This is like not being aware of the idea that if that there was an exceptional god out there, it does not disallow the rules. That is, there can be exceptions that do not break the rules.
The fact that exceptions to those rules have been stated confirms those rules hold in all other cases. The full statement of the principle reads exceptio probat regulam, in casibus non exceptis. The exception proves the rule in cases not excepted.
These days, you’d have to be one heck of a stickler to insist that “the exception that proves the rule” only be used in its original Latin sense. It has probably come to its current sense through some blending with the expression, “every rule has an exception.” Most of the time, when people say something is “the exception that proves the rule,” they could just as well say it’s “an exception to the rule.” I would argue, however, that “the exception that proves the rule” does more by highlighting the unusualness of the exception. The Mini-Transat, or Adrian Peterson, or a Congress reaching an agreement are not just outside the norm, they are so far outside the norm they force you to notice what the norm is, or that there is one at all. There is an important kernel of the original sense here. The existence of the exception gives force to the rule. The no swimming after 10 pm sign makes it clear that it’s okay to swim before that. The congressional compromise on student loans makes it all the more clear that congress can’t compromise on anything else. Sure, there’s usually a good bit of hyperbole going on when someone pulls out this expression, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make any sense.
Point is that physics would still continue even if a deity comes in. IMHO when I take into account how a multidimensional being would appear in the dimension we inhabit we would think that it is breaking all the rules, however as Carl Sagan could explain, the inhabitants of Flatland would continue to be dealing with their flat world.
The rules referenced in that article are utterly different from the laws of physics. They’re generalisations based on experience - most yacht races are duels between French sailors, Congress usually doesn’t agree on stuff. Physics is based on the idea that the laws of nature we observe are not mere generalisations but fundamental attributes of reality that do not and cannot vary. As @Babale said upthread:
“The exception proves the rule” is absolute anathema to physics. The whole point is that the rules apply everywhere. When you find a case where they don’t then you have to re-write the rules to take account of the exception.
Which in the case of Flatland (where you can derive rules that work for multi-dimensional creatures and are still consistent with life in 2-d) or Newtonian vs Einsteinian physics (where again, it turns out the old rules are just the new rules being applied in specific circumstances) is fine. The rules are more complex than you thought, but they are still consistent rules and you can show that they apply in both the old and new circumstances perfectly well.
In the case of @MEBuckner’s excellent “the world stops spinning” example, you can’t do this. The sudden, causeless, halt in the earth’s rotation and it’s equally sudden resumption with no ill effects doesn’t admit of a new set of rules. It’s a miracle - a phenomenon contrary to natural law. There is no consistent set of physical laws that will explain both the sudden halt and the way the universe worked up until then.
People would look for such a set of rules, sure. But they couldn’t find one. And we’d be left with a physics that said:
E=mc2 except when it doesn’t
F=ma usually
Angular momentum is conserved, most of the time.
This isn’t slightly different from real-world physics. It’s categorically different.
But that drops totally the point that we should drop all rules when a god shows up that breaks the rules. In your previous post, it was implied the entity would make useless the need for physics, now it seems that we just need to rewrite the rules (just as it has been). Meaning that therefore we can explain eventually what that deity does.
And that shows that you ignore what Sagan said. There was a reason why I did mention what one can notice when taking other dimensions into account. Early on, you are demanding that physics should remain broken after a miracle is observed. That is not the case.
Occam’s razor would point out that it is more likely that, just like in a flatland universe, the appearance of an Apple god does not really break the physics that the Flatland people will continue to deal with.
Then I wasn’t clear. The paragraph you quoted was talking about what happens in the real world when we find it doesn’t conform to the rules we think we’ve worked out. In the real world there are no miracles.
You can’t rewrite the rules to account for a miracle-causing deity. The deity is beyond and outside natural law by definition. This is metaphysics. Literally that which is beyond and outside physics.
To put it another way, if we can derive a set of rules that consistently account for both miracles and real world physics, then they’re not miracles. It just means the universe and its laws are more complex than we thought and we have to work to understand them. And we will, and we’ll develop cool new tech based on our deeper understanding and start moving planets around. Which is cool. But has nothing to do with the question, “What if a miracle happens?”.
If the best it can be done is to use the miracle of the earth stopping and continuing with no ill effects, it is a very underwhelming example when it is clear that other civilizations did not notice anything amiss then. What was very, very, likely is that it was just an embellishment by a biblical writer trying to make a victory in battle to also be a result of a miracle.
The explanations I mentioned, and linked to, do imply also what to take into account if and when a miracle takes place. You do not drop the physics you have, you modify them (as history shows it is done, as mentioned). Also, don’t forget that the one behind a miracle could not give a hoot about us. It could have other priorities.
“Natural” meaning what, exactly? Meaning “existing within our universe”?
Because I don’t think that’s an axiom; rather, that’s an observation. If we observe events for which the best explanation is that an extra-universal force is the cause, are you suggesting that science can’t incorporate that?
For example, we might modify a law of physics: an object at rest tends to remain at rest, absent an external or extra-universal force operating on it.
If extra-universal forces (EUFs, from now on, e.g., Gods, or simulation-programmers, or whatever) start becoming more common, are you suggesting that scientists cannot investigate these phenomena? They might not be able to explain them fully, but they won’t shrug off investigation.
Not at all. Some immutable law exists which allow these EUFs to operate.
Now, one of the axioms that I DO think is a true axiom of science, as I said earlier, is that an objective universe exists which we may access via our senses. An EUF might, by virtue of existing outside of our universe, be inaccessible to our senses; and, failing some way to project our senses beyond the universe, might create phenomena whose causes are completely opaque to science.
I would argue that this is somewhat similar to pre-big-bang events. While some folks hypothesize that time itself began at the big bang, Hawking suggests that’s a shortcut: “Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang,” he said. It may be that the universe has expanded and contracted an infinite number of times. But we are unable to observe what happened before the BB. We don’t know. All we can do is to study the effects of the BB and what happened afterward.
Similarly, we would be unable to observe the EUF directly. All we could do is to study the effects of the EUF.
Just as physicists don’t throw up their hands and cry uncle based on the opacity of the big bang, I wouldn’t expect miracles to result in a lot of towel-throwing.
It would be begging the question if the question was “How do we tell if something’s a miracle?”. The question is “Given that an indisputable miracle has occurred, what would be the implications?”.
Also, I know that in this world the earth didn’t really stop! I’m talking about a hypothetical case where, tomorrow, it really does. And everyone notices. And nobody gets hurt and the core doesn’t rip through the mantle and weather continues fine and then it restarts with a similar lack of ill-effects. And when we investigate we find there was no force acting on the earth to either stop or start it.
No miracles have taken place in history, so history shows nothing about what to take into account if they take place.
A miracle is not “Something weird that we can’t explain right this very second.” A miracle is “a phenomenon contrary to natural law”. The point at which it is “indisputably” a miracle is not when it happens. It’s when it’s been investigated and we realise that there is no possible explanation consistent with the fundamental axiom that the universe is governed by fixed laws.
The response to finding out that Mercury isn’t quite where you thought it was is to start using the Laws of Relativity instead of Newton’s Laws. The response to a miracle is to abandon the idea of universal laws because if you can describe it using universal laws then it’s not a miracle.
As I noted, you are missing that even if there was an undisputed miracle happening, it would also be reckless to drop the laws that we have found so far. As it would be also the assumed outcome you are implying so far: that we all surrender to an entity that we don’t know what his/her/it purpose is.
That wouldn’t stop thousands of papers being published that try to explain it. Cosmic strings or microblackholes or vortexes of dark matter or something else. Until or unless the phenomena or a similar one is repeated, they will remain hypothesis for sure, but that doesn’t mean that the scientific community will not try to explain what happened.
I like this example. In Star Trek terms, it’s the difference between something the Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, or even Borg could do, vs. something Q could do.
Every day, in college classrooms, good careful students do assigned experiments and get an unanticipated AKA incorrect result.
The professor, or TA, may then try to guess what was done wrong. They will try to explain the possible miracle. Not in a scientific way, but in an explain-it-away way.
Do I think God is performing such miracles? No. But such could be, and, if so, the volume is high.
There is no such thing as an indisputable miracle unless some super-powerful God decides to change human nature.
Whatever God or gods exist have to exercise their extreme knowledge and power in a way consistent with natural laws. Otherwise they could do the impossible.
This greatly limits God’s powers. But if you go by the New Testament, God can’t lie, and can’t protect himself from great pain. Obviously that isn’t the only conceivable kind of God. But it certainly is conceivable that God exists while being hemmed in by natural laws. I can’t conceive of any other real-world God.
This sounds like a bit of a circular argument. Suppose God did do something impossible - then what? It would be a case of, “Yes I did do what I was told I couldn’t do, what about it?”
For instance, the law of conservation of mass says mass can be neither created nor destroyed (within a closed system.) Certain claimed miracles have been violations of that law. So either the miracles didn’t happen, or the law was violated, but in no instance was the claim made that “the miracle did happen, but it is consistent with the law.”
No, “natural” meaning something more like “arising from the nature of reality”. It’s in the nature of our universe that nothing travels faster than the speed of light, for example. But the word “natural” isn’t the important bit. Strike it out or replace it with “physical” or “reality” if you like. The important bit is that these laws apply everywhere at all times.
And that is an axiom. You cannot build knowledge experimentally if you do not consider the results of your experiments to reflect a consistent underlying reality. When an Italian mathematician drops two lead balls off a leaning tower and sees them hit the ground at the same time, the conclusion we draw is not that “In Pisa in 1589 different sized objects accelerate at the same rate, but that tells us nothing about what happens on the Moon in 1971”. If you don’t start from the position that the laws of physics apply everywhere at all times then there’s no point climbing the tower, or indeed building a space rocket. Experimental results become contingent and meaningless. Thanks to Galileo and Newton and Einstein, we are confident that we can accurately predict the movements of celestial bodies light years away - but only because we take it as axiomatic than in those far flung galaxies, the same laws apply as do right here, and will do for as long as they and the universe exist.
I’m not clear what you mean by an extra-universal cause. If you mean that there’s some higher level of reality that itself conforms without exception to a consistent set of laws of which our laws are merely a highly specialised case (as with Flatland) then yes, with enormous difficulty our scientists could incorporate that. But in that case, the assumption that there is some set of constant laws underpinning reality still holds.
If you mean that the EUF is some entity who is able to rewrite the laws of nature at their whim like a programmer of a simulation then I don’t think there is a scientific way to incorporate that into your understanding of reality because… they can rewrite the laws of nature at their whim. We have no way to study the programmer because we can’t break out of the simulation so we can’t derive any information about how or why they change the rules. All we know is that the rules can suddenly change but not how or when or why or to what.
If you mean that the EUF is akin to a god, which is to say not only able to rewrite the laws of reality but also not bound by any laws then we definitely can’t scientifically study them because we could place no reliance on any findings.
None of which is to say that people can’t investigate of these phenomena. But the investigation will not be a scientific one. Because we can’t proceed on the assumption that our experiments mean anything. “An object remains at rest unless acted on by another force” boils down to F=ma (he says, blithely hoping he’s remembering high school physics properly). “An object remains at rest unless acted on by another force or an EUF” boils down to F=ma * x - where x has an infinite range of values, may be scalar or vector, may be imaginary, may be [some other weird mathematics I’m too ignorant to detail] but cannot be known until afterwards and can be different every time. That’s not science, it’s theology.
Is that an axiom or an observation?
An opaque EUF is a good model for a First Mover god, who sets the universe in motion with all its laws and then retires gracefully. (Big Bang as described by you/Hawking is also a good model for this). But with the advent of the miraculous, we’re not talking about such a EUF. We’re talking about one who interferes with the laws. You can observe those effects and you can investigate them. But you can’t investigate on the basis that the laws of your reality are immutable because you know that’s not true.
Who’s talking about towel-throwing? The question of “What the fuck is going on round here” would still need to be answered. But we’d need to adopt a different investigative approach, one that was based on the facts that a) the laws that govern reality are not immutable and b) the EUF exists. It’s a categorically different paradigm.
Newton’s laws are being used as an approximation of the actual laws, because at the scale we work on most applications only require that approximation. But we know precisely when that approximation will and won’t work so that e.g. when we’re building Global Positioning System we don’t use Newton, we use Einstein. And that’s fine. Like I say, in miracle world I’d still walk out the front door and not the second-floor window. But so what? My fundamental understanding of how the world works has been radically altered, and so has everyone else’s. The tools we use to understand it are now all only approximations and we don’t know when or where those approximations stop being valid.
“Surrender” seems like a very loaded term. In the event of a miracle, it would be reckless to disregard the fact that there is an entity that can rewrite the laws of reality. What you mean by “surrender” and what I mean by noting that are I suspect very different things.
Actually, in the linked Storm short video, Tim Minchin disposes of that (and he is that one that noticed that your approach is the one that tells others to do that walking of the second floor)
And that is excluding the middle. As Carl Sagan told it, a miraculous entity might as well be dedicated to fool with some of us, but in the end, not bother to change the rules that are already in Flatland. That entity actually used the rules that he/she/it/Apple knew already and left the rules of the flat universe unchanged in the end.
Is “god” part of reality? If so, I’m not clear what “supernatural” would mean, and I’m not sure why the existence of a natural god who can change other aspects of reality would break an axiom about natural laws that apply everywhere, or that all phenomena have natural causes.
To the best of our current knowledge, yes: that’s a conclusion drawn through scientific observation, not an axiom. But if something comes along to change that, we’ll change the scientific consensus.
(Some laws are statistical in nature)
knew already and left the rules of the flat universe unchanged in the end.