There are plenty of experiments that yield different results because of factors that are initially obscure - I wouldn’t expect people to simply give up trying to understand the world around them because it’s hard - they’ll look for a pattern; they’ll try to discern a cause. If there is no pattern, they’ll never stop looking.
Edit: and it’s not my understanding that we are actually talking about a world in which it is widely accepted that the laws of nature no longer apply. The scenario I believe we are discussing is the world we currently live in, into which an anomalous and unexplained event has intruded, and that event is well verified to have happened.
If I’m wrong, and we are in fact discussing the world where miracles are both commonplace and widely accepted, then the answer is: anything you like - it might be like the Bible, Narnia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or anything else you care to postulate - there can’t be a logical answer as to what would happen to the world, based on cause and effect, if cause and effect have been destroyed and abandoned.
So if indeed this is the world that you describe, the answer is: everyone who learns about it sprouts rainbow coloured wings and flies to the moon - there’s no way to say that wouldn’t happen, because there’s no way to be sure about anything.
I don’t mind sharing the details but the point of my argument is no amount of evidence is ever enough to convince someone of something they don’t want to believe.
During my late teens I attended a church with nice people. One Sunday I noticed a woman in her mid-twenties who was signing along with an interpreter while the rest of the church sang. I didn’t think much of it at the time but she continued to attend regularly.
A couple years later we ended attending some of the same church events (mission trips, etc) and I started to get to know her through mutual friends. She had lost her hearing as a young girl so she could speak without an accent and she could read lips very well. I eventually started dating her roommate so we ended up being around each other quite a bit. She was a very nice person but she talked quietly all the time; she said this was because she was afraid of “being one of those deaf people who talked too loud.” Around the same time she started tutoring a mutual friend of my GF and I who was taking ASL at our local community college.
I didn’t think of it at the time but in addition to being completely fluent in ASL there were many things she did which she couldn’t have possibly known without being immersed in deaf culture. Like for instance, getting extremely pissed off after seeing a “deaf person” asking for handouts in an airport. I had no idea at the time but deaf people do not see themselves as disabled, at all. I’d never seen her so angry; had she been male that guy definitely would have gotten his ass kicked. Or her missing out on us laughing at a friend stumbling over their words and (after we explained it) her mentioning that signing had “tongue twisters” too. Or when she talked about how as a little girl she didn’t know sound went around corners so she’d try to sneak up on her brother only to have him scare her instead. Or her telling me never to say ‘vacuum’ to a deaf person. Or a hundred other similar instances.
Anyway to stop rambling, she had her hearing restored, out of the blue, with no medical procedure. She claimed God had healed her. She ran in to tell us and was weeping, etc. She was worried we wouldn’t believe her so she made a point of answering us with her back turned. etc. Afterward everything was loud to her. As I said she was a nice person but she had to keep telling people to talk quieter, turn down music, etc because everything hurt her ears. I wasn’t with her so I have no proof but she then went to a doctor who confirmed she could hear again. As I understood it her hearing tested as very sensitive; “newborn hearing” without the normal hearing loss adults have.
When the people in our church heard about this they were instantly divided. About half of them refused to believe and called her a liar who made everything up. I guess they thought she had been pretending to be deaf, for every moment of her life she was around other people, for the last four years? I’m not sure why someone would want to do that. If anything being deaf made her an outsider. I don’t think I could pull it off even if I wanted to. The other half of people were very excited and treated her like a celebrity. She stopped talking about it pretty quickly after she saw their responses. It became so uncomfortable for her she eventually left the church and started attending another one where I presume she kept it secret. We continued to hang out through mutual friends for another year or so after which I moved away and broke up with my GF so I lost touch. A couple years later I saw her in a picture of our community college’s recent nursing degree graduates.
The most shocking part of it for me was not that she was healed, but seeing the lengths people will go to refuse to believe. Not to mention these were people who claimed to believe God does miracles. I learned a great deal about human nature through that experience.
One factor would be the sheer number of fraudsters, rip-offs and hoaxsters within the charismatic church. I don’t doubt that some things are legit, but I have seen a staggering amount of false ‘Christian’ prophecy (I know, prophecy is not the same as healing) and it would be reasonable for people to cast similar doubt on some healing stories as well. I don’t doubt your friend’s story at all, but it’s reasonable for people to take massive grains of salt, because the bad give the good a bad name. But there is, too, a lot of stubbornness as you pointed out as well.
The other might be that some people may acknowledge something in abstract but refuse to accept it in concrete.
Nope, no one did. If that was the case she had psychosomatic symptoms for 20+ years then they suddenly went away. From my point of view I’d still classify that as God healing her.
I want a cite for actual events that are unexplainable that really occurred. Rather than say “well no one can explain how this prophet performed that miracle” when actually there is no evidence that said prophet performed said miracle at all.
I’m not digging up a cite to demonstrate that people think God did the Big Bang or whatever. I’m confident you’re smart enough to process the broader point.
That point being… a “proven miracle” as described by the OP isn’t going to move the epistemic needle for many people at all. The skeptics are going to stick to their posture of “it must be natural, we just need time to investigate.” The faithful will stick to “it must be supernatural if science can’t explain it immediately.”
One event won’t change anything for anyone. It would need to look like communications from an intelligent being. If such were forthcoming, we’d still have to figure out how to prove that being was supernatural or just a previously unknown life-form.
So, in summary, there would be no societal ramifications at all because there’s no type of “miracle” that’s going to change anyone’s epistemic reality.
That still excludes other, more likely possibilities.
Conductive hearing loss
Less common than sensorineural hearing loss, conductive hearing loss is caused by an obstruction or damage to your outer or middle ear that inhibits sound from being conducted to your inner ear.
With conductive hearing loss, your inner ear and auditory nerve are undamaged. Depending on the cause, conductive hearing loss can be temporary or permanent. Causes can run from wax impaction to a traumatic break in the connection between the bones of the middle ear.
I will! Science does not currently have a complete explanation for the origin of life from non-living precursors. There are lots of very sound hypotheses and pieces of explanation - to the extent that (IMO) it’s a pretty clear general picture, just missing pieces of the fine detail.
That fine detail may never be known, simply because the evidence it left would likely have been fragile and ephemeral. Even if we advance science to the point where we can create life in a test tube, we won’t ever be able to be completely certain that’s exactly how it happened on Earth as a precursor to the evolution of living organisms on our planet.
But we know it must have happened, because living things exist.
It depends on whether God can, in your religion, lie.
A God can’t do the impossible. This is AFAIK part of any serious philosophy of religion.
There is an enormous realm of impossibilities. Some we know about. Some we don’t. It might be that the physics of the universe is set up in a way that having God-level power makes it impossible for God to lie. Or not. If God can lie, then he can dispute truths.
Suppose pantheism is true. I regard this — universe has consciousness — as plausible despite being completely unproven. But it is AFAIK impossible for thoughts to travel faster than the speed of light. This wouldn’t falsify pantheism, but would limit pan. (Unless pan is legitimately in a special relativistic frame beyond my understanding.)
God might exist somewhere in the realm of almost completely unknown natural phenomena. The illusion is to think that there is a realm of the supernatural.
There are “miracles” that would epistemologically extraordinarily consequential, and very hard to pass off as “sufficiently advanced aliens” (“a previously unknown life-form”), even if they were just one-off events that were never, ever repeated, and human existence continued for thousands of years afterwards.
Suppose Earth “stood still” for a few hours, as in Joshua 10:12-14. This isn’t some localized and subjective phenomenon—obviously no other culture or civilization on Earth took any note of the alleged phenomenon described in the Book of Joshua. But suppose instead that this time people’s direct perceptions, all over the world, and also scientific instruments, astronomical observatories, satellites and space probes, all agree, that the entire planet just…stops rotating for a few hours. Then—no muss, no fuss—it just starts back up again. But, Earth’s crust doesn’t melt, there are no appalling seismic events associated with these events, nothing like that. Just, to heck with conservation of energy and angular momentum! We could study a thing like that for centuries, and still be utterly baffled, even if it never, ever happened again, and I think saying “Well, maybe it was aliens” would be a pretty unsatisfactory answer: Yes, but how? And I don’t think those of us who are atheists would be able to just shrug off a thing like that. “Well, it was only just the one time. It was probably just a glitch.”
And I can think of crazier things than that. One day, the visible stars all rearrange themselves. Maybe, from now on, instead of Orion and the Big Dipper and so forth, the stars spell out “JESUS SAVES”, or “OM MANI PADME HUM” (in Sanskrit—come to think of it, it would be weird if the stars said “JESUS SAVES” in English. Weirder, I mean.) or “WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE”. But then, nothing like that ever happens again. At the very least, a substantial fraction of this galaxy has been rearranged—something totally beyond anyone’s understanding of physics—solely to send a message (potentially a rather ambiguous message) to a bunch of mostly hairless, mostly harmless, bipedal apes on one particular mote of dust.
We could ponder that for a thousand years, and not get any closer to coming up with any reasonable theories about how the Universe really works. This isn’t “sufficiently advanced aliens” in the sense of “little green men in flying saucers”; this is “sufficiently advanced aliens” in the sense of beings—who might be “hyper-intelligent shades of blue”, for all we know—who are running the entire Universe as a simulation on their “computers” (which may or may not resemble the simulated “computers” we simulated apes are familiar with from inside the simulation)…those “aliens” might as well be called “God” (albeit they wouldn’t necessarily be the Christian God, or the God of any other religion anyone has ever actually preached).
It wouldn’t necessarily have to be that overt or extreme either. Using the 30+ fall as an example (who is actually a friend of mine) - I am no doctor or physicist, but AIUI, the physics of mass and acceleration should make it pretty much impossible at a height of 30-35 feet for someone to jump onto concrete without suffering some form of detectable injury or, at the least, feeling pain - and when also considering that the person reported that her sensation upon hitting the concrete was not that of a hard surface, but rather a springy trampoline-like feeling on impact - the neighbors, who had seen her jump, were incredulous about her soft and bouncy description of the concrete impact - and there is something here that scientists would have to scratch their heads very, very hard over for a very very long time.
I think this thread is made very difficult because “miracle” is so broad as to be almost nondescriptive. Yes, there are some sequences of miracles that wouldn’t admit any scientific research, as discussed earlier. But this one? Of course there’d be scientific investigation. You say that
and I agree with you. This would upend physics. But it wouldn’t end physics.
Physicists would want to know what things looked like at the moment of stopping and continuing of rotation. Was the process slow, or immediate? Did the earth’s revolution around the sun stop as well? Did temperatures increase on the day side and decrease on the night side as you’d expect? Were there any strange readings on radiation sensors before, during, or after the event? Were there any strange astronomical observations?
Science is in the business of asking, “What the fuck is going on around here?” A very strange event wouldn’t end the questions; rather, it’d increase them.
It might not find answers. But I don’t think scientists would, or should, stop asking questions, even if things get superhink.
I agree with everything but the last sentence. And only then so far as to say that the direction people look will change. We’re talking about an “indisputable” miracle. So once it is beyond dispute that this event did not and cannot conform to any laws of nature, people will stop looking for explanations based in natural laws and start looking to the divine/spiritual/supernatural.
I admit I’m taking my cue from the OP’s focus on the miracle being “legit” and “indisputable”:
and assuming that means that it’s well understood and largely agreed that there isn’t a scientific explanation for what happened. If the hypothetical is that something weird happened and we’re investigating it under the assumption that a scientific explanation will be forthcoming, then that doesn’t feel like a legit miracle, if you know what I mean. I jumped to multiple miracles as a way of getting to the point where the investigations are done, and the acceptance of miracles is firmly embedded. For me, the itneresting question is about how society would change if we accepted that occasionally, for no discernible reason, the laws of nature don’t apply.
Well, yeah - this is kind of the point. The OP asks about the societal and and scientific implications of a miracle. There’s no way to be sure about anything is a great summation of what that implies. And you’re right that any answer has to take into account the fact that miracles might affect what ever scenario you come up with.
If everyone believes that miracles happen, but only roughly every 150 years or so and only affecting a small amount of people, what then?
If everyone beleives that miracles happen, and you’ve got a 50/50 chance of experiencing one in your lifetime, what then?
If everyone believes that miracles happen, and you’ll be involved in one every ten years or so, what then?
I agree that if we postulate a world where miracles just keep happening then no coherent answer is possible. But the above scenarios are more stable than that. What would it be like living in that world?
Science is in the business of asking “What the fuck is going on around here?”, but that’s not what makes it science. Other areas of intellectual inquiry ask the same question. What sets science apart is how it goes about answering the question. We all know the scientific method. That method is based on certain axioms: chiefly that there are natural laws that always apply everywhere and that all phenomena have natural causes. From these it follows that you can derive those natural laws from experimentation and deduction, and from that that you can make predictions about the world.
When the world miraculously stops spinning, those axioms go out the window. There is no coherent set of natural laws that says angular momentum exists and can be rigorously predicted except for that one time when it didn’t and couldn’t. Scientists would look for natural causes for the Great Halt for a long time, but eventually they would have to come to the conclusion not only that they cannot find any such causes but that under the assumption of immutable and universal natural laws, no such cause could exist. And that therefore the only intellectually honest conclusion is that immutable and universal natural laws don’t exist.
So yes, it would break physics. And the important question of “what the fuck is going on round here” would have to be approached by different tools than the scientific method. Axioms like “There is an Entity which is above and beyond what we thought were physical laws and can alter them at its whim” would become tenable in a way that they haven’t since the Enlightenment and intellectual inquiry based on those axioms would take a much more prominent role.