(urth) Information, etc.

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

I think Chris & I are in violent agreement here.

On 4/12/06, Chris <rasputin_ at hotmail.com> wrote:
> There is a general problem with saying that the Christian *faith* is "based
> on" miracles. Basically if you know, by whatever means, that the event is
> possible, then it doesn't require faith at all. In its ideal form, faith
> would admit that the event was rationally impossible, and believe in it
> anyway.

I think this is more-or-less true; the loophole in it is, "with God all
things are possible." In other words: Event X is a miracle if it is
outside the scope of physical-logical possibility, _and happens
anyway_. (Some scientistic zealots have discussed the idea of
a "thermodynamic miracle," in which something not quite impossible
but wildly improbable occurs; I regard this as a non-miracle, since,
if I'm not mistaken, the odds against any given state of the universe
occurring dwarf the term "astronomical" -- yet the universe continues
having states. Of course, the universe itself is a miracle, but that's
another topic.)

The point being that, if the idea of God is accepted as a premiss,
then miracles are rationally possible. Whether God _does_ pass
miracles or not is (again) another matter, and has more to do with
the purported character of God than with logic. ("You say Jehovah,
I say YHWH -- let's call the whole thing God.") But the rational or
irrational character of God is precisely beyond our ability to determine
-- God is _by definition_ beyond our ability to get at by experiment,
and, while we can reason about God, we cannot prove that the
basis of our reasoning is valid. Ergo, back to the irrational...

But when I say that the Christian faith is predicated on belief in
miracles, I mean something like what CS Lewis said fifty years
and change ago: if one does not believe that Christ was resurrected
from the dead, then one should not refer to oneself as a "Christian,"
no matter how good you think his moral teachings were. It dilutes
the term, which has a fairly clear meaning.

> Now Hume assumed just what you and Dan'l have said - that the
> Christian faith is based on miracles - and then gave a tricky little proof
> that miracles were impossible. I say tricky because the main body of
> the proof is mostly handwaving,

Yep. Agreed completely. I think Hume was by-and-large a very fine
thinker, but not here. (I love the bit where he observes that, having
reached a certain conclusion, there's really nothing for the thinker
to do but go play a game of billiards or have a drink with some friends.)

> A miracle, he says, is something which contradicts the laws of
> nature. Now for Hume a "law of nature" is a customary connection that is
> made when a certain effect is *always*, uniformly, conjoined with a
> certain cause.

It is worth noting in passing here that one of the things Hume was
after was proving that we do not in fact "know" any laws of nature,
because we can't prove that _any_ effect is _always_ consequent
upon a purported cause: he clearly dismissed the idea of
inductive reasoning...

> In any event Wittgenstein later said something astute about miracles -
> which I don't think were a matter of general concern to him - that went
> something like: it makes no sense to talk about whether a miracle does
> or doesn't break a law of nature, because to look at an event with an eye
> to its causes is a completely different way of looking at it than the way of
> looking at it as a miracle...

I do love Wittgenstein. I don't always agree with him but I do here.

> In any event the same might be said to apply to Wolfe. We can (and are
> driven to) come up with causal explanations for some of the wondrous and
> confusing events in his stories. When we do it seems like we're assuming
> that there was nothing wondrous about the event in the first place; but the
> wonder we experience when first reading the story is nowhere to be found
> in the events we try to explain.

Thus, the cathedral of the Pelerines rising into the air...

--Dan'l

--
I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.
                        -- St Teresa of Avila
http://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer