Imagination
Allen Orr talks about metaphysical imagination.
Dawkins’s problems with philosophy might be related to a failure of metaphysical imagination. When thinking of those vast matters that make up religion – matters of ultimate meaning that stand at the edge of intelligibility and that are among the most difficult to articulate – he sees only black and white. Despite some attempts at subtlety, Dawkins almost reflexively identifies religion with right-wing fundamentalism and biblical literalism. Other, more nuanced possibilities – varieties of deism, mysticism, or nondenominational spirituality – have a harder time holding his attention. It may be that Dawkins can’t imagine these possibilities vividly enough to worry over them in a serious way…[P]art of what it means to suffer a failure of imagination may be that one can’t conceive that one’s imagination is impoverished. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that people like James and Wittgenstein struggled personally with religion, while Dawkins shrugs his shoulders, at least in part because they conceived possibilities – mistaken ones perhaps, but certainly more interesting ones – that escape Dawkins.
I love the ‘part of what it means to suffer a failure of imagination may be that one can’t conceive that one’s imagination is impoverished’ bit. It seems true, and amusing, and a useful warning, all at once. To put it another way, it describes an interesting variety of cognitive distortion, and I’m fascinated by cognitive distortions. I’m especially fascinated by those infintitely regressing kinds, that you can’t tell you have because the ability to detect them is precisely the distortion you have.
But at the same time, I’m not entirely sure it’s a fair point overall. I haven’t read The God Delusion (nobody gave it to me for Xmas, the bastards), but I’m not entirely sure it’s a fair point in general, independent of the book. That’s because one of the striking things about orthodox, common or garden, churchy, public religion is how unimaginative and impoverished it is. How narrow, confined, hemmed in, and uninspiring it is. I don’t deny that metaphysical speculation can be imaginative, but I’m not convinced that religion generally is. Religions have creeds and dogmas and orthodoxies, and orthodoxy is not conducive to metaphysical imagination. The ‘more nuanced possibilities’ may be of interest, but I’m not sure all discussions of religion have to deal with them.
Ben Goldacre talks about imagination (in a way) in Bad Science.
People who like science usually just happen to think that the story it can tell us about the world is more interesting, more intricate, and more beautiful than anything anyone could make up and put in a holy book…I’m just not very interested in religion. Maybe if there was a religion that was invented after the enlightenment, after the invention of the microscope, the discovery of the atom, that incorporated a bit more of what we knew, it might have a bit more oomph. But when you stand up “made in seven days” against the amazing findings of comparative anatomy, and everything that suggests about convergent and divergent evolution, the way that my hand is the same structure as a bat’s wing, the way that the green toed sloth has a symbiotic relationship with algae that provides it with green camouflage against a forest background, and more, I’m sorry, I know whose books I’m buying this Christmas. From the moment we started to work out what was going on with the stars we realised that we weren’t the centre of attention in the universe, and the rules had to be rewritten. From a starting position of glorious pointlessness, we generate meaning for ourselves.
Yes. ‘Made in seven days’ just doesn’t…sing.
I could think up some pointers for Ben Goldacre’s post-Enlightenment religion. One could reinterpret Teilhard’s Omega Point theology without the vitalism, and add some transhumanist spice to it, at the same time steering clear of Tipler’s hopeless attempt at religionizing science… Or look into Process Theology, which at its basis is neutral to any of the traditional religions. There’s a lot of stuff out there without the “in seven days” stuff.
PZ Myers had a good post about this, maybe not the supposed lack of imagination of Dawkins but more the whole “he doesn’t get the subtlety of theology and metaphysics” charge against him.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php
He calls it “The Courtier’s Reply”.
OB: “The ‘more nuanced possibilities’ may be of interest, but I’m not sure all discussions of religion have to deal with them.”
I have now (recently) read “The God Delusion” and I think it is fairly clear that Dawkins targets mainstream religion because that is what most believers believe.
Indeed, in some of the “more nuanced possibilities” the god that is imagined has little relationship to the idea of “god” that most people (religious or not) have.
I have a t-shirt that reads ‘So many books, so little time’ and I suspect that Dawkins has one as well. When there are so many important and interesting things that deserve his attention, why waste time reading works that are, in essence, just retreads of the ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’ stuff. Clever theorising about nonsense is still nonsense.
PZ gets it exactly right. If the emperor is, in fact, starkers, it is not reasonable to criticise someone for lack of familiarity with a host of publications detailing various aspects of his raiment. Don’t we all have better things to do?
Stewart & Arnaud have it exactly right.
Meantime, there is yet ANOTHER (sigh) christian nutter,one John Cornwell, in the Sunday Times here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2517335,00.html
going on and On and
“It’s either a subject with no content, a null – or else it’s part of Physics… “
Oops – that post came out squiff, didn’t it?
Never mind, I think you’ve got the point….
Arnaud, thanks, P Z’s post is great – I linked to it in News yesterday!
“I think it is fairly clear that Dawkins targets mainstream religion because that is what most believers believe.”
This is what I’ve gathered, from what Dawkins has been saying in interviews and on his website – but since I haven’t actually read the book yet, I decided not to say that. But it does seem odd that people keep upbraiding him for discussing mainstream religion and not the more sophisticated variety if the former simply is his subject.
Dawkins went to great pains to define his terms at the start of the book (and, OB, I am shocked at your remissness) and to make it clear he was in general addressing mainstream belief;
‘Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that ‘God is the ultimate’ or ‘God is our better nature’ or ‘God is the universe.’ Of course, like any other word, the word ‘God’ can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.
Weinberg is surely right that, if the word God is not to become completely useless, it should be used in the way people have generally understood it: to denote a supernatural creator that is ‘appropriate for us to worship’
So, no, Dawkins isn’t addressing god as the poteniality of possibility, or god as the immanence of alternates, or god as the second before time began, or god as string theory. He is addressing the god who is worshipped.
PZ Meyers’ point in “The Courtiers’ Reply” is pretty bad, regardless of the merits or demerits of the criticism levelled at Dawkins. The simple reason being that it is a retort that can be levelled by any crank “debunking” a body of knowledge without actually acquainting himself in depth with a body of knowledge. If a creationist were to launch a broadside against Dawkin without reading the Origin of Species, the retort would serve him just as well.
Not so sure about that, Merlijn. Creationists are fond of referring to Origins as a ‘Bible’. You can be expected to be familiar with the basic texts and the state of the debate, but accusations that unless you have read the meditations of Saint Scabrous or the dissertations of some Swiss theodicist then you are unfit to address the basic issue are merely swarming.
Of course, it all depends on what you would call a ‘body of knowledge’.
That’s what I was going to say. Is theology ‘a body of knowledge’? I’m not convinced. I know we’ve had this discussion before, but I remain unconvinced.
Besides. The vast majority of believers and churchgoers and followers of mainstream religion also know nothing of theology – yet no one thinks that disqualifies them from being believers and churchgoers and followers. So why are people who dispute the mainstream god, as opposed to accepting it, expected to study theology?
There is a difference, though, between forming an opinion about an issue and writing a book about one. The problem with reasoning like G. Tingey’s –
Failing, or deliberately not looking at the point, that Theology is studying “god”.
But if the very existence of “god” is under discussion, then theology is irrelevant, isn’t it?
is that it pointedly ignores the very literature in which the counterargument is provided. And this literature exists. I am currently reading Jonathan Rowe (an atheist philosopher of religion) on the Cosmological Argument. It deals with the issue with great intricacy and detail, and does not dismiss Aquinas and other defenders of the argument on the basis of the preconceived conclusion that God does not exist and that, therefore their work is vacuous. Then there is Hartshorne’s defence/reworking of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument, which even if it is wrong, nonetheless makes some very interesting points. And I could go on. The literature written in defence of theism constitutes a body of knowledge regardless of whether God exists or not, and has been treated as such by a large number of atheist writers on the subject as well.
Now, I do not know whether or not Dawkins has acquainted himself sufficiently with literature on the subject. He may have. But PZ Meyers’ satire conspicuously fails to argue that he has, as his reviewers argue he hasn’t.
The argument of PZ’s piece seems to be that, since the emperor is without clothes (i.e. God does (probably) not exist, defenders of the alternative viewpoint are engaging in covering up the nudity of the monarch. But this is clearly assuming a conclusion which, if Dawkins’ critics are correct, is not warranted at all – for Dawkins to make, at least.
What I do not mean by this is that OB, you or indeed I are somehow not justified in rambling on about the relative merits of atheism or theism in the absence of a twelve-year study of St. Augustine. But that is because there is a difference between blogs, blog comments, and books.
Well, true. I did disagree with Tingey’s comment, and there are god questions I wouldn’t tackle in a book (because I have zero desire to read theology).
And yet, and yet – because this pesky god is a public subject, and everyone does feel quite free to lay down the law about it, and tell everyone else what’s what – actually I do feel that dissenters have an at least equal right to dispute the claims, without expertise in theology.
Oh, I don’t begrudge you or Dawkins or anyone else the right to dispute the claims in question, with or without expertise in theology. But this does not by itself inoculate lack of expertise against criticism, does it? This goes for defenders of theism as well as critics of it.
Hmm. Contradicting yourself there, I think. If we’re not justified, then we’re not justified. Right?
I think PZ misses the point slightly. It is the broader discipline of metaphysics which has ‘no clothes’.
Anything which, by it’s very nature, has no way of being verified is by definition pure speculation.
That, for me, is the root problem with the god(s) thing. Until that is address, considering any theology is pointless.
I’ve not read TGD, so I’m not sure if Prof’ D crits in in that manner.
Sorry my grammar is pants. I blame it on the after effects of my Saturnalia food binge and English being my second language.
The second sentence needs a comma after the “verified”, and “in in” the last sentence should by “it in”.
I’ve award myself 3/10, and I’ll being talking to myself after class.
OK, let’s pretend that a “god” exists.
Then why is that god not detectable, or has not yet been detected?
With all our modern detection equipment, where is “god”?
Where do all the prayers and effort go to – other than the pockets of the preachers and the churches, who are doing very nicely out of their many-thousand-year-old blackmail racket, thank you.
All this vast effort put into religion, and no effects, other than blackmail, murder, torture and obscurantism….
Something wrong, here, surely?
Which is where Dawkins came in, in the first place.
Also, remember Tipler’s argument about theology.
And I do agree that Dawkins was almost certainly deliberately aiming at the “common believer” rather than the super-sophisticated theologians.
Who then complain that they are not being spoken to!
I happen to side with the majority who think Anselm & Hartshorne are flat wrong, but that’s another story.
Well now I don’t think pure speculation is pointless. Far from it in fact. But I do think it needs to be recognized as speculation, rather than treated as well-established fact or even as warranted belief. Average normal mainstream conventional etc etc theists don’t generally treat the existence of a deity as pure speculation, and they often treat belief in it as downright mandatory.
OB, I didn’t state pure speculation is pointless. I said theology was, which makes truth statements based on the bedrock pure speculation.
It also depends on what the speculation is for as to how pointless it is. Albert E speculated what it was like to ride on a beam of light and got relativity out of it. Star Wars fans can speculate about whether Han Solo will make a good husband to Princess Leia and entertain themselves. However to mandate how people will live based on unsubstantiatable assertions is worse than pointless, it’s nuts.
Oh, right, so you did; beg pardon.
Yeah – that’s what I’m saying. To take the speculation and try to impose it on everyone else – that’s nothing to do with speculation, and I say the hell with it.
Oh but by the way, it was Einstein’s wife who speculated about what it was like to ride on a beam of light, not Einstein.
[collapses in mirth]
Hmm. Contradicting yourself there, I think. If we’re not justified, then we’re not justified. Right?
Hmmmm… No. There’s a difference between writing on a weblog and writing a book, in the first place – I expect arguments in the latter to be furnished more carefully than the former. Second, I think there’s a difference between being “justified” to make a point and “have the right to” make a point. Suppose A makes a point concerning the mating habits of the Guinean red-tailed hawk or whatever, and B charges him with neglecting the copious writings of Professor X about said mating-habits. Did A have the right to make those claims? Obviously. Was A justified in making the claims on a weblog, in conversation, at a seminar, whatever? Of course. Would he be justified in making the claims in a book or a published article? That’s a whole different issue.
GT:
Also, remember Tipler’s argument about theology.
I can’t imagine where all this Tipler-quoting of yours comes from, GT. The man’s project probably puts science in a worse light than all the Intelligent Design efforts put together. It’s hideous theology, it’s hideous science, and it’s offensive in being a Teilhard the Chardin rip-off without paying the tribute that the infinitely more subtle and acute Frenchman would be due. Bah!
BJN:
I think PZ misses the point slightly. It is the broader discipline of metaphysics which has ‘no clothes’.
Anything which, by it’s very nature, has no way of being verified is by definition pure speculation.
Fair enough. But no metaphysics means no Plato, no Aristotle, no Aristotelian logic, no scientific method, and no…
It’s true that metaphysics and theology are much more speculative than hard science is and can be. But that does not mean that anything goes. Speculative philosophy has its own standards of reason to conform to, theological or not. But these must be logical, rather than empirical.
Philosophical illteracy is indeed a virtue. What’s the point of reading William James or Wittgenstein when we already know they are wrong? Never mind about them: how about that Pat Robertson? What a wanker! Can I get an amen on that? Yeah? Awesome!
No BJN – there was nothing wrong with your punctuation of that sentence; whether the subject is short and simple or long and complex, unless parenthetical, there should never be any between subject and verb. Whyever did you think it was wrong? You just failed with the spelling of its.
_
Tremendously amusing, Dr Frank. But it overlooks the sad reality that Pat Robertson and his pals have real influence on laws and regulations, as well as education and culture, so your implication that it’s silly to resist the Pat Robertson crowd rather than the massed followers of Wittgenstein is…not particularly convincing, at least not to me.
Watching a log fire, it struck me how entirely reasonable chymists once were to suppose that burning releases phlogiston. I think Dawkins says the equivalent of
1. I am dealing with the sort of phlogiston ordinary chymists talk about, not mystics’ verbiage about phlogiston as the reason why there is burning at all.
2. The evidence for phlogiston is weak, and combination with oxygen is a much more powerful explanation for combustion. Phlogiston might once have seemed like a good idea, but it does not exist.
3. No, I haven’t read Paracelsus on the 7 varieties of phlogiston, and Varicella on how to conjure it from a dunghill. [I am making that up, of course.] I don’t need to, because phlogiston does not exist.
Personally, I agree with that approach, because personally I think that the kind of god ordinary people worship, omnipotent and benevolent, demonstrably neither designed, nor intervenes in, life on this planet. And (though I see the force of Merlijn’s distinction between blogs and books), I do think it really is that simple. Bad books by Swinburne, and better books by others, completely fail to answer the simple point that no benevolent designer would design a planet with an unstable crust, and life-forms eating each other, and parasites, and many sentient life-forms seeing most of their offspring die.
Well, the last time we had this discussion, there were people claiming that the better books by others in fact don’t completely fail to answer that simple point – that they do give sophisticated answers that are hard to counter. I admit I remain incredulous myself, but I also have to admit that I haven’t read any Aquinas or similar since I was an undergraduate (and that was during the early Cretaceous).
I have read some crap arguments since then though – the Swinburne-Keith Ward school. But if there are better ones (and we’re told there are), that doesn’t count.
Hmmm…metaphysics and empiricism? I seem to recall a famous Scottish philosopher saying (perhaps provocatively?):
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, ‘Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?’ No. ‘Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?’ No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” (from his Treatise concerning human understanding)
:-)
“… if there are better ones (and we’re told there are)…”
Maybe this the theists’ secret weapon.
Let me pose a metaphysical question: were we to discover extensive, substantial proof that a god existed, would we have proved the existence of a supernatural being, or would we have naturalized god — stripped him, her, or it of the protective custody of the supernatural?
Elliott (and in a sideways fashion, Nicholas) –
I think most theologists would answer affirmatively to that question. But they would also (and I agree here) argue that the issue would never come up, as “extensive, substantial proof” that a God exists is inconceivable. We’ve been through miracles. Which by definition are singular infractions of the laws of nature – if they were not, they would be part of them. So as possible proof of God, they cannot be scientifically validated. Miraculous proof would be possibly personally convincing but unlikely to be intersubjectively convincing. For a supporter of a materialist or otherwise atheist metaphysics, there would always be loopholes.
Putting it briefly – but this is the heart of the matter – a God whose existence could be proven in a scientific fashion would be a part of the natural universe, and not transcend it. This is, obviously, in and of itself not an argument against the existence of a transcendent being.
It can only be made to be such an argument if we suppose that the natural universe (as the universe of entities obeying physical laws) is all there is (call this hypothesis X). Which is what Nicholas is supposing in his phlogiston argument, which recalls G. Tingey’s aether argument – which as an analogy I think is quite weak, as I argued before. By presupposing X is true, the question is begged against the theist.
Then there is potential metaphysical and logical proof for the existence of God. But I don’t think these can do anything but making a case for theism being reasonable (likewise, I do not believe any competing philosophies can be argued for beyond the reasonable). Basically I don’t think we can gain (relative) certainty by anything but the scientific method, and philosophy (which the scientific method nonetheless depends on in many ways) is always more open. Which doesn’t mean it is “sophistry or illusion” or indeed not subject to human reason (I am a rationalist in the old “rationalist vs. empiricist” sense).
I think a lot of theologians would here stress the limitations of our thought and the likelihood that God can never be fully comprehended. Which might be quite right. I’m nonetheless uncomfortable with the idea in as far as it may be interpreted as an abdication of intellectual responsibility and a surrender to fideism. A matter on which I am in agreement with the Holy Father (Regensburg Address). One of the best arguments for theism is the capacity of Man’s reason to comprehend a reasonable universe, or as Peirce (CP 2.24) says:
The doctrine of a light of reason seems to be inwrapped in the old Babylonian philosophy of the first chapter of Genesis, where the Godhead says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” It may, no doubt, justly be said that this is only an explanation to account for the resemblances of the images of the gods to men, a difficulty which the Second Commandment meets in another way. But does not this remark simply carry the doctrine back to the days when the gods were first made in man’s image? To believe in a god at all, is not that to believe that man’s reason is allied to the originating principle of the universe?
OB wrote:
I have read some crap arguments since then though – the Swinburne-Keith Ward school. But if there are better ones (and we’re told there are), that doesn’t count.
I have not read Keith Ward. What I have read of Swinburne’s theodicy was odious indeed, but I am not sure whether he is to be wholly dismissed as a systematic theologian – I haven’t read Swinburne. Though he does seem to represent a kind of classical theistic, omniscient/omnipotent/extratemporal conception of God which I think runs into serious difficulty with theodicy. I think the temporal deity of neoclassical theism/process theology (the theodicy of which is represented by Kushner, if I recall) is better suited to deal with this. I wouldn’t advise you to read Hartshorne. You’d hate him. Not because he’s not brilliant – he is – but because his writing style makes me search for new synonyms of the word “smug”. He makes some wonderful points, but you have to be very charitable to get there. Not that I would ever doubt your charitableness, OB, but I do have a feeling Hartshorne’s poor books would hit the chilly waves of Puget Sound ere long, if you were to read them. For theology in general, I like Arthur Peacocke, though he deals with science/religion issues more than with theology as such. Myself I’ve been reading more around theistically relevant philosophy by both theists and atheists (Peirce, Whitehead, Nagel) and will probably continue to do so for a while, rather than theology proper.
This said, I kind of agree with the points of Nicholas Lawrence which you reply to. In that I don’t believe the earth as such, or life-forms as such, have been designed by an omnipotent God. The question is really whether he could have intervened to make things a bit less intolerable to frail living creatures. And if so, whether he should have as a benevolent Deity. Say lower the pain barrier a bit. I could do without 90% of the physical pain I feel, thank you – the remaining ten would be quite sufficient to keep me aware. I also wonder whether he could not have worked to ensure the evolution of an ecology without carnivores, or parasites. Now I would guess that classical theologists would answer that God could, but should not – restricting himself to let the universe evolve naturally, and sentient beings use their freedom. I don’t think the answer is necessarily nonsense. There’s probably good arguments for such a view. But I’m moved to reject considering the existence of such a God (for these and other reasons). The kind of God whose existence I would consider is one who would not be omnipotent, in that the openness of the future, the free acts of sentient creatures, and all that, are just as closed for intervention to Him/Her/It as they are for us.
Elliott, you walk into this bar. After a while, chap with strangely piercing eyes comes up to you. “I’m Jesus. I’ve come again, and once I’ve recruited a few assistants, I’m going to heal the world. Yes, of course you think I’m mad. To convince you, I’ll just do a small miracle, which won’t have any unexpected repercussions.” He touches your empty beer glass, and instantly it’s full again. “I know you think that’s just a trick, but I’ll do it again with James Randi and Derren Brown watching.” Just then, James and Derren both walk into the bar, and Jesus does it again, as many times as they like.
I think I’d accept that as proof of a supernatural entity. OB can get to play the barmaid, and maybe she’ll tell us whether she would too?
To believe in a god at all, is not that to believe that man’s reason is allied to the originating principle of the universe?. Er, no. Much belief in a god is not allied to any reason at all. And why should we buy into the concept of “man’s reason”? On a planet without sentient beings, the ferns still get wet when it rains.
… classical theologists would answer that God could, but should not – restricting himself to let the universe evolve naturally, and sentient beings use their freedom. Er, nonsense. Caterpillars have no freedom not to let wasps lay eggs in them, and beetles who don’t understand plate tectonics have no freedom not to live on the slopes of volcanoes.
The observed state of this planet is consistent with one or more of Hume’s bungling infant deities, or with one or more cruel deities. It’s not consistent with benevolent deities.
I wouldn’t believe anything that happened while Derren Brown was in the room.
“OB can get to play the barmaid, and maybe she’ll tell us whether she would too?”
No, I wouldn’t. I would have to get a new glass, found by me somewhere random and unpredictable; then ‘Jesus’ would have to refill it somewhere outside the bar; then I would perhaps think ‘Jesus’ might be an entity with some currently inexplicable powers – I’m still not sure I would think he was a supernatural entity, if only because there would be too many variables I’d have been unable to rule out.
This is not unlike the argument several months ago with a commenter who claimed to have special powers because according to him he knew the answer to a question in a game of Twenty Questions played with his wife. The commenter said we were all obtuse or wrong or obstinate or something not to agree with him that his story was an indication that he had special powers – but I kept insisting, and I still think, that the story simply couldn’t possibly be as convincing to us as (he claimed) it was to him. In the nature of the case, it couldn’t. He could have been simply bullshitting all of us, and to us that possibility simply can’t be less plausible than the possibility that some stranger on the internet has special powers.
It’s the same with the ‘Jesus’ thing. I would try to rule out trickery but if he could still fill the glass I would simply suspect that I hadn’t thought of all the possible tricks, which wouldn’t even be surprising – I’m not that clever, and there are a lot of tricks in the world (as my namesake points out in her mad scene). It is far more plausible that I simply don’t know how Jesus did the trick than it is that Jesus is a supernatural being.
I don’t even believe Derren Brown when he tells us how he did it.
_
“Now I would guess that classical theologists would answer that God could, but should not – restricting himself to let the universe evolve naturally, and sentient beings use their freedom. I don’t think the answer is necessarily nonsense.”
It’s not nonsense. Arguments of that kind make a sort of sense in their own terms. But apart from the fact that it’s nasty, it also gives the irresistible impression (at least to me) of ad hoc-ness. The argument exists to deal with an uncomfortable (to say the least) aspect of reality – to deal with it in the sense of explaining it away. One can’t help thinking that if reality were otherwise, the argument would be different – that the argument doesn’t convince or appeal because of its own inherent convincingness, but because it does explain away that thing that keeps interfering with belief in a benevolent god. It’s hard not to hear theists who make that argument as simply knitting some patchy thing together to cover the indecency.
Nice to see that the barmaid’s the brightest person in the bar, as ever. “I would simply suspect that I hadn’t thought of all the possible tricks.” Fair enough – though I was, of course, meaning that Randi and Brown would be able to rule out all the known tricks.
Isn’t there any performance which will persuade even the most skeptical barmaid that “Jesus” is a less unlikely hypothesis than “trick unspottable by Randi and Brown”?
“Jesus” says “Look at Orion tonight, midnight local time.” Lots of people do, and lots of astromers film it. At the midnights, everyone sees, and it’s on every film, the stars whirl about, and then spell out in several languages “I do exist, though all your current religions are full of crap, signed, God.”
No, we can’t rule out that Darren Brown has engineered a worldwide collective hallucination, but isn’t it less unlikely that it was a miracle?
I find it more attractive to say “Yes, we will set the test high, and all the classic claimed miracles are pathetic (and guessing who your wife’s thinking of is a non-starter), but in principle we can label some performances miracles” than “No, if it actually happens, that just shows we didn’t fully understand how stars can sometimes move in strange ways”, because the latter position is unfalsifiable, and therefore not scientific.
“[A self-restricting God] is not nonsense“. On reflection, agreed, I was wrong to call it nonsense. But, as well as being nasty and ad hoc, it’s implausibly anthropocentric. It doesn’t acknowledge the suffering of beetles fried in lava, or caterpillars eaten from within by wasp larvae. Indeed, it’s androcentric. It doesn’t acknowledge the suffering of human women in childbirth, especially in the morbid fable that makes that a punishment for a distant ancestor listening to a talking snake.
“Isn’t there any performance which will persuade even the most skeptical barmaid that “Jesus” is a less unlikely hypothesis than “trick unspottable by Randi and Brown”?”
Oh, sure. I can think of hypotheticals that would turn my thinking upside down. It’s just that the beer isn’t it. The beer would certainly give me pause, though – I don’t mean to say it wouldn’t. It would. But I would also second-guess myself. But I can very easily imagine much more powerful miracles that would be vastly harder to second-guess. People suddenly starting to fly, for example. Not sweatily a few feet off the ground for fifteen seconds, but soaring and swooping around like barn swallows.
I think there are definitely miracles one can think of that might convince me, personally – but I do not think any miracle would attain the strength of consensus of scientifically validated knowledge. At most, we would be able to state that we cannot explain some observation scientifically, and that’s where it stops. So the “best” possible outcome would be very negative: a high frequency of miraculous events would possibly erode belief in the scientific method, methodological naturalism, etc. without putting anything as methodologically strong in its place.
I can put the preceding a bit more clearly. In science, and this goes particularly for the hard causal realm of the natural sciences, acceptance of basic methodology almost forces acceptance of the results. Which is the whole idea. There may be dispute on the meaning of results, Not to speak of really speculative areas (string theory etc.). But an experimentally verified hypothesis essentially must be accepted. Now, the most basic of the methods involved are the same rational methods (deductive and inductive logic, abduction, etc.) which we use in rational thought generally. So dispute on those methods often stays on a very abstract level, and is hardly ever thought through consistently. See Dawkins’ remark about the hypocrisy of relativists at 15,000 feet (which is accurate, it just does not refute relativism).
The thing with divine miracles is that scientific method is essentially inapplicable to them. As we are (assumably) dealing with the teleologically motivated acts of a transcendental, unlimited Being. We can deal with teleological actions in a scholarly and intellectually responsible fashion to be sure, but the fact that they are not causal, not deducible from the workings of a general natural law, therefore not predictable places big constraints on how we explain them. And that’s just for human action, not to speak of the actions of a transcendental creator. Scientific method in the narrow sense and the “force” they exert in working to some kind of intersubjective consensus fall away.
If teleologically motivated Divine intervention occurred frequently, science would never have gotten off the ground as the whole causality of the natural world would be obscured. So we can agree that if they can (in principle) occur, they are very, very rare. Couple the rareness of the occurrence (if it occurs at all) with their defiance of scientific method – and you have very strong reason to assume that the causal chain of natural events has not been broken, that the miracle might be a trick, or some eccentric but natural event hitherto unexplained. There is nothing problematic with the latter. There are lots of things science apparently cannot (yet) explain. I’ve never seen ball lightning, but family members have, and as I understand the phenomenon in question is not quite explained. It probably will be eventually.
So the sceptical bar-maid answer is quite correct.
Of course, this would mean that scientifically validating supernatural events become problematic. When we are dealing with experiments concerning the healing effects of prayer, telekinesis, telepathy and similarly paranormal but repeatable events, we might at best observe their occurrence, statistically validate the effect – but an explanatory framework is wholly lacking. When we are dealing with Divine intervention, which typically concern singular events (seeing as God may occasionally strengthen the heart of the faithful, but may not necessarily be willing to subject himself to statistical tests), we don’t even get that.
Flying? You’d accept flying, barmaid? I knew it. You like that Mo better than me. Him and his stupid flying horse. It’s all done with wires, I tell you.
I do like that Mo better than you, it’s true, but not because of the horse. He just looks so much less etiolated and, well, frankly kind of unhealthy than you do. You should get more fresh air or something, dude.