Oh, mate.
See, now you’re doing theology!
“What is the nature of god?” is absolutely the right question to be asking in Miracle World. It is not a scientific question. It is the question you have to answer before you can do science. Does the EFU conform to underlying physical laws which we can discover through replicable experimentation? If the EFU can change physical laws relating to, say angular momentum and thermodynamics, does this mean it can change such physical laws as relate to the EFU? How can we determine this?
We could assume - or take as an axiom - that the EFU does conform to some set of immutable laws such that its behaviour is at least theoretically discoverable and predictable. But until recently we had a similar assumption about the immutabilty of other laws and it turns out not to have been so reliable. So it feels a bit heroic to make a similar but greater assumption now. However, by all means, let’s say in Miracle World we do make that assumption. That still leaves us with this problem:
The laws affecting [everything that’s not the EFU] which we thought were immutable are not; experiments no longer falsify our hypotheses; we do not now understand the conditions under which these laws change; we may never; until we do, all scientific enquiry is beset with fundamental uncertainty.
Yes, I know it’s not an axiom. It’s a fundamental law of nature. We’ve deduced it through observation and experimentation. But those deductions rely on the fundamental assumption that what we observe in this little corner of the galaxy, and the specific experiments conducted at certain times and places, produce results that could be replicated at literally any point in the whole of spacetime. Hence our confidence in our deductions. If we believed that tomorrow light might speed up or slow down at the EFUs whim, or that the shape of spacetime might fundamentally change, we could no longer rely on our previous observations and deductions (because how would we know if they were EFU-affected?) and so we’d have to abandon our certain knowledge about how the universe works in return for mere uncertainty: It’s like this until it isn’t.
Continuous repetition of the miracle will demonstrate how much we will have to mind. Under those conditions, there are approaches that use logic and a bit of science anyhow. Like finally finding out how many prayers or which ones will work with the deity.
That fell flat. 
In reality, science works currently with the assumption that all theories are not the final word in their respective fields. Everything, even before a deity finally shows up, is not considered the final word in science.
The following is from a climate researcher, but dealing with the common retort from science contrarians that claim that “science isn’t settled” (they are correct in this case, but wrong in the idea that it should lead one to dismiss all science)
The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context – at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts.
The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary – science isn’t either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence – for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don’t know everything, we know nothing.
But no scientists would be scientists if they thought there was nothing left to find out. Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them. The community spends most of its time trying to add a brick here or a brick there and slowly adding to the construction. The idea that the ‘science is settled’ is equivalent to stating that the building is complete and that nothing further can be added. Obviously that is false – new bricks (and windows and decoration and interior designs) are being added and argued about all the time. However, while the science may not be settled, we can still tell what kind of building we have and what the overall picture looks like. Arguments over whether a single brick should be blue or yellow don’t change the building from a skyscraper to a mud hut.
The point then is that until we find (even without science) what the deity is up to, it would not stop science at all, what it would be more likely is that it will help identify the places where the deity is concerned about. And then science continues in all other areas. Or all of them if the deity is eventually more concerned with other stuff elsewhere.
BTW early people that investigated the nature of things (not scientists yet) had to ask for permission about what they could research in the past, to not ruffle the feathers of the ones claiming that the deity was just inside the big building. It did not go well for the ones that did go against their authority, particularly when the researchers showed that they were more correct than the ones in contact with the deity.
I want to cross-pollinate these topics, because I swear to God* the title of this topic is exactly what the Leftovers is about!
Also the show is amazing. One of the best 5 things I’ve ever watched.
* if God even exists
I don’t think the last 3 break science. The first might or might not.
#2: If we’re in a simulation, there might still be regularities we can study and take advantage of.
#3: Welcome to reality: we routinely study such situations with statistics.
#4: If laws change on a regular basis without pattern, we can conclude that Big G doesn’t want us to perceive a pattern (otherwise he would suspend physical laws in favor of what His Will, which He’s explained to us a number of times). Furthermore, even if there’s no recognizable pattern, we can still characterize the stochastic process with sufficient sample size. I suppose this indicates that one and done miracles might be particularly hard to process. But those are also difficult to care too much about.
#1: If P is true now, and ~P is true in another second, we don’t have a problem. But yeah, logical impossibilities might break science, because basically you are saying that something is observed that I currently am unable to conceive. Or not, since quantum mechanics manages with simultaneous contradictory states. Who knows?
So yeah, I agree that if we saw enough miracles, we’d just open up a few Departments of Miracleology, and get funding from the John Templeton Foundation.
ETA: OP: Another way of expressing the OP might be: what if a given religion won 3 consecutive James Randi challenges in a row? The answer is that whatever happened would be subject to investigation, and if the conclusions provided guidance on how we should live our lives, no problem, and thanks for the advice.
Yes, I know. That has nothing to do with what I’m saying. Even in your lengthy article we find quotes like this:
Think of the science as a large building, with foundations reaching back to the 19th Century and a whole edifice of knowledge built upon them.
However, while the science may not be settled, we can still tell what kind of building we have and what the overall picture looks like. Arguments over whether a single brick should be blue or yellow don’t change the building from a skyscraper to a mud hut.
There’s a huge gulf between “We don’t understand absolutely everything” and “We place no reliance at all on literally anything we think we know, no matter how well-established”. The first is true, the second false - as the useful analogy of scientific knowledge as a building shows. Clearly we do place pretty heavy reliance on things like “The First Law of Thermodynamics” - these are, in your quote’s analogy, load-bearing structures in the great edifice of science. We could not be adding new bricks to the building if were not absolutely confident in the solidity of the lower stories.
(Let’s break out of the analogy for a second: is there any science, anywhere, being undertaken on the assumption that the First Law of Thermodynamics might perhaps not be true? No, there is not and if you suggested to scientist that she should consider this approach she would - quite rightly - laugh you out of the room.)
In a world where an indisputable miracle has taken place, the foundations of the building have cracked. We can’t rely on the First Law of Thermodynamics any more, so what we thought was a solid structure is now unsound.
Speaking of assumptions, may I say that in this conversation you seem to be operating on the assumptions that I don’t know how science works, that I’m unaware of the work of the scientist and philosopher Carl Sagan or the piano-player Tim Minchin*, and that your role here is to educate me in these basics.
None of these are good assumptions.
Even if it’s just humouring me, can we try proceeding on the basis that I understand these matters almost as well as you do? I think it will help enormously if you engage with what I’m actually saying rather than treating me to your default Science For Dummies course.
*E.g. I first heard Storm over a decade ago and when I did I recognised Minchin’s reference - in the line about leaving the house by the door not the window - to the works of the Enlightenment thinker David Hume
Neither are your assumptions about what the point is, the point remains: You are assuming, and hard, that the foundations will be craked when a deity comes by.
Well, here is where one has to take some history into account, when the best and the brightest of the theologians out there do tell us that what we are assuming took place already in the past, it means that what it is observed now is that when laws are being checked and found afterwards, that after many centuries now of looking, they are solid again after those big assumed miracles.
As I said, it is more likely that a deity may show up and make us flatlanders go all “Hi diddly ho neighborinos!”… wait, those are Flanders , I mean that us Flatlanders will see portents and unexplained to us phenomena, but it is more likely that the laws of physics will revert to form once the deity decides that we are no longer amusing or having better things to do elsewhere.
That’s not my assumption, it’s my conclusion.
My assumptions in this hypothetical are:
- That all scientific knowledge proceeds from the axiom that the laws of nature are immutable and universal.
- That a miracle is a phenomenon contrary to the laws of nature
- That an indisputable miracle has occurred
From this it follows that by definition the indisputable miracle has shown the axiom of immutable universal laws to be false.
If that axiom is shown to be false, then the knowledge derived from a methodology based on it is no longer sound. A whole new level of uncertainty has been introduced. The error bars on both measurement and prediction are now infinite. Statements like “In a closed system entropy cannot increase” are no longer absolute or reliable; they are now immeasurably uncertain.
This is a big deal! Our primary intellectual response for understand what @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness neatly frames as “What the fuck is going on round here” is now no longer fit for purpose. New methods of intellectual inquiry will have to be developed based on very different fundamental axioms.
It seems to me that to avoid that conclusion one has to make certain other assumptions, namely at least one of the following (all advanced in this thread):
- That miracles are caused by some Entity
- That that Entity is itself bound by certain rules
- That these rules can be discovered or deduced
- That the Entity will get bored and go away
These all strike me as quite big assumptions.
OK, a flawed conclusion.
Remember, I can point at history of what it is more likely to had taken place in the past. It is likely that that will take place later in a future when a real miracle comes by.
Sorry, dropped this bit.
Are you really arguing that such scientific laws as we have were developed on the assumption that miracles were real? Which specific laws are you thinking of and can you show how the observations, experiments and deductions which led to them were informed by the explicit or implicit assumption that miracles happen?
I don’t think you can, because there are no scientific laws that were developed in that way.
Well, every day’s a schoolday. In what way does my conclusion not follow from my assumptions?
Oy vey!
The point is that if we do want to go for a hypothetical that we still can’t just nilly willy ignore history, as related to what societies did early when they assumed that real miracles took place in this planet. As mentioned, early researchers were at odds with the ones claiming that the miracles that might have been seen in the past are still happening.
Again that is not the same as developing laws assuming that miracles were real, on the contrary, that was with the realization that laws are outside the dictates of the keepers of the miracles. The point was that looking at history it is more likely that a miracle happening now or in the future will not break the scientific laws from then on, that the miracle will be just a one time issue (or for a few times) that while important by itself (if we follow the hypothetical) it does not mean that the laws of physics will remain broken from then on.
Yes, there was an enormous scientific and theological dispute! It lasted centuries! The more a society could be described as one that “assumes that real miracles take place on this planet” the less science they did. The abandonment of the assumption of an interventionist God and the development of an empirically derived set of consistent laws about the universe went hand in hand. And not everybody was happy about this because they saw what it would mean for faith in God:
“The Notion of the World’s being a great Machine, going on without the Interposition of God, as a Clock continues to go without the Assistance of a Clockmaker; is the Notion of Materialism and Fate, and tends, (under pretence of making God a Supra-mundane Intelligence,) to exclude Providence and God’s Government in reality out of the World.”
But again, this happened in the real world, where (and I cannot stress this enough) no actual miracles took place. Miracles which had taken been regarded as indisputable became, over time, disputed.
This has no relevance to our hypothetical world, where everyone knows an indisputable miracle took place. Saying “over time, people would forget the miracle or pretend it had never happened or disregard it while formulating their ideas about how the world works” is just another way of dodging they hypothetical of an “indisputable” miracle.
In history, no miracles happened. How can you possibly derive any notion of the likelihood of future miracles given the hypothetical that one has happened when your sample space for your probability distribution contains no miracles?
This is just the fallacy of simple induction writ large.
No, that is just moving the goal posts.
You are then not only ignoring science, but history. Remember, we do have to go for the closest examples of what a real miracle can give to society. It does not really give evidence if a miracle in the past was real or not. However, we can look at how societies (and then scientists) in the past reacted to when we’re pondering about a “real” miracle in the future.
Are there contemporary first-hand reports of how people reacted to supposed miracles?
The 1600s isn’t really “contemporary,” but when Miguel Pellicer had his lower left leg restored (which had been missing for two years,) the Catholic church launched an extensive year-long investigation process with numerous witnesses, and then Pellicer was also invited to the royal court at Madrid where King Phillip kissed his restored leg.
Some more modern examples would be claims of miracles done in southeast Africa by people in, or affiliated with, Heidi Baker’s Iris Global ministry. According to Baker and others, many people in Africa already believed in the supernatural to begin with, so Christian miracles shifted their faith/belief into God instead of other spiritual entities.
And using Dark Sponge’s own anecdote mentioned abovethread - when a deaf woman at his church had hearing restored, half of the congregation regarded her as a liar while the other half treated her like a celebrity.
I’m doubtful about this claim. It seems to me that belief in miracles as extremely rare, exceptional suspensions of the way things generally work—breaking natural laws—implies that there are natural laws to break.
@Thudlow_Boink 's point is the critical one here - the definition of miracle we’re using is one that has evolved in the face of the growth of the scientific worldview. If you were to ask, say, Gregory VII, what a miracle was you might get something more like “A sign of God’s infinite grace”. Which isn’t to say that medieval Europe didn’t have a concept of laws of existence, but that laws imply a lawgiver and they were certain both that God had written laws that govern our world and that he could break them at His pleasure.
By that token, if we’re looking at how did societies that believed in miracles respond then Europe in the Middle Ages is a perfectly good model: widespread popular belief in an intercessionist deity; sacraments and rituals designed to implore specific interventions from said deity; status and power flowing to those who designed and led those sacraments and rituals; frequent outbreaks of mass religious hysteria; bitter disputes over the true nature of God and how to get on His good side; acceptance of divine revelation as a valid epistemology; tension between the pursuit of empirically derived knowledge on one hand and said revealed truths on the other.
How long that goes on for following, say, worldwide documentation of the earth stopping spinning (an event that would be astronomically verifiable 1000s of years into the future) is anyone’s guess but my view is that it would last considerably longer than it did in our time when - and I can’t stress this enough - there weren’t any miracles.
I just wanted to note that there is a current Miracle that was observed recently in Florida–a cat survived the collapse of the Champlain Towers South:
In the middle of this sadness, we were hoping for good news either for any survivors or any pet,” said Maria Gaspari, an animal advocate and a friend of the cat’s owners. “As you may know, pets are family, and this is a miracle. I’m shaking right now.”
Science has NO EXPLANATION for this cat’s survival, and I doubt that Science ever will. It is hard to imagine how evidence would be found that would account for it.
And Science is, frankly, cool with that. “We don’t know. We could make some guesses, but there is no way to determine what happened,” says Science.
Binx’s owner will probably regard his survival as an indisputable miracle. I predict that the world will roll on without any effect whatsoever.