In his re-post of February 26, 2024 (What
is Hume Doing In His Essay “Of Miracles”?), John W. Loftus
asks:
So let me put it to my readers. What would it take for you to believe
a miracle had taken place given natural law and the fact you have never
previously experienced a miracle nor anyone else you know (that is true,
right?) What kind of miracle would it have to be? Let’s say one day a
man’s arm was blown off and the next day it had regrown. It’s never
going to happen, that’s for sure. If someone claimed it did, would you
believe it was a magic trick of some kind? How about a virgin having a
baby without any male sperm? How about someone telling you s/he heard
god’s voice? What about YOUR hearing a god’s voice? What of someone
coming back to life after being embalmed at the morgue?
The original article appeared several years ago; apparently as a
result of that, the comments below the re-post article are closed. So
that we may Lift
Every Voice and … comment, I’m posting a reply article, which
will have the welcome side effect of starting a new discussion
thread.
Note that this business of miracles has been beaten to death in many
books, articles, and blog posts, so it would be a miracle if anything I
write is either original, comprehensive, final, or perhaps even correct.
But maybe something here will be useful to someone. Just because
everything’s in libraries doesn’t mean we all know all of it. And as
always if you spot a goof, correct me.
The
arrow of time - one of the ways to distinguish the mundane from the
miraculous
Reality is kind of a
One Direction concert
So, what would it take for me to believe a miracle had taken place?
Two of John’s hypotheticals involve something like reversals of the arrow of time.
There are many natural processes which we only ever observe moving in
one direction. If you were to record such a one-way process as a motion
picture, you could replay the event forwards or backwards. The backwards
replay would then appear jarringly unnatural. For example, imagine
someone’s arm exploding, and then un-exploding. Things sometimes
explode, but they do not then un-explode. Similarly, we could record a
person dying and then being embalmed by an undertaker, but we never
observe that process reversing itself: a person being un-embalmed and
then resurrected. Cremating the corpse would make for an even more
dramatically impossible backwards replay, as that would require the
widely scattered combustion products to coalesce back and un-combust
themselves to reconstitute the corpse, which would then re-animate. (As
an aside, the cryonics movement
rests on the premise that super-duper technology of the future will be
able to re-animate frozen corpses and repair whatever diseases or
accidents killed them. If you’re skeptical about that you’ve got lots of
company.)
Similarly, we can videorecord a baker making bread. The backwards
replay would show the loaf of bread un-baking back into dough and the
dough un-mixing back into the original ingredients. If we ran it farther
back, we’d see the flour traveling back to the store, and then to the
mill, and un-milling itself back into wheat, which would then un-grow
back into carbon dioxide, water, soil nutrients, and the wheat
seeds.
The arrow of time happens to be a paradox. According to the Wikipedia
article:
The arrow of time paradox was originally recognized in the 1800s for
gases (and other substances) as a discrepancy between microscopic and
macroscopic description of thermodynamics / statistical Physics: at the
microscopic level physical processes are believed to be either entirely
or mostly time-symmetric: if the direction of time were to reverse, the
theoretical statements that describe them would remain true. Yet at the
macroscopic level it often appears that this is not the case: there is
an obvious direction (or flow) of time.
Entropy as an arrow of time
Shot
through the heart, and Clausius is to blame; he gave the heat death of
the universe a bad name
We can think of entropy
as an arrow of time. One way to think about this is in terms of
probability: everything that happens is an “attempt” by the universe to
push itself into a more probable (or more disordered) state. Local
excursions into lower probability (higher order, lower entropy) are
possible, but they must be somehow coupled to larger offsetting
increases in entropy elsewhere. A classic example is the evolution of
life on Earth, which represents a substantial increase in order. It was
driven mostly by the much larger decrease in order in the Sun as it
consumed its nuclear fuel, unleashing solar energy which was then
harnessed by the mechanisms of mutation and natural section. This
decrease in order manifested largely as nuclei in the Sun transmuting
along the curve of
binding energy. The evolution of life also depended on plate tectonics
which is driven largely by the decay of heavy radionuclides inside the
Earth, as they approach the same spot on that curve of binding energy
from the upper end. Those heavy radionuclides in turn originated in
earlier supernovae
and neutron
star mergers.
(And sorry if I upset fans of Rudolf Clausius
and/or Bon
Jovi and/or the English language with my terrible puns. Sticklers
might protest that Lord Kelvin is more to blame for the heat
death of the universe.)
The second law: why
anything happens at all
In the Preface to his book The
Laws of Thermodynamics: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Atkins
introduces the four laws of thermodynamics (emphasis
mine):
The mighty handful consists of four laws, with the numbering starting
inconveniently at zero and ending at three. The first two laws (the
‘zeroth’ and the ‘first’) introduce two familiar but nevertheless
enigmatic properties, the temperature and the energy. The third of the
four (the ‘second law’) introduces what many take to be an even more
elusive property, the entropy, but which I hope to show is easier to
comprehend than the seemingly more familiar properties of temperature
and energy. The second law is one of the all-time great laws of
science, for it illuminates why anything — anything from the
cooling of hot matter to the formulation of a thought — happens
at all. The fourth of the laws (the ‘third law’) has a more
technical role, but rounds out the structure of the subject and both
enables and foils its applications. Although the third law establishes a
barrier that prevents us from reaching the absolute zero of temperature,
of becoming absolutely cold, we shall see that there is a bizarre and
attainable mirror world that lies below zero.
Given that the second law is why anything happens at all (as Atkins
puts it), demonstrable violations of the second law might be strong
candidates for miracles. No such violation has ever been reliably
observed in the roughly 400 years of modern
science. (The period of modern science is my focus because that’s
when scientists have had an exponentially increasing capacity to detect,
recognize, and record such violations of natural law, if any were to
occur.) That’s how natural “laws” get to be called laws: they appear to
be exceptionless. Thousands of scientists make millions of observations
and nobody can demonstrate the “law” to admit exceptions. Then the
engineers and industrialists join the party by stamping out millions or
billions of artifacts made possible by the laws, and all of them appear
to obey the laws as well. Then there is evolution, which mindlessly
solved some molecular problems over a billion years ago, and the
resulting genes and proteins have been “conserved” from yeast to humans.
That means that at no point were the laws ever violated by enough to
erase the adaptive advantages of those genes and proteins, which would
have interrupted the Tree of
Life. The laws of physics and chemistry that dictate the behavior of
biomolecules have held sufficiently well since at least back to the last
universal common ancestor.
Would you believe a
miracle if you saw it?
Nobody has ever reliably demonstrated a violation of the second law,
but suppose someone did. That leads to John’s thought question:
If someone claimed [that an exploded arm unexploded or grew back],
would you believe it was a magic trick of some kind?
Skepticism would be my starting hypothesis. I’m aware of the history
of failed attempts to violate the second law, such as with perpetual motion
machines, water-fueled
cars, and so on. As Hume famously pointed out in his essay Of
Miracles, violations of natural law appear to be so improbable
that almost any alternative explanation for our observation of a
supposed miracle which does not violate natural law is more likely to be
true.
I would certainly need more than someone’s claim! I would need
evidence comparable in strength to the evidence that World War II
happened.
We are smarter than me
I certainly wouldn’t set myself up as the final authority on what I’m
seeing. For example, I’ve seen videos of close-up magic
by David Blaine
and others. Some of what they do looks to me like miracles, but I know
they are just doing tricks that obey natural laws and fool my
perceptions. Rather, I would rely on the entire community of scientists,
magicians, skeptics, journalists, and so on to vet a miracle claim for
me. For example, the Randi
prize went unclaimed for over 50 years. If anyone had claimed it, I
wouldn’t have needed to examine the claim for myself, given that the
winner would probably have become a household name and probably would
have started a whole new field of inquiry, with practical spin-offs
galore. A real-life Hogwarts School of
Witchcraft and Wizardry would likely spring up in no time around the
trick - if it were reproducible.
But as Richard Carrier and others have pointed out, if a “supernatural”
phenomenon turned out to be reproducible, then it would satisfy one of
the necessary conditions to be a natural phenomenon, and the result
might be that it would get incorporated into the rest of science.
(Reproducibility is among the foundations of the scientific
method.) In the past, seemingly magical phenomena like electricity,
magnetism, and radioactivity were eventually shown to be reproducible,
whereupon they became part of science.
Do miracles have to be
one-offs?
For a miracle to remain a miracle then, it might have to be
irreproducible, and that creates all sorts of problems. One of the
strongest forms of evidence for the plausibility of a phenomenon is
being able to observe it or elicit it again under known conditions. If a
miracle is a one-off, then we would lose the strongest argument for its
plausibility. We might be left wondering if it were just some sort of a
glitch, with no clear way to resolve that. We would only have the
reliability of the records of that one event - and that reliability
tends to decay over time, as memories fade, the original witnesses die
off and can no longer be cross-examined, libraries full of documents get
sacked and burned, physical books wear out, and so on.
Alleged reproducibility in
the bible
Reproducibility of a sort sneaks into the bible. The books of the
bible were written over a span of several centuries, and the times they
purport to describe cover even more centuries. But throughout all that
time, according to the bible, miracles were almost a dime a dozen. In
all the bible stories involving people from Genesis to the Acts of the
Apostles, it’s just one miracle after another. Reading the bible is not
unlike reading the Harry
Potter series with its spell-casting and wizardry and trampling
of natural law underfoot. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that both of these
domains of fiction enjoy such enduring popularity. Reality kind of
sucks, since that pesky second law constantly works against us. Few
people get everything they want just handed to them. Instead we have to
work hard to temporarily and locally hold back the forces of decay.
Everybody wants a shortcut, a magical way to “manifest” the goodies we
want. The so-called “New Thought” law
of attraction is the same kind of something-for-nothing snake oil that nearly
every religion has always sold to the gullible.
Presupposing
naturalism; the Moses and Red Sea example
John summarizes Levine (from The
Cambridge Companion to Miracles):
Part I presupposes naturalism, Levine says. Philosophers like him,
who rule out the possibility of miracles “are in effect presupposing or
else arguing for a thoroughgoing naturalism. Hence, Hume’s empiricism
commits him to naturalism, and if that goes unrecognized, his a
priori argument in Part I of his essay against the possibility of
justified belief in miracles is impossible to follow.” (p. 292). All one
has to admit is that “naturalism is possibly false.” Once this is
admitted “miracles are possible.” (p. 292).
John then quotes Levine directly (emphasis mine):
Hume is thus constrained by his empiricism in such a way that had he
been on the shore of the Red Sea with Moses, and had the Red Sea crashed
to a close the moment the last Israelite was safe, Hume would still be
constrained by his principles to deny that what was
witnessing was a miracle (p. 298).
There’s a tricky point about “principles” here - are we talking about
principles, as in a prior commitment (an axiom, a presupposition, etc.),
or are we talking about prior experience (an inductive conclusion)? See
for example Richard Carrier’s Naturalism Is
Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and In
defense of naturalism by Gregory W. Dawes. I confess to not
having read enough of Hume or Levine to know whether Hume actually made
the mistake that Levine appears to charge Hume with having made, but I
don’t think that matters very much unless we’re trying to get past peer
review, in which case we need all those attributional ducks in a row.
Carrier and Dawes warn against this very mistake. Just read Carrier and
Dawes and don’t make the same mistake yourself!
As to the Red Sea example given, I think Hume was in something like
the same position with regard to most of what we now understand to
constitute modern science. For example, during Hume’s life, nobody had a
clue about plate
tectonics (and thus why there are mountains, volcanoes, and even
land above sea level at all); nor did anyone have a satisfying natural
explanation for biodiversity; nor did anyone know how the stars shine
(that had to wait for Hans Bethe in 1938);
nor what a virus was; and on and on. Everywhere that Hume looked he saw
candidate miracles, as far as anyone knew at the time. Given Hume’s lack
of understanding of the physical mechanisms to explain the wonders he
saw, his primary fall-back seems to have been regularity. For example,
he didn’t know how the stars shine, but he saw that they always shine.
Therefore, the shining stars didn’t constitute a miracle for Hume, even
though a satisfying natural explanation lay centuries in the future.
Further, it’s worth recalling that the Moses and Red Sea example is a
pure hypothetical, given that archaeologists and historians who aren’t
Christian fundamentalists have accepted that the whole Exodus account is
almost certainly fictional. See for example Did
Moses Exist?: The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver and The
Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the
Origins of Its Sacred Texts. The Moses and Red Sea example is
as likely to have actually happened as the successful spell-casting in
Harry Potter.
Further reading
For more on the impossibility claims of science, see A
Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism: Applying Laws of Physics to
Faster-Than-Light Travel, Psychic Phenomena, Telepathy, Time Travel,
UFOs, and Other Pseudoscientific Claims by Milton A. Rothman.
If I were King of the World, I would require the people who reject the
impossibility claims of science to live without the technological
goodies made possible by science. That is, I would require the science
deniers to live according to their professed beliefs. Among Christians,
it seems that only the Amish minority comes close to such consistency of
behavior with belief.
To understand the difference between “impossible” and the merely
improbable, see The
Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events
Happen Every Day by David J. Hand.
For more on miracles, see (of course) the anthology John W. Loftus
edited after his original blog post: The
Case Against Miracles.
For more on Hume, see Hume’s
oeuvre. If that’s too ambitious, start with Hume: A Very
Short Introduction by A. J. Ayer, himself
a prominent philosopher of the 20th century.
For the prior (and rather massive) blog activity and discussion
history about these topics on Debunking Christianity, follow the
labels.
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