Bill Vallicella – Page 755 – Maverick Philosopher

Laws of Nature, Civil Laws, and the Idea of ‘Breaking’ a Law

The advantage of the epistemic approach [to miracles] is that it rescues us from the rank absurdity, pointed out by Hume, of having to say that there are laws of nature that admit of exceptions. Since our understanding is imperfect, our formulations of the laws of nature will some of them admit of exceptions. But it is hard to credit the idea that the laws themselves could admit of exceptions.

This assertion that (deterministic) laws cannot have exceptions drew heavy fire. 'Ockham' commenting at my old blog, wrote:

If a law couldn't be broken, why do we ever use the word 'broken' in the same vicinity as 'law'? Indeed, at this point I could use a 'contrast argument' which I know Bill hates. It only makes sense to talk about laws not being broken, if laws can be broken. Ergo, laws can be broken.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: “Let’s Think About Livin'”

I'll buy you a beer if you can remember this 1960 crossover hit from Bob Luman (1937-1978). A period piece offering wry commentary on the music business of the day.

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.)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.)

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