, and hit the
asteroid. A second later the asteroid glowed and melted under the
terrific bombardment of solar energy directed in a tight beam.
"It's O.K.," said Hellion. "But have the gang build us three larger
tubes to be mounted turretwise. Then we can cope with society."
"What do you hope to gain by that? Surely piracy and grand larceny
are not profitable in the light of what we have and know."
"I intend to institute a reign of terror."
"You mean to go through with your plan?"
"I am a man of my word. I shall levy a tax against any and every ship
leaving any spaceport. We shall demand one dollar solarian for
every gross ton that lifts from any planet and reaches the planetary
limit."
"How do you establish that limit?" asked Kingman interestedly.
"Ironically, we'll use the Channing Layer," said Murdoch with dark
humor. "Since the Channing Layer describes the boundary below
which our solar beam will not work. Our reign of terror will be
identified with Channing because of that; it will take some of the
praise out of people's minds when they think of Channing and Venus
Equilateral."
"That's pretty deep psychology," said Kingman.
"You should recognize it," smiled Murdoch. "That's the kind of stuff
you legal lights pull. Mention the accused in the same sentence with
one of the honored people; mention the defendant in the same
breath with one of the hated people—it's the same stunt. Build them
up or tear them down by reference."
"You're pretty shrewd."
"I am," agreed Murdoch placidly.
"Mind telling me how you found yourself in the fix you're in?"
"Not at all. I've been interested for years in neurosurgery. My
researches passed beyond the realm of rabbits and monkeys, and I
found it necessary to investigate the more delicate, more organized,
the higher-strung. That means human beings—though some of them
are less sensitive than a rabbit and less delicate than a monkey."
Murdoch's eyes took on a cynical expression at this. Then it passed
and he continued: "I became famous, as you know. Or do you?"
Kingman shook his head.
"I suppose not. I became famous in my own circle. Lesser neuro-
surgeons sent their complex cases to me; unless you were complex,
you would never hear of Allison Murdoch. Well, anyway, some of
them offered exciting opportunities. I—frankly, experimented. Some
of them died. It was quite a bit of cut and try because not too much
has been written on the finer points of the nervous system. But there
were too few people who were complex enough to require my
services, and I turned to clinical work, and experimented freely."
"And there you made your mistake?"
"Do you know how?"
"No. I imagine that with many patients you exceeded your rights
once too often."
"Wrong. It is a funny factor in human relationship. Something that
makes no sense. When people were paying me three thousand
dollars an hour for operations, I could experiment without fear. Some
died, some regained their health under my ministrations. But when I
experimented on charity patients, I could not experiment because of
the 'Protection' given the poor. The masses were not to be guinea
pigs. Ha!" laughed Murdoch, "only the rich are permitted to be
subjects of an experiment. Touch not the poor, who offer nothing.
Experiment upon those of intellect, wealth, fame, or anything that
sets them above the mob. Yes, even genius came under my knife.
But I couldn't give a poor man a fifty-fifty chance at his life, when the
chances of his life were less than one in ten. From a brilliant man,
operating under fifty-fifty chances for life, I became an inhuman
monster that cut without fear. I was imprisoned, and later escaped
with some friends."
"And that's when you stole the Hippocrates and decided that the
solar system should pay you revenge money?"
"I would have done better if I had not made that one mistake. I forgot
that in the years of imprisonment I fell behind in scientific knowledge.
I know now that no one can establish anything at all without technical
minds behind him."
Kingman's lips curled. "I wouldn't agree to that."
"You should. Your last defeat at the hands of the technicians you
scorn should have taught you a lesson. If you had been sharp, you
would have outguessed them; out-engineered them. They, Kingman,
were not afraid to rip into their detector to see what made it tick."
"But I had only the one—"
"They knew one simple thing about the universe. That rule is that if
anything works once, it may be made to work again." He held up his
hand as Kingman started to speak. "You'll bring all sorts of cases to
hand and try to disprove me. You can't. Oh, you couldn't cause a
quick return of the diplodocus, or re-enact the founding of the solar
government, or even re-burn a ton of coal. But there is other carbon,
there will be other governmental introductions and reforms, and
there may be some day the rebirth of the dinosaur—on some planet
there may be carboniferous ages now. Any phenomena that is a true
phenomena—and your detector was definite, not a misinterpretation
of effect—can be repeated. But, Kingman, we'll not be out-
engineered again."
"That I do believe."
"And so we will have our revenge on Venus Equilateral and upon the
system itself."
"We're heading home now?"
"Right. We want this ship fitted with the triple turret I mentioned
before. Also I want the interconnecting links between the solar intake
and the power-projectors beefed up. When you're passing several
hundred megawatts through any system, losses of the nature of
.000,000,1% cause heating to a dangerous degree. We've got to cut
the I²R losses. I gave orders that the turret be started, by the way. It'll
be almost ready when we return."
"You gave orders?" said Kingman.
"Oh, yes," said Hellion Murdoch with a laugh. "Remember our last
bout with the stock market? I seem to have accumulated about forty-
seven percent. That's sufficient to give me control of our company."
"But ... but—" spluttered Kingman. "That took money—"
"I still have enough left," said Murdoch quietly. "After all, I spent
years in the Melanortis Country of Venus. I was working on the
Hippocrates when I wasn't doing a bit of mining. There's a large vein
of platiniridium there. You may answer the rest."
"I still do not get this piracy."
Murdoch's eyes blazed.
"That's my interest. That's my revenge! I intend to ruin Don Channing
and Venus Equilateral. With the super turret they'll never be able to
catch us, and we'll run the entire system."
Kingman considered. As a lawyer, he was finished. His last try at the
ruination of the Venus Equilateral crowd by means of pirating the
interplanetary communications beam was strictly a violation of the
Communications Code. The latter absolutely prevented any man or
group of men from diverting communications not intended for them
and using these communications for their own purpose. His defense
that Venus Equilateral had also broken the law went unheard. It was
pointed out to him that Venus Equilateral tapped his own line, and
the tapping of an illegal line was the act of a communications agent
in the interest of the government. He was no longer a lawyer, and, in
fact, he had escaped a long jail term by sheer bribery.
He was barred from legal practice, and he was barred from any
business transactions. The stock market could be manipulated, but
only through a blind, which was neither profitable nor safe.
His holdings in Terran Electric were all that stood between him and
ruin. He was no better off than Murdoch, save that he was not
wanted.
But—
"I'm going to remain on Terra and run Terran Electric like a model
company," he said. "That'll be our base."
"Right. Except for a bit of research along specified lines, you will do
nothing. Your job will be to act apologetic for your misdeeds. You will
grovel on the floor before any authority, and beseech the legal
profession to accept you once more. I will need your help, there. You
are to establish yourself in the good graces of the Interplanetary
Patent Office, and report to me any applications that may be of
interest. The research that Terran Electric will conduct will be along
innocuous lines. The real research will be in a secret laboratory. The
one in the Melanortis Country. Selected men will work there, and the
Terran Electric fleet of cargo-carriers will carry the material needed.
My main failure was not to have provided a means of knowing what
the worlds were doing. I'll have that now, and I shall not be defeated
again."
"We'll say that one together!" said Kingman. He flipped open a large
book and set the autopilot from a set of figures. The Black Widow
turned gently and started to run for Terra at two G.

Walt Franks frowned at the memorandum in his hand. "Look, Don,

are we ever going to get to work on that deal with Keg Johnson?"
"Uh-huh," answered Don, without looking up.
"He's serious. Transplanet is getting the edge, and he doesn't like it."
"Frankly, I don't like dabbling in stuff like that either. But Keg's an old
friend, and I suppose that's how a guy gets all glommed up on
projects, big business deals, and so forth. We'll be going in directly.
Why the rush?"
"A bit of personal business on Mars which can best be done at the
same time, thus saving an additional trip."
"O.K.," said Don idly. "Might as well get it over with. Date with
Christine Baler?"
"Sure," grinned Franks.
Actually, it was less than an hour before the Relay Girl went out of
the South End Landing Stage, turned, and headed for Mars. Packing
to the Channings was a matter of persuading Arden not to take
everything but the drapes in the apartment along with her, while for
Walt Franks it was a matter of grabbing a trunkful of instruments and
spare parts. Space travel is a matter of waiting for days in the
confines of a small bubble of steel. Just waiting. For the scenery is
unchanging all the way from Sol to Pluto—and is the same scenery
that can be seen from the viewports of Venus Equilateral. Walt
enjoyed his waiting time by tinkering; having nothing to do would
have bored him, and so he took with him enough to keep him busy
during the trip.
At two Terran gravities, the velocity of the Relay Girl built up bit by bit
and mile by mile until they were going just shy of one thousand miles
per second. This occurred an hour before turnover, which would take
place at the twenty-third hour of flight.
And at that time there occurred a rarity. Not an impossibility like the
chances of collision with a meteor—those things happen only once
in a lifetime, and Channing had had his collision. Nor was it as
remote as getting a royal flush on the deal. It happened, not often,
but it did happen to ships occasionally.
Another ship passed within detector range.
The celestial globe shimmered faintly and showed a minute point at
extreme range. Automatic marker spheres appeared concentrically
within the celestial globe and colures and diameters marked the
globe off into octants.
Bells rang briefly, and the automatic meteor circuits decided that that
object was not approaching the Relay Girl. Then they relaxed. Their
work was done until another object came within range for them to
inspect. They were no longer interested, and they forgot about the
object with the same powers of complete oblivion that they would
have exerted on a meteor of nickel and iron.
They were mechanically incapable of original thought. So the object,
to them, was harmless.
Channing looked up at the luminescent spot, sought the calibration
spheres, made a casual observation, and forgot about it. To him it
was a harmless meteor.
Even the fact that his own velocity was a thousand miles per second,
and the object's velocity was the same, coming to them on a one
hundred and seventy degree course and due to pass within five
thousand miles did not register. Their total velocity of two thousand
miles did not register just because of that rarity with which ships
pass within detector range, while meteors are encountered often.
Had Channing been thinking about the subject in earnest, he would
have known—for it is only man, with all too little time, who uses such
velocities. The universe, with eternity in which to work her miracle,
seldom moves in velocities greater than forty or fifty miles per
second.
Channing forgot it, and as the marker-spheres switched to
accommodate the object, he turned to more important things.
In the other ship, Hellion Murdoch frowned. He brightened, then, and
depressed the plunger that energized his solar beam and projector.
He did not recognize the oncoming object for anything but a meteor,
either; and his desire was to find out how his invention worked at top
speeds.
Kingman asked: "Another one?"
"Uh-huh," said Murdoch idly. "I want to check my finders."
"But they can't miss."
"No? Look, lawyer, you're not running a job that may be given a stay
or reprieve. The finders run on light velocities. The solar beam runs
on the speed of light squared. We'll pass that thing at five thousand
miles' distance and at two thousand miles per second velocity. A
microsecond of misalignment, and we're missing, see? I think we're
going to be forced to put correction circuits in so that the vector sums
and velocities and distances will all come out with a true hit. It will not
be like sighting down a searchlight beam at high velocity."
"I see. You'll need compensation?"
"Plenty, at this velocity and distance. This is the first time I've had a
chance to try it out."
The latter fact saved the Relay Girl. By a mere matter of feet and
inches; by the difference between the speed of light and the speed of
light squared at a distance of five thousand miles, plus a slight
miscompensation. The intolerably hot umbra of Murdoch's beam
followed below the pilot's greenhouse of the Relay Girl all the way
past, a matter of several seconds. The spill-over was tangible
enough to warm the Relay Girl to uncomfortable temperatures.
Then with no real damage done, the contact with ships in space was
over, but not without a certain minimum of recognition.
"Hell!" said Kingman. "That was a space craft!"
"Who?"
"I don't know. You missed."
"I'd rather have hit," said Murdoch coldly. "I hope I missed by plenty."
"Why?"
"If we scorched their tails any, there'll be embarrassing questions
asked."
"So—?"
"So nothing until we're asked. Even then you know nothing."

In the Relay Girl, Channing mopped his forehead. "That was hell
itself," he said.
Arden laughed uncertainly. "I thought that it would wait until we got
there; I didn't expect hell to come after us."
"What—exactly—happened?" asked Walt, coming into the scanning
room.
"That—was a spaceship."
"One of this system's?"
"I wonder," said Don honestly. "It makes a guy wonder. It was gone
too fast to make certain. It probably was Solarian, but they tried to
burn us with something ..."
"That makes it sound like something alien," admitted Walt. "But that
doesn't make good sense."
"It makes good reading," laughed Channing. "Walt, you're the Boy
Edison. Have you been tinkering with anything of lethal leanings?"
"You think there may be something powerful afloat?"
"Could be. We don't know everything."
"I've toyed with the idea of coupling a solar intake beam with one of
those tubes that Baler and Carroll found. Recall, they smashed up
quite a bit of Lincoln Head before they uncovered the secret of how
to handle it. Now that we have unlimited power—or are limited only
by the losses in our own system—we could, or should be able to,
make something raw-ther tough."
"You've toyed with the idea, hey?"
"Uh-huh."
"Of course, you haven't really tried it?"
"Of course not."
"How did it work?"
"Fair," grinned Walt. "I did it with miniatures only, of course, since I
couldn't get my hooks on a full grown tube."
"Say," asked Arden, "how did you birds arrive at this idea so
suddenly? I got lost at the first premise."
"We passed a strange ship. We heated up to uncomfortable
temperatures in a matter of nine seconds flat. They didn't warm us
with thought waves or vector-invectives. Sheer dislike wouldn't do it
alone. I guess that someone is trying to do the trick started by our
esteemed Mr. Franks here a year or so ago. Only with something
practical instead of an electron beam. Honest-to-goodness energy,
right from Sol himself, funnelled through some tricky inventions.
What about that experiment of yours? Did you bring it along?"
Walt looked downcast. "No," he said. "It was another one."
"Let's see."
"It's not too good."
"Same idea?"
Walt went to get his experiment. He returned with a tray full of
laboratory glassware, all wired into a maze of electronic equipment.
Channing went white. "You, too?" he yelled.
"Take it easy, sport. This charges only to a hundred volts. We get
thirteen hundred microfarads at one hundred volts. Then we drain off
the dielectric fluid, and get one billion three hundred million volts'
charge into a condenser of only one hundred micro-microfarads. It's
an idea for the nuclear physics boys. I think it may tend to solidify
some of the uncontrollables in the present system of developing high
electron velocities."
"That thirteen million dielectric constant stuff is strictly
electrodynamic, I think," said Channing. "Farrell may have developed
it as a by-product, but I have a hunch that it will replace some
heretofore valuable equipment. The Franks-Farrell generator will out-
do Van Der Graf's little job, I think."
"Franks-Farrell?"
"Sure. He thunk up the dielectric. You thunk up the application. He
won't care, and you couldn't have done it without. Follow?"
"Oh, sure. I was just trying to figure out a more generic term for it."
"Don't. Let it go as it is for now. It's slick, Walt, but there's no weapon
in it."
"You're looking for a weapon?"
"Uh-huh. Ever since Murdoch took a swing at Venus Equilateral, I've
been sort of wishing that we could concoct something big enough
and dangerous enough to keep us free from any other wiseacres.
Remember, we stand out there like a sore thumb. We are as
vulnerable as a half pound of butter at a banquet for starving
Armenians. The next screwball that wants to control the system will
have to control Venus Equilateral first. And the best things we can
concoct to date include projectile-tossing guns at velocities less than
the speed of our ships, and an electron-shooter that can be
overcome by coating the ship with any of the metal-salts that
enhance secondary transmission."
"Remind me to requisition a set of full-sized tubes when we return.
Might as well have some fun."
"O.K., you can have 'em. Which brings us back to the present.
Question: Was that an abortive attempt upon our ship, or was that a
mistaken try at melting a meteor?"
"I know how to find out. Let's call Chuck Thomas and have him get
on the rails. We can have him request Terran Electric to give us any
information they may have on energy beams to date."
"They'd tell you?" scorned Arden.