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.
Laws of Nature, Civil Laws, and the Idea of ‘Breaking’ a Law
In Kant on Miracles, I wrote:
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.
We do speak of breaking laws and of laws being broken. But this is almost always in the context of civil (legal) laws and moral laws. The latter are prescriptive and proscriptive: You shall do X and you shall refrain from doing Y. Laws of these forms are often broken. But when they are broken, this has no tendency to show that they are not valid or binding. Legally and morally, one must feed one's children; but it would be absurd to argue that since some parents do not feed their children that these laws do not hold.
But in the case of laws of nature, violations do show that they are not valid. A law of nature that could be violated would not be a law of naure. A legal or moral law that could not be violated, by contrast, would not be a legal or moral law. The latter are 'laws of freedom,' laws that legislate with respect to free beings. A necessary feature of them is that they allow the possibility of their own violation. By contrast, a necessary feature of laws of nature is that they be exceptionless.
The necessity that attaches to moral and legal laws is moral necessity or obligatoriness. Now the following is a consistent set: {It is obligatory that All Fs are Gs; Some Fs are not Gs). By contrast, the necessity that attaches to laws of nature is nomic necessity. The following is an inconsistent set: {It is nomically necessary that All Fs are Gs; Some Fs are not Gs.)
If we bear clearly in mind the distinction between laws of nature on the one hand, and legal/moral laws on the other, then we will not speak of the breaking of laws of nature.
With respect to Ockham's contrast argument, I concede that it is bound up with the very sense of 'legal/moral law' that it be possible for such laws to be broken. But a law of nature is not a law in this sense. Events in nature can neither abide by laws of nature nor break them. That one and the same word 'law' is used both for legal/moral imperatives and also for nature-descriptive declaratives is an interesting fact, but it looks to be a case of pure equivocation.
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.
Continue reading “Possibility, Intelligibility, and Miracles”
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.
Continue reading “Is the Problem of Miracles a Special Case of the Interaction Problem?”
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.
Continue reading “Kant on Divine Concurrence and Miracles as Complementa ad Sufficientiam“
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:
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.)
Continue reading “Augustine and the Epistemic Theory of Miracles”
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.