Problems with Miracles?

[Clizby WampusCat]

It would be hard for me to imagine a better description of what Darwin did not do. Every step of Darwin’s process was marked by conjecture and error corrections, which is the opposite of evidence just handing you a theory to run with.

The empiricist bed time story doesn’t work on its face, even if we didn’t know the details of Darwin’s journey. The evidence for natural selection was "observed" by anatomically modern humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Yet it wasn’t until 1838 that the idea was created and, the kicker, was published semi-independently by 2 different men at the same time in 1858. If the evidence “told” Darwin the theory of natural selection, why didn’t the evidence tell someone else twenty thousand years prior? If ever there was a good example of how layers upon layers of explanation and slow philosophical progress over thousands of years can build to a new way of interpreting the same old drab evidence that was always available to everyone, the theory of evolution by natural selection is it.

Even now, “evidence” is raining down upon your head and mine that, if we only knew how to interpret it, would win us a Noble prize.

Would there have been a theory without the evidence? Of course not, evidence plays a pivotal role. But given that evidence for natural selection was available to every human ever, it would be debaucherous to claim the evidence led to the theory. It is our guesswork that even tells us which evidence to look for in the first place.

As it happens we do have the details of Darwin’s journey, and not only did he not observe natural selection (this much is obvious), he did not even “observe” his own evidence that ruled out natural selection’s rivals. And I don’t mean in the technical sense described above that what we see with our eyes is actually a very flawed image created by the brain, thus is never directly observed, though that is true as well. I mean Darwin *did not know what he observed* until friends back in England helped him understand. He confused finches for grosbeaks. He confused other finches for blackbirds. He mixed up species for varieties in rheas and mockingbirds, and stumbled through a myriad of other misconceptions, bad guesses, and dead ends until he finally arrived at a good idea.

That theory of natural selection is the combined product of fallible human creative thought, building more or less on contributions from John Gould, Richard Owen, Lamark, Cuvier, and Malthus. Not to mention other concepts on which the theory depends; such as cause and effect, heredity, natural law, and deep geological time. And not one of these concepts is observed as is. Humans had to create the ideas, then test them against the evidence. Conjecture and refutation bruh.

Darwin’s ideas are not the basis of the ToE. Verifiable evidence is. We have witnessed natural selection and speciation in our lifetimes in nature. There is more good evidence for ToE than any other theory in science.

 

[Carbon]

Darwin’s ideas are not the basis of the ToE. Verifiable evidence is. We have witnessed natural selection and speciation in our lifetimes in nature. There is more good evidence for ToE than any other theory in science.

I think you are arguing a different point than I am making here.

 

[Clizby WampusCat]

I think you are arguing a different point than I am making here.

OK. I guess I misunderstood.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

None of this is worth addressing. IDK why I am wasting my time with this.

Well, in a moment I'm going to go through your responses and show how each one is mistaken. I'll point out the mistakes and explain your errors so that you will be able to learn from them. I hope you will not think that having your errors corrected is a waste of your time.

I am aware of this. Guess what? It doesn't change my belief in God. Now what?

Your belief in God is not what we are discussing here. Your belief that there actually existed a tomb of Jesus and, moreover, that we know where it is today is what we are discussing. Dawkins was exactly right. It is nothing but hearsay and wishful thinking. Are there any records showing where Jesus' tomb was? Any maps? Any "Jesus woz 'ere" graffiti?" You say that the people of Jerusalem would not have forgotten such an incredible and amazing place, but they waited for decades before even writing the stories of Jesus down, and then decades more before they were able to resolve their fighting and decide on the official version. Do you have any idea at all how easy it is for ideas to become confused, mistranslated, plain forgotten over decades? Do you have any idea at all how gullible and superstitious and ready to believe absolutely anything the people of this time were?
The place you are thinking of might have been Jesus' tomb. Or it might have been Pontius Pilate's little hideaway for conducting affairs in. It might, frankly, have been anything.

Read my signature.

I can't see anything there that is helpful in defending your comparison of Jesus' execution to 9/11.

Do you have a point, or do you just want to hear yourself talk?

I have a point. And it is that you saying that you know you have found the empty tomb because there is no Jesus there is a very poor argument indeed. There are lots of places where Jesus isn't; indeed, all of them. So my saying that you know the Invisible Man is standing next to me in the photo because you can't see him because he's invisible is actually a very good comparison.

Unfortunately for you, the above explanations do no fit for every instance of the supernatural. And if someone is lying about something, then nothing happened to them at all.

YES. Maybe nothing did happen to them at all. That is a perfectly possible explanation.

And none of these things happened for the Apostles, who were basically putting themselves directly into danger to share their belief with people.

On the contrary.
Maybe the apostles were just hungry for attention and power and welcomed the thought of attracting thousands of followers. Can you prove this was not the case?
Maybe the apostles really believed in God, and felt that the ends of growing God's church justified the small deception of lying about Jesus's death and resurrection. Can you prove this was not the case?
Maybe both of the above were true - it started out as pious fraud, but over time they gradually convinced themselves that what they were saying was the truth. Can you prove this was not the case?

My approach to religious claims is that there is some truth to them.

Well, there's your mistake. Your approach to religious claims should be to follow the evidence. If you begin by assuming that they are at least partly true, you are biasing your own thinking. Can I recommend a famous thinker to you? It was someone who said: "
Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me." *

And with Christianity, we have people passing on more or less the SAME information from one person to another since Christ ascended.

Oh, it's just a matter of research to become an atheist in your opinion? This doesn't seem to match the facts of the world.

I am not even encouraging you to be an atheist. I am simply saying that your arguments could benefit from some thinking over. It might well have the effect of making your apologetics more convincing.


* Just a little tongue-in-cheek humour there. It was Sherlock Holmes. But I think it's good advice, and you might benefit from the wisdom of the Great Detective.

 

[Jesse Dornfeld]

Your belief in God is not what we are discussing here. Your belief that there actually existed a tomb of Jesus and, moreover, that we know where it is today is what we are discussing. Dawkins was exactly right. It is nothing but hearsay and wishful thinking. Are there any records showing where Jesus' tomb was? Any maps? Any "Jesus woz 'ere" graffiti?" You say that the people of Jerusalem would not have forgotten such an incredible and amazing place, but they waited for decades before even writing the stories of Jesus down, and then decades more before they were able to resolve their fighting and decide on the official version. Do you have any idea at all how easy it is for ideas to become confused, mistranslated, plain forgotten over decades? Do you have any idea at all how gullible and superstitious and ready to believe absolutely anything the people of this time were?
The place you are thinking of might have been Jesus' tomb. Or it might have been Pontius Pilate's little hideaway for conducting affairs in. It might, frankly, have been anything.

First, what gives you the idea that, at that time, that it would be reasonable to record things about common knowledge? Secondly, you VASTLY underestimate the legitimacy of the verifiability of information to be passed on from one generation to the next if you say we can't trust the people who say they are fairly certain they know where Jesus tomb was because its been passed down. You are actually defeating your own argument by saying people do not have the capacity to pass on the same information from one generation to the next if you hold that we have actually been able to pass the idea of rational thought on from one generation to the next. Jordan Peterson seems to think the same story can be passed down virtually identically for up to 50,000 years. In fact, I would say this is something our society actually does a lot WORSE then people used to be able to do.

I can't see anything there that is helpful in defending your comparison of Jesus' execution to 9/11.

Do you honestly think that is what my point is? Or do you think I have a different point I am making? Strawman. What do you think my point actually was?

I have a point. And it is that you saying that you know you have found the empty tomb because there is no Jesus there is a very poor argument indeed. There are lots of places where Jesus isn't; indeed, all of them. So my saying that you know the Invisible Man is standing next to me in the photo because you can't see him because he's invisible is actually a very good comparison.

I think you just shot yourself in the foot there mate. It's not a good argument you are making here. Are you a Jesus Mythisist? If you are, then I am so so sorry for you. That theory didn't even exist till the 1800s and it would get you laughed out of the building if you brought that up to almost any serious scholar of the NT.

Also, would you at least pretend to engage with the evidence?

YES. Maybe nothing did happen to them at all. That is a perfectly possible explanation.

This is where I suggest you read that paper I linked you.

On the contrary.
Maybe the apostles were just hungry for attention and power and welcomed the thought of attracting thousands of followers. Can you prove this was not the case?

Anything is POSSIBLE, but that doesn't say at all what is PROBABLE. We judge our beliefs based on probabilities not possibilities.

Maybe the apostles really believed in God, and felt that the ends of growing God's church justified the small deception of lying about Jesus's death and resurrection. Can you prove this was not the case?

You can't prove God doesn't exist any more than this, correct?

Maybe both of the above were true - it started out as pious fraud, but over time they gradually convinced themselves that what they were saying was the truth. Can you prove this was not the case?

Just how stupid do you think people were back then? This is where you would probably just hand wave the 7 wonders of the world because they were not smart enough or something?

Well, there's your mistake. Your approach to religious claims should be to follow the evidence. If you begin by assuming that they are at least partly true, you are biasing your own thinking. Can I recommend a famous thinker to you? It was someone who said: "
Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me." *

Whoever said that is deceiving themselves. (I just looked it up. You are quoting a fictional character and think this is more true then the claims of the Bible. I feel so bad for you.) Claims represent something happened because most of the time people do not have a valid reason for making up completely erroneous stories for no reason.

I am not even encouraging you to be an atheist. I am simply saying that your arguments could benefit from some thinking over. It might well have the effect of making your apologetics more convincing.

Yeah, well, your arguments are exactly anything to write home about.

* Just a little tongue-in-cheek humour there. It was Sherlock Holmes. But I think it's good advice, and you might benefit from the wisdom of the Great Detective.

I think you view the Bible as fiction when there's no evidence it was actually written as a fiction.

 

[InterestedAtheist]

First, what gives you the idea that, at that time, that it would be reasonable to record things about common knowledge? Secondly, you VASTLY underestimate the legitimacy of the verifiability of information to be passed on from one generation to the next if you say we can't trust the people who say they are fairly certain they know where Jesus tomb was because its been passed down. You are actually defeating your own argument by saying people do not have the capacity to pass on the same information from one generation to the next if you hold that we have actually been able to pass the idea of rational thought on from one generation to the next. Jordan Peterson seems to think the same story can be passed down virtually identically for up to 50,000 years. In fact, I would say this is something our society actually does a lot WORSE then people used to be able to do.



Do you honestly think that is what my point is? Or do you think I have a different point I am making? Strawman. What do you think my point actually was?



I think you just shot yourself in the foot there mate. It's not a good argument you are making here. Are you a Jesus Mythisist? If you are, then I am so so sorry for you. That theory didn't even exist till the 1800s and it would get you laughed out of the building if you brought that up to almost any serious scholar of the NT.

Also, would you at least pretend to engage with the evidence?



This is where I suggest you read that paper I linked you.



Anything is POSSIBLE, but that doesn't say at all what is PROBABLE. We judge our beliefs based on probabilities not possibilities.



You can't prove God doesn't exist any more than this, correct?



Just how stupid do you think people were back then? This is where you would probably just hand wave the 7 wonders of the world because they were not smart enough or something?



Whoever said that is deceiving themselves. (I just looked it up. You are quoting a fictional character and think this is more true then the claims of the Bible. I feel so bad for you.) Claims represent something happened because most of the time people do not have a valid reason for making up completely erroneous stories for no reason.



Yeah, well, your arguments are exactly anything to write home about.




I think you view the Bible as fiction when there's no evidence it was actually written as a fiction.

Looking at your answers, True Counterphobia, I seem to detect a rather emotional tone. I think it might be a good idea for us to suspend our conversation for the moment. I wouldn't want to turn a reasoned debate into a personal dispute.
Goodbye for now, and best wishes in your further interactions on the forums.

 

[Pommer]

Just how stupid do you think people were back then? This is where you would probably just hand wave the 7 wonders of the world because they were not smart enough or something?

Just an aside, (no need to delve into this):
Until about 300 years ago if some object moved the rule of thumb was:

• It’s alive
• A person or animal caused this object to move
  
• It was moved by the wind
• Magic

 

[Carbon]

It has always been acknowledged that there are different kinds of miracles. Some are fully impossible on naturalism, whereas others (most) are a kind of drawing out beyond the limits of natural science. This doesn't mean that the latter aren't miracles. For example, if a holy person heals someone of cancer, and science later discovers how to fight cancer with drugs and radiation, it doesn't follow that the healing was not miraculous. The mode of miracles and the mode of science are usually legitimately different, even when they achieve the same end.



Haha



I have not read Deutsch but I have read a small bit of Popper. I think your claim here is just mistaken. Even if we want to say that long-term scientific progress proceeds by way of falsification, theories are still proposed on the basis of evidence (Christopher Southgate gives some minor arguments on the importance of a more robust scientific imagination that synthesizes evidence and produces higher-quality theories in his book on Glory).

To take a simple example, when Darwin was observing birds in Chile and the Galapagos, he was collecting evidence which he synthesized into his theory about descent. Proportional evidence led to his hypothesis and caused him to write a book that changed the way scientists think about variation among and between species. Without that evidence there would be no theory. So the claim that science is about falsification and not verification is quite strange. Falsification always presupposes verification.



I could probably sign on to 1, 3, 6, 7, and 8. 5 is a common modern misunderstanding of knowledge. The others do not hold much weight in my opinion (2 and 4).



What do "easy-to-vary" and "hard-to-vary" mean, and what makes them good or bad? Is it just to say that more generalized theories are more useful?

I have heard the term used in different contexts, such as economics and politics. What do you mean by "unknown-knowns"?

Fair enough.

Unknown knowns are unconscious expertise and collective memory. Knowledge embodied in the universe where the holder of the knowledge doesn't know *that* it knows such as genes encoding the knowledge of how to build a bird, or doesn't know *how* it knows such as a child knowing the physics of how to ride a bike. Daniel Dennett calls it competence without comprehension.

You also asked about the hard-to-vary criterion. Unlike generalization, it is more like skin in the game but for explanations instead of people. In a good explanation all the details play a functional role such that, if a decisive experiment refutes the explanation’s entailed predictions, the explanation cannot easily be tweaked to accommodate this new information.

Deutsch’s example in Beginning of Infinity is the change of seasons on Earth where he contrasts the Persephone myth with the axis tilt theory. Both make predictions. One predicts that seasons will match across hemispheres, the other predicts seasons across the hemispheres will be out of phase. And so both explanations are testable.

But the Persephone myth is a bad explanation because, had the Greeks performed the proper experiment (i.e. travelling to New Zealand) and refuted their explanation, they could have easily refactored their explanation ad infinitum to fit the new information. Say maybe Hades abducted not only Persephone but Aphrodite too and struck a similar bargain with Zeus, only Persephone and Aphrodite alternated their time in the underworld with husband Hades for purposes of conjugal continuity. Summer thus returns to the Northern hemisphere, then six months later returns to the Southern hemisphere. There is literally no end to how many ad hoc re-rigs could done to the Persephone myth, and every one of them is “testable”.

The axis tilt theory on the other hand would be hopelessly falsified if the seasons matched across the hemispheres because it is hard to vary. None of the operational details of the theory could be tweaked to explain this new information, be it the geometry of the Earth, the behavior of radiation on spheres, heliocentrism, or our relative tilted axis, without upending all the interrelated explanations.

Both explanations have evidence that “verifies” them to be true. Every winter the Persephone myth is confirmed. And one happens to have additional evidence that directly refutes it. But the bigger point is, the Persephone myth could have been discarded *without testing it*, because it is a bad explanation, easy-to-vary.

 

[zippy2006]

Unknown knowns are unconscious expertise and collective memory...

I will come back to this eventually... Just taking some time away from social media.

 

[Carbon]

I will come back to this eventually... Just taking some time away from social media.

Exercising self control over media addiction? Show off.

 

[zippy2006]

Unknown knowns are unconscious expertise and collective memory. Knowledge embodied in the universe where the holder of the knowledge doesn't know *that* it knows such as genes encoding the knowledge of how to build a bird, or doesn't know *how* it knows such as a child knowing the physics of how to ride a bike. Daniel Dennett calls it competence without comprehension.

You also asked about the hard-to-vary criterion. Unlike generalization, it is more like skin in the game but for explanations instead of people. In a good explanation all the details play a functional role such that, if a decisive experiment refutes the explanation’s entailed predictions, the explanation cannot easily be tweaked to accommodate this new information.

Deutsch’s example in Beginning of Infinity is the change of seasons on Earth where he contrasts the Persephone myth with the axis tilt theory. Both make predictions. One predicts that seasons will match across hemispheres, the other predicts seasons across the hemispheres will be out of phase. And so both explanations are testable.

But the Persephone myth is a bad explanation because, had the Greeks performed the proper experiment (i.e. travelling to New Zealand) and refuted their explanation, they could have easily refactored their explanation ad infinitum to fit the new information. Say maybe Hades abducted not only Persephone but Aphrodite too and struck a similar bargain with Zeus, only Persephone and Aphrodite alternated their time in the underworld with husband Hades for purposes of conjugal continuity. Summer thus returns to the Northern hemisphere, then six months later returns to the Southern hemisphere. There is literally no end to how many ad hoc re-rigs could done to the Persephone myth, and every one of them is “testable”.

The axis tilt theory on the other hand would be hopelessly falsified if the seasons matched across the hemispheres because it is hard to vary. None of the operational details of the theory could be tweaked to explain this new information, be it the geometry of the Earth, the behavior of radiation on spheres, heliocentrism, or our relative tilted axis, without upending all the interrelated explanations.

Both explanations have evidence that “verifies” them to be true. Every winter the Persephone myth is confirmed. And one happens to have additional evidence that directly refutes it. But the bigger point is, the Persephone myth could have been discarded *without testing it*, because it is a bad explanation, easy-to-vary.

Okay thanks. That makes sense regarding unknown-knowns and the hard-to-vary criterion. I don't disagree with any of this.

I still do not see why you claim that science is not (partially) driven by evidence and induction. It seems to me that falsification takes priority over verification once a theory is well-established, but that you cannot establish theories at all without evidence and induction. Of course the evidence and induction that end up forming theories are not really the stuff of scientific experiments. The observations of Darwin that I alluded to in #73 were not formal scientific experiments, but they were a more organic form of evidence-gathering.

 

[Carbon]

Okay thanks. That makes sense regarding unknown-knowns and the hard-to-vary criterion. I don't disagree with any of this.

I still do not see why you claim that science is not (partially) driven by evidence and induction. It seems to me that falsification takes priority over verification once a theory is well-established, but that you cannot establish theories at all without evidence and induction. Of course the evidence and induction that end up forming theories are not really the stuff of scientific experiments. The observations of Darwin that I alluded to in #73 were not formal scientific experiments, but they were a more organic form of evidence-gathering.

In my view of how knowledge grows, imagination and criticism play the “driving” role. Evidence plays more of a guardrail role, similar to how death plays a restrictive role in natural selection by preventing certain variations in an environment. Evidence cannot play the driving role because data do not interpret themselves, even in the Cogito. People imagine what the physical world is made of and how it works -- this world of which we have no direct experience -- then subject those guesses to all sorts of criticisms. Rational argument, comparison to other guesses, interpretation of evidence, and other criteria (such as the hard-to-vary criterion) combine to constrain the possible solutions to a given problem.

So we agree that evidence, or to be more pedantically precise good explanations of evidence, is useful in weeding out misconceptions. Where we differ is likely that I consider evidence dispositive only.

Induction on the other hand plays no role whatsoever. In my view induction isn’t a thing. All observation is theory-laden. This idea, of which you seemed the most skeptical in my original listing, plays a crucial role in Popper’s and by extension Deutsch’s and my view of knowledge-growth in general, as well as science in particular. It coincides with modern neurology (with the prefrontal cortex being the story-telling executive and the unreliability of sense perception), Hume’s problem of induction, and my own subjective personal experience as a semi-autonomous version 2021 primate.

This form of epistemology has implications that are broad and deep.

In my professional field we sometimes say colloquially “the evidence clearly proves” this or that explanation of some phenomena. We speak these sloppy words because we are in game mode. There just isn’t time for philosophical precision. But if we start to actually believe in the induction myth, forgetting imagination and criticism are really doing all the heavy lifting, then we stand to lose many millions of dollars getting sucked into black holes such extrapolation, self-evidence, verification, and other such mirages.

An ironic implication is as follows. Naturalists are quite wrong when we flatter ourselves that religion and science are distinguished from each other on the basis of evidence. Science has directly observed facts, we say, and religion has “made up stuff”. What a shameful silliness denigrating imagination in this way. One of the deep implications of the Popperian picture is that both science and religion begin by “making stuff up”. The difference is science holds nothing sacred, everything can be subjected to criticism. Thus we can eliminate our errors little by little in a way that religious faith cannot.

From which we can infer a second even deeper implication of Popperian fallabilism. Because we are always error prone, and because everything not prohibited by the laws of physics is possible, the only thing that can possibly stop us from achieving any physically possible goal is “knowing how”.

In addition to these real world takeaways, the rejection of Induction has something to say about systems of government, why beautiful things are beautiful, prison systems, and how we treat children, to name a few.