I don’t understand why you say it’s like I didn’t read it. I read it, and I’m explaining why I think he has an idiosyncratic use of the term. He’s basically saying anything is miraculous, he’s just dividing it into three different categories. That still leaves us with something patently non-miraculous by any conventional understanding of the term, still being miraculous to Paul. Okay, he gets to have his private vocabulary.
Weird.
These methods do make demonstration of certain ideas much easier. For example, if I define “gods” as the collection of (1) powerful supernatural entities and (2) domesticated canids ranging from about five to two hundred pounds in weight, I can then easily establish that the gods walk among us.
Yes, @Paul.B.Rimmer’s general understanding of the miraculous is different from many people today (including what most contemporary atheists seem to think). His definition seems to be somewhat of a hybrid of the contemporary and historic understanding of the term. In general, “miracles” are events, things, or truths which evince the involvement of God in some way. But this is true not only of aberrations from the regular order of things (such as the Resurrection), but also of the general order of nature. This is something that many people (both atheists and Christians) often overlook today.
To elaborate further, let’s take Paul’s first definition of a miracle:
The conventional understanding of the miraculous takes for granted that nature can continue to exist and operate by itself, without the constant sustaining of an Unmoved Mover. But of course this is not what Christians believe. Christians believe that God continuously sustains and upholds the existence of all things and the laws that determine how they behave. God explains why anything exists rather than nothing. Thus, the existence of anything is a sort of “pointer” towards God.
Objection: “This type of “miracle” is pointless because it makes everything a miracle.”
Answer: But that’s the point! We believe that God exists not just because we need him to explain things that science can’t explain (e.g. aberrations in nature like Jesus turning water into wine), but because he is the Creator, Sustainer, and Primary mover of all. In fact, I would argue that this “role” for God is more important than as an explanation for the aberrations. It also explains why I don’t regard God acting in this first sense as a sort of scientific hypothesis that must be assessed on par with other naturalistic explanations.
I’ll just preempt a response by saying that many atheists will just not get this idea of God as the explanation for existence, because it’s very firmly ingrained in their minds that God is some sort of scientific hypothesis that we’ve discarded now “because science!”. Then they become flabbergasted when scientists like myself reveal that we still believe in God, and attribute it to extreme compartmentalization in the mind, childhood indoctrination, and so on.
No, the answer is that people like me simply have a more “wondrous” and “enchanted” view of nature than others who take it for granted.
Next, the second understanding:
@Paul.B.Rimmer might need to clarify exactly what he means regarding snowflakes and stars, but I can agree with him for the case of the birth of a child. Christians hold that humans are special compared to other natural things, in that their souls have an immaterial component that does not and cannot arise from the natural order, but are directly created by God. Thus, even though reproduction (and the existence of humans) is commonplace, Christians believe that every time a new human being is formed, God supernaturally creates a soul and integrates it with the material part (the embryo). This supernatural act is not an aberration, but integral to the natural order (for we are sure that each human being born has a soul). (This is also the standard Roman Catholic account, btw.)
I don’t think that applies to Christians in general. I know that, for example, Thomists assert God is (the Aristotelian final cause) required to sustain the universe’s continued existence and operation, and if he suddenly were to stop doing this, the universe would instantly stop existing(and some will have convoluted arguments that try to show this to be true, such as Edward Feser). IIRC this kind of Thomistic interpretation is more popular among Catholics. But I’ve come across many other Christians who explicitly reject this kind of Thomistic interpretation of causality.
Speaking of miracles, It’s pretty clear to me that someone like Gilbert Thill doesn’t use the word miracle in the same sense Paul does. Gilbert seems to refer explicitly to things that somehow can’t be explained merely by the laws of physics in the same way that the formation of a snowflake can, and as examples of such things he thinks the origin and evolution of life are miraculous in that they can’t be explained by just the “mindless” laws of physics. That is to contrast it with something more mundane and not at all miraculous which he thinks (presumably) science can explain, like a clay pot falling from a shelf to the floor and breaking.
Let me take this opportunity to state that it’s not about “getting” it. I understand the claim, I just completely disagree with it. If you’re saying God is (required to) sustain the universe’s continued existence, then you’ve made a claim about how the world works, and I think claims need to be supported with good evidence and arguments to be believed rationally. Whether you want to call it a scientific hypothesis or not, you are making a claim about how the world works.
Ahh okay, more wondrous and enchanted. Got it. I guess if I can just claim something about how the world works, insist it isn’t meant to be a scientific hypothesis, and then call it wondrous and enchanted, then I’m not required to justify believing it. And I like the implicit dig at the people who don’t share your particular interpretation of causality as “taking it for granted”.
I have a wondrous and enchanted view that you owe me a great deal of money. You haven’t paid me back in a long time since you borrowed it, and seem to have just taken my generosity for granted.
Yes, not all Christians share this interpretation, and possibly Gilbert doesn’t, but after more investigation of historical theology and philosophy I’ve concluded that this interpretation best captures the history of Christian thought on the matter. It is also a more convincing and comprehensive picture than the neo-theistic view.
The problem here is that if I ask you what you mean by “good evidence”, based on our past interactions, you will likely only accept scientific evidence, of the same kind that proves that the Higgs boson exists. So I am skeptical that you really understand the nature of this question, such that it cannot be adjudicated via scientific evidence alone.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing. This is yet another example of why I think you just don’t get it. The above example is one of a contingent situation: you’re speaking of two specific people (you and I), a specific object (money), a specific relation (being owed), and a specific amount (great). All of these individual qualifiers can thus be verified or disproven by means of empirical evidence. However, that’s very different from the fundamental question of why anything exists at all, or why the laws of nature continue to exist.
An axiom is an unproven proposition, used as the basis of a reasoning.
Look Daniel, I get it just fine. But you yourself just supplied all I need in the other thread:
Alice: It is true that all human cognition starts with sense data. But through abstraction and other intellective acts, we can move beyond these data, so that while our knowledge starts with our experiences it needn’t end with them.
So just like we can do in science, we can start with sense data(that’s the evidence part), and then from that try to make sense of the word using our reasoning.
I think the problem is that I get it all too well, and that I’m just not allowing bovine faeces to fly. So far, all you’ve provided are assertions, veiled insults, and self-gratifications.
How can it be adjudicated via other sorts of evidence? What sorts of evidence?
It seems that you are saying that diversity rhymes with randomness. Why would it be the case?
No, they are not. Cf Lewontin’s statement below:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Thanks @Rumraket and @dga471 for your feedback, comments and questions, about the kinds of miracles I laid out.
My goal really wasn’t to invoke miracles or create a private vocabulary, but to explain the way I think about how God acts in the world. I have a lot of uncertainty about how this really works out, and so my account should be considered at most a theological ‘toy model’. It gets at certain important ideas that theologians over the years, Gregory Palamas, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Marilynne Robinson, Alvin Plantinga, Bill Craig, etc. have expressed far more completely, but at a level that I, a non-theologian, can understand and use.
Given that context, let me shift from ‘miracle’ to divine activity, by which I mean ‘God’s doing something’.
I’m happy to surrender the use of the word ‘miracle’ for divine activity of the first kind and even much of divine activity of the second kind. Whatever a miracle is, though, I have a strong intuition that the coming into existence of a new person should qualify, so some divine activity of the second kind and all divine activity of the third kind would qualify as ‘miracles’. This is just semantics, so I won’t spend a lot of time defending this usage. I just don’t want to confuse people needlessly.
My warrant for divine activity involves cosmological and fine tuning arguments, and most of all my personal religious experience. I’m not here (or really anywhere) trying to provide an argument to others for the existence of God. Other people out there do that kind of thing far better. I think @dga471’s already given a stronger defense of aspects of my position than I could.
My purpose here was more to explore this point:
I’d like to find out how @Giltil’s understanding of miracles intersects with my own, and whether he’d consider the origin of life to be a miracle (or divine activity, if you prefer) of the first, second, or third kind. If it’s a miracle of either of the first two kinds, I think origins of life reveals more about the nature and character of God, and a scientific account would not undermine this revelation, but I believe would uphold and strengthen it.
Additionally, there would be no reason for added labels like ‘intelligent design’ because (a) science can’t deal with divine activity, that’s for philosophy and theology (and in some cases also music and poetry) and (b) I believe everything is designed, so any generic ‘intelligent design’ research program will either be unfalsifiable or will fail.
On the other hand, if @Giltil thinks the origin of life is a miracle of the third kind, then I’d like to know why he thinks that. My basis for belief in these kinds of miracles is special revelation, and I don’t think that God has specially revealed that the origin of life was a miraculous event.
If I came to know that God has specially revealed this, that realization would have profound implications for my future research.
Yes, they are. Notice how my name is’t Lewontin. Lewontin doesn’t speak for me and never did.
No, that’s not what I’m saying. The point is that there is no apparent goal of evolution, not even multiple goals. Instead we get what looks quite like millions of random walks through evolutionary space. If there are goals, they’re myopic, focused only on immediate adaptation with no thought for the more distant future. If it were your goal to make humans, well of course you would spend 3 billion years purely on bacteria, another half billion on single-celled eukaryotes, then a series of fronds, polyps, and worms, followed by some fish, and only after a hundred million years of that send a few fish onto the land. And so on. The road to petunias, paramecia, and priapids is equally random. Nobody would look closely at the history of life and see consistent purpose.
Or, to put it another way, “Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin what what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”
I don’t remember having ever insisted that evolution has stopped but rather that it is now an amortized process.
It happens that Pierre-Paul Grasse did think that evolution is now an amortized process. See below the relevant passage taken from his masterpiece « Evolution of Living Organisms »:
Summing up the facts set out in the preceding pages, we can see that the room for manoeuvre of evolution has been constantly shrinking: in the Ordovician, the genesis of the branches stops, in the Jurassic, that of the classes, in the Paleocene-Eocene, that of the orders.
After the Eocene, the evolutionary sap still flowed in some orders, since Mammals and Birds continued to specialize in various directions and took over all the marine terrestrial biotopes that Reptiles had previously occupied.
Little by little, the evolutionary novelties changed in amplitude. They now only concern details and leave the organizational plan intact. Speciation is the form in which evolution has continued since the Oligocene in insects, the Miocene in molluscs, the Pliocene in birds and Simians, the Holocene in some Glories and the Hominians (Homo sapiens, last place, probably dates back 100,000 years).
Evolution not only slowed down but, as the biosphere aged, its amplitude diminished.
It is certain that it no longer operates today as it did in the distant past. Something has changed. It would be of great importance to know what, because it would shed light on the intimate mechanism of the phenomena. Organizational plans are no longer disrupted, new things no longer flow in. The evolution, after the immense effort, the last one, that the formation of the orders of Mammals and hominization cost him, seems out of breath, it is drowsy. All this is only a metaphor, but paints a good picture of the present state of evolutionary phenomena.
The phase of high fertility is over: The present biological evolution has the appearance of an amortized, decadent or nearing completion process. Are we not witnessing the persistence of an immense phenomenon on the verge of extinction, are not the small variations that we are registering everywhere not the residues, the last oscillations of the evolutionary movement? Isn’t there not a mechanism missing in our plants and animals that was present in the springtime of flora and fauna?
It is often observed that all its supposedly efficient causes are present, but evolution nevertheless stops. Vandel (1972) has just provided an excellent example.
The two species of sowbugs of the genus Australoniscus, one in Nepal (A. alticolus), the other in Western Australia (A. springetti), are separated because of the division of the continent of Gondwana and continental drift, since the beginning of the Cretaceous, i.e. about 140 to 135 million years ago. They are separated by a minimal character: “the end of the endopodite of the first male pleopod is different…: it is straight in springetti, hooked in alticolus”.
Thus, in 140 million years, neither segregation, nor mutations, nor selection operating in different environments have modified these crustaceans. The cause of their stability must therefore be sought in the intimate constitution of the animal.
/……/
We will learn from our investigation that today evolution is not what it used to be. This state of affairs, with its many consequences, has hardly caught the attention of biologists who, however, must not limit themselves to the search for the mechanism of evolution, but also reveal the causes that have stopped the creation of new types and caused the speed of the process to vary.
These deceitful attacks do you no credit.
Okay. And so you do realize that when Axe claims that modern biologists say it has stopped, that’s a lie? Previously you were defending him and insisting that he was right to say that that claim accurately characterizes the consensus views of modern biologists.
Perhaps, but that wasn’t what Axe claimed. Nobody could get you to acknowledge the difference. You do see the difference now and see that Axe was being dishonest, then?
Do your deceitful defenses of Axe’s deceit do you credit? I will be very disappointed if you think they do.
In that prior thread, in order to defend Axe’s ludicrous claim, you mischaracterized Grasse:
Now, of course, that was rather nonresponsive in any event because Axe hadn’t claimed Grasse believed this; he had claimed that modern biologists believe this:
“The current stance is that evolution was so successful that it perfected life to the point where modern forms no longer evolve, making the whole process even further removed from the category of observable phenomena.”
Note what I said about word-dancing. You couldn’t cope with the actual defense of Axe’s statement, so instead of facing the fact that he simply lied about the position of actual modern biologists, you tried to find SOME biologist, ANY biologist, who had ever lived who took the position Axe claimed. You couldn’t find that, so you took Grasse, and misstated what Grasse said.
Why is it so hard to admit Axe lied? I mean, it’s Axe. Does he do anything else? He’s with the Discovery Institute. Do they do anything else? Really, if you want to argue for ID, the DI is your worst enemy: they’ve given this a very, very bad name and any sincere ID advocate should kick them straight to the curb.
He also ignored that plotting the biological innovations listed in his own source against time produced the exact opposite of what he’d claimed.
Might not the equivalence between mass and energy (e=mc^2) open the way to such an idea?
Sure. How much energy is being added to the system, what is the mechanism for converting it to matter, and what form will the matter take?
Let’s say I was trying to increase the mass of the plants in my garden using energy equivalence from sunlight, and my plants are special plants that convert 100% of the solar energy into mass. My garden’s about 10 m^2 in size. That means it gets around 15000 J of energy from the sun every second, given the luminosity of the sun (3.83 x 10^26 W) divided over a sphere 1 AU (distance from Earth to Sun, 1 AU = 1.496e x 10^11 m) away, and then multiplied by the area of my garden:
3.83 x 10^26 W/(4 pi (1 AU)^2) * 10 m^2 ~ 15000 W = 15000 J/s
I divide that number by the c^2 ~ 10^17 m^2/s^2, where c is the speed of light, and get 10^-13 kg/s. That’s about 1 mg (a few grains of salt in mass) after a year.
It’s going to be very challenging to even measure this change in mass over that length of time, even in a controlled setting, and correcting for other possible sources of error.
I think this kind of measurement might be possible (a physicist could answer this), and this outcome would be astounding, but that’s not what makes me most skeptical about that paper. It’s when the author says that the entropy of the closed system decreases. If he means what I think he means, he’s claiming to have overthrown the second law of thermodynamics.
That’s a claim that would require some truly amazing evidence (from several independent labs) before I’d even start to consider the possibility.