Maverick Philosopher

Miracles: Some Preliminary Points

It can't hurt to back up a bit to examine some definitions, make some distinctions, nail down some terminology, and catalog some questions.  See how much you agree with.

1)  A little girl falls into a mine shaft but is pulled out three days later alive and well. People call it a 'miracle.' That is a misuse of language because the unlikelihood of an event does not justify labelling it miraculous.

2) David Hume's two-part definition has dominated subsequent discussions. The gist of his definition is that a miracle is "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity . . . ." (Enquiry, sec. x, part i)

3) Hume's definition raises a number of questions. What is a law of nature? What is it to 'transgress' or violate a law of nature? Could a violation of a law of nature occur without supernatural agency? If so, would it count as a miracle? If a supernatural agent such as God brings about something by an act of will, but without violating any natural law, is that a miraculous bringing-about? If God ("the Deity") is involved in every miracle, what attributes must God have to be so-involved? The God of Aquinas could be a miracle worker, but what about the deus sive natura of Spinoza?

4)  Laws of nature must not be confused with laws in the political-legal realm. And this despite the use of 'transgression,'  'violation,'  and 'law' with respect to both kinds of law, and despite  talk of  laws of nature 'governing' this or that phenomenon and of phenomena 'obeying' laws.  Two differences come immediately to mind: legal laws, unlike laws of nature, are enacted by legislatures and need enforcement. Kepler's laws of planetary motion, for example,  were neither enacted by a legislature nor do they need enforcement.  There is no need for an 'astro-cop' to make sure that the planets keep to their elliptical orbits, or to ensure that no signal exceeds the cosmic speed limit, 186,282 mi/sec.  This ties in with another apparent difference. Legal laws are prescriptive, permissive, or  proscriptive statements; statements of laws of nature are merely descriptive: they merely codify what happens. And even if they codify what must happen, the necessity involved is not legal but nomological or nomic.  This point leads to a further distinction.

5) A legal law is just a statement that states either what is legally required, or legally permitted, or  legally prohibited.  There is no distinction between a legal law and something in the world of nature that makes its true.  But in the case of laws of nature we need to distinguish between law statements and the laws themselves.  Let me explain.

On one theory of laws, the regularity theory, a law is just an exceptionless regularity, a repeatable pattern of event sequences.  A sample of pure water at sea-level is heated to 212 deg. Fahrenheit. That is one event token. It is followed  by a second spatiotemporally contiguous event token: the beginning to boil of the same sample of water. The two event tokens make up an event sequence. What makes it a causal sequence is its instantiation of a pattern which, formulated in a statement, would go like this: "Whenever pure water at sea level is heated to 212 Fahrenheit, it boils."  What makes this universal generalization  true is the underlying pattern of heating-boiling events 'out there in the world.'  

A statement of a law of nature, therefore, must be distinguished from the law that it states. The latter exists whether or not the former does. If Coulomb's law is true it was true long before the birth of  Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.

6) Now what is a transgression of a law of nature? I should think that a law of nature is more than an exceptionless regularity in that laws support counterfactual conditionals.  But without going into this, we can confidently say the following.  Whatever a law of nature is, it either is or entails an exceptionless regularity.  A transgression/violation of a law would then be an exception to the regularity, i.e., a counterexample thereto. But then it would seem to follow that miracles as Hume understands them are not just impossible, but logically impossible. Try this argument on for size:

1) A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2) Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
3) A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity. But:
4) An exception to an exceptionless regularity is logically impossible.
Therefore
5) Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible, then they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood?  Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.  Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities.  The idea is that any theory of  (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

Interim conclusion: If miracles are possible, then they cannot be construed as Hume construes them.  And now: modus ponendo ponens? Or modus tollendo tollens?

(To be continued)

7) Humean miracles are violations ("transgressions") of laws of nature by divine agency. But are miracles Humean? William Lane Craig thinks not:

That is, I think, an untenable definition of what a miracle is . . . . Miracles are not violations of the laws of nature. The laws of nature describe what would happen in a particular case assuming that there are no intervening supernatural factors. They have what are called ceteris paribus clauses implicit in them – namely, all [other] things being equal, this is what will happen in this situation. But if all [other] things are not equal, the law isn’t violated. Rather, the law just doesn’t apply to that situation because there are other factors at work. In the case of a miracle, God doesn’t violate the laws of nature when he does a miracle. Rather, there will be causal factors at work, namely God, which are supernatural and therefore what the laws of nature predict won’t happen because the laws of nature only make predictions under the assumption that there are no intervening supernatural factors at work. So a miracle, I think, properly defined, is an event which the natural causes at a time and place cannot produce at that time and place. Or, more succinctly, a miracle is a naturally impossible event – an event which the natural causes at a certain time and place cannot bring about. It is beyond the productive capacity of nature. (Emphases added)

 

Spinoza's Epistemic Theory of Miracles

Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry.

We learned from our discussion of Augustine that there is a tension and possibly a contradiction between the will of God and the existence of miracles ontically construed. Miracles so construed violate, contravene, suspend, transgress, or otherwise upset the laws of nature. But for theists the laws of nature are ordained by God, regardless of how  laws are understood, whether as regularities or as relations of universals that entail regularities (as on David M. Armstrong's theory of laws) or whatever. So it seems as if the theist is under a certain amount of conceptual pressure to adopt an epistemic theory of miracles. We heard Augustine say, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. We find a similar view in Spinoza, despite the very considerable differences between the two thinkers:

. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature -- an evident absurdity. (tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)

It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:

Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)

Since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain given the present state of our knowledge. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous. That is the first main point that Spinoza makes in his chapter "Of Miracles."

The second main point is that neither God's nature, nor his existence, nor his providence can be known from miracles, but can be known only from the fixed and immutable order of nature.

Spinoza's argument, expressed in my own way, is something like the following. If we take miracles ontically, as actual interruptions or contraventions of the order of nature, and thus of the will of God, then not only are they impossible, but they can provide no basis for knowledge of God. If, on the other hand, we take miracles epistemically, as events the causes of which we do not understand, then in this case as well we have no basis for knowledge of God. For we cannot base knowledge of God on ignorance, and events are miraculous only due to our ignorance of their natural causes.

Spinoza concludes his defense of his second main point with the surprising claim that belief in miracles leads to atheism:

If, therefore, anything should come to pass in nature which does not follow from her laws, it would also be in contravention to the order which which God has established in nature for ever through universal natural laws; it would, therefore, be in contravention to God's nature and laws, and, consequently, belief in it would throw doubt upon everything, and lead to Atheism. (p. 87)

Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry.

We learned from our discussion of Augustine that there is a tension and possibly a contradiction between the will of God and the existence of miracles ontically construed. Miracles so construed violate, contravene, suspend, transgress, or otherwise upset the laws of nature. But for theists the laws of nature are ordained by God, regardless of how  laws are understood, whether as regularities or as relations of universals that entail regularities (as on David M. Armstrong's theory of laws) or whatever. So it seems as if the theist is under a certain amount of conceptual pressure to adopt an epistemic theory of miracles. We heard Augustine say, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. We find a similar view in Spinoza, despite the very considerable differences between the two thinkers:

. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature -- an evident absurdity. (tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)

It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:

Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)

Since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain given the present state of our knowledge. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous. That is the first main point that Spinoza makes in his chapter "Of Miracles."

The second main point is that neither God's nature, nor his existence, nor his providence can be known from miracles, but can be known only from the fixed and immutable order of nature.

Spinoza's argument, expressed in my own way, is something like the following. If we take miracles ontically, as actual interruptions or contraventions of the order of nature, and thus of the will of God, then not only are they impossible, but they can provide no basis for knowledge of God. If, on the other hand, we take miracles epistemically, as events the causes of which we do not understand, then in this case as well we have no basis for knowledge of God. For we cannot base knowledge of God on ignorance, and events are miraculous only due to our ignorance of their natural causes.

Spinoza concludes his defense of his second main point with the surprising claim that belief in miracles leads to atheism:

If, therefore, anything should come to pass in nature which does not follow from her laws, it would also be in contravention to the order which which God has established in nature for ever through universal natural laws; it would, therefore, be in contravention to God's nature and laws, and, consequently, belief in it would throw doubt upon everything, and lead to Atheism. (p. 87)

Bergoglio the Secularist on the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes

Dr. Vito Caiati reports:

Something that the Argentinian did this week really annoyed me.

Specifically, in his homily on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, Bergoglio continued his devious discouragement of belief in miracles, flagitiously denying the great nature miracle by which Christ fed a multitude with just five loaves of bread and two fish.

As you know, the Gospel of Mathew describes the miracle as follows: “Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass; and taking the five loaves and the two fish he looked up to heaven, and blessed, and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.  And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over.  And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children” (Mt 14:19-21; cf. Mk 6:40-44 and Lk 9:14-17, which have essentially the same wording, and Jn 6:10-14, which diverges only slightly).

Whatever happened here, it is quite clear that the very small quantity of matter contained in five loaves and two fish, was exponentially enlarged after Christ’s “blessing.” Thus, something miraculous occurred.

Now, here is Bergoglio’s exegesis of this event:

“Jesus.., .after having recited the blessing, gave the bread to be distributed, revealing in this the more beautiful significance: bread is not only a product of consumption: it is a means of sharing. In fact, surprisingly, in the telling of the multiplication of the loaves, multiplication is never mentioned. On the contrary, the verbs utilized are “break, give, distribute.” (cf. Lk 9:16)  In short, the act of sharing rather than the multiplication is emphasized. This is important: Jesus does not perform an act of magic; he does not transform the five loaves into five thousand loaves and then day: “Now distribute them.” No, Jesus prays, blesses those five loaves and begins to distribute then, trusting in the Father. And those five loaves never finish. This is not magic; it is faith in God and in his providence” https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2019/documents/papa-francesco_20190623_omelia-corpusdomini.html).

Notice that the concept of miracle nowhere enters into this analysis; rather, Bergoglio engages in a sleight of hand, counterpoising the notion of “magic” with that of “faith in God.” His deprecation of multiple loaves, of which none of the Gospels in fact speak, insinuates that such a multiplication, certainly within the powers ascribed to Christ by the Evangelists, would have to be magical rather than miraculous. Now, magic is defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “All practices . . . , by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others.” Jesus was, of course, accused of magic (as in Mt 12:24 or Lk 11:15),  but the Gospels reject this falsity and instead proclaim that “Jesus accompanies his words with many “‘mighty works and wonders and signs’, which manifest that the kingdom is present in him and attest that he was the promised Messiah” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 547). In other words, when personally present here on Earth, Christ revealed His divine power through miracles. It is precisely this power that is denied in turning the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves and two fish into a simple “act of sharing.” Here, we have the Incarnation filtered through the decadent left-wing “humanist” ideology that is the hallmark of this pontificate.  

Miracles and Resurrection

Thomas Beale writes,

Quoting from your quote of Ian Hutchison:

...Miracles are, by definition, abnormal and non-reproducible, so they cannot be proved by science’s methods.

Today’s widespread materialist view that events contrary to the laws of science just can’t happen is a metaphysical doctrine, not a scientific fact. What’s more, the doctrine that the laws of nature are “inviolable” is not necessary for science to function. Science offers natural explanations of natural events. It has no power or need to assert that only natural events happen.

I think this is pretty hard to swallow from a scientific perspective - the first statement more or less says that miracles are by definition 'abnormal' and thus unprovable, but in fact science does pretty well with all kinds of abnormal. He really means 'law-breaking', and is thus saying that miracles by definition must confound science. But science isn't generally confounded by having its current set of laws broken; its usual way of responding (at least in the modern era) is to try to find new paradigms or at least theories that accommodate the new evidence, just as we had to wait for Einstein to explain the lensing of starlight around heavy bodies. If his statement still holds, then all it means is that completely arbitrary things can happen.

BV: Hutchison may be confusing laws of science with laws of nature. 

There is a distinction between a law of nature and a law of science. If there are laws of nature, they have nothing to do with us or our theorizing. They are 'out there in the world.' For example, if we adopt a regularity theory of laws, and I am not saying we should, the regularities, and thus the laws, exist independently of our theorizing. Surely, if there are physical laws at all, and whatever their exact nature, their existence antedates ours. Laws of science, on the other hand, are our attempts at formulating and expressing the laws of nature. They are human creations. Since physics is a human activity, there were no laws of physics before human beings came on the scene; but there were physical laws before we came on the scene. Physics is not the same as nature; physics is the study of nature, our study of nature. It is obvious that physics cannot exist without nature, for it would then have no object, but nature can get on quite well without physics.

The laws of science are subject to qualification, revision, and outright rejection; the laws of nature are not.  For example, the Additivity of Velocities was once thought to hold universally, but now the qualification is added: at pre-relativistic speeds. Nature didn't change, but our understanding of nature did.

The concept of miracle is very difficult. Here is a conundrum for you.  John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8:

. . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

Now consider:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood?  Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.  Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities.  The idea is that any theory of  (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.

The second part gets into the debate about whether laws are natural, or human inventions. One such law that does appear to be part of the universe's functioning is the second law of thermodynamics, which happens to be the one that ultimately prevents biological cells reversing their death state, and thus dead organisms reviving. For those who believe that God directly created the universe the way it is, i.e. with its law-like behaviours, quarks weighing what they do, the speed of light being what it is, and Planck's constant as we know it, it seems hard to claim that arbitrary abnormalities can occur without disturbing the space-time fabric so to speak, because everything is so strongly interrelated (try changing c ...). Reversing the arrow of time in order to resurrect someone is likely to have catastrophic consequences for a patch of the universe around it.

BV: Yes, there is a problem here. Augustine was on to it. See Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles.

Another way of looking at the whole thing for the scientifically oriented might be to think more in terms of inference to the best explanation (admittedly dodgy territory). If we thought that no natural laws could be broken, we might theorise that Christ had not really died (undoubtedly he looked as if he had), and that therefore he could rise again three days later, with good care. Alternatively we might believe that he really died, and that the person presented as the risen Christ was someone else; from there, numerous variations on a theme become possible.

BV: The first theory is called the Swoon Hypothesis.

I have often wondered if the first theory would really harm Christianity. The idea that a man (at least connected to the divine, if not incarnating it) sacrificed himself for humanity, was crucified by the Romans, nearly died from his injuries and pain, but survived just long enough for friends to take him down in the storm, was cared for and then 'rose' again three days later. That takes nothing away from the heroic act, and perhaps showed that even the Roman empire couldn't kill this man. Would this Christ be any less than the one we are taught today?

BV: Would he be any less?  I should think so.   No orthodox Christian can gainsay what Saul/Paul of Tarsus writes at 1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV) See Is Christianity Vain if not Historically True?

Miracles and Burden of Proof

0.  I continue my investigation of the role of burden-of-proof considerations in philosophy.  My ruminations are collected in the aptly titled category, Burden of Proof.

1. Consider a dispute in which one party claims that there are miracles and the other claims that there are no miracles.  Where does the burden of proof (BOP) lie?  I am open to the suggestion that both claimants incur an obligation to defend their claims if challenged, simply on the ground of having made a claim or advanced a thesis that cannot count as self-evident or foundational in the way in which the Law of Non-Contradiction is foundational.    But if both have an obligation (dialectical if not moral) to defend their respective claims if challenged, on pain of being deemed unreasonable if they refuse to do so, that is not to say that both shoulder a burden of proof (BOP).  For if I maintain that p and you maintain that ~p, and each of us has a burden of proof, then, given the correlativity of BOP and defeasible presumption (DP) lately explained, there is a defeasible presumption in favor of both p and ~p in the dialectical situation in which we confront each other -- and that is absurd.  In the context of a proceeding wherein the goal is to settle whether a proposition or its negation are true it cannot be provisionally assumed both that the proposition and its negation are true.

So we need to distinguish between the (dialectical if not moral) obligation to defend one's assertions, an obligation one incurs whether one asserts or counter-asserts, and burden of proof.  Thus we talk of the burden of proof in a dialectical proceeding.  It presses down on one interlocutor or the other, but not both, if it presses down on either.

What I want to resist, however, is the notion that there is a fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies.  I want to suggest that there is no context-independent fact as to which side shoulders the BOP.  As a consequence, arguing about where the BOP lies in philosophical debates is as pointless and out-of-place as arguing in a court of law whether the BOP is on the prosecution/plaintiff or on the defense.  That the onus probandi lies on the former is constitutive of the courtroom 'game,' at least in the Anglosphere.  As constitutive, it is not up for grabs in the legal context.

2. Some think that whoever who makes a positive claim assumes a BOP.  But we should beware of the ambiguity of 'positive claim.'  Are we referring to the content of a claim, or the claiming of the content?  Are we talking logic or dialectics?   'There are miracles' is logically affirmative while 'There are no miracles' is logically negative.  And this quite apart from the dialectical situation in which alone it is appropriate to speak of presumptions and probative burdens.  The propositions expressed by those sentences are the contents of the respective claims or assertions.  But both the miracle-affirmer and the miracle-denier are making a positive claim in that they are both positively claiming something.  A counter-assertion is just as much of an assertion as an assertion.

If one makes a claim (advances a thesis, asserts something, etc.), then one does so regardless of whether the content of the claim is logically affirmative or logically negative.  So why should the onus probandi rest  on the one who asserts that there are miracles and not on the one who asserts the opposite?  Since both make a claim, both reasonably incur the obligation to defend the claim if challenged.  I am not assuming dialectical egalitarianism according to which, as Michael Rescorla puts it, "every asserted proposition requires defence when challenged by an interlocutor."  There may be propositions that need no defense.  I am only assuming that the propositions we are discussing can both be reasonably challenged.

3. One cannot therefore in general hold that only those who make assertions the content of which is logically affirmative  assume a burden of proof.  This may also be appreciated from the fact that some logically negative propositions entail logically affirmative ones.  If there are no miracles, then there are no violations/suspensions of natural causal laws.  If there are no such violations, then nature is a causally closed system into which nothing enters and nothing escapes.  But 'Nature is causally closed' is logically affirmative.  The naturalist who claims that there are no miracles is also committed to claiming that nature is causally closed.  Clearly, if he bears a burden of proof with respect to the latter proposition then he bears it with respect to the former one as well.

4. So where does the BOP lie if it doesn't lie on the one the content of whose assertion is logically affirmative?  Does it lie on the one who calls into question received opinion?  That cannot be right either, enshrining as it does an extreme inquiry-inimical doxastic conservatism.   The way 'burden of proof' is standardly used, the BOP lies on one party or the other but not both.  But I fail to see why in the miracle case or any other it rests on one side rather than the other.  I suggest, in line with what I maintained day before yesterday, that there is no fact of the matter as to where the BOP lies.  It is a matter of decision, if not by an individual, then by a community.

5. So let's consider the scientific community.  The members of this community are bound together by common goals and methods.  The 'game' of natural science is played according to game-constitutive rules.  One of these rules is that in natural science there can be no appeal to anything supernatural: everything that science explains -- everything in nature -- is to be explained using only other 'stuff' in nature, smaller 'stuff,' earlier 'stuff.'  Thus the tides are explained in terms of the moon and its gravitational effect; earthquakes in terms of tectonic plate shifts; diseases in terms of viruses, etc.

For one who plays the scientific 'game' and abides by its rules, there is no question but that the burden of proof lies on the one who asserts that there are miracles.  No scientist worth his salt could hold that there is a presumption in favor of the existence of miracles.  It is the other way around: there is an exceedingly strong, if not quite indefeasible, presumption in favor of their nonexistence, and indeed of the nonexistence of anything nonnatural.  But this onus-assignment is relative to the scientific 'game' and partially constitutive of it. 

6.  My point, then, is that BOP-assignments are context- and community-relative and depend on conventions that members of these communities collectively adopt.  In the legal context the BOP is on the prosecution while in the science arena, where methodological naturalism rules, the BOP is on anti-naturalists: those who defend miracles, the existence of God and the soul, the libertarian freedom of the will, etc.  But the science 'game' is not the only game in town.  There is the religious 'game.'  No one who takes the latter seriously could possibly think that science delivers the ultimate metaphysical low-down.  Relative to the religious 'game,' the BOP will be on atheists.

And then there is the moral 'game.'  Most of us play it: we think in moral categories and we cannot imagine not thinking in them.  We speak of right and wrong, good and evil; we hold ourselves and others morally and not just causally responsible for what we do and leave undone.  We judge and we are prepared to be judged.  We praise, we blame, we distinguish among the impermissible, the permissible, the obligatory, and the supererogatory.  We subject our thoughts, words, deeds, institutions and laws to moral evaluation.  Committed as we are to moral responsibility, we are committed to the freedom of the will.  So, from within the moral 'game,' it is clear that there is a presumption in favor of the freedom of the will so that the burden of proof lies squarely and nonnegotiably on the shoulders of those who would deny it.

My suggestion is that it makes no sense to ask where the BOP really lies, on, say, the moralist or on the one who holds that morality and its presuppositions (freedom of the will, etc.) are illusory and without standing in a physical world.  The moral way of thinking brings with it a presumption in favor of the reality of its categories, a presumption which, if defeasible, is just barely so.  The scientistic way of thinking brings with it an opposite presumption.

 So instead of arguing the procedural question as to who has the BOP in a philosophical dispute one should simply get to work and make one's case.

Revelation and Miracles

The question I want to pose and to which I do not have a firm answer — Nescio ergo blogo! — is whether every case of divine revelation is a miraculous event, or whether there are or can be cases of divine revelation that are not miraculous. To treat this question properly we need some preliminary definitions of key terms. After proposing some definitions I will suggest that they point in the direction of the possibility of non-miraculous revelations.

Of Summertime in the Desert and Miracles

When cold water comes out of the 'hot' tap, and hot water out of the 'cold,' is it a miracle? No, it is summertime in the desert. (The pipe from the water heater runs through the air-conditioned house; the cold water line comes from outside where the temperature is in the triple Fahrenheit digits. So if I want nice cold water for a short time, I turn on the 'hot' tap.)

What appears to be an exception to an exceptionless regularity is not one at all, for the apparent exception is itself regular. The statement, "Hot from 'hot,' cold from 'cold'," has a counterexample. But it does not follow that the underlying regularity has an exception. For if the underlying regularity were to be captured in a complete statement, that statement would be seen to have no counterexamples since all the exceptions would have been built into it.

This is just a little 'warm-up' for a further series of posts on miracles.  And I just noticed that Frege (whom to have on one's side in a logic fight is like having Doc Holliday on one's side in a gunfight) seems to be on my side:

The word 'law' is used in two senses. When we speak of laws of morals or the state we mean regulations which must be obeyed but with which actual happenings are not always in conformity. Laws of nature are the generalization of natural occurrences with which the occurrences are always in accordance. (First paragraph of "The Thought: A Logical Inquiry")

A law may be more than an exceptionless regularity, but it is at least one.

More with Mason on Miracles

Franklin Mason e-mails (mid-June 2007):

I'd meant to get back to a little point you'd made a few days ago.

You said this: "I think of creation as an ongoing 'process': God sustains the world in being moment by moment. But at each moment, the totality of what exists is completely determinate: for each individual x and for each property P, either x has P or x has the complement of P. I would say that all and only the complete exists. Creation is bestowal of existence. So if at time t God is sustaining the world in existence, and what exists is complete, it is hard to see how God could add anything to it. The world at t is complete; anything added to it would precipitate a contradiction."

I agree with everything you say, but it doesn't seem to me to rule out the possibility of an input of new energy into space-time. It would of course be a contradiction if God were to both sustain the world at a time such that no new energy was anywhere present and, by a special act of will, bring it about at that time that there was new energy. But the creation of new energy at a time need not entail this contradiction. Rather, if there's new energy at time t, its existence is part of the complete world-whole at t; and God does not, at up to and at t, sustain the world-whole such that no new energy is present. Completeness does not imply a lack of novelty. Rather all that it implies is that novelty, when it occurs, is part of the world-whole at the time of its introduction and thereafter.

Ceteris Paribus Laws and Miracles

Here is a passage from a paper by Nancy Cartwright, In Favor of Laws that are not Ceteris Paribus After All, for you to break your eager heads against:

Turn now to what Earman, Roberts, and Smith call “special force laws”, like the law of universal gravitation (A system of mass M exerts a force of size GMm/r^2 on another system of mass m a distance r away) or Coulomb’s law (A system with charge q1 exerts a force of size ε0q1q2/r^2 on another system of charge q2 a distance r away). These are not strict regularities. Any system that is both massive and charged presents a counterexample. Special forces behave in this respect just like powers. This is reflected in the language we use to present these laws: one mass attracts another; two negative charges repel each other. Attraction and repulsion are not among what Ryle called ‘success’ verbs. Their truth conditions do not demand success: X can truly attract Y despite the fact that Y is not moved towards X. But perhaps, as with the delights of our universe or the Ratman’s desire for the death of his father, the requisite effects are really there after all. Earman, Roberts, and Smith feel that the arguments against this position are not compelling. I think they are: the force of size GMm/r^2 does not appear to be there; it is not what standard measurements generally reveal; and the effects we are entitled to expect –- principally an acceleration in a system of mass m a distance r away of size GM/r^2 – are not there either.

Possibility, Intelligibility, and Miracles

Dave  Gudeman at my old blog commented forcefully and eloquently:

I've always had difficulty with arguments like this:

It is not easy to understand how God could add causal input to the space-time system.

I'm aware that such arguments have a distinguished history, but I don't get it. Just because you don't understand how it works, you doubt that it is possible? But you don't really understand how anything works. Not matter, not energy, not beauty, not humor. Science pretends that it understands things, but if you trace their theories to the end, all they do is propose underlying mechanisms that suffer from the same opaque nature as what they are trying to explain.

Since you don't understand how any cause at all operates, what does it prove that you can't understand how God operates?

This deserves a careful response.

A Definition of 'Miracle' Examined

Franklin Mason, on my  old blog, wrote:

The definition of a miracle that I have in mind is this: event M is miraculous just if (i) M was brought about by an agency outside nature, and (ii) at the time and place at which event M occurred, there was no natural cause at work sufficient to bring about M. This of course leaves open the possibility that M is not at all out of the ordinary. God might, for instance, make a wave a few inches taller than it otherwise would have been so that He might submerge a boat; no observer would ever guess that a miracle had occurred. Though it is not detectable, it is still miraculous. The available energy in the system before God intervened would not have been sufficient to raise the wave to the level that in fact it reached. But M might also be quite spectacular. God might bring about a great conflagration where there had been no material to burn before. How would he do this? Ex nihilo creation of tinder and a spark.

This is clear, interesting, and not obviously mistaken. But here are some comments and criticisms.

Is the Problem of Miracles a Special Case of the Interaction Problem?

1. The Ontological Problem of Miracles

The ontological problem of miracles is the problem of explaining what miracles are and how they are possible. These questions are logically prior to the questions of whether any miracles have occurred or whether such-and-such an event is a miracle. You may believe, for example, that miracles have occurred, and you may cite as an example of a miracle Therese Neumann's subsistence for decades on no food except a daily communion wafer. The philosopher of religion, without necessarily denying either the general occurrence of miracles or this particular instance, will then ask: what is it that makes this supposedly miraculous event miraculous and how is the existence of miracles rationally integratable into the rest of what we know and believe about the world? In short: What are miracles? How are they possible? The philosopher of religion needn't be arguing for miracles or against them; he may simply be trying to understand them, both in themeselves, and in relation to everything else.

In this respect the philosopher of religion may comport himself like the typical philosopher of science. It is rare for a philosopher of science to argue against any scientific procedure or result; for the most part, philosophers of science simply try to understand science: the nature of scientific explanation, the status of laws, etc. They do not question the truth of scientific results.

The ontological problem of miracles is also logically prior to the various epistemological questions that arise, questions about the reliability of the testimony of eye witnesses, etc.

Kant on Divine Concurrence and Miracles as Complementa ad Sufficientiam

The question concerning the possibility of miracles is connected to a wider question concerning the relation of secondary or natural causes and the causa prima, God. How do these two 'orders' of causation fit together?

1. One extreme position is occasionalism according to which all causal power is exercised by God. For the occasionalist, God is all-powerful not just in the sense that he can do all that is (broadly) logically possible, but also in the sense that he exercises all the power that gets exercised. For the occasionalist, God is the only genuine cause and all secondary causes are mere occasions for the exercise of divine power. Although I have defended occasionalism elsewhere ("Concurrentism or Occasionalism?" Am Cath Phil Quart, Summer 1996, 339-359), I will not be assuming its truth here.

Kant on Miracles

Earlier posts uncovered epistemic as opposed to ontic conceptions of miracles in Augustine and in Spinoza; but Immanuel Kant too seems to favor an epistemic approach. "If one asks: What is to be understood by the word miracle? it may be explained . . . by saying that they are events in the world the operating laws of whose causes are, and must remain, absolutely unknown to us." (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Harper Torchbooks, p. 81) There is no talk here, as in Hume, of a miracle as involving a "transgression" of a law of nature. The idea is that in the case of miraculous events there are laws of nature operating but these laws are unknown to us. This seems to imply that the miraculousness of a miracle is an appearance relative to our ignorance. If we knew the laws, there would be no miracles.

Spinoza's Epistemic Theory of Miracles

Chapter Six of Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise is entitled, "Of Miracles." We do well to see what we can learn from it. Spinoza makes four main points in this chapter, but I will examine only two of them in this entry.

We learned from yesterday's discussion of Augustine that there is a certain tension between the will of God and the existence of miracles ontically construed. Miracles so construed violate, contravene, suspend, or otherwise upset the laws of nature. But the laws of nature are ordained by God, and that would seem to be the case however laws are understood, whether as regularities or as relations of universals or whatever. So it seems as if the theist is under a certain amount of conceptual pressure to adopt an epistemic theory of miracles. We heard Augustine say, Portentum ergo fit non contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura: A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. We find a similar view in Spinoza, despite the very considerable differences between the two thinkers:

Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles

In The City of God, Book XXI, Chapter 8, St. Augustine quotes Marcus Varro, Of the Race of the Roman People:

There occurred a remarkable celestial portent; for Castor records that, in the brilliant star Venus, called Vesperugo by Plautus, and the lovely Hesperus by Homer, there occurred so strange a prodigy, that it changed its colour, size, form, course, which never appeared before nor since. Andrastus of Cyzicus, and Dion of Naples, famous mathematicians, said that this occurred in the reign of Ogyges.

The Bishop of Hippo comments:

So great an author as Varro would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature which happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature, but contrary to what we know as nature. (Modern Library, p. 776, tr. Dods, emphasis added.)

Swinburne on Miracles: Quotes and Notes

Herewith, a bit of commentary on R. G. Swinburne's "Miracles" (Phil. Quart. vol. 18, no. 73, October 1968. Reprinted in Rowe and Wainwright, pp. 446-453) To be fair, I should consider what Swinburne says in his later publications on this topic; perhaps in subsequent posts.

1. What is a miracle? Swinburne writes,

I understand by a miracle a violation of a law of Nature by a god, that is, a very powerful rational being who is not a material object (viz., is invisible and intangible). My definition of a miracle is thus approximately the same as Hume's: "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity or by the interposition of some invisible agent." (446)

Three Senses of 'Law' Distinguished

1. There is a distinction between a law of nature and a law of science. If there are laws of nature, they have nothing to do with us or our theorizing. They are 'out there in the world.' For example, if we adopt a regularity theory of laws, and I am not saying we should, the regularities, and thus the laws, exist independently of our theorizing. Surely, if there are physical laws at all, and whatever their exact nature, their existence antedates ours. Laws of science, on the other hand, are our attempts at formulating and expressing the laws of nature. They are human creations. Since physics is a human activity, there were no laws of physics before human beings came on the scene; but there were physical laws before we came on the scene. Physics is not the same as nature; physics is the study of nature, our study of nature. It is obvious that physics cannot exist without nature, for it would then have no object, but nature can get on quite well without physics.

The Supernatural and the Miraculous

I think it is important to distinguish the supernatural from the miraculous especially inasmuch as their conflation aids and abets the 'Dawkins Gang.' (That's my mocking moniker for Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, and their fellow travellers.) Let's briefly revisit Daniel Dennett's definition of religions as

. . . social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought. This is, of course, a circuitous way of articulating the idea that a religion without God or gods is like a vertebrate without a backbone.(Breaking the Spell, p. 9, emphasis added)

Two Aspects of Miracles

What makes a miracle a miracle? Is it the type of causation that issues in the miraculous event? Or is it the fact that the miraculous event fails to fit an expected pattern? Suppose God parts the Red Sea in the manner depicted in the movie "The Ten Commandments." Does the miraculousness of this event reside in the fact that this TYPE of event does not occur (except for the one miraculous occasion on which it does occur) and so constitutes an exception to a regularity? Or does the miraculousness of the event reside in the fact that a supernatural cause brings about this event TOKEN? Or both?  My claim is that both are involved.  A miracle is both a violation of a law of nature and something whose cause is supernatural.

Are Miracles Logically Possible? Part II

The problem raised in the first post in this series is whether we can make logical room for miracles, specifically, divine interventions in, or interferences with, the natural course of events. Now nature is orderly and regular: it displays local and global ('cosmic') uniformities. If that were not the case, it would not be possible to have science of it. (But we do have science, knowledge, of nature, ergo, etc.) For example, it is a global uniformity of nature that any two electrons anywhere in the universe will repel each other, that no signal, anywhere, can travel faster than the speed of light, etc. Here is the form of a global uniformity, an exceptionless regularity:

1. Wherever and whenever F-ness is instantiated, G-ness is instantiated.

Now for various reasons which we may consider later, a law of nature cannot be identified with an exceptionless regularity. (For one thing, law statements support counterfactuals while statements of global uniformity do not support counterfactuals.) But laws manifest themselves in global uniformities. (This talk of 'manifestation,' which I find felicitous, I borrow from D. M. Armstrong.)

Are Miracles Logically Possible?

John Earman, Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles (Oxford 2000), p. 8:

. . . if a miracle is a violation of a law of nature, then whether or not the violation is due to the intervention of the Deity, a miracle is logically impossible since, whatever else a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.

According to a standard way of thinking, miracles are violations of laws of nature. This approach has an impressive pedigree. Thus Thomas Aquinas writes, in the Summa Theologica (Q. 110, art. 4, respondeo), "A miracle properly so called takes place when something is done outside the order of nature." Thomas makes it clear that by 'nature' he means the whole of created nature, and not just physical nature. He concludes that God alone can work miracles.

Thomas also alludes (in Reply Obj. 2) to a distinction between miracles ontically and epistemically construed. This is not his terminology. He speaks of miracles "absolutely" considered and miracles "in reference to ourselves." Something that occurs by a power unknown to us may appear miraculous to us and yet not be miraculous absolutely.  We could call that an epistemic miracle: an event  which does not contravene a law of nature, but appears to do so due to our ignorance.  Genuine miracles, events that in fact do contravene laws of nature, we could call ontic miracles.  But don't be misled by the terminology: the suggestion is not that there are two kinds of miracles, epistemic and ontic, but two senses of 'miracle.'  'Epistemic' in 'epistemic miracle' is an alienans adjective.

Now consider:

1. A miracle is an exception to a law of nature.
2. Every law of nature is an exceptionless regularity (though not conversely).
Therefore
3. A miracle is an exception to an exceptionless regularity.
Therefore
4. Miracles are logically impossible.

This argument seems to show that if miracles are to be logically possible they cannot be understood as violations of laws of nature. How then are they to be understood?  Please note that (2) merely states that whatever a law of nature is, it is an exceptionless regularity.  Thus (2) does not commit one to a regularity theory of laws according to which laws are identified with exceptionless regularities.  The idea is that any theory of  (deterministic) laws would include the idea that a law is an exceptionless regularity.