Science doesn’t know how this particular cat survived, but it also isn’t particularly remarkable.
When a mosquito bites you, no one truly knows exactly where it came from. Its egg could have been laid in any of innumerable ponds of standing water in the nearby area. That doesn’t make it a miracle.
Is this Poe’s Law?
Going with the premise of the OP, I figure a lot of people would simply lose their shit. Mass choas ensues.
Good thing it ain’t never gonna happen.
Explanation’s right in the article you cited:
The furry survivor belongs to the Gonzalez family. Angela and Deven Gonzalez were seriously injured in the collapse and remain in the hospital. Edgar Gonzalez remains missing.
The Gonzalez family lived in unit 904, which was sheared in two when part of the tower fell.
Binx either survived the collapse or escaped what was left before the rest of the building was brought to the ground in a controlled demolition.
The cat was in an apartment which was split open in the initial collapse. Two humans who had been in the same apartment also survived. The cat either survived in the same fashion that they did – with less injury due to being smaller, lighter, and more flexible or just due to landing on something softer – or else was in the portion of the apartment which didn’t fall initially, and got out afterwards, as the apartment was no longer an enclosed space.
(He then apparently allowed a stranger to pick him up and take him to a rescue center. This would be extraordinary behavior for some individual cats, but entirely normal behavior for others.)
That’s a great link Velocity. It underlines the point that most miracles admit a mundane cause and the OP’s hypothetical is by necessity pretty unusual. As the IMHO thread shows, convincing miracles are harder to engineer than you might think, even with supernatural powers.
Anyway regarding the OP, while any miracle would be a media sensation, if it was one and done there’s no reason to call a halt to either civilization or the scientific method. If the miracle contained additional information (eg, evidence for a monotheistic God - something not specified in the OP) that would be interesting. Such evidence could shift beliefs among the scientific elite, although again I doubt whether it would cause a collapse of international western capitalism or scientific progress. From a bird’s eye view, I’d say societal ramifications would be minimal, even with large swings in public opinion.
OTOH, if miracles were common occurrences, we could uncover patterns via the science of Miracleology.
Reflecting on this thread, I’m revising my view on what the societal implications would be.
I now think that in the event of a miracle, large swathes of society would turn away from rationalism, retreating instead to discredited dogmas and irrational ideologies rather than simply deal with the evidence in front of them. Awkward facts would be ignored; the scripture of prophets would be a source of comforting myths about the nature of the world. The methods of intellectual inquiry would become ossified, no matter how outdated or inappropriate they had been shown to be.
I’d originally been more optimistic than that, but this thread has been a real eye-opener.
I don’t understand why that would have been the only two reactions.
Personally, I would have regarded it as a fortuitous, but perfectly secular, event. The body sometimes does repair damage that most doctors would have thought was permanent. You can call that a miracle that an improbable and beneficial event happened to you, sure, but it’s not as if such things are without precedent in non-believers as well.
I’m not sure how you got to that conclusion. Not only are there quite a number of different perspectives given in this thread, but none of them indicate anything along the lines as you have claimed.
The only options in the face of a “true” miracle is to try to understand it, or to throw up our hands and no longer believe that anything can be comprehended.
It sounds as though you are saying that trying to understand it would be to cling to ossified methods of intellectual inquiry, and that the only rational response would be to give up on understanding anything about our environment.
Personally, I would give more credence to advance technology from alien civilizations before invoking the supernatural. In fact, I would assume we live in a simulation, where the people running the sim have decided to go ahead and mess with us before assuming the divine.
Yes, absolutely!
That is in no way what I am saying.
What I am saying is that in a world where it is indisputable that the laws of physics can be broken, you cannot investigate the breaking of the laws of physics by a methodology which relies on the laws of physics being unbreakable. An enormous - possibly immeasurable - amount of ontological uncertainty has been added to the system and the approach we take to investigating the miracle - or indeed anything else - has to in some way account for this uncertainty.
Proceeding to investigate under the assumption that physics always works and that therefore experiments are reproducible, for example, is wilfully shutting your eyes to important new knowledge. We need a new epistemology; sticking with the old one is irrational.
OK, you make that assumption. The next day, a child who has always been honest in your dealings with her comes to you and says she was hiding in a wardrobe and found herself in a magical land talking to a faun. How do you decide whether to believe her or not? If you go to the wardrobe and rap on the back of it, does that prove anything?
In this world, you don’t need to test the wardrobe. You know how physics works, and it’s not like that. But if you’re operating under the assumption that we’re in a simulation then “someone programmed the world to work like this yesterday then deleted that subroutine today” is a perfectly possible sequence of events. So what tools do you use to investigate the claim?
That may be the path of the devout Cleric or the naturally gifted Sorcerer, but the far mightier Wizard would instead investigate these claims in a manner not unlike our own scientific method. For example, he or she might try opening the wardrobe under a full moon, or when Saturn is ascendant, or will send a child of pure heart to open the wardrobe, and so on.
Sounds like the Wizard (an odd job title for someone living in a simulation, but let’s go with it) is privy to certain arcane knowledge: to wit that there are rigid laws governing the opening of magical wardrobes which can be discovered by reproducible experimentation. How did she come by this knowledge? Was it vouchsafed to her by an oracle? Did she conjure up a demon and ask it? I mean, she has to know it somehow, otherwise she would just blithely be assuming that she can use the scientific method to deduce and predict the behaviour of whatever entity is running this simulation. An unevidenced assumption that would be mere faith. There’s a word for unjustified belief about the nature of a higher power and “scientific” ain’t it.
Well, the new epistemology is by definition irrational, as it cannot be predicted, reproduced or explained. It does not follow reason.
So, we either try to find rational explanations, or we just give up and embrace the irrational ones.
What do you propose we do, in a world where we can no longer count on the world acting according to cause and effect?
I can’t tell what you are saying then. You agree that the only two options are to try to understand it, or to give up on understanding anything, and it seems as though you are saying that we shouldn’t try to understand it.
I compile other claimed anomalies, and attempt to see any pattern or reason to them.
Either there are rules to discover, in which case the scientific method is your best bet for doing so, or there aren’t, in which case NOTHING you do will help. So you need to try to discover the rules, no matter how esoteric. Maybe you’ll find them and maybe you won’t, but at least you’re trying, unlike the Cleric who falls to his knees and starts to grovel.
Even the Cleric grovelling is attempting to get a reproducible result.
If prayer worked, even if only part of the time, that would be data that would help to explain what was going on. “Oh, we make this deity happy and this happens. We make it mad, and this other thing happens.”
That’s true, but it’s a matter of approach. The Cleric recites his prayer due to tradition. The Wizardly approach would be to figure out WHY the prayers work. Is it because an ultrapowerful entity is listening for your prayer? Is that deity interested in your intent, or in the specific sounds or actions performed as part of the ritual? Can you “hack” key bits from the traditional Cleric’s rituals in order to harness these “miracles” more easily?
It’s the difference between a witch doctor saying “we put all these plants in a mortar and pestle, grind them up while chanting, make a broth that we put in a gourd and wave around your head twelve times, then you drink the liquid and it will cure your disease” and a regular doctor figuring out that one of the plants involved contains chemicals with antibiotic properties and that those can be synthesized.
And how fickle is that deity? Maybe he would have cured your disease, but you caught him right after a fight with his ex, so instead your condition worsens.
This is essentially Pascal’s wager isn’t it? Fantastic!
I propose that we attempt to develop new epistemologies that are better suited to such a world. For example, revelatory epistemology becomes infinitely more viable. Failing that, we need to develop ways of investigating reality that allow us to cope with uncertainty. That doesn’t mean not trying to understand reality, it means approaching the problem in an intellectually honest way, with the tools suited to the job.
Research Theology would be a wonderful development. Would it be restricted to responses to prayer’s/rituals or would it include other aspects? If someone came to the Wizard and said that last night the deity spoke to them, would the Wizard accept these revelations as evidence about the nature and will of the deity? Or would only revelations obtained under a double-blinded RCTbe acceptable?
So are you saying that an indisputable miracle would “break” science? That we could no longer do science (at least in the same way) because we could no longer count on events always predictably obeying natural laws?
That may be the case. (And, if it is the case, it might be offered as a reason why God would not do indisputable miracles.) But I can think of two possible rebuttals.
One is that science already can’t count on events always predictably obeying natural laws, because of quantum randomness (which says that some things aren’t determinate), and perhaps also chaos theory (which says that some things, while determinate, are not predictable in any practical sense).
The other is that, throughout the history of science, there have been scientists who were religious believers who believed in at least the possibility that God could intervene in reality in miraculous ways (even if God seldom or never actually did so). But they continued to do good science, because when they were acting as scientists they considered it their job to study the way the world normally works, when God does not miraculously intervene, which is at least the vast majority of the time.
Not even close.
How would we evaluate them?
How so? Which revelation are we going with? How does something unexplainable by science occuring indicate which god did it?
We have that. It’s called statistics. If it doesn’t bear itself to statistical analysis, then it’s just random, and we can no longer evaluate anything.
No, it means that to be “intellectually honest”, by your definition, means giving up on understanding reality.
What tools are there, other than that of using methodology to understand cause and effect?
That would still be following the scientific method, just with a new area of study.
Why would they without some sort of evidence? If they said the deity told them that the sun would stop in the heavens at noon, and it did, then that would be evidence of the nature and will. If they just said that the deity told them that gay people are icky, then that is not necessarily evidence of any kind.
If we want to actually understand the universe then yes. If we want to just accept that we are at the whim of fickle and irrational beings with power over the universe, then it doesn’t really matter.
We may not be able to understand any better than a Sim can understand how that chair just appeared out of thin air in front of them.
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, thank you.
I’m not very current with the influence of quantum randomness/chaos on scientific epistemology but I have just come across this utterly fascinating snippet in Wikipedia:
In fact, Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen showed that if quantum mechanics is correct, then the classical view of how the real world works (at least after special relativity) is no longer tenable.
What I was going to say was that I think there would still be a fundamental difference between statistical randomness on one hand (which can perhaps be measured and accounted for) and the universe being subject to acts of Will by a deity. However, further googling reveals that there is enormous debate about your exact point, as witness:
ABSTRACT
Scientific realism has traditionally maintained that our best scientific theories can be regarded as more or less true and as representing the world as it is (more or less). However, one of our very best current theories—quantum mechanics—has famously resisted such a realist construal, threatening to undermine the realist stance altogether. The chapters in this volume carefully examine this tension and the reasons behind it, including the underdetermination generated by the multiplicity of formulations and interpretations of quantum physics, each presenting a different way the world could be. Authors in this volume offer a range of alternative ways forward: some suggest new articulations of realism, limiting our commitments in one way or another; others attempt to articulate a ‘third way’ between traditional forms of realism and antirealism, or are critical of such attempts. Still others argue that quantu
m theory itself should be reconceptualised, or at least alternative formulations should be considered in the hope of evading the problems faced by realism. And some examine the nature of these issues when moving beyond quantum mechanics to quantum field theory. Taken together they offer an exciting new set of perspectives on one of the most fundamental questions in the philosophy of modern physics: how can one be a realist about quantum theory, and what does this realism amount to?
How cool is that?