First you would have to prove that the event did occur, and wasn’t an imbelishment of the event. You are “begging the question” by presuming that entity G exists (un-proven) that could do event X, therefore event X could occur.
After all, I never catch Bass smaller than 5 pounds when telling folks at the tackle shop that I went fishing.
I’m going to try one more time, since my above comments don’t seem to have garnered any responses.
All this talk of “is this possible” (e.g., is it possible that there’s a God who can and does violate the laws of physics) seems to me to be beside the point. The question is, is it credible?
If I tell you I had cereal for breakfast this morning, you would probably believe me. After all, lots of people eat cereal for breakfast. If I tell you I flew to Mars on a rocket ship this morning, you probably wouldn’t believe. The evidence is the same (my word), but you judge the claims differently. The difference is that one claim is, for lack of a better word, surprising. Even if you consider it possible in principle that I might have built a rocket and flown it to Mars, it’s an absolutely shocking claim, and any reasonably skeptical person would demand strong evidence before believing it.
It seems to me that even devout Christians should admit that the Bible makes some very shocking claims. A child born to a virgin, a man who can heal leprosy and other ailments at will, who can even raise the dead, and who returns from death himself. If I told you I saw someone do those things last week, you would probably demand a great deal of evidence before you’d believe. Even if I would rather die than recant, that only proves that I believe it, not that it’s true.
Consider: If I and a dozen others were willing to swear in the face of death that my friend Phil could walk on water, would that be enough to convince you?
If not, why are a few 2000 year old second hand accounts so much more convincing? I’m not trying to be patronizing, I really want to understand why people believe these things. And do you feel that you’re applying a lower level of skepticism to Biblical claims than to other claims? (I’m addressing this to Christian believers, of course – although I guess it works just as well for any religion that believes in miracles.)
Oh, I’m not even close to trying to prove that any miracle did occur - only that Diogenes’s proof that miracles are impossible has a hole in it. I’m presently unable to distinguish it from a simple statement “Miracles are impossible because miracles are impossible”, which he calls proof by definition and I call begging the question.
Fancy that! I had no idea that “size” could take a negative argument
I’m saying that physical laws do not permit the possibility of an entity who can violate them. Positing God is just positing one miracle to validate the plausibility of another.
I think you missed an important aspect of Diogenes’s proof… he started with the definition of what a Miracle is, and then expanded upon that:
So, to defeat his proof, you would have to show an example where one side or the other were incorrect. If either of his definitions are wrong, then so is the proof.
Begging hte question, as I understand it, is starting with a presumption that leads to the conclusion “God exists, he can do X, therefore Y” (as I attempted to demonstrate) this can also be reffered to as a Circular argument. Example: “The Bible is God’s word because the Bible Says it is”
Dio, you’re so intelligent and your arguments are usually so cogent, (and I agree with you so often) that it really bugs me when you start going off half-cocked like this. Physical laws don’t permit anything. They describe. The only thing a physical law tell us is that nothing violating them has been reliably observed. I doesn’t tell us anything about what is or is not possible under unobserved (or unobservable) circumstances. If that were not so, Newtonian laws could never have been modified by relativity and QM.
It is true that positing God to explain miracles only pushes the problem back a level, and violates Okham’s Razor, but that is a logical objection, not a purely scientific one, and it doesn’t prove that the posited entity is impossible, only unsupported by evidence.
Okay, but the question then becomes, are the Biblical mousteria (and I’m intentionally using the transliterated Greek to equip us with a discrete term) – which are termed “miracles” in common modern English – actually “miracles” by Diogenes’ definition?
Because everyone seems to be missing the point Malacandra is making – and it’s a damned important one IMO – that if you define “miracle” as something scientifically impossible, and then count everything in the Bible that is termed a mousterion as a miracle-by-Diogenes’-definition, you are begging the question the opposite way. You have automatically defined that miracles are impossible because miracles are impossible.
To look at the point without the issue of religious belief entering into it, consider the following: “We now know that the alchemists’ dream of turning lead into gold is impossible.” Well, no. It’s quite possible: you need a cyclotron and some highly improbable and finicky work with nuclei – but it’s at least theoretically possible to bombard a lead target with stripped boron nuclei or some such in such a way as to cause it to fission into gold and some other byproduct. Much more trouble than it’s worth, and certainly nothing you can do with an alembic and distilled bats’ blood. But physically possible.
The issue at hand is, are you willing to allow that there may be singularities in physical laws such that things described as “miracles” might occur under the right circumstances? It’s not impossible to turn water into wine – the joint work of grapevine and microorganism does it on a regular basis in France, Italy, the Napa Valley, and elsewhere. Any waterstrider is capable of another “miracle.” And certainly credulity among ancient peoples might have a lot to do with it – playing “Telephone” or “Gossip,” it’s a very short step from “it was almost like…” to “it was…”
So what’s being said here is to eliminate all preconceptions – both the idea that “God exists, and God can work miracles” and “miracles are physically impossible, so any miracle story is ipso facto unbelievable.”
Poly, I’m only speaking to a narrow definition of “miracles” as literal violations of physical laws. I have no problem with methaphorical/allegorical/spiritual definitions.
For instance, I have often seen it suggested that the feeding miracles are an allegory for Jesus’ teachings on commensality and community. One kid offering to share his lunch with others precipitates an avalanche of sharing in the crowd. They find out that when they pool their resources together, it’s not only sufficient but that they even have leftovers. A miracle.
The disciples are afraid during a storm on the lake and the presence of Jesus calms them.
Two grieving disciples meet a stranger on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion and they meet up with a stranger. They begin walking with him and later when they stop to share a meal with them (meal-sharing being one of the central tenants of Jesus’ ministry), they recognize the presence of Christ. They have brought him back to life by continuing to follow his practices. A miracle.
I see these stories as parabolic. They are using symbology to express spiritual truths. I think that an insistence on literal interpretations misses the point. It’s looking at the finger instead of the moon.
ARRRRRGGGGGHHHH! So what the hell is your point? Is it possible for you to state your point succinctly, like in one sentence?
By the definition, anything that looks like a miracle can’t be, since the fact that it happens means that our understanding of natural laws must change, thus the “miracle” would follow the new understanding of natural law and no longer qualify as a miracle. So, I’m not sure how useful the definition is.
The problem would be finding a verified “miracle” for which no consistent set of physical laws could be defined to explain. But it’s all moot until we have strong evidence anything resembling a miracle has ever happened.
Tell ya’ what - I’ll make this multiple choice. With regard to the accounts of the resurrection in the Bible, which is your position:
The accounts are accurate and some people witnessed a physical resurrection of Jesus in his human body.
The accounts are accurate and some people witnessed a resurrection of Jesus in a spiritual, non-corporeal, but nevertheless real, observable form.
The accounts are accurate, but those people had some sort of internal gestalt or catharsis, or whatever you want to call it that caused them to believe that Jesus was resurrected, but didn’t literally see Jesus.
The accounts are accurate, but those people only believed Jesus lived symbolically, as in “He lives on in our hearts”.
The accounts are inaccurate or fictional. Nobody actually saw Jesus return from the dead.
Those people were delusional.
Some other succinct explanation.
O.K., so without talking about televisions, which one of these is your position?
Just a note - if it’s (2), and we’re talking about whether something is possible under the physical properties of the universe as we understand them, then I don’t think 2 is any more possible than 1.
I would go with a combination of 2 and 3. Visionary or dream exeriences by some (in which they really believed they literally “seen and spoken” to Jesus) and more abstractly revelatory experiences by others eventually getting simplified into a physical resurrection narrative.
This one gets my vote.
That’s not compatible with my understanding of life, universe, reality, physics, or god.
I don’t know it to be true. I wasn’t there and I certainly never spoke with those who were. (Best we’ve got is those ancient texts). It’s not something I believe or claim to understand. See 4 below, though. Insofar as I was not there, I’m not ruling out some sense in which what occurred would not be incompatible with my understanding of life, universe, reality et. al. if I did understand it.
Maybe, mostly as an expansion on your next item, also well-expressed by Diogenes above, in combination with some distorted understandings on their part. I’ve had distorted understandings myself, whereby the symbolic understanding of something gets mixed up with the literal. A possibility.
That’s what I tend to believe. If you want to get a bit more metaphysical about it, the sense of identity of Jesus of Naz was beyond merely being an individual. You could make the same point for, let’s say, Martin Luther King, that not only did he “live on in our hearts”, but also that what he was about, who he really was, by the time he died, was a lot more than the individual mortal person Martin Luther King. Which goes marching on, yadda yadda etc.
Reasonable. I don’t specifically believe it to be true, but that kind of thing happens often enough.
That, too, is reasonable and could’ve happened.
Well, see - I tend to agree with you. That’s why I’m so confused as to what point people are trying to make. You seemed to side with Polycarp, yet Polycarp took umbrage at my use of the word “symbolic”, and you don’t. 
I guess the question in my mind comes down to: "Do you think there was an objectively observable phenomemon, or do you think that people simply believed in their own minds that Jesus lived? If the latter, then there wasn’t really a resurrection; only people having religious beliefs.
I guess I’m also irritated when people disingenuously blur the distinction between that which is real and that which is only in the mind. This borders on solipsism, which I loathe.
I remember reading an interesting article, although I forget who the author was (maybe someone here will know), that made a very convincing case that the followers of Jesus, blindsided by his sudden death, decided to believe that he still lived, and that through the next century, the accounts gradually became more and more embellished until it became a story about a physical resurrection rather than a symbolic one.
I am not Polycarp. I think we have sufficient overlap in perspectives that we would enjoy discussing matters spiritual and philosophical, but our perspectives do differ somewhat. I consider “God” to be an abstraction — not a nonreal or nonexistent Divinity, and in actuality a useful abstraction with (to me) compelling explanatory powers. And I have experienced the phenomenon of prayer, so saying it is an abstraction is not the same as saying there is no direct personal experience. It’s all quite as personal and intimate as advertised. But at any rate many Christians would not ratify that description of God at all. (I can’t speak for Polycarp).
Never. Not anywhere, under any circumstances. Objectivity does not exist, period. Although we find it a highly useful oversimplification, much like pretending the world is flat and not round when we make maps: much of reality is sufficiently well-described by the model of perception that utilizes “objectivity” in its framework for us to ignore the differences in interaction, perspective, intersubjectivity-modeling, altercasting, and the like, and to pretend that objectivity exists.
But I would not bring it here, to this discussion.
Agreed. If there’s anything I hate worse than the insistence that there is an objective universe and that furthermore we can know what it is and rinse our brains of subjectivity and “see it for what it really is”, it’s the hippie-dippy solipsistic subjectivity things: “You model your own reality. Everyone conjures up their own reality. Reality is what you cause it to be. I don’t like your reality, man, it gives me a bad head trip, and it’s just your reality, man, so conjure it differently or go away and let me do my own thing”.
That’s most vehemently not what I’m talking about. There’s definitely a reality outside of our heads. Trees fall in forests whether you can hear them or not. But all meaning (yea, even all reality itself, but let’s not go there) is interactive rather than objective or subjective. You don’t experience anything in and of itself, what you experience, by definition, is you-in-relationship-to-it.
As for Jesus, insofar as I’m not a Christian and have no theological thing going about resurrection and sacrifice and lamb of god and original sin and whatnot, the whole business of his alleged resurrection is scarcely a footnote in my theology. I like what I consider to be his own theology (although badchad says I cherry-pick to a disgusting degree). Ultimately if what I consider to be his own theology wasn’t, then, well, it should’ve been, and if he does resurrect himself I’d enjoy discussing and debating theology with him. (Being able to transcend death doesn’t make him automatically right, you know!)
O.K., I think I follow your drift now. Thanks.
First, lowbrass, let me compliment you for post #111 – it’s one of the best attempts to pull together a range of possibilities in what was becoming an argument hopelessly mired down in semantics, without presupposing an answer, I’ve ever seen in GD, and this sort of confusion, calling for similarly sorted posts, has happened all too often before in the last 7 1/2 years. Thanks!
I agree with Diogenes in identifying the right answer as a combination of #2 and #3 (with an admixture of #6; any movement has its nutballs). I’m not certain what happened was solely “dreams and visions” as DtC goes on to specify.
To clarify my position better than the Anna Nicole foofaraw: phenomena can be “real” in some meaningful sense without having a particular specific physical reality. If, for example, you word-process a draft document and do not yet print it out, then save it, close down the computer and go do something else, that document has “real” existence – yet its physical character is simply binary code on a magnetic medium – it’s not a “document” in any sense that a librarian or semantician of 1930 would recognize as such.
Now, whatever the “physical” nature of God may be, if anything, it’s not something that is presently measurable or describable using the tools of physical science. I am convinced of His reality for the best of reasons: I underwent a classic conversion experience in which I sensed His presence quite clearly. I’ve been at pains in the past to specify that I recognize this is purely a subjective experience, and an extraordinary claim subject to the presupposition that it was a hallicination or delusion, that presupposition to be valid until rebutted. My own critical analysis of the experience suggests to me that there is valid reason to believe it was “real” as opposed to delusional – and I don’t want to write pages on why I think this right at this moment.
I do tend to agree with AHunter on this: whatever the noumenon is, it’s not on a one-to-one point-to-point mapping with our phenomenal reality – yet that is an important element in it, and is fully real as itself. It’s simply not the whole of ‘That Which Is’ – and the modern physical/cosmological explorations into tachyons, dark matter and dark energy, and such demonstrate that the phenomenal world accessible to senses and instruments is only a part of the total nature of reality. The whole “what if anything is God” discussion needs to be assigned to that more metaphysical area of discourse.
However, here’s what I think: The Biblical accounts, naively told and mutually contradictory as they are, reference something real – but not the Zombie Jesus of the physical-resuscitation school of understanding the Resurrection. That Something is that the persona of Jesus is housed in what Paul calls “a spiritual body” – something that can function like a physiological human body but is not subject to its limitations in space and time. Supposedly, this is the future that awaits all of us-- “I am come that they might have life, and that more abundantly.” Some parts of the accounts reflect objectively “real” experiences of this Jesus – others, the more internal “Sense of the Presence of Christ” of your #3, no less real but not with objective physical referent.
I really appreciate the way you break this down. It should have happened many a post ago. Good job.
Knowing the way mankind seems to build a legend I tend to think it’s 3 or 4 with a slimmer chance at 2. I find it’s a relief to realize that I don’t have to know in order to appreciate what Jesus taught. In short, it’s something I don’t think I can really “know” and I realize that I don’t really need to know in order to try and live as Jesus taught.
I don’t agree with DtCs definition. I tend to agree with Alan and Mac.
Considering the history of scientific discovery and what was considered impossible in decades past it seems to me that a miracle might accurately be described as a violation of physical laws *as we presently understand them *. If we can hold spiritual beliefs provisionally can’t we accept that our current understanding of our physical universe has much left to discover as well. Couldn’t there be a “miraculous” event that was unexplainable as yet but would become explainable as our understanding grows?