on miracles and revealed religion

In Walter R. Cassels’ response to Dr. Lightfoot, contained in A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot’s essays, he writes in his concluding remarks, emphasis mine and made in relation to this discussion on Violet’s blog.

The true character of miracles is at once betrayed by the fact that their supposed occurrence has thus been confined to ages of ignorance and superstition, and that they are absolutely unknown in any time or place where science has provided witnesses fitted to appreciate and ascertain the nature of such exhibitions of supernatural power. There is not the slightest evidence that any attempt was made to investigate the supposed miraculous occurrences, or to justify the inferences so freely drawn from them, nor is there any reason to believe that the witnesses possessed, in any considerable degree, the fulness of knowledge and sobriety of judgment requisite for the purpose. No miracle has yet established its claim to the rank even of apparent reality, and all such phenomena must remain in the dim region of imagination. The test applied to the largest class of miracles, connected with demoniacal possession, discloses the falsity of all miraculous pretension.

He continues elsewhere, and I agree

Ignorance and superstition created miracles; knowledge has for ever annihilated them.

To justify the belief in miracles, he says the peddlers make two assumptions

first, an Infinite Personal God; and second, a Divine design of Revelation, the execution of which necessarily involves supernatural action. Miracles, it is argued, are not contrary to nature, or effects produced without adequate causes, but on the contrary are caused by the intervention of this Infinite Personal God for the purpose of attesting and carrying out the Divine design. Neither of the assumptions, however, can be reasonably maintained.

I rest my case.