对于大多数相信真主是宇宙的创造者、并且在世间仍具有自主意志的人来说，真主行奇迹、或使他人行奇迹的能力是容易接受的。毕竟，如果真主创造了自然律，那么从逻辑上讲，祂并不受祂所设计的体系约束，而能够在该体系之外促成某些事件。奇迹只对无神论者（不信任何真主）和自然神论者（认为真主不干预世事）构成问题；这两类人若能熟悉《古兰经》和圣训中关于真主存在的论证，或许会感到耳目一新。348

For the majority of people who believe that God is the Creator of the universe and remains a willful agent in the world, God’s ability to perform miracles—or to enable others to perform them—is easy to accept. After all, if God created the laws of nature, it logically follows that He is not bound by the system He designed but can also bring about occurrences outside of that system. Miracles are only problematic for atheists (who believe in no God) and deists (who posit a non-intervening God), both of whom may find it refreshing to familiarize themselves with the case for Allah’s existence in the Qur’an and Sunnah.348

虽然在基督教社会中，相信奇迹是普遍的标准，但向现代性的转变标志着一种走向更加怀疑立场的转变。启蒙思想中的机械自然主义者描绘了一幅“去魅”的自然图景，把自然视为一个封闭的系统，并将自然法则描述为与上帝无关。349

While belief in miracles was standard in Christian societies, the transition to modernity signaled a shift toward a more skeptical stance. The mechanical naturalists of Enlightenment thought painted a “disenchanted” view of nature as a closed system, describing natural laws as disconnected from God.349

究竟而言,他们对任何暗示神迹干预的说法都怀有深刻的反感。奇迹的观念普遍被斥为“非科学的”而遭到否定。这一观点最著名的先驱,或许是荷兰理性主义者巴鲁赫·斯宾诺莎(卒于1677年)和苏格兰经验主义者大卫·休谟(卒于1776年)。两人都曾用各种论证来否定奇迹的可能性,但这些论证要么存在事实错误,要么存在逻辑矛盾,要么与穆罕默德先知ﷺ的神迹毫不相关。 在其《神学政治论》中,斯宾诺莎主张,相信奇迹只是前现代蒙昧心智的残余,是其无法解释自然现象的结果,而非《托拉》经文的本意。他对奇迹的轻视并不令人意外,因为在他所处的时代,占主导地位的理性主义哲学视“超自然干预”的观念与之格格不入,并最终催生了欧洲启蒙运动。然而,斯宾诺莎为证明奇迹根本不可能发生而表现出的狂热,与他通常的敏锐颇为相悖。例如,他试图将圣经中每一处明确的奇迹记载都解释为并非真正的奇迹。他甚至声称,每一个所谓的奇迹都可以被看作是对某种自然现象的误解。

Ultimately, they had a profound aversion to any suggestion of miraculous intervention. The notion of miracles was commonly rejected because they were “unscientific.” Perhaps the most notable vanguards of this view were the Dutch rationalist Baruch Spinoza (d. 1677) and the Scottish empiricist David Hume (d. 1776). Both used various arguments to reject the possibility of miracles, all of which suffer from either factual errors, logical inconsistency, or irrelevance to the miracles of the Prophet Muhammad .صلى الله عليه وسلم In his Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza argued that belief in miracles was but a remnant of the naive premodern mind, its inability to interpret natural phenomena, and not the intended meaning behind passages in the Torah. His contempt for miracles is expected, as the idea of “supernatural intervention” was perceived to be at odds with the philosophical outlook of rationalism that dominated his era and soon produced the European Enlightenment. However, Spinoza’s unbridled zeal to disprove the very possibility of miracles is contrary to his usual astuteness. For instance, he attempts to explain away every explicit biblical account of miracles as not actually miraculous. He even claimed that every supposed miracle can be seen as a misunderstood natural phenomenon.

虽然无知和迷信确实使一些人过早地将某些事件归为奇迹，但有什么科学证据表明木杖可以变成蛇、天生失明的人可以恢复视力，或者月亮可以被分裂然后复原？斯宾诺莎认为，由于我们对自然的认识是不完整的，因此不能断言某个特定事件是奇迹，因为它可能有尚未被发现的自然解释。斯宾诺莎推测，无法解释的事件只需要我们修正对自然法则的理解。然而，现代科学哲学认为斯宾诺莎的论证是谬误的：奇迹发生时，自然的基本法则并不会因此被改写。一只从拆解的尸体中被奇迹般复活的鸟，并不需要我们修订对尸体自然腐烂的认识。

While ignorance and superstition have certainly driven some people to prematurely classify some events as miracles, what scientific evidence suggests that staffs can be transformed into snakes, people blind from birth can have their sight restored, or that the moon can be split and restored? According to Spinoza, since our knowledge of nature is incomplete, there is no way to assert that a particular event is miraculous since it may have a yet-undiscovered natural explanation. Spinoza presumed that inexplicable occurrences should simply require us to rewrite our understanding of the laws of nature. However, modern philosophy of science considers Spinoza’s argument fallacious; the fundamental laws of nature are not rewritten when miracles occur. A bird being miraculously resurrected from a disassembled carcass350 does not require us to revise our knowledge of the natural decay of corpses.

除了这一认识论层面的对奇迹的反对之外，斯宾诺莎提出的另一项反对意见，兼具准神学与本体论的性质：

Aside from this epistemological objection to miracles, another objection Spinoza raised was quasi-theological cum ontological:

“如果有人断言神的作为会违背自然律，那么他就必然要断言神的作为违背了他自己的本性。”351 然而，这一论证完全取决于接受斯宾诺莎对神的贫乏理解。斯宾诺莎把神仅仅视为自然本身（这种观点将神限定得如此狭隘，以至于许多人相信斯宾诺莎的信仰与无神论本质上并无二致）。在这种观点下，自然自相矛盾，的确显得荒谬。但当神是存在万物的至高主宰，他说“有”，事物便成其所是，那么神干预其创造、限定他所命定的某些自然律的适用范围，就不存在任何理性上的反对理由。

“If anyone asserted that God acts in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature.”351 But this argument is entirely contingent upon accepting Spinoza’s impoverished conception of God. Spinoza considered God as nothing other than nature itself (a view that limits the Divine so severely that many are convinced that Spinoza’s beliefs are essentially no different from atheism). On such a view, certainly it would seem absurd for nature to contradict itself. But when God is the Supreme Master of all in existence, who says “Be” and something comes into existence, then there is no rational objection to God intervening in His creation and delimiting the scope of some of the natural laws that He has ordained.

有趣的是，斯宾诺莎也主张：如果奇迹是真的，那就意味着上帝创造了一个有缺陷的世界，而祂不得不不断去修补它。这不仅与他的观点相矛盾——他认为奇迹应当促使我们修正对自然法则的理解——而且构成了一种稻草人谬误，即驳斥一个实际上没有人持有的立场。信仰者并不主张奇迹的目的是为了修补一个有缺陷的世界。

It is interesting that Spinoza also asserted that if miracles were true, they would imply that God created a flawed world that He had to keep repairing. Not only does this contradict his view that miracles should make us revise our understanding of natural laws, but it also constitutes a strawman argument whereby a position no one actually holds is refuted. Believers do not claim that the purpose of miracles is to fix a flawed world.

相反,他们相信,创造这个世界及支配其运行的规律的那一位,同样可以中止这些规律。

Rather, they believe that the One who created this world and the laws that govern it can also suspend them.

斯宾诺莎批判的弱点是显而易见的。直到休谟发表《人类理解研究》之后,围绕奇迹在逻辑上和科学上是否可能的争论才愈演愈烈。休谟的论证不仅更为精细,而且启蒙时代盛行的诸多范式,如怀疑论与自然主义,也有利于其观点获得更广泛的接受。休谟断言,自然界持续不断的齐一性证据迫使我们,即便面对任何关于某一瞬间超自然事件的最有力证词,也必须加以否定,因为根据定义,这样的事件必然违背已被证实的自然律。

The weakness of Spinoza’s critique was evident. It was only after Hume published his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding that debates surrounding the logical and scientific possibility of miracles intensified. Not only were Hume’s arguments more refined, but prevailing paradigms of the Enlightenment era such as skepticism and naturalism were conducive to a wider embrace of his views. Hume alleged that we are forced by continuous evidence of nature’s uniformity to dismiss even the strongest testimony of any momentary supernatural event, since it would, by definition, violate the proven laws of nature.

他又以缺乏对任何一项神迹的历史证据,以及众多信徒为各自相互冲突的教义而宣称神迹,作为进一步的论证依据。伊斯兰教独特的知识传递机制如何满足历史证据的标准,稍后将会讨论。但不同宗教给出不同的说法,并不足以因此将它们全部弃之不顾。若如此,历史研究本身便毫无用处,因为梳理相互冲突的记载并加以相互权衡,正是每一位历史学家的方法。即便是休谟本人,在认为自然界持续不断的见证比个别神迹记载更有力时,也遵循了这一原则。至于休谟主张经验科学优于历史见证的论点,其根源在于他的哲学框架,而这一框架实际上是不可知论者或无神论者的框架。另一方面,有神论者则认为神迹与自然现象并无二致,因为两者都源自真主。正如宇宙由真主的命令而开始,其规律依照真主的安排运行,神迹也可能依真主的意志在宇宙中偶尔发生。神迹的真实性,归根结底是神圣实在的延伸;正如真主通过精妙的自然法则彰显了祂的存在与伟大,祂也通过偶尔以令人惊叹的方式打破这些同样的法则,彰显了祂的全能以及祂使者的正直。最后,"自然法则"只是对我们所经历世界的描述,而非对其必须如何运行的必然规定。因此,神迹可以只是对主导性自然秩序的例外,与之相悖却并不矛盾。这样一来,我们便能摆脱休谟关于二者不可调和的预设,将探讨从逻辑上的可能性转向神迹的历史记录。352

He further justified this by the lack of historical evidence for any one miracle, and by the multitude of the faithful who claim them in support of their conflicting doctrines. How Islam’s unique mechanism of knowledge transmission satisfies the criterion of historical evidence will be discussed shortly, but the fact that different religions offer different accounts does not justify dismissing them all. Doing so would render the very study of history useless, since sifting through conflicting reports and weighing them against one another is every historian’s methodology. Even Hume himself followed this protocol when he considered nature’s ongoing testimony stronger than individual accounts of miracles. As for Hume’s argument for the superiority of empirical science over historical testimony, this stems from his philosophical framework which was effectively that of an agnostic or atheist. Theists, on the other hand, perceive miracles as identical to natural phenomena, in that both originate with God. Just as the universe began by the command of God, and its laws run as ordered by God, miracles can sometimes occur in it by the will of God. The reality of miracles is ultimately an extension of the divine reality; just as God evidenced His existence and magnificence through the brilliant laws of nature, He evidenced His omnipotence and the integrity of His messengers through occasionally breaching these same laws in mind-boggling ways. Finally, the “laws of nature” are a mere description of the world as we experience it, not a necessary prescription for how it must function. Miracles can, therefore, simply be exceptions to the predominant natural order, contrary to it but not contradictory. That would deliver us from Hume’s presumption of irreconcilability and shift our investigation from the logical possibility to the historical documentation of miracles.352