§ 4. I shall now advert to a very serious misapprehension of the principles of the subject, which has been committed by some of the writers against Hume's Essay on Miracles, and by Bishop Butler before them, in their anxiety to destroy what appeared to them a formidable weapon of assault against the Christian religion; and the effect of which is entirely to confound the doctrine of the Grounds of Disbelief. The mistake consists in overlooking the distinction between (what may be called) improbability before the fact, and improbability after it; or (since, as Mr. Venn remarks, the distinction of past and future is not the material circumstance) between the improbability of a mere guess being right, and the improbability of an alleged fact being true.
Many events are altogether improbable to us, before they have happened, or before we are informed of their happening, which are not in the least incredible when we are informed of them, because not contrary to any, even approximate, induction. In the cast of a perfectly fair die, the chances are five to one against throwing ace, that is, ace will be thrown on an average only once in six throws. But this is no reason against believing that ace was thrown on a given occasion, if any credible witness asserts it; since though ace is only thrown once in six times, _some_ number which is only thrown once in six times must have been thrown if the die was thrown at all. The improbability, then, or in other words, the unusualness, of any fact, is no reason for disbelieving it, if the nature of the case renders it certain that either that or something equally improbable, that is, equally unusual, did happen. Nor is this all: for even if the other five sides of the die were all twos, or all threes, yet as ace would still on the average come up once in every six throws, its coming up in a given throw would be not in any way contradictory to experience. If we disbelieved all facts which had the chances against them beforehand, we should believe hardly anything. We are told that A. B. died yesterday: the moment before we were so told, the chances against his having died on that day may have been ten thousand to one; but since he was certain to die at some time or other, and when he died must necessarily die on some particular day, while the preponderance of chances is very great against every day in particular, experience affords no ground for discrediting any testimony which may be produced to the event's having taken place on a given day.