The Late Christopher Hitchens On Miracles
Firstly, we must disabuse ourselves of a misconception that's so ingrained in our psyche that it slips under our radar and like a spy in the perfect disguise is lost in the crowd, passing unnoticed and, like the spy, will probably sabotage our efforts in trying to make sense of our world. This misconception is intimately linked to the way we look at religion in general, Christianity in particular. We view religion as, another word for it is, faith(s) as if to say that, in the context of faith defined as belief sans evidence, religions are belief systems that are completely lacking evidence of any kind.
This is false for what are so-called miracles if not evidence of a divine nature. The definition of miracles that's relevant to this discussion is instances of suspension or violation of the known laws of nature, at least that's how the late Christopher Hitchens sees it and that's the definition that I'll be using here.
Secondly, the late Hictchens made a particularly intriguing comment on the assumed association between the Jesus miracles, which I will not mention here for the reason that it's common knowledge, and God/the divine. He said that even if the Jesus miracles were veridical it still wouldn't qualify Jesus as the son of God. He offered no explanation but by way of a pertinent explanation I offer you the following quote:
[quote=Arthur C. Clarke]Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic[/quote]
Said differently, and replacing "magic" with "miracle", something that doesn't seem an issue, we're left with the impression, albeit outlandish, that Jesus could've been someone from the future or an alien, a being with access to technology that would've given him the ability to work miracles of the kind that would've impressed people of the iron age.
Thirdly, in defense of Christian miracles, specifically their value as evidence for God/the divine, I'd like to offer you a personal anecdote. A while back I was involved in the IT sector and had to deal with a software package that was designed for health services. Not being too experienced, my team, if one could call us that, wanted to make some alterations to the software but our engineers informed us that that was simply impossible. The reason? We didn't have the so-called source code - the only people who could make alterations to the software were the original developers [of the software].
Taking software packages as analogous to the laws of nature and the original software developers as god, it seems completely reasonable to assume that changes in the software, suspensions/violations of the law of nature, can only be the work of the original coder, god basically. There seems to be, in my humble opinion, a necessary connection between miracles and god.
A penny for your thoughts...
This is false for what are so-called miracles if not evidence of a divine nature. The definition of miracles that's relevant to this discussion is instances of suspension or violation of the known laws of nature, at least that's how the late Christopher Hitchens sees it and that's the definition that I'll be using here.
Secondly, the late Hictchens made a particularly intriguing comment on the assumed association between the Jesus miracles, which I will not mention here for the reason that it's common knowledge, and God/the divine. He said that even if the Jesus miracles were veridical it still wouldn't qualify Jesus as the son of God. He offered no explanation but by way of a pertinent explanation I offer you the following quote:
[quote=Arthur C. Clarke]Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic[/quote]
Said differently, and replacing "magic" with "miracle", something that doesn't seem an issue, we're left with the impression, albeit outlandish, that Jesus could've been someone from the future or an alien, a being with access to technology that would've given him the ability to work miracles of the kind that would've impressed people of the iron age.
Thirdly, in defense of Christian miracles, specifically their value as evidence for God/the divine, I'd like to offer you a personal anecdote. A while back I was involved in the IT sector and had to deal with a software package that was designed for health services. Not being too experienced, my team, if one could call us that, wanted to make some alterations to the software but our engineers informed us that that was simply impossible. The reason? We didn't have the so-called source code - the only people who could make alterations to the software were the original developers [of the software].
Taking software packages as analogous to the laws of nature and the original software developers as god, it seems completely reasonable to assume that changes in the software, suspensions/violations of the law of nature, can only be the work of the original coder, god basically. There seems to be, in my humble opinion, a necessary connection between miracles and god.
A penny for your thoughts...
Comments (41)
I have not come across Christopher Hichens but I do like the analogy between miracles and computer technology in general.
I think that many people who reject the idea of the supernatural get frustrated with computer software and systems not seeing any links with how the makers are a bit like God. I once had a friend who,in a state of relapse of psychotic illness was banging his head repeatedly, saying 'God is a computer.' That was at the time I was questioning religious experiences deeply and even though my friend was unwell I could see the point he was making.
I think that we are beginning to take digital technology for granted, not seeing how some of it verges on the miraculous itself. We expect Wifi to be working and moan if is not fast enough. We expect the books we want to be downloaded at the flick of a switch.
I sometimes think we sit back on our devices expecting divine answers to appear on our devices has some relationships to Moses reading on tablets. If there is a God perhaps 'they' communicate the miraculous in digital form.
I am not sure if what I am saying is what you were saying, but at least you have a first response to your thread.
I wonder...I wonder...truthseeker. What would it entail if god is computer? Kindly factor in the possibility that this might be a mistake in that the computer may simply be one that is running the simulation i.e. there's someone behind the screen kinda thing, bashing the keys, creating the code, etc.
Perhaps rather than a computer being God, the computer is made in the image of God. Or perhaps I am evolving a new computeromorphism.
By the way, I had imagined you more as a school teacher than as an IT person. Having worked in mental health care mostly, perhaps you were involved in working with the computer packages I was using, but I am in England and I don't know if you are. I used to get really angry when the packages' behaviour. It was like some divine being was playing tricks. Sometimes the packages would stick or a whole page I had written would vanish into limbo. There was this to cope with and patients banging on the office windows, desperate for attention.
Also, we had a few patients smashing computers. I remember being in the process of giving out medication and a man leaned over the medication counter and pushed the computer to the floor. Perhaps it was his anger towards God.
Just the one that you're no doubt expecting...
Quoting TheMadFool
Quite clearly you cannot use the claims of a religion -- such as miracles -- as evidence for that religion. Belief in miracles is part of Christian dogma, not some separate source. Now if you had evidence, not just claims, that a given miracle occurred, then that would be something. However the presence of evidence would then remove the necessity of faith and the peculiarity of a particular religion, insofar as it would generally thought to have occurred by believers and atheists alike. It would be not a miracle but a mystery.
That's what I've been getting wrong all this time. Christianity isn't about faith. There's evidence, at least it's meant to be such - Jesus miracles.
They're anecdotes from the same dubious sources they're supposed to be evidence for. They don't pass any muster as evidence. But I do see what you mean: they are meant to play the same role evidence. After all, these stories originate from a time when record-checking wasn't generally possible.
This is a 'myth of the enlightenment'. The literature of world religions including commentarial materials and apocrypha, contain vast numbers of myths and legends, but also historical accounts and records of events beliieved to have occurred. Of course hardly any of this will meet scientific standards of evidence and has been elaborated and redacted over millenia. But the Enlightenment more or less declares that, on this basis, it is as if none of what is recounted ever occurred, it should all be taken out of consideration. Then 'the burden of proof' is placed on the believer, to demonstrate why any of what she believes is true, 'without a shred of evidence!'
However there is actually a data set for miracle cures, or cures that seem to have been effected by prayers to Cathoic saints. Those are the records required for the beatification of saints in the church, and have been kept for centuries. The beatification process requires two bona fide, attributable miracles, and the process of obtaining those bona fides is extremely rigorous. See Pondering Miracles, Medical and Religious.
Thank you. My main aim is to somehow soften the blow of late Hitchens' declaration that the association between miracles and God is too weak to be of any significance.
I seem to have forgotten to mention that the "suspensions/violationz of the laws of nature" (miracles) must be authentic in the sense that it's not the case that they were/are perceived as such because of ignorance. To illustrate the point, a time traveller who takes his plane to the bronze age and takes to the air isn't going to count as a miracle for the reason that it's going to seen as "miraculous" because iron age folks would be ignorant of the principles of aeronautics. However, if a cup broken into pieces suddenly reassembles and becomes whole again or your long-dead grandfather whose ashes you personally disposed off in the ocean appears at your front doorstep, that would be a bona fide miracle. You get the picture, right?
It appears that miracles, defined in the Hitchensian sense as above, is a function of ignorance. The more ignorant one is, the more miracles one sees and that sets the bar very high for miracles because not only is it necessary to prove that a suspension/violation of the laws of nature has occurred but too that the belief that a miracle has occured isn't because of a lacuna in our knowledge. The former condition is an easier one to meet than the latter.
What gives?
Is Hitchens' definition too stringent? After all, it makes a nigh impossible demand - that our knowledge of the laws of nature is both complete and accurate. Is it possible to know that we know everything there is to know? Thereby hangs a tale. I wish to discuss that if you're game?
If we relax the criterion for miracles, say by declaring that only current, the most up-to-date, knowledge of the laws of nature matter, there's a real and unsettling chance that we might end up believing and worshipping god/gods which is/are, at this point, simply various manifestations of our ignorance.
This reminds me of Socrates who famously announced, "I know that I know nothing." Juxtapose this with the words of the Delphic Oracle: "Socrates is the wisest man there is." In a weird but palpably true sense, if wisdom, the be all and end all of philosophy, means to be cognizant of one's ignorance, it makes sense to, well, worship it, no? Could it be, is it possible, that the human tendency to immediately atrribute miraculous events to the divine, to god, is an indication that, deep down, we all know what wisdom really is - the Socratic paradox - and hence the, sometimes irresistable, urge to worship the unknown?
Quoting Wayfarer
Can you kindly read my reply to Kenosha Kid above?
Quoting Wayfarer
I just recently got wind of the beatification process. I was surprised that the criteria were quite so stringent. Nonetheless, it seems the Pope can and has relax(ed) the conditions for sainthood by, for instance, reducing the required number of miracles from the standard two to one. Thanks.
In my world that counts as a win! :up:
Well, let's compare:
Quoting TheMadFool
with things that, historically, science couldn't explain but now can, such as the blackbody radiation spectrum, or the stability of the atom, or the orbit of Mercury, or the cause of radiation, or how and why children inherit characteristics of their parents, or how and why lightning occurs, why winds blow, etc., etc. Most of these have not been considered miracles, merely the scientific mysteries I mentioned earlier. Some, like weather phenomena, might have been considered the will of a god, but not the will of a human fulfilled by a god (a miracle).
Scientific mysteries -- the holes you refer to in our understanding of natural law -- are not like miracles because they are generally true, we just don't know why. Miracles on the other hand are specific instances of specific people's desires being manifest by specific gods; as such, they are as good as their historical evidence.
And the problem with historical evidence for miracles is threefold: first, the event is almost always claimed rather than demonstrated (i.e. there is no evidence that the event ever took place); second, that the miracle worker in question is responsible for that event can never be established; third, that the means by which the actor achieved the event is often miraculous only nominally (i.e. it was perfectly possible for the actor to bring about the event without divine assistance).
Which brings us to the other obvious difference between a scientific mystery and a miracle, which Wayfarer has kindly brought into the conversation:
Quoting Wayfarer
The Vatican's criterion for recognising a miracle is that no natural explanation will do, which is problematic because the Pope is also the head of the church that insists that miracles occur at all. They are like a prosecuting attorney who really wants to be your defence attorney, and the judge and jury to boot. One would expect that, if the Vatican genuinely were this adept at spotting deviations from natural law, the scientific community would be racing to find natural explanations for these apparent miracles. But they don't.
One could interpret this as a 100% ubiquitous disdain for the Catholic church, a conspiracy of silence if you will, so as not to lend weight to archaic ideas. Or, more reasonably, one could conclude that the scientific community see nothing in these miracles worth investigating, and nothing in Vatican's CV that lends weight to their claims of breaches of natural law.
For example, one of Mother Teresa's alleged miracles is the cure of Monica Besra's cancer by placing a locket of Teresa on her breast. A witness claimed that light shone from the locket and eradicated the cancer, and that is the judgment of the Vatican. The judgment of medical science is quite different: Besra didn't have cancer at all, but a cyst caused by tuberculosis, for which she was medicated and treated by doctors for nine months prior to the cyst's eradication. It is a fortunate case of investigation and medicine -- two things forbidden by Teresa who left her worst patients in agony rather than allow them more than paracetamol -- working, which happens regularly enough to not merit attention.
Miracles are not like scientific mysteries and scientific mysteries are not like miracles. This is why imperfect knowledge, which may support and even incline people toward miraculous answers to mysterious questions, supports but does not explain miracles imo.
I'll focus on this point in your post. I hope @Wayfarer will chime in at some point.
We've been discussing matters as if there's a fundamental antagonism between science and religion. Forget miracles for a moment and consider the fact that, if I'm correct, scientists thought/think of themselves as involved in an enterprise which they affectionately describe as reading the mind of god. In other words, contrary to religious folk who seem to see the hand of god in the extraordinary, scientists see god in the ordinary, the so-called laws of nature. What's the deal here? I mean if both the ordinary and the extraordinary can be interpreted as having divine origins how do we disprove the existence of god? A classic case of eating the cake and having it too!
Some individual scientists have, because science does not close its doors to the religious, and the religious see natural law as the will of God. Speaking as a lapsed physicist, I can vouch that this is an atypical view of what science is about in my experience.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, it's a hugely circular argument. If both X and ~X are support the same argument, the argument can be dismissed as not meaningful.
That doesn't follow. Even if Christians were the first monotheists (they weren't), and the first scientists (they weren't), the universe existed for scientific study whether some people first claim it as the work of their god or not. Certainly now, whatever the history of Christianity or science, scientists do not presuppose the existence of God in order to study the universe.
The only exceptions I can think of were very "liberal" believers who didn't like to define God and made sure their beliefs were consistent with science, but still thought there was some sort of spirit to the universe along with maybe an afterlife. Jesus was a good moral teacher who had some non-literal spiritual insights and all that jazz. The resurrection was some kind of metaphor for personal enlightenment.
I'm an atheist, so I think they're both wrong, but the first category has their own evidence based on a worldview that is somewhat at odds with our full modern understanding.
Many accounts of miracles are rejected on the basis of scientific evidence. Jacalyn Duffyn, whose article I linked to, says:
So I think it's a falsehood to claim that the Church denies or ignores science in these matters.
Don't get me wrong - I completely accept that religious institutions often block or stand in the way of science. I have zero respect for, for example, religious ordinances against blood transfusions, or faith healing over-riding medical treatment for cancer. Religious prejudice blocked progress in countless ways in times past. But in these cases, there is considerable scientific testimony to which due weight was given, and in many cases it was decisive.
Quoting TheMadFool
Hawking used that phrase in his book Brief History of Time, but considering his lifelong animosity towards religion, it can at best be described as hubristic.
Quoting TheMadFool
This is why I keep repeating the fundamental importance of studying the history of ideas. It is 'a field of research in history that deals with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. The history of ideas is a sister-discipline to, or a particular approach within, intellectual history' (wikipedia). Many fundamental ideas such as substance, agency, evolution, mind, and so on, were gradually developed and refined over centuries. Through the history of ideas, you examine how these fundamental conceptions shape-shifted over time. It is very, very different to religious apologetics, but it also provides no comfort to positivism.
As for the role of science in proving or disproving God's existence, a recent book worth considering is Karen Armstrong, A Case for God. Armstrong too is more an historian of ideas than religious apologist. One of her arguments in this book was that the early moderns too easily assumed that the marvels of natural science 'shewed God's handiwork' - Newton certainly did - inadvertently paving the way for LaPlace's declaration of 'having no need of that hypothesis.' It became increasingly easy to show that, rather than saying anything about God, science's enormous progress in understanding the universe showed no need of such an explanation. This finally culminated in vast misunderstanding of what, exactly, was meant by 'God' at all, save as a kind of placeholder for 'what science has yet to work out'.
But Armstrong points out that the various dogmatic expressions of religious ideas were never intended as what moderns understand by 'propositions' or 'proofs':
The other point you might consider is 'the conflict thesis' which maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science and that it inevitably leads to hostility. It is obviously writ large in many debates on this forum and the books of popular atheism. It leads to the view that naturally only one or the other can be true, that if one holds to science then one must abandon faith.
I believe I previously mentioned Georges Lemaître.
In any case, I completely reject 'the conflict thesis'. In a nutshell, the error of fundamentalism is to insist that religious texts are literally true, and that if science contradicts them then it must be false. But for those who never accepted the literal truth of scripture, then the fact that they're not literally true, doesn't prove or disprove anything. It's just business as usual.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
However, 'naturalism assumes nature'. It assumes that the sensory domain, vastly amplified by electronic devices, possesses an inherent reality.
I never said otherwise.
Quoting tim wood
Doesn't add up to: scientists presuppose a god.
Quoting tim wood
This might astonish you, but the choice isn't God or turtles. In fact, those are both wrong answers based on ignorance to quite different questions.
Precisely, atheists, given that they're in the business of refuting religion, are in an uncomfortable position - damned if you do, damned if you don't!
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems to be a different state of affairs in that the Church is going against science in the sense that healing/recovery happens in a medically/scientifically inexplicable way. How do we square this attitude with that above: for believers, medicine is just one more manifestation of God's work on earth."? The Church's ability to have it both ways must be mighty frustrating to atheists trying to build a solid refutation of religion in this respect.
Quoting Wayfarer
Well, I don't see how it's wrong for people to have thought that 'marvels of natural science 'shewed God's handiwork'"? After all, theism's claim is the god created this universe; surely his handiwork must be visible in all things, big and small.
Quoting Wayfarer
No smoke without fire is all I can say at the moment. Perhaps the notion of a conflict between religion and science isn't wrong per se but just flawed with that little grain of truth that people cling onto to keep the issue afloat.
In effect, it is obliged to interpret the action of medicine, along with the resilience of the human body, viz:
and the function of medicine itself, viz:
as all part of the miracle.
I've cited one instance already where the church misrepresented the medical opinion of doctors to claim a recovery for their religion. One can do that all day, but the broader point stands in its stead: if these miracles pointed at recoveries despite the failures of medical science, they would be of broad concern and interest. As it happens, no one outside the church finds anything miraculous in such cases.
On which, and getting back to the point in hand, I guess I should qualify my earlier statement: miracles do not look like what scientific mysteries look like to scientists, the case of Teresa being a perfect and usefully recent example.
As noted, Jacalyn Duffyn whose interest in these cases grew from her own expert testimony, found much evidence; she’s a haematologist, historian of science, and as a professed atheist, is outside the Church. But I think I do understand why, a priori, they all must be considered fallacious.
It's certainly true in many cases. But it became a major theme in Western culture during and after the Enlightenment. The conflict I see is between religious fundamentalism and scientific materialism. But it's a big world with room for many perspectives.
Quoting TheMadFool
Armstrong's argument is not so much that it was wrong, but that it backfired - that this kind of rhetoric could just as easily be used against Christians as by them.
Do you mean religious fundamentalists take the good book literally and scientific materialists have their own version of the good book which they too take literally?
Makes sense. The extremes are likely to be poles apart from each other.
Is there any way to find common ground? A way out for those who, say, want to have the best of both worlds, so to speak? I mean there maybe many religious scientists in the world? How do they manage?
Quoting Wayfarer
Ah! :up:
This in no way constitutes broad concern and interest.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think so. People have found wisdom in the stories of the Bible, particularly the teachings of Christ, without insisting on a literalist, historical interpretation that must be treated as perfectly and eternally true. To quote Monty Python, there's little to quarrel with Mr Christ about. The contention has historically arisen when science has discovered facts contrary to literalist interpretations of the Old Testament.
Indeed, but how long until, how many words can we remove from Hamlet, Hamlet stops being Hamlet? How many? The literal truth of the Bible is now dead and buried. What's next? The miracles? Then? Jesus' historicity? I sense, slippery slope fallacy notwithstanding, a slow but steady progression of the Bible from fact to fiction.
I see but surely, you can sense how reasonable the sentiment is. If god created the universe then, necessarily, all in it - matter, energy, the laws that govern them - are god's doing.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
It's more of of hypothesis/theory issue to me. If a hypothesis that accomodates both a certain proposition and its contradiction then that hypothesis is [s]useless[/s] not scientific. This, however, seems to be biased point of view - looking at religion from a scientific lens.
What would happen if we did the reverse? If we bring a religious perspective to science, there's no problem at all for the simple reason that science is in the business of deciphering the laws of nature, laws that god created. It appears then that, in this respect at least, the dissatisfied party is science - science is accusing religion of being non-scientific. Religion, on the other hand, can be said to be applauding the work of scientists in their efforts to understand god's laws.
Too, @Wayfarer made a mention of Pierre Simone Laplace's reply to Napoleon's question, "where is god in all this?" which was "I had no need for this hypothesis". Notice Laplace didn't say, "that hypothesis (god) is false", he simply asserted that god was/is unnecessary to the entreprise of discovering and mathematically describing the laws of nature. :chin: You can take it from there.
I think it's more of a qualitative shift from logos to mythos, but yeah, that's the fate of all religions it seems. Nonetheless, while I wholeheartedly refute that Christianity is the foundation of science, it is the historical keystone of our moral superstructure. I think it will always be the most relevant mythology.
Quoting TheMadFool
Sure. But then it is the creationist that presupposes, not the scientist.
Quoting TheMadFool
And yet historically the opposite is true. Even the new atheist movement was driven by the intolerance of religious zealots toward e.g. teaching science in science classrooms, or an insistence on teaching non-science *as science*.
Perhaps it is the tacit understanding that we will never know everything, that the God hypothesis, while having no scientific relevance, will never be falsified, which makes science disinterested in religion, while creationists who believe in the concept of blasphemy do have cause for upset when evidence contrary to *specific* creationist narratives is discovered.
Because that's the difference between what you're describing and what has typically occurred. You're describing a generic, non-detailed creationism that can absorb any scientific discovery and claim it for a god. What we actually have is specific creationist myths that are falsifiable even when the underlying motif -- the God hypothesis -- is not.
Then, the matter is settled, cut-and-dried, as they say, for you. You've already used the logos-mythos paradigm on the issue and labeled Christianity as a mythology. Good for you.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Well, I mentioned Laplace, a, if not the, paradigmatic case of science and its proponents. Even the great Newton of France said no more than "I didn't need that (god) hypothesis". It falls short, noticeably, from asserting "the god hypothesis is false". It says a lot in my world. Perhaps you might want to look into it at your leisure. You just might pick up something on your truth scanner.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Perhaps, but look at from a best-case scenario viewpoint. If the religious believed that god created the universe, they have no reason at all to level criticism against science; after all, the raison d'etre of science is to understand the universe (creation).
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You're looking at from the standpoint of authority I believe. Religion has authority and thus so-called entities like blasphemy and heresy. Science has the same motivations [the phrase "scientific heresy" makes complete sense], if not the power to translate these motivations into laws like the ones we have in religion against blasphemy and heresy. Reminds me of Animal Farm by Goerge Orwell - fine, the animals at the farm got rid of the humans, however, the pigs that replaced them were no better.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Falsifiable? I recall reading a book once that basically said that propositions don't exist in isolation and that they form a complex structure much like a network or a web with each proposition connected, existentially, to others. The bottom line, is "creationist myths [that] are falsifiable" must exist in a framework of other assumptions, assumptions that may not be, you know, strong enough to provide sufficient support for the claim. Personally, I haven't tried it myself but I'm fairly certain that the trail of assumptions for the claims of science won't end in "happy place" if you know what I mean.
This is following the supposed rejection of a literal, historical interpretation of perfect and eternal truth. The pseudo-historical aspects thus yielded would constitute a mythology, yes.
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes, but like I said, the religious are not only defending the God hypothesis; they are defending specific historical narratives that *are* falsified by science.
Galileo did not uncover that God did not exist; he merely concluded that the Earth orbited the Sun. By your argument, the church should have been happy to know God's universe better, but they weren't because, above and beyond the God hypothesis, church dogma placed the Earth at the centre of the universe.
Quoting TheMadFool
The phrase "scientific orthodoxy" or "scientific consensus" makes sense. I've never heard of "scientific heresy" and would describe any scientist employing it as histrionic at best.
Quoting TheMadFool
I meant 'falsifiable' in precisely the same sense it is meant in meeting the criterion of scientific hypothesis. If we next have to undermine the basis of the falsifiability criterion, one can bypass most of this conversation entirely and just have one of those threads that pop up from time to time stating that science doesn't work, etc, in which case religion presumably has nothing to worry about.
Shouldn't the same logic apply to science, the part that goes "...rejection of [a literal, historical interpretation of] perfect and eternal truth"? I mean, if you're going to challenge the "perfect and eternal truth" of religion, does it seem reasonable to claim "perfect and eternal truth" yourself? If you say "no", then how do you know you're right? You won't say "yes", right?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Ok but, again, can science claim rights to anything that's "perfect and eternal truth"? No! So, how does science know it's right?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Yes. I think I got a bit carried away there. Pardon the brain fart.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Falsifiable..."meeting the criterion of scientific hypothesis"? Of course but take the religious perspective for a second and many scientific claims are false. :chin:
But science doesn't present perfect and eternal truths. It is, by its nature, self-correcting and incomplete.
Quoting TheMadFool
Empiricism. Scientific models are primarily tools for generating hypotheses -- predictions of specific experimental outcomes which may be tested and retested in a lab. Typically a model will assume the existence of an external reality that is the cause of such phenomena, but really you can replace this with whatever you like, including, as you say, God. For instance, if we assume that God causes every motion, then science is good at predicting what motions God will cause. If we assume that there is no external reality, only hallucinatory impressions for instance, then science is good at predicting hallucinations. The same model will work as well. That is the limit to which it can be considered 'right'; everything else is a belief.
Quoting TheMadFool
We all get em!
Quoting TheMadFool
Yes. Although the God hypothesis we suppose to be compatible with science would not have any criteria by which to assess. Those who believe the Bible to be a perfectly accurate, eternally true, literal description of historical facts, do have criteria: is it consistent with scripture? And that's when things get heated.
Then, it should, for that reason, accommodate religion. I mean if science is all about tentative theories, and it is, these theories and the claims based on those theories are liable to change, not only change in the sense that an essence is retained with minor modifications but actually overturned, turned on its head as it were. Do you know the Phlogiston theory? It's fate should serve as a reminder to scientists that their theories can be (some have been) totally disproved. This means we need to be very cautious about drawing conclusions from the mere occurrence of a contradiction between science and other stuff like religion.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Please read above. If I must say anything at this point, it's that science, by its own admission, is tentatively right which is another way of saying it could be completely wrong. I suppose my argument hangs on that, even if small, nonetheless non-zero, possibility.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:ok:
In the contrary, for that very reason it should not. It is precisely that theory must be falsifiable, testable, modifiable, or even rejectable, i.e. self-correcting, i.e. not a claim to perfect and eternal truths, that makes them scientific. To count a religion as such a theory would be to make a heinous category error.
Quoting TheMadFool
Well, it depends what you mean by "completely wrong". Newtonian gravity is good enough to wang a probe around the solar system and land it on an asteroid. I wouldn't say that it was "completely wrong" in that regard. But yes artefacts of models, such as the ether of electromagnetic theory, or Thompson's plum pudding model of atomic theory, were certainly wrong enough!
Quoting tim wood
Ultimately, that seems right. In terms of intermediate steps, the universe is our lobster, but we can't exactly kick of a universe and study it. The best we are likely to get is a compelling reason for one model over all others.
Quoting tim wood
Among the religious, yes. It is not typical for scientists to ascribe the as-yet- unexplained to a god, especially in the last 100 years.
Quoting tim wood
This is effectively saying that if the Christian God had never been believed in, we wouldn't have science. I think that extremely unlikely and another example, like miracles, of rending unto God that which is definitely not God's. I think what you're talking about is the popularisation of the deterministic (and therefore predictable in principle) universe.
I acknowledge, for instance, the importance of Christian scholars of Greek philosophy, but the fact that that was the course of history, it does not follow that that was the only factor nor that, had things been otherwise, we would not have taken a different path to the same route. Determinism underpins teleological modes of our thinking (if I do X, then Y shall follow), and technology is a great driver of science that has informally and indirectly encoded laws for tens of thousands of years. So long as people were erecting buildings and bridges, making vehicles, improving agriculture and manufacturing weapons for wars -- all of which were well underway long before JC appeared -- then science was working along deterministic lines even if it wasn't particularly well formalised. I think that formalisation and generalisation was an inevitable result of the importance of technology.
Lastly, a miracle is itself a suspension of deterministic natural law. So I further disagree that the universe of Christians bears all that much of a resemblance to that of science.
Quoting tim wood
There are many scientific mysteries. I think you mean miracles.
Says you. The facts remain, and they're directly relevant to the OP.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
In fact, there were influential clerics who argued strongly against any censure of Galileo whose trial also marked a conflict between progressive and conservative Catholics. And the conservatives won out. I haven't read right into it, but the whole case is not so cut-and-dried as is often portrayed and as I once believed.
Quoting TheMadFool
No. Biblical literalism is not hard to understand. It's taking 'the Bible' as the literal 'word of God', dictated by Him and transcribed by men, describing factual events in realistic detail. Then there's the less absolutist version of trying to show that science 'proves' divine cause or intervention, such as you see in Intelligent Design arguments.
Materialism, meanwhile, wants to argue that science 'proves' that there is 'almost certainly' no God (Dawkins' words). That's why they often seize on fundamentalism to support their arguments. But they're both missing the point; whatever G*d is, is forever out of scope for empirical proof. Which leads to 'oh well, you mean it's believing something without evidence.' Again misses the point; to the believer, the Universe itself is evidence. But that is not an empirical claim.
Suffice to say, I think it's perfectly sound for an Alvin Plantinga to say that what we know of the Universe provides a rational warrant for belief in God; but I also think it's rational not to believe it. Science is not going to able to adjuticate that.
I think a lot of what is written and said about G*d is really more about Father Christmas. It's not grounded in an adequate conception of what is being affirmed or denied.
Spot on. Although refer to my last comment above.
Has anyone, to your knowledge, tried to interpret the Bible as metaphorical and then discovered that the metaphors contained in the Bible correspond to actual truths/facts about the world? For instance, outlandish it may sound, the six days of creation could, with a little bit of imagination and the right creative spark, be mapped onto the scientific theory of the 13.8 billion years ago Big Bang. Is there anyone who undertook such a project?
Quoting Wayfarer
I suppose it's not a matter of choosing a side in the god debate and nor is it a matter of unifying the opposing camps. What we need is an altogether new and fresh perspective on the issue. I wonder what that would look like?
Quoting Wayfarer
Thus we must adjust to the darkness since no light is near at hand.
Quoting Wayfarer
After all...we are dealing with the ineffable.
That's more in the domain of hermenuetics and comparative mythology. There are myriad facts but there will always be aspects of religious lore that are inexplicable from a scientific rationalist viewpoint.
Ancient Indian cosmology, at least, whilst obviously containing mythological elements ('turtles all the way down') also envisaged realistic time scales and posited an eternal cycle of creation and destruction. Mah?y?na Buddhist cosmology envisages a universe of countless life-bearing orbs. And so on. But I'm sceptical that any of these claims will get, or even need, any kind of scientific validation. Besides, Buddha's teaching is always concerned with things much closer to home.
One of the themes in comparative religion is study of the convergences between different faith traditions - like the myths, Gods, tales, and so on, that turn up from Iceland to Timbuktu. For instance, the Germanic legend of Barlaam and Josephat turns out to be a retelling of the life of the Buddha.
But the point of all this is that, just because religious mythology isn't literally true, that doesn't make it simple fantasy. Myths and legends carry stories of heros and legendary feats which actually bind cultures together. In ancient India, 'picture show men' used to travel from village to village with scrolls depicting scenes from the Hindu epics, which they would put on a stand and then speak to. They would draw huge crowds. That was how the living culture was conveyed and transmitted.
Quoting TheMadFool
Examples abound. The entire 'sixties movement', self-awareness training, popular Eastern spiritual movements, syncretism in popular sciences, the 'new physics' which incorporates ideas from Greek and Indian philosophy - there's a huge list. Check out Cults and Cosmic Consciousness Camille Paglia - one of the gems I found via forums. Also American Veda. (I could write 50,000 words on it, but won't ;-) ).
I personally have re-assessed 'classical' Christian philosophy, mainly as a reaction against the two-bit anti-religious polemics of the likes of Hitchens. (Incidentally, you know his brother Peter went on to become something of a bare-knuckle evangalist?) While my orientation is not denominationaly Christian, there is still something at the heart of it I continue to beileve in.
If you're insisting that one single person's interest constitutes "broad interest", then I'm afraid our disagreements on the English language are rather fundamental, and an impediment to any meaningful conversation.
I'll have to make a note of that. Thanks.
Quoting Wayfarer
Correctamundo!
Quoting Wayfarer
A positive effect as far as I can tell. I like Hitchens. :smile: He seems forthright and if religious apologists find him to be a tough nut to crack then either they aren't genuine or it'll motivate them in re what areas of their worldview they have to work on. It seems you experienced the latter from your encounter with Hitchens.