The trouble with miracles is that they are so random and senseless. Look at St. John of Cupertino. There are so many eyeswitnesses that any court would accept that it really happened. He floated during mass. He did not want to float, as it resulted in him getting kicked out from towns and charged by the Inquisition twice. It was not a trick with ropes. People would notice that in a church. It was not a conspiracy by the church to make people believe. The Inquisition charged him with witchcraft, twice. The most likely explanation is that it was genuine.
But then it looks just like the Sysadmin of the Matrix playing random cruel jokes on people.
Alleged eyewitness reports of Joseph's levitations are noted to be subject to gross exaggeration, and often written years after his death.
Robert D. Smith in his book Comparative Miracles(1965) suggested that Joseph performed feats similar to a gymnast. Smith noted that some of his alleged levitations "originate from a leap, and not from a prone or simple standing or kneeling position, the witnesses mistook a leap of a very agile man for levitation.
Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell concluded that:
Joseph's most dramatic aerial traverses were launched by a leap—not by a simple slow rising while merely standing or kneeling—but, moreover, I find that they appear to have continued as just the sudden arcing trajectories that would be expected from bounding. They were never circuitous or spiraling flights like a bird's. Invariably, Joseph's propulsions began with a shout or scream, suggesting that he was not caused to leap by some force but chose to.
So a few resources that are in the vicinity that bear mentioning and potentially help deal with this argument:
1. On the theory that god's action is providential, intended to lead us to him by the most felicitous method God might have reasons to want some people to have irrefutable proof of his existence (if that is what will be best for their spiritual development) but not others- e.g. consider his statements to Thomas that those who believe without proof are blessed.
2. God might want his existence to be such that it can be proved, but there are resources which allow one to obfuscate and deny it to oneself if one wants. God might want the evidence to be good- very good- but of such a nature that one can rationalise it away, should one choose.
This is a clever argument but it only works against certain conceptions of God which do not correspond to, for example, the Jewish or Christian god.
Various Christian traditions are endorse either (I) explicit mystery (God does stuff which you can’t understand, and you shouldn’t always be able to fathom his motives or even substance) or (II) God operating on a different moral level which is explicable on its terms but doesn’t make sense applied to humans (for instance, having “God’s glory” be the terminal value not “nice things happen to creation”)—gives you a lot of degrees of freedom to explain away this sort of problem. In Judaism, God can do whatever we wants, more or less because he feels like it (potter, clay, etc.) and you can’t test him or demand stuff from him. You worship him because if you don’t he blows you up (and if you do sometimes nice things happen to you) and also you are bound by the promises of your ancestors to do so—its the covenant.
Whether the variations “God just does inexplicable things for reasons humans cannot fully understand” is actually satisfying to you is another question.
In other words, I think your argument just restates the problem of evil with less force. If you have swallowed that pill on the basis of the above sorts of defenses (and to be clear I do not) it shouldn’t really bother you.
I'm not sure I agree here - while you're right to say that some totally unconvincing arguments like "God gets to do whatever he wants and you can't wonder why" could make any divine action whatsoever explicable, a plausible answer to the problem of evil that actually makes sense in a moral context will presumably relate in some way to the overriding goods that are obtained by God's refusal to intervene, right? But this argument does undercut explanations like those, since it shows that God doesn't actually value that hiddenness.
But the situation that actually obtains with a bunch of small scale miracles (blood orbs not booming voices) is that more people, but not everyone, are convinced of gods existence.
If you are already going to buy “well, god likes some degree of hiddenness” there is no reason to exclude “he also likes a few absolutely convinced people” either for its own sake or because that’s the mechanism he uses to calibrate for the non maximal but non zero level of hiddenness he prefers.
Unlike Bugsy, who would rather leave no clues at all but is not able to do that while still stealing, god here is aiming at “suspicion but not proof for most people” which is consistent with occasionally doing very personally moving but not earth shattering miracles. People commonly speculate that is because he values “faith” defined as “believing without sufficient evidence” in itself (for some reason; he also likes foreskins; the god of Abraham has weird preferences man IDK).
You address this in terms of probability; I'd address it in terms of motive and fairness, which are important for establishing a) whether God exists as an agentic being at all; b) whether God is just. A policy might not be understood, but if it's identifiable as a policy then it's easier to suppose some kind of motive, and a consistent policy doesn't really come in for accusations of unfairness. But once exceptions are introduced, it looks less like intentional action and more like randomness, and even if the action is intentional it's much harder to support it as just. To adapt a comment I just made at BB's recent post (https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-miraculous-healing-of-barbara/comment/162561882), a policy like "no cell phones at school" or "we aren't getting a pet" may be disliked, but it applies equally to everyone and one can imagine justifications for it. But once the school allows one student but no others to get a phone, or when I let one kid get a pet but not the other one, explaining the justice of this becomes a lot more complicated.
I think that the argument should be weakened slightly. Rationally compelling miracles can't be an argument *against* theism because that would imply that they're not rationally compelling in the first place - the argument refutes itself in much the same way that the claim that God doesn't want his existence to be known refutes the claim that we rationally know of his existence. Rather, the argument here demonstrates that there just can't be a rationally compelling miracle, because rational belief in God requires belief that God has some reason to stay hidden and thus couldn't produce a rationally compelling miracle.
Phrasing it that way doesn't change anything. Those events aren't evidence *against* theism because the argument that they are relies on the fact that they're compelling evidence *for* theism as a premise. But obviously they can't be evidence both for and against theism at the same time, so that argument is self-refuting. However, if all the other premises of the argument are true, we can make the same point as a conditional argument, with the conclusion, "If these events really are rationally compelling miracles, then they're evidence against theism." Of course, this implies that the events aren't rationally compelling, since them being rationally compelling leads to the contradiction that they are simultaneously evidence for theism and evidence against theism.
Yes, I think your analysis is correct here - we should accept that rationally compelling miracles are literally impossible, because if they were not, you would end up in exactly this sort of bind.
I am not sure that there is such a thing as an argument being “rationally compelling” in the abstract, that is without reference to a person or otherwise to a subject able to be rationally compelled. After all a rationally compelling argument expressed in Korean is compelling only to Korean speakers. Is there a fancy philosophical name for this point?
Yeah, "rationally compelling" is a bit of an ambiguous phrase. I'm using it to mean that understanding the facts involved would compel acceptance in anyone who exhibits some sufficient level of rationality, not that it actually is compelling to everyone who encounters it in any form.
I see. I wonder if it’s only a matter of a “sufficient level” of rationality though. A mathematical argument that is compelling a person who adheres to classical logic and accepts the principle of the excluded middle is not compelling to an intuitionist, though I would not call the latter less rational. If we imagine that God picks the right language to talk to each person perhaps he would show miracles only to those who are likely to feel that miracles are a compelling proof of his existence, while reaching out to others in different ways. If this is the case the whole contradiction seems to melt away.
But even for any specific individual, this argument should show that God would not want to display his existence to them in a way that was rationally compelling in relation to their own set of beliefs and abilities, right?
The solution seems pretty simple to me. If the disjunction is that either God wants to *always* remain hidden, or that that’s not the case, clearly the theist can just say the latter. But the latter does not entail that God’s desire is *never* to be hidden. God might have a general desire to be hidden (for reasons X, Y, Z), but those reasons can be sensitive to context (say, because in some contexts reasons X Y and Z are outweighed by circumstantial, contingent reasons A, B, and C). E.g., perhaps some groups of people who might not be expected to otherwise believe in God ought to have more evidence. Or, perhaps this particular miracle might lead to excellent consequences. Or perhaps there is a multiverse and one minimally-good distribution of interventions is this one, etc. Of course, what the disjunction does show is that theism doesn’t *strongly predict* this haphazard pattern of miracles. But it strikes me as obviously wrong to say the disjunction can be run as an internal critique.
As you are using the term, there is always a performative aspect to miracles. The event doesn’t just stand alone, but demonstrates some form of supernatural statement
The Christian Scriptures do not teach that God - in general - desires to be unknown. Romans 1 claims that “his divine qualities are seen from creation, but men suppress the truth”. Several times various people & peoples are urged to seek God so that they will find him. In contrast, Scripture also teaches that God hides himself, although this is often portrayed as a punishment for failing to seek God
Miracles in Scripture are usually referred to as “signs” or “mighty works”. Often, the former back up some message, the latter enable some happening. Critically for the above essay, miracles are generally not presented as obscure. Miracles-as-signs are usually presented as proof that the prophet is genuine or extra reinforcement for a message that the hearers should have accepted even without the sign - Jesus frequently refers “dull” and “hard-hearted” hearers. In that sense, Scripture basically denies any incontrovertible miracle in the present age, because those who will not believe will never be convinced. For example, “if they will not listen to Moses & the prophets, they will not listen even if someone rises from the dead”.
Which does leave some questions open about “annual” miracles. There are examples of regular miracles in Scripture, but they are generally very obvious - the cloud of God’s presence in the tabernacle, Moses face shining after talking with God. Beyond this, signs tend to be very ad-hoc: “here’s a message, & here’s a sign to back it up”
If some supernatural oddity occurs annually, what does it signify? Is it achieving some divine goal or confirming some message? Self-referential supernatural events are mentioned in Scripture, but usually in the hands of those using the signs for their own ends
So in either case, the miracle itself is not primarily there to reveal secret knowledge, but to shake the observer out of their complacency. If the miracle is “convincing”, the take home message is “why aren’t you paying attention?”
It’s not about determining whether Bugsy is crooked or honest; it’s whether you will pay attention to the announcements over the PA system. If the announcement itself is muddled, that gives reason to think it might just be a glitch
I'm struggling with the hidden part. Folks are talking about God all the time. History is chalked full of God. We're conscious beings embedded in incredibly complex information systems. If you believe in a creator God, than every amazing complexity in the cosmos is a revealing miracle.
If God exists, it is such an immersive experience we cannot contextualize not God . I get that people want breaks in the order, a bit of could to contextualize the greater order (aka miracle). The greater problem is that the order breaks down all the time; perception of fallible, higher actors play on the world creating illusions.
Where I am baffled is how a materialist can perceive the utter complexity of the perceived world and conclude that he is the highest order ever to emerge. It's like a liver cell filtering my whiskey, fully embedded in cellular life and scoffing at the notion of "man".
Most materialists do not believe humans are the highest order to ever emerge. Instead they view reality as lying entirely within matter. For them, the complexity of the world is the world itself, not humans or deities.
Yet I perceive the electrical patterns in your brain by way of a culturally supported communication network carrying electric fields and magnet polarization or minute variations in frequency. One could say it's just material, yet our conversion is facilitated necessarily by several layers of complexity biological to cultural.
That is to say the content of the world shapes the material, reduction from the complexity loses casual inference. Not reducing acknowledges the centrality of emergent complexity aka patterns that are not material.
Sounds great until someone cuts the wires or shoots a bullet through the brain. For a materialist, you can undercut emergent behaviors by changing the underlying matter. For instance if I unplug my pc it doesn't matter what software it's running, the physical location of the cord is going to shut it down. You can get around this with idealism but not the way you're approaching the issue.
First, disrupting the idea/pattern in one substrate doesn't kill the idea. The concept of the dodo has long outlived the physical bird. The meme is more resilient than the species. It's pretty clear that you get bi directional causation been patterns and material. The only functional materialism makes room for an effective dualism emergent from complexity. I'd just argue that once you accept a conceptual space as essential to your ontology, you're in a dualism.
For a materialist, the Dodo as a concept exists in physical matter; books, discs, tapes, brain tissue, etc. Disrupt those materials and the Dodo as a concept disappears. If everyone ripped out the pages with Dodos in them, punished Dodo oral traditions, and deleted Dodos from digital media, the concept is gone.
Sounds impossible? We actually know this happened because of things such as the dead sea scrolls - people in the past successfully destroyed some concepts by attacking their material basis. They only reemerged because the physical destruction was imperfect. There's also tons of documents and ideas that are referred to in historical documents that we know nothing about, because every trace was erased.
Dualism is a pretty challenging position to hold because if there's a causal relationship between the two spheres, then it can be very difficult to keep them separated. If your religious beliefs prevent you from being a materialist, have you considered Berkleyian idealism? It's quite robust.
I think we're talking past each other at this point. The fuzziness of the edges doesn't bother me. I would just argue that a reductionist materialism isn't a complete ontology. Idealism is possibly worse. You need a synthesis and a version of dualism seems more plausible than pansychism. Anyway, if materialism works for you *shrug*.
The counter to this argument is a fairly obvious "god operates on a level we can't understand". If I were a dog and was engaged in a race with a human, I might assume that the human was throwing the race by fiddling around with their pockets rather than taking off sprinting. But to the human their actions make perfect sense, they're searching for their car keys at which point they'll drive and handily beat the dog.
At this point you've got to debate theists by questioning god's motives. We don't really have a reason to trust that this god fellow is who he says he is. If he's so far beyond us, then just as we can't know he's bad by judging his actions, neither can we know he's good. He has lied before, and if he's both omnipotent and deceptive then he could've deceived anyone into believing anything for ANY reason. The evidence provided by literally anything happening is 0 because we exist in a universe controlled by an omnipotent being that will succeed at every attempt at deception. The only move as a rationalist is to throw up your hands and say that we really don't know. God could be anyone or anything, he could make you believe in things of any sort, therefore we know exactly nothing about the guy.
If the world looks like evolution happened because "the truth is X, but God wanted you to believe Y" then it's equally possible that the bible exists because the truth is Y but God wanted you to believe Z. The concept of a deceptive god is pointless to consider because, by definition, it creates a scenario in which nobody can know anything beyond that they know nothing!
This reads like God is a stage magician withholding a reveal instead of the ground of being itself. The casino analogy collapses once you stop thinking of divinity as someone managing odds.
Mystics don’t need proof. Hiddenness isn’t strategy, it’s reality shimmering behind perception. The mind wants a miracle it can measure, the heart lives one every time it breathes.
Blessed be the ones who no longer need evidence to recognize Presence.
i think the god case might be more compelling but idk Bugsy could just be having some fun, making money and realize that, if kept in check, he could say his spree days were just one in a million random bad luck which is a plausible explanation given that the rest of the days were normal.
I mean there's a difference here in that Bugsy makes a lot of money on the day of his birthday. while God doesn't like.. make money by publicizing his existence through miracles.
I think it's plausible under theism that arbitrary miracles would occur.
Suppose you were a theist & believe in some form of a multiverse theodicy; for simplicity's sake let's say that God creates all net-good universes and makes beth-2 copies thereof, because a perfectly good God should create all possible goods, and no possible evils except those upon which a greater-in-magnitude good logically (but owing to God's stipulated omnipotence, not practically) depends. Under this view, strict Deism (a non-interventionist God) is unlikely because the count of created universes with miracles would enormously outnumber universes without miracles; therefore the prior probability of living in a universe with no miracles would be extremely low.
The strongest objection to the above is that we would expect there to be lots of miracles, and on average more miracles should be non-arbitrary (b/c they increase net good), therefore our world which, if we take reported miracles seriously, seems to have few arbitrary miracles and even fewer non-arbitrary miracles, odd. I think the best theist response to this would that (a) there is a logical limit to divine intervention before induction breaks down, which is plausibly bad, and (b) there is a tangible benefit to God being partly hidden; therefore miracles, ceteris paribus, reduce the net-good and therefore creation-worthiness of a given universe, which skews the sample of created universes towards low-miracle quantity universes.
I'm a far cry from an expert (or even competent) theologian, so I don't know if any of the above works or makes sense, but my instinct is that strict Deism, while being aesthetically preferable to more "rationalist" theists, has significant issues that might make an arbitrary-miracles view of the universe more plausible under theism.
The trouble with miracles is that they are so random and senseless. Look at St. John of Cupertino. There are so many eyeswitnesses that any court would accept that it really happened. He floated during mass. He did not want to float, as it resulted in him getting kicked out from towns and charged by the Inquisition twice. It was not a trick with ropes. People would notice that in a church. It was not a conspiracy by the church to make people believe. The Inquisition charged him with witchcraft, twice. The most likely explanation is that it was genuine.
But then it looks just like the Sysadmin of the Matrix playing random cruel jokes on people.
lol no:
Alleged eyewitness reports of Joseph's levitations are noted to be subject to gross exaggeration, and often written years after his death.
Robert D. Smith in his book Comparative Miracles(1965) suggested that Joseph performed feats similar to a gymnast. Smith noted that some of his alleged levitations "originate from a leap, and not from a prone or simple standing or kneeling position, the witnesses mistook a leap of a very agile man for levitation.
Skeptical investigator Joe Nickell concluded that:
Joseph's most dramatic aerial traverses were launched by a leap—not by a simple slow rising while merely standing or kneeling—but, moreover, I find that they appear to have continued as just the sudden arcing trajectories that would be expected from bounding. They were never circuitous or spiraling flights like a bird's. Invariably, Joseph's propulsions began with a shout or scream, suggesting that he was not caused to leap by some force but chose to.
So a few resources that are in the vicinity that bear mentioning and potentially help deal with this argument:
1. On the theory that god's action is providential, intended to lead us to him by the most felicitous method God might have reasons to want some people to have irrefutable proof of his existence (if that is what will be best for their spiritual development) but not others- e.g. consider his statements to Thomas that those who believe without proof are blessed.
2. God might want his existence to be such that it can be proved, but there are resources which allow one to obfuscate and deny it to oneself if one wants. God might want the evidence to be good- very good- but of such a nature that one can rationalise it away, should one choose.
This is a clever argument but it only works against certain conceptions of God which do not correspond to, for example, the Jewish or Christian god.
Various Christian traditions are endorse either (I) explicit mystery (God does stuff which you can’t understand, and you shouldn’t always be able to fathom his motives or even substance) or (II) God operating on a different moral level which is explicable on its terms but doesn’t make sense applied to humans (for instance, having “God’s glory” be the terminal value not “nice things happen to creation”)—gives you a lot of degrees of freedom to explain away this sort of problem. In Judaism, God can do whatever we wants, more or less because he feels like it (potter, clay, etc.) and you can’t test him or demand stuff from him. You worship him because if you don’t he blows you up (and if you do sometimes nice things happen to you) and also you are bound by the promises of your ancestors to do so—its the covenant.
Whether the variations “God just does inexplicable things for reasons humans cannot fully understand” is actually satisfying to you is another question.
In other words, I think your argument just restates the problem of evil with less force. If you have swallowed that pill on the basis of the above sorts of defenses (and to be clear I do not) it shouldn’t really bother you.
I'm not sure I agree here - while you're right to say that some totally unconvincing arguments like "God gets to do whatever he wants and you can't wonder why" could make any divine action whatsoever explicable, a plausible answer to the problem of evil that actually makes sense in a moral context will presumably relate in some way to the overriding goods that are obtained by God's refusal to intervene, right? But this argument does undercut explanations like those, since it shows that God doesn't actually value that hiddenness.
But the situation that actually obtains with a bunch of small scale miracles (blood orbs not booming voices) is that more people, but not everyone, are convinced of gods existence.
If you are already going to buy “well, god likes some degree of hiddenness” there is no reason to exclude “he also likes a few absolutely convinced people” either for its own sake or because that’s the mechanism he uses to calibrate for the non maximal but non zero level of hiddenness he prefers.
Unlike Bugsy, who would rather leave no clues at all but is not able to do that while still stealing, god here is aiming at “suspicion but not proof for most people” which is consistent with occasionally doing very personally moving but not earth shattering miracles. People commonly speculate that is because he values “faith” defined as “believing without sufficient evidence” in itself (for some reason; he also likes foreskins; the god of Abraham has weird preferences man IDK).
You address this in terms of probability; I'd address it in terms of motive and fairness, which are important for establishing a) whether God exists as an agentic being at all; b) whether God is just. A policy might not be understood, but if it's identifiable as a policy then it's easier to suppose some kind of motive, and a consistent policy doesn't really come in for accusations of unfairness. But once exceptions are introduced, it looks less like intentional action and more like randomness, and even if the action is intentional it's much harder to support it as just. To adapt a comment I just made at BB's recent post (https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-miraculous-healing-of-barbara/comment/162561882), a policy like "no cell phones at school" or "we aren't getting a pet" may be disliked, but it applies equally to everyone and one can imagine justifications for it. But once the school allows one student but no others to get a phone, or when I let one kid get a pet but not the other one, explaining the justice of this becomes a lot more complicated.
I think that the argument should be weakened slightly. Rationally compelling miracles can't be an argument *against* theism because that would imply that they're not rationally compelling in the first place - the argument refutes itself in much the same way that the claim that God doesn't want his existence to be known refutes the claim that we rationally know of his existence. Rather, the argument here demonstrates that there just can't be a rationally compelling miracle, because rational belief in God requires belief that God has some reason to stay hidden and thus couldn't produce a rationally compelling miracle.
Could the argument be phrased as “those events which are *commonly considered* rationally compelling miracles are evidence against theism”?
Phrasing it that way doesn't change anything. Those events aren't evidence *against* theism because the argument that they are relies on the fact that they're compelling evidence *for* theism as a premise. But obviously they can't be evidence both for and against theism at the same time, so that argument is self-refuting. However, if all the other premises of the argument are true, we can make the same point as a conditional argument, with the conclusion, "If these events really are rationally compelling miracles, then they're evidence against theism." Of course, this implies that the events aren't rationally compelling, since them being rationally compelling leads to the contradiction that they are simultaneously evidence for theism and evidence against theism.
Yes, I think your analysis is correct here - we should accept that rationally compelling miracles are literally impossible, because if they were not, you would end up in exactly this sort of bind.
I am not sure that there is such a thing as an argument being “rationally compelling” in the abstract, that is without reference to a person or otherwise to a subject able to be rationally compelled. After all a rationally compelling argument expressed in Korean is compelling only to Korean speakers. Is there a fancy philosophical name for this point?
Yeah, "rationally compelling" is a bit of an ambiguous phrase. I'm using it to mean that understanding the facts involved would compel acceptance in anyone who exhibits some sufficient level of rationality, not that it actually is compelling to everyone who encounters it in any form.
I see. I wonder if it’s only a matter of a “sufficient level” of rationality though. A mathematical argument that is compelling a person who adheres to classical logic and accepts the principle of the excluded middle is not compelling to an intuitionist, though I would not call the latter less rational. If we imagine that God picks the right language to talk to each person perhaps he would show miracles only to those who are likely to feel that miracles are a compelling proof of his existence, while reaching out to others in different ways. If this is the case the whole contradiction seems to melt away.
But even for any specific individual, this argument should show that God would not want to display his existence to them in a way that was rationally compelling in relation to their own set of beliefs and abilities, right?
The solution seems pretty simple to me. If the disjunction is that either God wants to *always* remain hidden, or that that’s not the case, clearly the theist can just say the latter. But the latter does not entail that God’s desire is *never* to be hidden. God might have a general desire to be hidden (for reasons X, Y, Z), but those reasons can be sensitive to context (say, because in some contexts reasons X Y and Z are outweighed by circumstantial, contingent reasons A, B, and C). E.g., perhaps some groups of people who might not be expected to otherwise believe in God ought to have more evidence. Or, perhaps this particular miracle might lead to excellent consequences. Or perhaps there is a multiverse and one minimally-good distribution of interventions is this one, etc. Of course, what the disjunction does show is that theism doesn’t *strongly predict* this haphazard pattern of miracles. But it strikes me as obviously wrong to say the disjunction can be run as an internal critique.
As you are using the term, there is always a performative aspect to miracles. The event doesn’t just stand alone, but demonstrates some form of supernatural statement
The Christian Scriptures do not teach that God - in general - desires to be unknown. Romans 1 claims that “his divine qualities are seen from creation, but men suppress the truth”. Several times various people & peoples are urged to seek God so that they will find him. In contrast, Scripture also teaches that God hides himself, although this is often portrayed as a punishment for failing to seek God
Miracles in Scripture are usually referred to as “signs” or “mighty works”. Often, the former back up some message, the latter enable some happening. Critically for the above essay, miracles are generally not presented as obscure. Miracles-as-signs are usually presented as proof that the prophet is genuine or extra reinforcement for a message that the hearers should have accepted even without the sign - Jesus frequently refers “dull” and “hard-hearted” hearers. In that sense, Scripture basically denies any incontrovertible miracle in the present age, because those who will not believe will never be convinced. For example, “if they will not listen to Moses & the prophets, they will not listen even if someone rises from the dead”.
Which does leave some questions open about “annual” miracles. There are examples of regular miracles in Scripture, but they are generally very obvious - the cloud of God’s presence in the tabernacle, Moses face shining after talking with God. Beyond this, signs tend to be very ad-hoc: “here’s a message, & here’s a sign to back it up”
If some supernatural oddity occurs annually, what does it signify? Is it achieving some divine goal or confirming some message? Self-referential supernatural events are mentioned in Scripture, but usually in the hands of those using the signs for their own ends
So in either case, the miracle itself is not primarily there to reveal secret knowledge, but to shake the observer out of their complacency. If the miracle is “convincing”, the take home message is “why aren’t you paying attention?”
It’s not about determining whether Bugsy is crooked or honest; it’s whether you will pay attention to the announcements over the PA system. If the announcement itself is muddled, that gives reason to think it might just be a glitch
I'm struggling with the hidden part. Folks are talking about God all the time. History is chalked full of God. We're conscious beings embedded in incredibly complex information systems. If you believe in a creator God, than every amazing complexity in the cosmos is a revealing miracle.
If God exists, it is such an immersive experience we cannot contextualize not God . I get that people want breaks in the order, a bit of could to contextualize the greater order (aka miracle). The greater problem is that the order breaks down all the time; perception of fallible, higher actors play on the world creating illusions.
Where I am baffled is how a materialist can perceive the utter complexity of the perceived world and conclude that he is the highest order ever to emerge. It's like a liver cell filtering my whiskey, fully embedded in cellular life and scoffing at the notion of "man".
Most materialists do not believe humans are the highest order to ever emerge. Instead they view reality as lying entirely within matter. For them, the complexity of the world is the world itself, not humans or deities.
Yet I perceive the electrical patterns in your brain by way of a culturally supported communication network carrying electric fields and magnet polarization or minute variations in frequency. One could say it's just material, yet our conversion is facilitated necessarily by several layers of complexity biological to cultural.
That is to say the content of the world shapes the material, reduction from the complexity loses casual inference. Not reducing acknowledges the centrality of emergent complexity aka patterns that are not material.
Sounds great until someone cuts the wires or shoots a bullet through the brain. For a materialist, you can undercut emergent behaviors by changing the underlying matter. For instance if I unplug my pc it doesn't matter what software it's running, the physical location of the cord is going to shut it down. You can get around this with idealism but not the way you're approaching the issue.
First, disrupting the idea/pattern in one substrate doesn't kill the idea. The concept of the dodo has long outlived the physical bird. The meme is more resilient than the species. It's pretty clear that you get bi directional causation been patterns and material. The only functional materialism makes room for an effective dualism emergent from complexity. I'd just argue that once you accept a conceptual space as essential to your ontology, you're in a dualism.
For a materialist, the Dodo as a concept exists in physical matter; books, discs, tapes, brain tissue, etc. Disrupt those materials and the Dodo as a concept disappears. If everyone ripped out the pages with Dodos in them, punished Dodo oral traditions, and deleted Dodos from digital media, the concept is gone.
Sounds impossible? We actually know this happened because of things such as the dead sea scrolls - people in the past successfully destroyed some concepts by attacking their material basis. They only reemerged because the physical destruction was imperfect. There's also tons of documents and ideas that are referred to in historical documents that we know nothing about, because every trace was erased.
Dualism is a pretty challenging position to hold because if there's a causal relationship between the two spheres, then it can be very difficult to keep them separated. If your religious beliefs prevent you from being a materialist, have you considered Berkleyian idealism? It's quite robust.
I think we're talking past each other at this point. The fuzziness of the edges doesn't bother me. I would just argue that a reductionist materialism isn't a complete ontology. Idealism is possibly worse. You need a synthesis and a version of dualism seems more plausible than pansychism. Anyway, if materialism works for you *shrug*.
The counter to this argument is a fairly obvious "god operates on a level we can't understand". If I were a dog and was engaged in a race with a human, I might assume that the human was throwing the race by fiddling around with their pockets rather than taking off sprinting. But to the human their actions make perfect sense, they're searching for their car keys at which point they'll drive and handily beat the dog.
At this point you've got to debate theists by questioning god's motives. We don't really have a reason to trust that this god fellow is who he says he is. If he's so far beyond us, then just as we can't know he's bad by judging his actions, neither can we know he's good. He has lied before, and if he's both omnipotent and deceptive then he could've deceived anyone into believing anything for ANY reason. The evidence provided by literally anything happening is 0 because we exist in a universe controlled by an omnipotent being that will succeed at every attempt at deception. The only move as a rationalist is to throw up your hands and say that we really don't know. God could be anyone or anything, he could make you believe in things of any sort, therefore we know exactly nothing about the guy.
If the world looks like evolution happened because "the truth is X, but God wanted you to believe Y" then it's equally possible that the bible exists because the truth is Y but God wanted you to believe Z. The concept of a deceptive god is pointless to consider because, by definition, it creates a scenario in which nobody can know anything beyond that they know nothing!
This reads like God is a stage magician withholding a reveal instead of the ground of being itself. The casino analogy collapses once you stop thinking of divinity as someone managing odds.
Mystics don’t need proof. Hiddenness isn’t strategy, it’s reality shimmering behind perception. The mind wants a miracle it can measure, the heart lives one every time it breathes.
Blessed be the ones who no longer need evidence to recognize Presence.
i think the god case might be more compelling but idk Bugsy could just be having some fun, making money and realize that, if kept in check, he could say his spree days were just one in a million random bad luck which is a plausible explanation given that the rest of the days were normal.
I mean there's a difference here in that Bugsy makes a lot of money on the day of his birthday. while God doesn't like.. make money by publicizing his existence through miracles.
I think it's plausible under theism that arbitrary miracles would occur.
Suppose you were a theist & believe in some form of a multiverse theodicy; for simplicity's sake let's say that God creates all net-good universes and makes beth-2 copies thereof, because a perfectly good God should create all possible goods, and no possible evils except those upon which a greater-in-magnitude good logically (but owing to God's stipulated omnipotence, not practically) depends. Under this view, strict Deism (a non-interventionist God) is unlikely because the count of created universes with miracles would enormously outnumber universes without miracles; therefore the prior probability of living in a universe with no miracles would be extremely low.
The strongest objection to the above is that we would expect there to be lots of miracles, and on average more miracles should be non-arbitrary (b/c they increase net good), therefore our world which, if we take reported miracles seriously, seems to have few arbitrary miracles and even fewer non-arbitrary miracles, odd. I think the best theist response to this would that (a) there is a logical limit to divine intervention before induction breaks down, which is plausibly bad, and (b) there is a tangible benefit to God being partly hidden; therefore miracles, ceteris paribus, reduce the net-good and therefore creation-worthiness of a given universe, which skews the sample of created universes towards low-miracle quantity universes.
I'm a far cry from an expert (or even competent) theologian, so I don't know if any of the above works or makes sense, but my instinct is that strict Deism, while being aesthetically preferable to more "rationalist" theists, has significant issues that might make an arbitrary-miracles view of the universe more plausible under theism.