Clutch

E_muse,

I don't have much to say about most of your post, since you didn't have much substantive to say about mine. That is, I accept your suggestions that I'm assuming the articulability of explanations and their motivations, since it's hard to see what the debate -- being linguistic and all -- could be about, otherwise.

But let me say, Good pick-up on the Lewontin quote. Fortunately, the guy is hardly regarded as the posterboy or spokesman for the scientific method! But, yeah, that's an example of professed a priori commitments. I disagree, and I think it's manifest that science works the other way 'round -- it takes methods that work, and that's all it cares about.

The inductive part comes in when we note that the history of explanatory progress has been the history of discovering that explanations involving claims like "God X did Y" do not generate explanatory power, nor, especially, predictive power, while explanations of Y not alluding to a deity provide both. Again, this is merely inductive evidence -- but then, so is the evidence that my mother won't mail me exploding cookies.

jdawg2

uh, doesn't that mean it's natural?

E_muse

O.K.

I'm simply making the point that it seems arrogant to make other's claimed experiences subserviant to our explanations especially when life appears to transcend our attempted explanations of it or our attempts to rationalise it, and we do not know the full details of what has happened.

Here I agree. Pragmatism will drive science. But it is also limited in terms of what it is able to investigate.

We cannot take conclusions made about events that the scientific method has been able to scrutinize and then draw conclusions about that which is outside its ability to study at the present time.

I think.. I'm sure you would agree with this.

However, neither does this mean that God statements are meaningless or groundless.

God is a being greater than which nothing can be imagined. If he exists, he defies explanation and reason. To argue a God of the gaps is to misunderstand the loftiest concepts of God as existent in the minds of men ... let alone a God who might be real.

I would seek to clarify something here. Claims like "God X did Y" do not generate explanatory power, nor, especially, predictive power, when seeking to describe causal relationships at the physical level.

E_muse

Exactly. It's hard to draw a line.

Kent Stevens

If God defies explanation, by saying God did it shows that we have not been able to close a potential gap in knowledge. For we can not explain God. If God is a being greater than can be imagined this suggests that he is infinite in complexity. This suggests that our gap in knowledge becomes infinite in size when we say God did it. For how can we explain something that is infinite in complexity?

On a separate issue on the argument that God would not use miracles. If God used miracles that violated natural laws then why should we believe a person that says such a thing occured. For normally if someone says to you "I saw pigs fly", your normal response is to think how would this be possible, this person is clearly not telling the truth as this event does not correspond to other observations of nature. But if a religious person says "God made pigs fly" then we are supposed to believe this by faith even though normally we would think it to be an impossible event. As God knows that we normally reject as false when people say that certain impossible things occur, then God would not tend to use miracles that are only seen by a few people that are then passed onto a much larger number of people. For God would be setting his prophets up for failure.

E_muse

Yes.

It would seem reasonable to say that, in order to fully explain God, we would have to be equal to him. Including his intellectual equal.

Because God is not our equal he will always be beyond our understanding. Whether or not he is infinite in any absolute sense, in terms of our preception of him, he is infinite.

With regard to explaining God, yes. Just for the sake of playing with the concept.. how much of God is unknowable is unknown to us and so it seems that it is impossible for us to judge whether this is a finite or infinite quantity in the absolute objective sense.

In other words, what would be the grounds for accepting a reported miraculous event?

One person reporting such an event would have their sanity questioned and would not be taken seriously. However, it does not follow that they are lying or not telling the truth. They may have experienced such an event.. perhaps as a result of taking hallucinagenic drugs. They may be suffering from a mental condition. But, in each case their claim may be perfectly true.

It is necessary to investigate the circumstances surrounding the claim.. Does the person have a track record of making bizarre claims? Are they prone to mental illness? Do they take drugs? Are there others who also claim to have witnessed the event? .. and so on.

I disagree. You're describing a poor charicature of how Christians think. Simply because someone claims an extrordinary experience, it does not follow that we must believe their claim simply because they are saying 'God did it'.

In Biblical terms.. at no point is anyone expected to believe in the resurrection simply 'by faith' or in other words, no evidence at all. In writing to the Corinthian Church, the apostle Paul is careful to detail those to whom Jesus appeared after his alleged resurrection. He mentions that Jesus appeared to over 500 believers at once, many of whom he states are alive at the time of writing.

Paul doesn't seem to be suggesting that the event should be accepted 'through faith' but on the basis of observation which can be verified with those who are still alive. That God raised Jesus from the dead is a matter of faith.. but not that the event happened for Paul.

Your statement is certainly true of western culture.. and the western church.

I agree with you.. and bizarrely, so does the Bible. It says that Jesus could not do many miracles in his home town because of their unbelief.

This suggests that where there is an unwillingness to accept miraculous claims, miraculous events are less likely to happen. I would say that this is absolutely the case in western culture.

Your conclusion makes sense to me. Why would God bother performing miracles in a context where the reports of such events would be rejected on an a priori basis without people even taking the trouble to investigate the claims?

Ron Singh

This doesn't seem like an arguement, rather an observation.

HRG

Because you cannot report a specific miraculous event. You can only report that your perceptions seem to be inconsistent with the absence of miracles; but whether the event which you think to have observed was miraculous, or your perception of a non-miraculous event has been miraculously altered, cannot be determined.

The connection between an event and our perception of it breaks down in the presence of miracles (=supernatural influences).

Regards,
HRG.

E_muse

Which is why it may be important to assertain how many people claimed to have witnessed the event. It would seem more unlikely that an event was simply explained by an altered state of perception when it was experienced by more than one person.

However, the line of reasoning you suggest seems to be tending towards a line of thinking such as that expressed by Descartes which could question the reality of all objective events as divorced from human perception - and as you correctly state, leaves us no nearer being able to ascertain what has happened. It serves no real purpose.

It seems that it makes more sense to accept an alleged event as it was experienced (an objectively real event - if it is described in that way, and especially by more than one person), rather than to muddy the waters with philisophical considerations that would not be called into play when considering any other claimed experience and cannot lead us any nearer to understanding what has really happened.

Also, to state that all apparently objectively real and apparently supernatural events cannot be distinguished from a miraculous change of perception is to decide a priori that this line of reasoning must be applied to all claimed experiences of said events as it is beyond falsification. We can't decide this as only one observation which contradicts this would prove it wrong. As I have stated earlier, each claim must be considered on its own merits, anything else is to make an a priori explanation.

Personally, if I take a particular philisophical stance towards life in general, then I am not going to simply switch it in order to maintain a sense of incredulity when this is challenged.

[ April 11, 2002: Message edited by: E_muse ]</p>

Kent Stevens

You seem to say E_muse that God is beyond explanation. Then trying to use God as an explanation is always going to succumb to the cruel cut of Occam's Razor. For when we have any other partly possible explanation for an event other than "God did it", that explanation will always be simpler and therefore be the better explanation.

The main way that a religious person believes in miracles is by faith. Paul even says something like we are saved by faith. What reason that religious person uses seems to be minimal, and this is why their religion is termed a faith and not a philosophy.

Faith makes people believe that the dead come back to life. Faith makes people believe that Moses parted the sea. Faith makes people believe that Jesus gave evil spirits permission to go into the pigs in a pig herd. This resulted in two thousand pigs rushing down to the lake to die by drowning. While this not the same as saying "God made pigs fly" it is getting close to this in it's absurdity.

God could easily convince us all by doing miracles that we could all see. If he raised people back from the dead on television, and this was verified by journalists, then people would believe in a certain religion. If God appeared on TV and shot out bolts of lightning, and this was confirmed by journalists, then people would believe in a certain religion.