Follies of the Wise
Jerry Coyne on Frederick Crews’s Follies of the Wise.
In Follies of the Wise, Crews takes on not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb to irrational ideas: recovered-memory therapy, alien abduction, theosophy, Rorschach inkblot analysis, intelligent design creationism, and even poststructuralist literary theory. All of these, asserts Crews, violate “the ethic of respecting that which is known, acknowledging what is still unknown, and acting as if one cared about the difference”. This, then, is a collection about epistemology, and one that should be read by anyone still harbouring the delusion that Freud was an important thinker, that psychoanalysis is an important cure, that intelligent design is a credible alternative to Darwinism, or that religion and science can coexist happily.
And should be read immediately by anyone still harbouring all four delusions.
Crews gives peacemaking scientists their own hiding, reproving them for trying to show that there is no contradiction between science and theology. Regardless of what they say to placate the faithful, most scientists probably know in their hearts that science and religion are incompatible ways of viewing the world….Virtually all religions make improbable claims that are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science: Mary, in Catholic teaching, was bodily taken to heaven, while Muhammad rode up on a white horse; and Jesus (born of a virgin) came back from the dead. None of these claims has been corroborated, and while science would never accept them as true without evidence, religion does. A mind that accepts both science and religion is thus a mind in conflict.
Or a mind that resolves the conflict by pigeonholing the two and keeping them, mentally, completely separate – but that seems to me to amount to the same thing. It can be done; people do it; but it does seem like an exercise in denial, and denial is what we use to suppress conflict.
It is not politically or tactically useful to point out the fundamental and unbreachable gaps between science and theology. Indeed, scientists and philosophers have written many books (equivalents of Leibnizian theodicy) desperately trying to show how these areas can happily cohabit. In his essay, “Darwin goes to Sunday School”, Crews reviews several of these works, pointing out with brio the intellectual contortions and dishonesties involved in harmonizing religion and science. Assessing work by the evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, the philosopher Michael Ruse, the theologian John Haught and others, Crews concludes, “When coldly examined . . . these productions invariably prove to have adulterated scientific doctrine or to have emptied religious dogma of its commonly accepted meaning”.
Just so. Anything can be made compatible with anything by changing the meanings of both sides of the equation, but that’s not an honest or, in the long run, helpful way of proceeding. Fred Crews does a great job of pointing that out.
What’s the odds that certain commentators will now rubbish the book, for speaking the truth?
As in “Oh it’s all the horrible atheists’ fault (like R. Dawkins) for being nasty!”
There are ceratinly plenty of “doctors” around who do not yet realise that diseases and defects have physical causes, be they ever so subtle.
Mind you, I agree with OB about the “keeping things seperate” thing. Which is why I always appreciated Dawkins’ combativeness more than Gould’s “seperate magisteria” proposal.
On the other hand, a mind in which there is no contradiction, no conflict, no incompatible ideas at all, seems to me a very inert mind. I personally _like_ the conflict between science and religion. It keeps me on edge, keeps me thinking.
However, I don’t think that the “conflict” between religion and science need necessarily express itself in miracles. I suspect Crews would regard a religion _without_ the resurrection and the walking on water and all that as not much of a religion at all – but I would disagree here. I think miracles in a way affirm the laws of nature as much as they break them – that’s why they’re miracles, after all. But I’m uncomfortable with the idea of God as a cosmic conjurer, who suspends the workings of the universe at will to show he’s really there.
Hmmmm…
“Rather than suggesting any solution (indeed, there is none save adopting a form of “religion” that makes no untenable empirical claims)”
But why would a religion that makes no untenable _empirical_ claims be not a “religion” or not subject to rational inquiry and analysis otherwise? (You used to have this God-game on the site which pretty much did that. I beat it, by the way) Which brings me to:
“The human race has produced only one successfully validated epistemology, characterizing all scrupulous inquiry into the real world, from quarks to poems. It is, simply, empiricism, or the submitting of propositions to the arbitration of evidence that is acknowledged to be such by all of the contending parties.”
Which sounds perfectly valid to me, however, _empirical_ evidence is just one yardstick, and not even applicable in many areas (mathematics), while having a quite different and weaker role in others (linguistics, philosophy). That does not mean that any claims made within those areas aren’t amenable to checking for logical consistency, coherence, etc.
Why does Crews mention the ‘assumption’ of Mary into ‘heaven’ but not the ‘ascension’ of Christ. (Catholics use the two different words.)
As for the ‘resurection’ of Christ the most rational explanation I’ve read was in a book by Frank Harris (of all people) in which he pointed out that since more recent crucifixions weren’t fatal until much later than three hours (he says it took days) he suggests that Christ was mistakenly removed from the cross while unconscious but still alive.
He then regained consciousness in the tomb.
There does seem to be historical evidence for his being seen after the crucifixion so this explanation meets one objection believers might raise.
Actually the God game was never on this site, it’s always been strictly TPM. We had Taboo here for a long time, but JS had to take it down after the hacker struck last year. I’m hoping he’ll put it back some day, but don’t know…
“There does seem to be historical evidence for his being seen after the crucifixion”
Does there? Like what? And how reliable is it? (For instance I think there’s a mention in Josephus, but scholars think that’s a later insertion.)
Wouldn’t the accounts of the resurrection in all four of the gospels (mind you, three of which are based on partially the same sources) as well as by Paul be itself an indication that the original apostles may have had an experience corresponding to seeing the risen Jesus. If the resurrection for example was an invention of Paul and spread from him into the later gospels, wouldn’t it have become an issue between him and the early Jewish Christians? (James etc.) Taken that into account, the “survival” story seems to be to me the most plausible alternative.
Incidentally, I cannot make _theological_ sense of the resurrection, in that it conflicts with how I would interpret the eucharist and the crucifixion (the whole point to me being that they’re final, that Jesus leaves his “flesh and his blood” to upcoming generations, and is going somewhere from which there’s no coming back). So it’s one of the more serious issues I have with Christianity.
Just did Battleground God for the first time; bit one bullet, no direct hits. Medal of Distiction!
“Wouldn’t the accounts of the resurrection in all four of the gospels (mind you, three of which are based on partially the same sources) as well as by Paul be itself an indication that the original apostles may have had an experience corresponding to seeing the risen Jesus.”
Not necessarily, no; there are other explanations. Then, even if Mary M or another apostle did have ‘an experience corresponding to seeing the risen Jesus’ that could of course have been a hallucination. Hallucinations are not particularly rare in humans.
Well done, Don!
I agree about the possibility for hallucinations – but even if Paul was exaggerating somewhat that there were 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection, they would almost have to be _shared_ hallucinations, wouldn’t they?
But Paul wasn’t there. Whatever he said was merely hearsay. It’s not even admissable in a court of law, so surely it can’t be considered reliable historical evidence of a resurrection. Miracles need better evidence than that.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you here. I dislike miracles both scientifically and theologically ;-) But I think that history generally has less stringent requirements for evidence than courts of law. The question I guess is whether the resurrection/the experiences of Mary M. and the apostles are established firmly enough to warrant explanations (miracle, or survival, or collective hallucination) or whether it can be dismissed out of hand. I’m leaning towards the former (but I’m not quite there yet).
Well, I’ve read some secular scholars on this subject, and none of them think there is any even slightly convincing evidence. They think there is myth-making rather than evidence.
History may have less stringent requirements for evidence than courts of law, but on the other hand, miracles have much, much higher ones! At least, if you think Hume was right, they do.
Was there an event which inspired the tradition, or was there a tradition which required the event?
I see no problem in accepting that there may have been an inspired teacher who lies behind the myth-laden figure we have now, nor that he may have been associated with exceptional events. A survival of execution is rare, but not so rare as to require a supernatural explanation.
We don’t even really know what happened this year on these lands, how can we pronounce on two thousand years ago?
OB, Hume, to use the modern vernacular, kicks ass! :-) (but then, I’m Scottish, and he’s the best we’ve ever had, so I’m possibly slightly biased…?)
Sometimes I am awestruck by the demolition job he does on old “natural religion”, just using reason alone. Fantastic.
Now THERE was an empiricist!
As to the original article, I thought debunking old Sigmund Fraud was getting a bit “straw man” these days…I certainly stuck the (perfectly justified) boot into him as an undergrad back in 1988, not that I was anything special…it almost seemed too easy. Mind you, I did get invited to leave the library because I was laughing too loudly at “The Interpretation of Dreams”…that ‘going through lots of rooms is all about wanting to shag lots of people’ section…
I know his pernicious influence is still out there, but still…
It wasn’t his fault, it was all the Columbian marching powder…nowadays he’d be in celebrity re-hab with Pete “waste of space” Docherty… :-)
Perhaps we suddenly find written eyewitness accounts or something. Pontius Pilate’s secret diaries. Unlikely though. Survival theories, or similar, are all very speculative. I like speculation, but it only gets us that far.
Unless of course the old codger decides to come back and do it all again ;-)
Wow, a topic where my own mind is described!
I believe in the malleability of the human mind. You need to interpret the evidence for resurrection in the light of Pentecost. See my past comment re Cialdini and the failed appearance of the rescuers in the flying saucer cult.
One of the accounts of Christ appearing after death had them walk along not recognising him while he explained theology, until the moment he vanished when they recognised him.
The accounts of his death also include the veil of the temple being ripped top to bottom with no witness details, and the dead coming out of their tombs and ‘appearing to many’ in the city.
These have to be classics of mental and rhetorical embroidery after the fact.
If you want natural explanations of matters such as the empty tomb and the resurrection, start with the passage in Cialdini that so illuminates the moment of Pentecost.
PZ has a review over at Pharyngula …
Is it available in the UK yet?
And how much?
Been available for some weeks (or even months?) Around 13 quid.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Follies-Wise-Frederick-Crews/dp/1593761015/sr=1-1/qid=1158008798/ref=sr_1_1/026-5019335-9858059?ie=UTF8&s=books
My favourite passage is on p 347: “Indeed, how can theology be considered knowledge at all, when the myriad intuitive knowers lack any way (short of persecution and murder) of resolving their differences?”
Did he really write that? Is he really ignorant of the fact that theology has a long tradition of academic argument without statements of intuitive knowledge and revelatory insight? And that practitioners of theology indeed have the same means of resolving the differences that historical linguists like me do – namely, with the methods current in the humanities?
I mean, you can disagree all you want with theologians from Anselm to Alvin Plantinga – but understanding and indeed disagreeing with their arguments needs no personal or revelatory insight. Let alone persecution and murder.
Merlijn:
Can you give a couple of examples of significant theological differences that have been resolved by the methods current in the humanities? And how would these methods resolve the really big questions, such as “was Jesus a God or a phoney?” “was Muhammad God’s only true prophet or a phoney?” “do humans have mastery over (other)animals or should we stop eating them?”
Perhaps I could mention the advent of a non-literalist interpretation of the Bible, instead of a literalist one? Which has been made possible by the methods of philology, history, and textual criticism wielded by theologians. Another nice example of such would be Pinchas Lapide’s analysis of anti-semitism in the Gospel narrative. I would venture that works like his did contribute to Mel Gibson’s viewpoints becoming slowly less current within mainstream Christianity.
I’ve always regarded theology about quite a bit more than the existence of non-existence of God. More about the relationship between man and God. And God does not even have to exist for the _relationship_ to be a subject worth of academic study. The reason why Theology exists as a distinct subject from Philosophy/Psychology of Religion may be historical more than anything else – but that does not make the subject irrelevant.
But is an analysis of anti-semitism in the Gospel narrative actually theology? Or is it comparative religion, or religious studies, or Biblical studies, or history, or all those?
All those, and theology, too :-) I think that even the “apologetics” parts of theology could be regarded as an instance of (theistic) metaphysics. Theology as a unitary subject exists for historical reasons, as well as for the continued existence of the Church (which wants theistic philosophy _and_ literary criticism _and_ psychology of religion, etc.) However, that does not mean that theology as practiced isn’t academically respectable.
Personally, I have a beef with historical linguistics being regarded a sub-branch of linguistics rather than of history, which it obviously is. I guess there are many such mismatches. But that doesn’t reflect on the work done within a certain field.
I thought of another example of the “fruitfulness” of theology as an academic subject. It’s a bit long, though. Whitehead’s metaphysics are currently studied and elaborated mainly in (mainstream) Protestant and Judaic theology. I guess that by itself Whitehead’s process philosophy would be philosophy/metaphysics rather than theology, but as it is as theistic as it gets, that would be nitpicking. In any event, there has been a fascinating attempt by the linguist Michael Fortescue to apply Whitehead’s ideas to linguistics. One I think is very promising at least in as far as diachronic linguistics are concerned. But it does mean “borrowing” good ideas from theology, even if Fortescue is himself neutral about the metaphysical and religious aspects of Whitehead’s ideas.
Another such example might be Bernard Lonergan’s work on metascience and theology (“Method in Theology”). I’ve only gotten halfway in it as the book is with my father. But it’s _very_ good so far and does seem to me to have possible applications beyond theology proper.
All of which does indicate to me that theology is not a vacuous field where people are still debating the amount of angels that fit on the head of a pin.
But only if you define theology that way. It is possible to define it in such a way that it’s not vacuous, but is that the way the word is generally understood? I don’t know, maybe it is – but I’m doubtful. When the BBC tells us it has a couple of philosophers and a theologian on a show to discuss some subject in ethics…what does the theologian bring to the discussion? It’s not always clear.
But no doubt there are theologians and theologians.
I think my definition is fairly well established, though. Definitely as far as academic theology goes.
You’re probably right in that there are theologians and theologians. I’m biased towards the more ‘liberal’ sides of Christianity as I think you need to have room for doubt in order to discuss anything in a rational manner. No doubt there are branches of theology I am less than sympathetic towards (however, those tend to survive not very well in academic environments – thus the Catholic Church authorities tend to pick their loyal priests from Seminaries rather than Theology departments).
Merlijn:
Surely two (self-styled) theologians often have different non-literal interpretations about what the unknown author(s) of a particular biblical text meant to express about the relationship between humans and a (supposed) god or gods? Can you point to a few examples when that difference has been resolved, I mean really resolved, a universal consensus achieved (maybe excluding a couple of obvious nutters)?
For example, the sadism and Jew-blaming inherent in the obvious interpretations of the Christians’ crucifixion myths is, I suggest, by no means universally rejected. The (then) Pope was quoted as liking Mel Gibson’s dreadful film.
Contrast that with the assertion (for example) that the English expression “forlorn hope” derived from Dutch “verloren hoop”, and hope meaning troop was later(understandably) confused with hope meaning hope. That can either be documented, or not. Historical linguists can reach agreement about it. They don’t have to fire off bulls and encyclicals that appeal only to a mythical “authority”.
Well, historical linguists can reach agreement about that in the same way theologists may reach agreement about the derivation of three of the gospels from a hypothesized Q document, or the traces of polytheism in the Old Testament. Of course, you might say, that’s not theology, that’s biblical criticism. But I’ve dealt with that already.
Consensus about the questions which I think interest you more (Is God…) is as far as consensus about the mind-matter issue among philosophers. Or in historical linguistics, the questions of whether structural change is indeed teleological or not. Or agreement about why Stalin did this or did that. Or indeed a universally accepted analysis of the “Iliad”.
In all of the above areas, as opposed to the former, empirical evidence plays a much slighter role. They can still be dealt with in an intellectually rigorous and methodical manner, though. Which I guess is one of the main reasons why I have little use for empiricism (as a metascientific position, rather than as a method which is applied where it can).
I don’t think papal bulls have much authority – if any – among theologists of the academic kind. Or even among the more academic sections of the priesthood, such as the Jesuits, come to think of it.
To bolster my point (and sorry OB for clogging your comment section), I decided to browse the abstracts of the last three issues of “The Journal of Theological Studies” published by Oxford. Thought it would be representative enough. I found six articles dealing with critical Bible scholarship (e.g. an analysis of the book of Hebrews arguing that the author’s point is contradictory); three articles dealing with history as relevant to religion (e.g. an article about the 2nd century Syrian church; an analysis of Judaean diplomacy in Rome); three articles dealing with linguistics and philology as relevant to religion (dealing for example with the interpretation of some ancient inscription) and four articles dealing with the more general philosophy of religion (including an interesting-looking comparison between Trinitarianism and Egyptian polytheism).
None of the articles looked particularly flaky to me. And some actually quite interesting.
“an analysis of the book of Hebrews arguing that the author’s point is contradictory”
In any other context, that kind of thing would belong to literary criticism, like Sherlock Holmes freaks pinpointing where Conan Doyle must have lost the thread. It’s the supposedly divine element that makes all the difference. I’ve long had a feeling that, when everything else is stripped away, theology (yes, of the kind practiced by believers) is really just a figleaf for the fact that religions and their dogma don’t make sense. Sorry if that’s too much of a gross oversimplification.
But if “everything else” – the history, psychology of religion, philology, literary criticism, etc. – is stripped away, you are left with religion, and religious faith, rather than with theology. It’s the “everything else” that really matters. If Crews wanted to argue that religion, the existence of God, or religious dogma doesn’t make sense, he should have called it that, instead of theology.
But I still don’t quite see why the history of religion isn’t the history of religion rather than theology, and the same with the other items. I get that there is an academic discipline with that name, but I’m not clear on how the demarcations work. I’m also not clear on how secular theology is. I gather that’s very contested…
I think the main reason is that theology was the first, and for a number of centuries the only subject to be studied at universities – and the name kinda stuck. Also, at least where I’m from, the Churches demand people with a theology background and thus some well-versedness in all of the diverse subjects within theology. So there is still a pragmatic demand for the moniker to exist. Finally, the existence of a (long) theological tradition should be a strong argument in itself for the name to exist.
How secular theology is probably depends on the institution concerned. In the Netherlands, my impression is that they are pretty secular – the department at my own alma mater makes it pretty clear that they demand a high school knowledge of Greek and an interest in religious matters, but certainly no faith as such. I cannot vouch, of course, for the quality of theology departments at the Christian Fundamentalist “universities”.
Merlijn:
I don’t disagree with anything you say. But I don’t see that you have answered Fred Crews’ challenge. Please choose a pair of incompatible propositions A and B about a supposed god or gods (or, if you prefer, humans’ relationship with a supposed god or gods) which have both been believed at some time by reasonable people. Then show how theologians have resolved the difference, such that all reasonable people now believe A (or B, or some specified compromise between A and B).
On all such questions, Fred Crews (and I) believe that theologians fail completely. (They prefer to twitter on about the sort of non-questions you find debated, but not answered, in the Journal of Theological Studies.)
How, in your view, could any theologian ever settle (not write about, settle) such questions as
(1) Is YHWH the best smiter among many, as the writers of the Torah believed, or the only god, as many Jews and Christians now hold, or an imperfectly perceived aspect of Bramah as (I think) a Hindu might hold, or a misunderstanding of Allah, (etc etc)?
(2) Was Jesus of Nazareth a god on earth, as most Christians believe, or an interesting but inadequate prophet, as most Jews and Muslims believe?
(3) Does a human’s relationship with a supposed god or gods continue after the human’s death, as many believe, but Buddhists (I think) deny?
(4) Is homosexuality in humans intrinsically evil, as has been asserted by several writers of texts supposedly inspired or dictated by a god; or a different way of living?
(5) Are humans masters of other animals, or is it wicked to kill any sentient being?
First of all, I challenged Crews’ assertion that theology is a vacuous discipline. Failure to answer the questions you would like to see answered does not mean that the academic discipline itself is vacuous. Rather, they aren’t the proper questions.
The questions you cite revolve around issues of conviction and faith. Taken as such, they can’t even be really debated (and no, I never suggested they could). You can debate whether homosexuality is immoral, to be sure. And you can debate the historical background of religious beliefs on homosexuality. And questions like the latter are questions relevant to theology as an academic discipline. What _cannot_ be academically debated is whether God said that homosexuality is immoral.
And even on the, er, “non-questions” which are the proper terrain for theology, consensus as the kind of consensus on the periodic table of atoms cannot be reached. Because they cannot be ultimately answered empirically (though empirical evidence may be involved in various ways) but must be by recourse to the human-to-human _understanding_ which is key in most if not all humanistic disciplines.
Of course, I most strenuously object that issues of textual criticism, philology and the like amount to “non-questions” about which practitioners “twitter” – but that is a much bigger issue, and I’m not sure N&C is the place to discuss it.
Addendum: “they can’t even be really debated” – meaning, a question such as “does God exist” (let’s leave the “Does God hate homosexuals” for later) _can_ be reasonably debated. However, what the debaters _cannot_ do is resolve the differences with such certainty that “all reasonable people” would come to hold the answer in a similar fashion as say the roundness of the earth. Which is because any answer would be subject to different and somewhat weaker criteria than generalization from inductive proof. Which does not make the exercise vacuous. Hegel’s dialectic vs. formal logic is interesting even if it is impossible to decide on empirical grounds which one is “true”. Whether laws of nature are immanent or conventional etc. is an interesting topic, but likewise one on which you’re not going to find consensus. Criteria which are relevant to such questions are coherence/lack of internal contradiction , etc. On the basis of which it would be possible, for example, to build “models” of a theistic metaphysics, or God, which may be more or less coherent, possible, etc.
I wonder sometimes if aesthetic criteria come into play as a criterion of metaphysics. Or whether such criteria as logical coherence, simplicity, etc. aren’t aesthetic more than anything else.
“( I claim ) … that either theology is pure nonsense, a subject with no content; or else that it must ultimately become a branch of physics.”
Prof. Frank Tipler, 1990.
Merlijn:
“The questions you cite revolve around issues of conviction and faith. Taken as such, they can’t … be really [resolved by debate].”
I completely agree. And I see no significant difference from what I quoted from Fred Crews:
“How can theology [by which I should explained he meant ‘non-trivial propositions about god or gods or humans’ relationship with gods’] be considered knowledge at all, when the myriad intuitive knowers lack any way … of resolving their differences?”
Sorry, I was unnecessarily rude about twittering. Yes, there is a worthwhile scholarly consensus, for example, that the four “gospels” are compilations full of absurdities and contradictions. But popes are still apt to quote a gospel text as if it could prove something.
What I should have argued was that theologians, because any answer to the important questions will offend myriads of intuitive knowers of the opposite, prefer to deal with side issues. They don’t study gospel sources as a preliminary to deciding whether Jesus was a god or a phoney or a compilation of various historical and legendary figures. And despite the power of the scholarly rule “difficilior lectio”, they don’t even (for example) openly come down in favour of the story in “Mark” that Jesus told parables to confuse the Gentiles, in preference to the sanitised version in “Matthew”.
Nor do they compare christian and egyptian polytheism with a view to exposing the absurdity of the dogma of “The Trinity”, or compiling a family tree of christian gods and goddesses (modified-YHWH, Jesus, Mary, hundreds of “saints”).
Nor do they question the received version of the early history of Islam, because they risk persecution or murder if they do.
G. Tingey: I know Tipler said that. And it pretty much follows automatically from his version of reductionism and his belief in a non-transcendent God at the end of the Universe. I’m not in agreement with those steps, and I don’t think theology will be ultimately reduced to physics, just like history or linguistics or psychology won’t be.
N. Lawrence: the polytheism article did criticize the Christian claim towards monotheism and the oneness of God. It didn’t criticize the “absurdity” of Trinitarianism as such, or indeed the “absurdity” of religious faith as such – but I don’t see why such a thing should be necessary. As for the lack of combativeness among theologians on issues of political importance such as Islam: this would take me quite some time to challenge – but even if you are right, it wouldn’t invalidate theology. God knows there are enough academics who lack a spine when they should have one.
I still insist that theology can be called _knowledge_. I agree that fundamentalist Islam, fundamentalist Christianity, etc. are not able to resolve their differences within theology. The currents that create most trouble currently do not _have_ any theology, because they do not have any critical analysis of the foundations of their faith. You can’t talk to a Christian fundamentalist about the enormous metaphorical depth of the Creation story because to them it isn’t a metaphor: God created the world in six 24-hour days. Bam. The whole theological enterprise rests on the idea that religion can be studied, not merely obeyed.
You may be right that many theologians are unwilling to offend the myriads who are ready to take up arms in defense of their “faith”. I don’t know. But even if they did, theologians would have little authority over them.
Merlijn:
Thanks for your continued willingness to respond. I think you are right that “theology” in the sense of “what people who call themselves theologians write about” does include some knowledge, for example about the probably dates of compilation of the Christian “gospels”, or the nature of the counter-arguments used by contemporary debunkers of Anselm’s ontological argument.
But I still think I (and more importantly Fred Crews) are right that what for the sake of argument I will call “Core Theology” – propositions about god or gods or humans’ relationship with them – cannot be called knowledge, because it has no tools to resolve the huge conflicts between different alleged revelations.
Incidentally, I don’t think that either of the two creation myths in Genesis have any metaphorical depth whatever – but that, of course, is just an expression of my aesthetic opinion. The second myth notably includes the shallow lie that women are inferior to men. Both include the shallow assumption that other animals and plants are inferior to humans.
I sometimes like to wind up fundamentalist by pointing out that there are two quite contradictory creation accounts of the creation… With metaphorical depth I was more thinking of the garden, and the tree of knowledge: it seems to me to be a quite powerful metaphor for self-consciousness and how it both enables knowledge while at the same time alienating us from our surroundings and each other.
The relationship between man and God can be studied, though, I believe, without any assumptions or indeed debate about the correctness of any revelatory statement about God. Namely, how do people relate to the God they believe in, and how does this belief cause them to behave.
Merlijn: Hmm. I completely disagree (you probably won’t be surprised to hear). I find the “Tree of Knowledge” part of the myth completely revolting. I would interpret it as a shallow admission by the inventors of the Elohim that they didn’t want ordinary people to make up their own minds about good and evil, but wanted to impose their own rules (Genesis ch 3 v22). And the fact that there is no way of deciding whether your, mine, or dozens of other interpretations is right, is Crews’ point.
(Nor, incidentally, do I see why self-consciousness enables knowledge. Minds that weren’t selfconscious could still process information about the world, and formulate knowledge. And nor do I see how self-consciousness alienates us from our surroundings and each other – but those are matters far beyond this topic and probably this blog.)
I agree that we can have knowledge about how individual humans relate to whichever of the dozens of incompatible gods they believe in, and how this belief cause them to behave. That’s human psychology and sociology, as expounded for example in Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. If you count Dennett as a theologian, then OK, some of theology is knowledge.
Well, there is a tradition of research in the psychology and sociology of religion before Dennett as well. Some of which written by theologians. All of which relevant to theology.
If Crews’ point is that there is no way of deciding which interpretation of Genesis is _right_, and that theology is therefore vacuous, then he is wrong. The point I’ve been trying to make is that even if the interpretation of texts (as done within but also outside of theology) is not an empirical enterprise, and doesn’t lead to the kind of certainty we have on say atoms, it is nonetheless subject to the rules of rational inquiry in general. Some interpretations may be more coherent, insightful, logically sound etc. than others.
“And nor do I see how self-consciousness alienates us from our surroundings and each other – but those are matters far beyond this topic and probably this blog.”
No, not beyond this blog (or blog-like object, or quasi-blog). Of interest.
Merlijn: Crews didn’t say that attempts to interpret (for example) the creation myths in Genesis are vacuous. He said that neither such attempts, nor anything else, can ever, at all, under any circumstances, lead to any knowledge about any god or gods, and that theology therefore cannot be called knowledge.
I would say (and I pompously imagine that Crews would agree) that interpretation of the Genesis texts, if backed up by archeology and other independent texts, could lead (but as far as I know hasn’t in practice) to knowledge about the priorities, beliefs, and delusions of the (as far as I know, unknown) people who invented, refined, and recorded them. None of that is, in my opinion, properly called theology, although it may be the sort of thing self-styled theologians prefer to write about, given that several million believers of the opposite will reject any proposition they make about any god.
If astronomers lacked telescopes and therefore wrote only about the interpretation of the myths underlying the traditional constellations, astronomy could not be called knowledge either.
“And nor do I see how self-consciousness alienates us from our surroundings and each other – but those are matters far beyond this topic and probably this [quasi-]blog.
No … Of interest.”
Crikey. Then, Ophelia, please would you like to start a thread about it, eg by inviting Merlijn to elaborate?
I completely agree with Nicholas. And the astronomer analogy is brilliant.
If theologians were unable to rely upon dogmatism, authoritarianism and scholasticism, they would soon find themselves out of work. The rest would be the object of study of philosophers, historians, anthropologists and psychologists.
I’ll first take up Ophelia’s invitation and clarify why I said that the Creation myth, particularly Genesis 3, is a “metaphor of enormous depth”. Please bear with me to the extent that I am not a theologian, and I don’t have time at the moment to do the needed background research on the text itself. Theologically, the below may be highly irresponsible.
I would regard the whole story of the garden and the expulsion of the garden as a, very wistful, reflection on the differences between us and the rest of nature, and the role of consciousness in determining that difference. My little exegesis below is my own – but I think similar ideas have been put forward quite often (e.g. Hegel in his encyclopedia logic §24).
The big difference between us and the rest of the animals (with the possible exceptions of chimpanzees) is our self-awareness: our ability to create ‘analog spaces’ in our heads in which we ponder our ‘analog self’ taken different actions than we actually do take. I think the eating of the tree of knowledge (of good and evil) is a metaphor for that self-awareness. Before the eating of the apple, Adam and Eve were unaware of their own nakedness, and (I would guess) unaware of any rift between them and the rest of creation.
Awareness of good and evil could be regarded as being based on our awareness of self and of others. A cat can play with a mouse without being very much aware of the ‘inner world’ of the mouse, and certainly not feeling much empathy for the mouse. To feel empathy for another person and become aware of the pain and suffering of others, one needs a ‘theory of mind’. The same goes for deceit and cruelty and other evil acts.
The paradisical nature of the Garden of Eden (not so much based on Genesis itself, but very much based on the tradition we derive from it) can be regarded as not so much pointing to a time where the wolf lies down with the lamb – for which Isaiah (11:6) longs so much – but a time when we were as unaware of natural evil and the terrible necessities of survival as the animals themselves are. Genesis 3 in a way desperately longs for a time when our eyes were shut to the evil that surrounds us.
Likewise, with self-awareness comes awareness of the passage of time, and most importantly, mortality. Gen. 2:17: “From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” Which I would allegorically interpret as gaining awareness of death, rather than mortality itself: “By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.” (Gen. 3:19).
Finally, self-awareness means also awareness of other minds, and the existence of other complex ‘inner worlds’ which will forever be hidden to us – no matter how much we may try to approach one another: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.” (Gen. 3:7), i.e. the sense of shame as the sense that the eyes of other people are upon us: people from which we may want to hide our innermost thoughts. This is what I meant with self-awareness alienating ourselves from others because it produces _awareness_ of others.
So both God and the serpent spoke truthfully. Eating of the tree of knowledge did doom us to death: it made us aware of our own mortality. At the same time, it made us “like gods who know what is good and what is bad.” – more accurately, it made us conceptualize what it would be like to be gods, to be immortal. Mammals at least seem to have an awareness of death – but they seem not too much bothered by it.
The fact that we are able to imagine ourselves immortal as Gods, yet will all end up as dust – there is no mention at all of any afterlife in the first five books of Moses, and Gen. 3:22 “he must not be allowed to put out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life also, and thus eat of it and live forever” could be a pretty sure indicator that, in the mind of the writer(s) of the verse, there is none – is a very tragical and essential part of the human condition.
And to put the crown on our expulsion from Eden, we can no longer eat the fruit from trees, but “Cursed be the ground because of you! In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, as you eat of the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, Until you return to the ground, from which you were taken; For you are dirt, and to dirt you shall return.” (Gen. 3 17-19). So we are doomed to change and modify our surroundings in order to survive, constantly at battle with nature – and doomed to constantly strengthen our control and mastery over it.
The whole passage reads to me like a lament for the disharmony between us and the rest of the planet, and a wistful longing for a mythical ‘age of innocence’.
I personally think we are and are not part of nature. I disagree with the line pushed by some writers at spiked-online, according to which we can pretty much do with animals whatever we want to. I also disagree with for example Peter Singer, who sees no ethical barrier at all between us and the animals. Gen. 3 encapsulates my contradictory feelings about the issue pretty much perfectly.
At the same time, the passage may also be regarded as a metaphor for individual growing up. The awareness that the world is a terrible place, that we are irreducibly alone, and that we eventually all will end up being food for the worms, are experiences that I would think are familiar to all of us. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny.
Part of my beliefs are that there is no life after death. No angels with harps or devils with pitchforks. At the same time, I very much _like_ being alive, and I can well imagine why people take recourse to believing in a paradisical afterlife. I have at times great difficulties wrestling with the awareness of death and mortality. And I doubt I am the only one here. For me, Genesis 3 is a reminder of what it is to be human: that all our inadequacies and our awareness of death come with the package, and that it is useless to long for a mythical paradise/childhood/age of innocence which is locked to us forever.
That, in a nutshell, should make clear why I believe the myth of the Garden and our expulsion of it to be such a powerful metaphor, and why I feel drawn to it.
Now my answer to Nicholas Lawrence’s objection: I think that part of our differences result from different “proper” definitions of theology. I would regard the current content of the discipline as pretty much its core part. The existence of God _can_ be contemplated rationally as a philosophical proposition, but it cannot be defended rationally as a revelatory insight – and the latter I would reject qua theology (if it is even considered as such).
However, I disagree with your astronomy analogy. Without telescopes, the stars are still there as a matter of principle. The limitations of astronomy would not result from its subject, but from its lack of tools. However, gaining empirical knowledge about God is (in my opinion at least) _in principle_ impossible. It is not something theology can do, should do or should pretend to do. Or should be demanded to do.
This does _not_ mean that theology has no knowledge content, or that it has no justification as a distinct academic subject (about that I replied to OB earlier).
OT,
http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/53121
Escaping Illusion?
Kim Sterelny
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Daniel C. Dennett. xvi + 448 pp. Viking, 2006. $25.95.
“
Before I discuss Dennett’s take on religion, let me explain why I think his cultural project is doomed. “
‘but even if Paul was exaggerating somewhat that there were 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection, they would almost have to be _shared_ hallucinations, wouldn’t they?’
Good grief, who where they? You read 500 witnesses and you take it for granted that they are real. If I write a story and say 1000 people witnessed me shooting fire from my eyeballs you would by it?
And I agree with Nicholas. Theology may have a component of knowledge as mentioned but it is primarily a vacous exercise.
And your wrong about only chimps being self aware.
Merlijn, While I disagree with your general approach to theology, I really appreciated your interpretation of the Adam & Eve story. I, too, think it’s a deep allegory, and I agree with a great deal of what you said about it. Amazing to think that there are people who actually take it literally!
I don’t know how you find the time for your contributions here. (Servants?)
Merlijn: “The existence of God _can_ be contemplated rationally as a philosophical proposition”
“However, gaining empirical knowledge about God is (in my opinion at least) _in principle_ impossible”
I pretty much agree with you. I would however say that I have knowledge, from empirical observation of this planet, that no omnipotent benevolent entity interacts with it. Of course, lots of writing by theologians denies that this is firm knowledge.
“it cannot be defended rationally as a revelatory insight” I think that is Crews’ point, and I am glad we can agree about it.
I agree that my analogy with astronomy has faults. I was thinking of an imaginary world where telescopes were in principle not possible. You wrote: “Without telescopes, the stars are still there as a matter of principle.” Not sure about that. We would have no knowledge of where “there” is. We might think the stars weren’t “there” at all, but holes through which the light of heaven shone!
Nicholas – if our putative telescopeless society would have the same attitude to knowledge as, say, the Greeks, perhaps someone would come up with the idea that they are actually stars like our sun is. As Aristarchus of Samos actually did. Of course, he had no way to prove his speculations at the time.
About the interactions of an omnipotent benevolent deity with our planet: I don’t know how _firm_ this knowledge is. I do think it’s a metaphysical assumption – albeit a very respectable one, and one with which I agree at least as far as any commonsense meaning of ‘interaction’ goes. But suppose we observe a miracle – say OB walking across Puget Sound. All we could do would be to observe it, but science would not be able to explain it as the actions of an omnipotent deity and hence regard it as empirical proof of one. Simply because the explanation is too strong – there is nothing a presumably interventionist omnipotent deity _cannot_ do. The whole enterprise is based on scientific laws remaining the same (otherwise where would replicability etc. go) – a deity lifting them at will would be impossible to deal with as such an omnipotent deity could not be incorporated within science as a treatable and observable cause.
I personally think that interventionist omnipotent deities – which includes the putative ID ones – are a bit like cars with square wheels. Philosophically, simply too clumsy. You can have a God who sets the whole thing in motion with the laws of the universe and their mathematical background and exploding supernovae spewing heavy materials all across space – and then he has to go in fix the flagellum and the eye because evolution supposedly can’t take care of itself. Not a very impressive Deity. Not even taking into account the problems with a supposedly benevolent Deity intelligently designing the human botfly.
I also agree that observations for omnipotent and interventionist deities messing around with stuff are less than impressive. The very success of science is testimony to the likelihood that your (and, partially, my) metaphysics are correct.
And I would be dishonest if I were to deny that science did not inform my theism to the extent that I regard such interventionist Deities as extremely unlikely (why I regard a non-interventionist one as nonetheless at least worth speculating about is a whole different subject).
But all this is not an empirical point. Interventionist omnipotent deities cannot be either empirically supported (in principle, I believe) or indeed disproved (the way we could experimentally disprove, provisionally at least, that tomato plants are ambulant and carnivorous when the moon is full). The difference is not so much a matter of practice as one of principle – we could at least _imagine_ ourselves observing tomato plants during all full moons until the death of the solar system, but I’m arguing we cannot imagine a scientifically valid observation and proof of an act of God.
That doesn’t mean that supposing interventionist deities at work is a rationally sound thing to do. I don’t think it is. But I do believe we move here into philosophical territory (subject still to the rational and the logical) rather than strictly empirical territory.
Merlijn: Your Lament for the Human Condition is beautifully written (and, Ophelia, don’t you think deserves to start a new thread?)
However, I don’t think your Lament has much in common with Genesis 3, and I think it is very unlikely that the authors of Genesis 3 had similar regrets. It is as if we had been discussing a repellent myth about some aspect of the building of the London & Birmingham railway, and you said this myth had deep metaphorical significance, and then produced Middlemarch as an explanation of the metaphor.
Yes, the adult human condition comes as a package. And yes, “it is useless to long for a mythical paradise/childhood/age of innocence”. But not “which is locked to us forever”. Rather “because there never was one, and that way madness lies”: See the happy moron / He doesn’t give a damn. /I wish I was a moron. /Good God, perhaps I am.
Genesis 3 is completely different. It relates that humans _chose_ the package – and, typically, blames one woman for making the wrong choice.
There never was a time when any _homo sapiens_ was unaware of suffering and death. Except, possibly, very recently and in rich countries, young children are aware of it too: they have sisters who die and parents who starve. When Genesis 3 was composed, children were lucky if they had two parents still alive.
I suppose you could argue that humans did choose to go in for intensive agriculture. But that happened long after Genesis was written. And there was no moment when some tribe decided “we’re fed up with killing a deer and gathering some berries in the morning, and then discussing dialectic vs. formal logic all afternoon. Let’s invent a plough and multiply.”
I think the loincloth bit in Genesis was written to institutionalise the cultural taboo on displaying your genitals as happily as other apes do. I don’t agree that it has any useful parallel with humans’ complex and varying abilities to share, hide, and discern each other’s inner worlds.
I agree that the authors of Genesis did assume that humans are fundamentally different from other animals. And maybe we are. However, as Thomas Nagel famously argued, we can never know what it is like to be a bat. For my part, none of that stops me enjoying splashing in a river with some ducks and knowing that I share 50% of my DNA with a banana.
Don’t you mean that agriculture arose long _before_ Genesis 3 was written? Meaning, in the Levant, at least several millenia. Which is why I don’t think Gen. 3 incorporates any “memory” of pre-agricultural life. It’d be too long ago.
Young children may become aware of death at an early age – but they are not born with that awareness. And whether indeed there never was innocence/childhood etc. does not so matter so much as that it is quite possible to long for such, and to associate childhood with unawareness of evil, unawareness of death, etc.
Merlijn: “Don’t you mean that agriculture arose long _before_ Genesis 3 was written?”
I was muddled. I had in mind modern intensive agriculture, but that’s irrelevant. I agree with you that Gen. can’t incorporate any “memory” of pre-agricultural life.
By the way, I think the nakedness thing goes a bit deeper than giving an explanation for the cultural taboo on nudity. Note that Adam and Eve instituted it in an act of disobedience – it wasn’t God that installed it. I would regard here the _knowledge_ of nakedness that Adam and Eve gained by eating the fruit as a metaphor for the birth of a sense of shame. And again, children aren’t born with any such thing.
I also believe that the whole growing up metaphor may not be so far-fetched as it seems. Humans at the cultural stage of Genesis hardly had any scholarly means to study history, origins or anything else. However, that doesn’t mean that creation myths are entirely made up out of thin air. One thing that an agricultural people would be aware of would be the difference between man and animals (notice the curse of birth pains which seems to be a way to explain why giving birth is so much more difficult for humans than animals – now, of course, we have different explanations). Or indeed the dim, fading memory of their own infancy – which may have seemed, as it usually does, much more happier and carefree than it really was. I don’t think that it is entirely far-fetched to claim that Gen. 2-3 may try to set up a basic view of man’s place in the world on the basis of primarily these two.
(There is a possible and interesting parallel between Gen. 3 and Frederick Engels’ “Origin of the State…” which paints a highly idealized view of pre-agricultural life, living in a blessed state of primitive communism and gender equality, and does regard the advent of agriculture, changing the land rather than living off it, as the primary cause of gender inequality, class divisions etc.)
Merlijn:
“About the interactions of an omnipotent benevolent deity with our planet: I don’t know how _firm_ this knowledge is.”
I was just thinking of the dear old “problem of evil”. Despite their millions of words, in my opinion no theologian has ever come anywhere near answering the simple questions attributed to Epicurus. Miraculously getting back on topic, I note that Crews’ Introduction brilliantly demolishes Rowan Williams’ pathetic wriggling about tsumanis.
If we observe OB walking across Puget Sound (and have checked whether JS has put a sheet of perspex just under the waves) then we conclude either
(a) our understanding of gravity, surface tension, etc is defective, and under conditions we will now investigate further, a human can walk on water; or
(b) there is an entity which has annoyingly, magically, and presumably temporarily enhanced the surface tension (or whatever), and this magical intervention is forever and in principle outside the capacities of our instruments to investigate. This entity doubtless doesn’t want OB to get her feet wet, but whether it is omnipotent or universally benevolent we cannot say. It’s only done this one trick.
As readers of this quasi-blog will not need to be reminded, Hume showed that (b) is a bad call.
I agree (b) is a bad call (haven’t read Hume, he’s on my list though). Scientifically, it’s a bad call. So would you agree that (b), or empirical proof of intervening deities (under which I would place also ID) is not so much _absent_ as _impossible_? ;-)
Put it another way. It _is_ a matter for empirical inquiry to not postulate the existence of unobservable, non-interacting things in space and time. I might “postulate” the existence of a background medium which cannot be observed directly or indirectly, but it has no place in a scientific model of the (empirical) world. So in cases like these, “unprovable” or “unobservable” can be taken to mean “doesn’t exist”.
Now suppose that we observe OB walking across Puget Sound. And contrary to our expectations, we find that the properties of water remain all the same nonetheless. We cannot replicate the hypothesized conditions of water which enabled OB to walk on it in any way.
Contrary to our unobservable, needless hypothesis above, this would be totally outside the scope of empirical science.
We cannot prove that the laws of nature have been lifted by a mischievous deity because our method depends on the continuity and replicability of the very laws that are supposedly lifted.
At the same time, the unobservable, non-interacting medium mentioned above falls _within_ the scope of empirical science because it is assumably subject to the laws of nature and the “model” of the world we are looking for. However, a transcendent deity who can break the laws of nature cannot be logically subject to them at the same time. So, in this case, “unprovable” cannot be automatically taken to mean “doesn’t exist” in the same way. To the contrary, OB’s walking on Puget Sound would remain unexplained forever.
So briefly, the one deity which I do believe science has “disproved” is a non-transcendent pantheist one – one which is more-or-less equal to “lawful nature” and therefore tautological. Redundant. The assumption that no transcendent deities are messing around with stuff is reasonable – but not defensible on purely empirical grounds. Not without hidden or explicit philosophical assumptions. Albeit good ones. So, I think that Jerry Coyne’s assertion that “virtually all religions make improbable claims that are in principle empirically testable, and thus within the domain of science” is mistaken. Miraculous claims are not, as a matter of principle (rather than practice) empirically testable.
One more remark, then I’m off! I mentioned in another thread that I felt Dawkins overstated the respectability of the argument from design (even in the 19th century) when he mentioned Darwinism made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. The argument from design/ID falls into the same trap of attributing spatiotemporally unlimited, and omnipotent, causes to spatiotemporally limited events. Which is I guess why even some of the classical philosophers were attracted to evolutionary thought. Either a Designer operates through naturalistic mechanisms, and that would be tautological. Or he does not, and that would be impervious to scientific, and possibly more widely rational, inquiry.
Of course, if the latter is the case, one might suppose that a lot of other phenomena would be inexplicable as well which goes right against the success of empirical science and the “understandability” of the natural world. But that’s a pragmatical and philosophical, not an empirical argument. So the only way for ID to get off the ground as a scientifically respectable idea is for it to categorically rule out any designers that are spatiotemporally unlimited and omnipotent – something hideously powerful but yet limited, like Star Trek’s Q, maybe, but not God.
So what I would accuse the IDers of is actually _abusing_ empiricism.
Just two thoughts on different bits of the preceding thread:
a) on the telescope/stars business: if the stars exist, they do so independently of our ability to investigate them with telescopes, or, in fact, perceive them at all. Same must go for a god or gods. Who was it went so far as to maintain that dinosaurs had literally not existed till we discovered their bones and gave them names? Surely that is one of things B&W is fighting.
b) Presumably by the time creation myths were set down on paper or parchment or papyrus or clay tablets they were already such an ancient oral tradition that they must have seemed almost as far away in time to the first to write them down as they do to us. Unlike the case of later events in the bible for which we can sometimes perceive contemporary political motivations at work (I think that starts when Israel starts having kings), the creation myths would seem to be reflections of something more basic. Even if Merlijn is wrong about what they meant to their authors, it shouldn’t be invalid to investigate where and how elements of these myths still resonate with concerns we have today.
Stewart’s points (a) and (b) seem to me to be fair-minded corrections of my earlier rants.
I rather wish others would chip in to help us untangle what I thought was the principal direction of this thread: Have theologians arrived at any non-trivial statements about god(s) that they can justifiably call “knowledge”?
B
Stewart’s points (a) and (b) seem to me to be fair-minded corrections of my earlier rants.
I rather wish others would chip in to help us untangle what I thought was the principal direction of this thread: Have theologians arrived at any non-trivial statements about god(s) that they can justifiably call “knowledge”?
Meanwhile, here are a few more reflections on the sight of OB walking across Puget Sound. The hard-line view is, for example, in Richard Robinson’s “An Atheist’s Values” (OUP, 1964). “And if an event really contradicts what we thought was a law of nature, that just shows that we were wrong about the laws of nature. We very often _are_ wrong about the laws of nature. They are not to be known by instinct, but only by the endless labours of science.”
A possible objection to that position is that it is not falsifiable, and therefore not, according to Popper, scientific.
I wonder if others think it is possible to imagine events that are so well attested by so many dispassionate persons, and so well checked for trickery, and so obviously contrary to what we perceive as a well-nigh indispendable law of nature, that we will admit them to a list of candidate miracles?
Personally, I would then also want to bring in an aesthetic appraisal. The miracles related in the bible that I can recall are all so petty, so unimpressively un-numinous.
Without searching for examples (lack of time), surely there is no shortage of phenomena which science has yet to explain to the satisfaction of scientists, for which investigation is continuing. Then there are so-called “miracles” sometimes attested to by thousands of people (weeping or bleeding madonnas, that kind of thing), not all of which anyone has taken the trouble to debunk. The reason most scientists wouldn’t seriously investigate such a phenomenon is because in those cases explanations other than those scientists think they should be spending their time on are so extremely likely.
Plus all those tortillas and muffins and turtle bellies and bowls of mushroom soup that look like Mary (or as a newspaper I saw the other day called her matily, “Jesus’s mom”) – science has a really hard time explaining those.
As for our water-walking miracle – I don’t think that it would count as an indication we were wrong about the laws of nature. Basically, a law of nature cannot be contradicted by a single event. It would take repeated events, and ones that are within the purview of scientific investigation, to do so.
Which is why I think investigating ostensible miracles would be a waste of time. I don’t believe they occur, mind you – but even if I did, investigating them would result in nothing exactly because they are miracles. And seeing Jesus in your soup doesn’t even count as one, unless the soup begins to relate parables.
I largely agree with the points that Steward raised. As for the aesthetics of miracles: there are some pretty impressive ones in the Bible. The seven plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the ascension of Jesus, etc.
The point about them repeating before one wastes time investigating is important. So is duration, as in: it should be there long enough to nail down. I’m no scientist, but I assume experiments with sub-atomic particles can enlighten us by way of contrast. They happen almost faster than is measurable, they’re so small one does more inferring of their existence than actual observation; they’re certainly not “witnessed” by thousands. And yet, they are repeatedly performed in controlled conditions, only reported as a finding if they are established to be consistent phenomena, and the experiments are not randomly decided upon; they are the result of a gradual process of investigating smaller and smaller parts of a picture that is big enough for all to see. Sub-atomic particles will always do the same things under the same conditions because they are obeying laws for which we have yet to find exceptions; madonnas appear in strange places (or bleed or weep) because deities have decided they would and not for any reason that makes sense to us. In any case, even without serious scientific investigation, many of these have been demonstrated to be frauds. Try doing that with sub-atomic particles.