Miracles and revealed prophecy are not credible

Deism affirms that miracles and revealed prophecy are not credible. Because the deist holds that God established the world with a fixed, rational order, the reported suspension of natural law in a miracle is judged improbable and unnecessary, and claims to foretell the future by divine revelation are treated with the same scepticism. Enlightenment deists argued that testimony to miracles is weaker than the standing evidence for the regularity of nature, and that a wise Creator would not need to violate the order he had made. Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, published in two parts in 1794 and 1795 while Paine was imprisoned in France during the Revolution, became deism's most widely read and most controversial popular statement, arguing that organised Christianity's miracle stories were either invented, exaggerated in retelling, or explicable by natural causes later dressed up as supernatural, and that reported prophecy fared no better under the same historical scrutiny.

Published amid the upheaval of the French Revolution and read by a mass audience unusual for a work of religious philosophy, it provoked fierce backlash in Britain and America, where Paine, previously celebrated for Common Sense and his support for American independence, found his reputation permanently damaged among many former admirers.

This affirmation follows directly from the deist picture of a God who creates a lawful universe and does not interfere with it. It sets deism against the revealed religions, whose scriptures rest heavily on miracle and prophecy, and it connects to the deist reliance on reason over revelation and to the belief that God does not intervene in the world. The rejection of miracles was among the most influential and controversial deist claims, and it is described here as the position deists maintained.

The philosophical version of this argument had already been made most rigorously by David Hume in "Of Miracles," the tenth section of his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which argued that because a miracle is by definition a violation of the laws of nature established by "firm and unalterable experience," no testimony could ever be strong enough to make believing a miracle more reasonable than believing the witnesses mistaken, deceived, or lying. Hume's essay became the central reference point for all subsequent philosophical debate on the credibility of miracle reports, and later apologists, including the twentieth-century philosopher and former atheist C. S. Lewis in his 1947 book Miracles, have continued to write specifically in response to its argument.