The Church of Hume

It forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations, that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations; or if a civilized people has ever given admission to any of them, that people will be found to have received them from ignorant and barbarous ancestors, who transmitted them with that inviolable sanction and authority, which always attend received opinions. When we peruse the first histories of all nations, we are apt to imagine ourselves transported into some new world; where the whole frame of nature is disjointed, and every element performs its operations in a different manner, from what it does at present. Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies, omens, oracles, judgements, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every page, in proportion as we advance nearer the enlightened ages, we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated from human nature.    It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days.   The advantages are so great, of starting an imposture among an ignorant people, that, even though the delusion should be too gross to impose on the generality of them (which, though seldom, is sometimes the case) it has a much better chance for succeeding in remote countries, than if the first scene had been laid in a city renowned for arts and knowledge. The most ignorant and barbarous of these barbarians carry the report abroad. None of their countrymen have a large correspondence, or sufficient credit and authority to contradict and beat down the delusion. 
– Hume

i) One of the things I'm struck by when I see some members/followers of the MacArthur circle dissing reported modern miracles is how their arguments unwittingly mimic the arguments of infidels like Hume. Take the way they breezily dismiss reported miracles in Third World countries, as if a reported miracle from Ethiopia, the Philippines, rural India or China, is inherently suspect. This is precisely the argument Hume uses. And it's the very same argument modern-day atheists deploy against Biblical miracles. Biblical miracles are reported by primitive, backward, superstitious writers. 

ii) I think part of the problem is that many members/followers of the MacArthur circle don't seem to have much experience debating atheists. They generally seem to prefer intramural debates involving eschatology, creationism, &c. That renders them oblivious to the way they are aping atheist objections to miracles in general. It would be pitifully easy for an atheist to turn the tables. It's not as if we can compare reported Biblical healings with PET scans, CT scans, and MRIs of the patient, before and after. 

iii) Now, for reported miracles from contemporary Western nations, I don't think it's unreasonable to request medical documentation. At least in a certain percentage of cases, if a miraculous cure took place, we'd expect there to be medical records to bear that out. That's because, in a certain percentage of cases, the patient ought to have medical records. So that's a reasonable standard, given the setting.

It's not reasonable to impose that standard in settings where that's not to be expected. Are we going to take the position that no Christian before the age of modern medicine is a trustworthy witness to a miraculous healing? Should we summarily scratch off 1800 hundred years of church history? Likewise, should we be reflexively skeptical of miraculous divine activity among the poor illiterate masses? Do we really think the distribution of divine activity lopsidedly favors the Northern hemisphere over the global south? Urban areas over rural areas? College grads over pious peasants? What about all the Christians who have to live by faith and prayer because they have nothing else to fall back on but the mercy of God?  

It's like those infamous "prayer studies," where God is supposed to submit to randomizing protocols–as if answering prayer is equivalent to card-guessing experiments.