Is All Knowledge of Causation Inductive? Blake Denenny Hume famously posited that all causation is known by induction, by the experience of constant conjunctions of events, and ergo the principle of causality is either flimsy or vacuous. To use an example, we expect that fire will burn paper because we’ve seen it happen consistently, but there is no logical connection between the two events. We could imagine that one day, even a normal piece of paper would refuse to burn: causes and effects are inherently “loose and separate,” and there is never any strictly logical connection between them, according to Hume. Now, there’s certainly something to what Hume is getting at: after all, no Christian has ever claimed that the miracles in the Bible are logical contradictions. But nevertheless, the stories in the Bible don’t contradict the principle of causality as such because they emphatically assert a ca...