{"id":3468,"date":"2017-11-08T11:49:40","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T08:49:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3468"},"modified":"2017-11-08T11:49:40","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T08:49:40","slug":"in-the-belly-of-the-whale-why-miracles-are-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3468\/in-the-belly-of-the-whale-why-miracles-are-possible\/","title":{"rendered":"In The Belly Of The Whale: Why Miracles Are Possible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“To smile in advance at all magic, we have to find the world completely intelligible. But this we can only do when we look into it with an extremely shallow gaze that admits of no inkling that we are plunged into a sea of riddles and incomprehensibilities and have no thorough and direct knowledge and understanding either of things or ourselves.” <\/em>\u2014Arthur Schopenhauer<\/p>\n

H<\/strong>AVING ESTABLISHED THE LIMITS OF REASON <\/strong>as confined to the world of experience, we now take up a very controversial question. In a world of scientific and natural laws, are miracles possible? Is it even credible, in the twenty-first century, to believe in a virgin birth and water being changed into wine and resurrection from the dead? Here I will show that such ideas are completely consistent with modern science, and that the most famous argument against miracles\u2014 advanced by the philosopher David Hume\u2014can be shown, on the grounds of Hume’s own philosophy, to be invalid.<\/p>\n

The issue of miracles is of special importance to Christians, because Christianity is the only major religion in the world that depends on miracles. Other religions, such as Judaism, may report or allow miracles, but only Christianity relies on them. I am thinking specifically of the miracle at the center of the Christian religion. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians 15:14 that without Christ’s resurrection, “our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” But the resurrection is far from the only miracle reported in the New Testa- ment. While the founder of Islam, the prophet Muhammad, never claimed to have performed a single miracle, Christ performed miracles all the time. He walked on water, quieted the storm, fed the multitudes, healed the blind, and even brought Lazarus back from the dead. Only if miracles are possible is Christianity believable.<\/p>\n

Richard Dawkins has shrewdly noticed that miracles represent the common ground on which religion and science seem to make rival claims. Biologist Stephen Jay Gould argues in his book Rocks of Ages <\/em>that science and religion can comfortably coexist as they operate in separate realms: “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world…. Religion on the other hand operates in the equally important, but utterlydifferent, realm of human purposes, meanings, and values.” Dawkins correctly observes that this distinction doesn’t always work. The reason is that religion too makes claims about nature. The Old Testament reports that Moses parted the Red Sea, and that Jonah lived in the belly of the whale. The New Testament tells of a virgin named Mary who conceived a child, and of a fellow named Jesus who performed innumerable acts that defy human expla- nation.<\/p>\n

“Science is based upon verifiable evidence,” Dawkins says. The miracle stories of Christianity, according to Dawkins, are “blatant intrusions into scientific territory. Every one of these miracles amounts to a scientific claim, a violation of the normal running of the natural world:’ Consequently, “any belief in miracles is flatly contradictory not just to the facts of science but also to the spirit of science.” Indeed, in Dawkins’s estimation, miracles are nothing other than “bad science.” As scientific laws cannot be violated, miracles cannot occur. Reasonable people therefore “have to renounce miracles.”
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\nMany liberal Christians are so intimidated by the authority of science that they do their best to banish the miracles. In doing so, they rely on a tradition of biblical scholarship that goes back to David Strauss’s Life of Jesus, <\/em>first published in 1835. Strauss treated the miracles as myths. How did Jesus feed thousands of people with a few loaves and fishes? Perhaps he had a secret store of food, or people brought their own packed lunches. How did Jesus walk on water? Maybe there was a platform floating just beneath the surface. How did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Lazarus might simply have been in a trance. How did Jesus come back from the tomb? He probably didn’t, but the important thing is that his followers believed <\/em>he did and that belief filled them with joy and hope. These explanations have actually been suggested by theologians. They get rid of miracles by getting rid of Christianity.<\/p>\n

I intend to make my case that miracles are possible by refuting the strongest argument against them. I am not trying to defend the veracity of a particular miracle. I am simply saying miracles should not be dismissed in advance as unscientific or incredible. Like all Christians I concede that miracles are improbable\u2014that’s why we use the term miracle\u2014but <\/em>improbable events can and do happen, and the same is true with miracles.<\/p>\n

The strongest argument against miracles was advanced by philosopher and skeptic David Hume in his book Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. <\/em>Hume’s argument is widely cited by atheists; Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens both invoke it to justify their wholesale rejection of miracles. Hume argued that:<\/p>\n

1. A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature.<\/p>\n

2. We know these laws through repeated and constant experience.<\/p>\n

3. The testimony of those who report miracles contradicts the operation of known scientific laws.<\/p>\n

4. Consequently, no one can rationally believe in miracles.<\/p>\n

Hume’s case against miracles has been enormously influential, but it can be effectively answered. To answer it, we must turn to the work of Hume himself. His writings show why human knowledge is so limited and unreliable that it can never completely dismiss the possibility of miracles. In formulating his objection to miracles, poor Hume seems to have forgotten to read his own book. My refutation will show that:1. A miracle is a violation of the known laws of nature.<\/p>\n

2. Scientific laws are on Hume’s own account empirically unverifiable.<\/p>\n

3. Thus, violations of the known laws of nature are quite possible.<\/p>\n

4. Therefore, miracles are possible.<\/p>\n

To see Hume’s influence, we must turn to his modern-day followers, who typically call themselves logical positivists. Atheists and “brights” don’t use this term, but if you examine their presuppositions you will see that they are based on logical positivism. A logical positivist thinks that science operates in the verifiable domain of laws and facts, while morality operates in the subjective and unverifiable domain of choices and values. The logical positivist is confident that scientific knowledge is the best kind of knowledge, and whatever contradicts the claims of science must be rejected as irrational. These people are all around us today. Many of them are extremely well educated and speak with an air of certitude, so even people who do not agree with what they say have a hard time answering them.
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\nFor the logical positivist, there are two kinds of statements: analytic statements and synthetic statements. An analytic statement is one whose truth or falsity can be established by examining the statement itself. If I say, “My neighbor is a bachelor with a beautiful young wife,” you know right away that I am not telling the truth. The term bachelor <\/em>means “unmarried man,” so a bachelor cannot have a wife. For Hume, mathematics provides a classic example of analytic truths. Mathematical axioms are true by definition; they are, one may say, inherently true.<\/p>\n

A synthetic statement can be verified only by checking the facts. If I say, “My neighbor weighs three hundred pounds and enjoys reading books by Richard Dawkins,” you cannot tell from the statement itself whether it is true. You have to visit my neighbor’s house and ask him. Hume argued that analytic statements are true a priori, i.e., by definition. Synthetic statements, on the other hand, are true a posteriori, i.e., by looking at the evidence. For Hume, the physical sciences provide the standard model of synthetic truths. Through the scientific method\u2014hypothesis, experimentation, verification, and criticism\u2014 we can discover synthetic truths about the world.<\/p>\n

On this basis Hume delivered his famous dismissal of metaphysics, which he did not consider any kind of truth at all. Consider the central religious claims that “there is life after death” or “God made the universe:’ Hume’s point is that these statements are neither true by definition, nor can they be verified by checking the facts. Consequently, he argued, these statements are not even untrue\u2014they are meaningless. Hume wrote, “If we take in our hand any volume\u2014of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance\u2014let us ask, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quality or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of fact or experience? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”<\/p>\n

This is sometimes known as Hume’s principle of empirical verifiability. It allows only two kinds of truths: those that are true by definition and those that are true by empirical confirmation. Right away, however, we see a problem. Let us apply Hume’s criteria to Hume’s own doctrine: Is the principle of verifiability true by definition? No. Well, is there a way to confirm it empirically? Again, no. Consequently, taking Hume’s advice, we should commit his principle to the flames because it is not merely false, it is also incoherent.<\/p>\n

There is another problem with Hume’s reasoning, less obvious but equally serious. Ittook the genius of Immanuel Kant to point out an error that had completely escaped Hume’s attention. Contrary to Hume’s assertions, mathematical truths are not analytic. Consider the famous mathematical proposition in Euclidean geometry that “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” This seems self-evidently true, and yet it cannot be confirmed simply by examining the sentence. There is nothing in the definition of the terms that makes it true. So how do we know it is true? We have to check. It is only when we make two points on a piece of paper and then draw a line through them that we can observe that the shortest distance between them is a straight line. Kant showed that many other mathematical propositions are of this sort.<\/p>\n

I mention Kant’s correction of Hume not to suggest that these mathematical axioms are wrong. What I am suggesting is that their veracity can be established only synthetically. We can proceed only by looking at the data. So mathematical laws are, in general, like scien- tific laws. We can verify them only by examining the world around us. When we examine the world around us, however, we make a disconcerting discovery first noted by Hume himself.
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\nScientific laws are not verifiable. They cannot be empirically validated. Science is based on the law of cause and effect, and that law cannot be validated in experience either. Hume’s argument was a bombshell. So far-reaching were its implications that very few people grasped them, and to this day Hume’s ghost continues to haunt the corridors of modern science. It is quite amusing to see educated people, including our community of self-styled “brights,” continue to make claims about science that were exploded two centuries ago by Hume.<\/p>\n

Why are scientific laws unverifiable? Hume’s answer was that no finite number of observations, however large, can be used to derive an unrestricted general conclusion that is logically defensible. If I say all swans are white and posit that as a scientific hypothesis, how would I go about verifying it? By checking out swans. A million swans. Or ten million. Based on this I can say confidently that all swans are white. Hume’s point is that I don’t really know this. Tomorrow I might see a black swan, and there goes my scientific law<\/p>\n

This is not a frivolous example. For thousands of years before Australia was discovered, the only swans people in the West had seen had been white. Consequently, the entire Western world took it for granted that all swans were white, and expressions like “white as a swan” abound in Western literature. It was only when Europeans landed in Australia that they saw, for the first time, a black swan. What was previously considered a scientifically inviolable truth had to be retired.<\/p>\n

At this point one might expect today’s champions of science to start patting themselves on the back and saying, “Yes, and this is the wonderful thing about science. It is always open to correction and revision. It learns from its mistakes.” Sure enough, Carl Sagan praises scientists like himself for their “tradition of mutually checking out each other’s contentions.” Sagan’s view is echoed by Daniel Dennett, who writes, “The methods of science aren’t foolproof, but they are indefinitely perfectible…. There is a tradition of criticism that enforces improvement whenever and wherever flaws are discovered.”8<\/p>\n

To say this is to miss Hume’s point, which is that science was not justified in positing these rules in the first place. All scientific laws are empirically unverifiable. How do we know that light travels at the speed of 186,000 miles per second? We measure it. But just because we measure it at that speed one time, or ten times, or a billion times, doesn’t mean that light always and everywhere travels at that speed. We are simply assumingthis, but we don’t know it to be so. Tomorrow we might find a situation in which light travels at a different speed, and then we will be reminded of black swans.<\/p>\n

But can’t scientific laws be derived from the logical connection between cause and effect? No, Hume argued, because there is no logical connection between cause and effect. We may see event A and then event B, and we may assume that event A caused event B, but we cannot know this for sure. All we have observed is a correlation, and no number of observed correlations can add up to a necessary connection.<\/p>\n

Consider a simple illustration. A child drops a ball on the ground for the first time. To his surprise, it bounces. Then the child’s uncle, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explains to the child that dropping a round object like a ball causes it to bounce. He might explain this by employing general terms like property <\/em>and causation. <\/em>If these are not meaningless terms, they must refer to something in experience. But now let us consider a deep question that Hume raises: what experience has the uncle had that the child has not had? The difference, Hume notes, is that the uncle has seen a lot of balls bounce. Every time he has dropped a ball it has bounced. And every time he has seen someone else do it, the result was the same. This is the basis\u2014and the sole basis–of the uncle’s superior knowledge.
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\nHume now draws his arresting conclusion: the uncle has no experience fundamentally different from the child’s. He has merely repeated the experiment more times. So it is custom or habit that makes him think, “Because I have seen this happen many times before, therefore it must happen again:’ But the uncle has not estab- lished a necessary connection, merely an expectation derived from past experience. How does he know that past experience will repeat itself every time in the future? In truth, he does not know. In this way Hume concluded that the laws of cause and effect cannot be validated. Hume is not denying that nature has laws, but he is denying that we know what those laws are. When we posit laws, Hume suggests this is simply a grandiose way of saying, “Here is our best guess based on previous tries.”<\/p>\n

By the way, it is no rebuttal to Hume to say, “Admittedly, scientific laws are not 100 percent true, but at least they are 99.9 percent true. They may not be certain, but they are very likely to be true.” How would you go about verifying this statement? How would you establish the likelihood, for instance, of Newton’s inverse square law? It says that every physical object in the universe attracts every other physical object with a force directly proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This law cannot be tested except by actually measuring the relationships between all objects in the universe. And as that is impossible, no finite number of tries can generate any conclusion about how probable Newton’s statement is. Ten million tries cannot establish 99.9 percent probability\u2014or even 50 percent probability\u2014because there may be twenty million cases that haven’t been tried where Newton’s law may be found inadequate.<\/p>\n

At this point we should pause to consider astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson’s exasperated outburst. Tyson believes it is simply ridiculous to say that scientific laws are not reliable: “Science’s big- time success rests on the fact that it works.” If science did not accurately describe the world, then airplanes would not fly and people who undergo medical treatments would not be cured. Airplanes do fly and sick people are healed in the hospital, and on that basis science must be taken as true. Better to fly in an airplane constructed by the laws of physics, Tyson scornfully says, than to board one “constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.”I agree that science works\u2014and you won’t get any argument from me about the limits of Vedic astrology\u2014but it doesn’t follow that scientific laws are known to be true in all cases. Consider this dismaying realization. Newton’s laws were for nearly two centuries regarded as absolutely true. They worked incredibly well. Indeed, no body of general statements had ever been subjected to so much empirical verification. Every machine incorporated its principles, and the entire Industrial Revolution was based on Newtonian physics and Newtonian mechanics. Newton was vindicated millions of times a day, and his theories led to unprecedented material success. Yet Einstein’s theories of relativity contradicted Newton, and despite their incalculable quantity of empirical verification, Newton’s laws were proven in important ways to be wrong or at least inadequate. This does not mean that Einstein’s laws are absolutely true; in the future they too might be shown to be erroneous in certain respects.<\/p>\n

From such examples philosopher Karl Popper concluded that no scientific law can, in a positive sense, claim to prove anything at all. Science cannot verify theories, it can merely falsify them. When we have subjected a theory to expansive testing, and it has not been falsified, we can provisionally believe it to be true. This is not, however, because the theory has been proven, or even because it is likely to be true. Rather, we proceed in this way because, practically speaking, we don’t have a better way to proceed. We give a theory the benefit of the doubt until we find out otherwise. There is nothing wrong in all this as long as we realize that scientific laws are not “laws of nature.” They are human laws, and they represent a form of best-guessing about the world. What we call laws are nothing more than observed patterns and sequences. We think the world works in this way until future experience proves the contrary.
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\nI am laying out the skeptical case here not because I want to endorse without reservations Hume’s (or Popper’s) philosophy. Rather, my goal is to overthrow Hume’s argument against miracles using his own empirical and skeptical philosophy. Hume insists that miracles violate the known laws of nature, but I say that Hume’s own skeptical philosophy has shown that there are no known laws of nature. Miracles can be dismissed only if scientific laws are necessarily true\u2014if they admit of no exceptions. But Hume has demonstrated that for no empirical proposition whatsoever do we know this to be the case. Miracles can be deemed unscientific only if our knowledge of causation is so extensive that we can confidently dismiss divine causation. From Hume we learn how limited is our knowledge of causation, and therefore we cannot write off the possibility of divine causation in exceptional cases.<\/p>\n

When we speak of miracles, we could mean either an extremely rare event that is nevertheless scientifically possible, or we could mean an event that somehow contravenes the established laws of nature. Consider the question of whether a dead person can come back to life. We may consider this unlikely in the extreme because no one we know has seen it happen. All medical attempts to revive the dead have failed so far. But it does not follow that for a dead person to return to life is a violation of the laws of nature. Can anyone say with certainty that in the future medical advances will not reach a point at which clinically dead people can be restored to life? Of course not. So the scientific proposition that dead people cannot come back to life is a practical truth\u2014useful for everyday purposes\u2014but it is not a necessary truth.<\/p>\n

But if we might see dead people come to life in the future, then it is possible that dead people have, on one or more occasions, been restored to life in the past. I am not makingthe claim here that this has happened. I am merely saying that if it might happen one day, then it could have happened before. Logical possibility cannot be confined to future events. If it happened in the past, it would be a miracle. If it happens in the future, we’ll call it scientific progress. Either way, it’s possible, not because nature’s laws are necessarily overthrown, but because we have no complete knowledge of what those laws are.<\/p>\n

Miracles can also be viewed as actual suspensions of the laws of nature, and here too there is nothing in science or logic that says that these things cannot happen. Who says that these laws are immutable? There is no evidence whatsoever for such a sweeping conclusion. Obviously, if God exists, miracles are possible. For God there are clearly no constraints outside the natural realm. Even modern physics concedes that beyond the natural world the laws of nature do not apply. There is nothing “miraculous” about heaven or hell for the simple reason that there are no laws of nature that operate outside our universe.<\/p>\n

But even within nature, God cannot be restricted. Like the author of a novel, God is entirely in charge of the plot. How can He be bound by rules and storylines that He devised? If God abruptly interrupts the “logic” of the story the result will surely be disruption and confusion. But this is the point of miracles, to disrupt the normal course of things and draw attention to something happening outside the narrative. If God made the universe He also made the laws of nature, and He can alter them on occasion if He chooses to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “To smile in advance at all magic, we have to find the world completely intelligible. But this we can only do when we look into it with an extremely shallow gaze that admits of no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7430,7431,3845,7432,7284,7433,1566,7434,3330,469,7435,7436,6798],"class_list":["post-3468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-arthur-schopenhauer","tag-belly-of-the-whale","tag-christian-religion","tag-david-hume","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-founder-of-islam","tag-lazarus","tag-letter-to-the-corinthians","tag-miracles","tag-modern-science","tag-riddles","tag-twenty-first-century","tag-virgin-birth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3468\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}