John 9:32

32. Since the world began Philosophers at the present day, like Hume and his followers, maintain that as miracles are contrary to experience, they can never take place. But, 1. A thing is not contrary to experience because it is unexperienced. To be contrary to experience, somebody must have a positive experience that a miracle cannot take place. But no one ever had or can have such an experience. 2. Miracles are not contrary but according to experience. This man could hold that giving sight to the blind-born was hitherto unexperienced; but he positively knew that it was not contrary to experience, for he knew that he himself had just experienced it. 3. Human experience is, that the so-called laws of nature are in themselves permanent, and yet that their operations are sometimes interrupted or varied by divine interpositions. And these two experiences are perfectly consistent with each other. Hence our man here correctly argues, human experience is, that ordinarily the born-blind is never restored; but a human experience also is, that in the present case the operation of that law has received a divine exception. 4. To say that a miracle never happened, because it is contrary to experience, is reasoning in a circle. For to say “it is contrary to experience” is but to say, in other words, that “it never happened.” So that the reasoning then is: A miracle “never happened” because it “never happened.”