Expertise in the Miracles Debate

Abstract

This chapter analyses debates about miracles at the Metaphysical Society, arguing that members claimed authority to speak on this topic by positioning themselves as experts in their disciplines. The essay begins with debates about miracles in the public sphere of the 1860s and 1870s, showing how these debates raised questions about who was qualified to speak on the subject. These questions were taken up in a series of papers at the Society. As speakers focused on witnesses to alleged miracles and what kind of testimony could be relied on, they asserted their own reliability on the basis of their disciplinary training. These assertions cut across the different positions on miracles taken by the Society’s members and across the disciplines they represented. Still, these commonalities do not show that the Society’s members were unified as participants in elite culture, since they presented competing claims about what constituted expertise and who possessed it.