An impressive cloud of modern witnesses can be called to support the case that the making, and reading, of this book is vanity.

The first to be cited is Bernard Williams, now a philosophy professor in Oxford; in 1983 when he was (at least) one of Cambridge's leading philosophers he reviewed J. L. Mackie's lucid book The Miracle of Theism (Oxford) in which, and prominently among the sequence of confident attacks on standard types of apologetic, Hume's dispatch of apologists' appeals to miracle reports is succinctly re-presented, endorsed and sharpened. Williams writes, ‘For a detailed and perspicuous account of how it now stands [that is, with the traditional reasonings in support of theism] I know of no book that does it better than this’. Williams goes on, however, to qualify his praise of the book: ‘It concedes too much to these arguments in pretending that it is an open question whether they could deliver their conclusion.… Hume and Kant.… broke up most of this furniture a long time ago’. A book attacking Hume's views about the actual or possible significance of miracle-stories, such as this book is, is presumably no less otiose than a book advocating those views, if the matter was long ago settled.

The second witness is Maurice Wiles, Regius Professor of Theology, now Emeritus, at Oxford, who has recently written dismissively about the view that ‘The absolute reliability of Scripture can be convincingly proved by the testimony of miracle and fulfilled prophecy.’