Friday, August 13, 2010

For want of a nail

JD WALTERS SAID:

“I've already argued for the disanalogy between things like dreams and perceptual illusions and the wholesale falsification of an entire history of the world. You haven't done anything to convince me those are anything alike.”

i) It’s not my responsibility to convince you.

ii) You attempted to draw an analogy by claiming that if a misperception comes naturally to us, then it isn’t deceptive.

But to say we naturally misperceive reality in various situations is a paradigm-case of deceptive appearances. For the deceptive appearance is built right into the experience. And since God is ultimately responsible for our sensory equipment as well as our natural environment, I don’t see that you can absolve God of the charge.

Mind you, I don’t think “deception” (with its prejudicial connotations) is the best term to use. But since that’s the term which critics of YEC are wont to use, I use it in my counterexamples.

“As I explained in my last comment, this takes a very narrow view of what the physical effects of this miracle would be. I would add, though, that, given the way we experience the uniformity of nature, the physical effects would and should be considered prima facie evidence for a natural origin. In our everyday experience, as well as in science, there is a presumption in favor of natural processes being at work, which presumption you demonstrate whenever you absent-mindedly walk over a bridge, confident it won't vanish in thin air, to take just one example. And how many times has that presumption misled you?”

But as I pointed out, there can be miracles of providential timing or answered prayer which which merge into the appearance of uniformity, even though the precipitating factor is supernatural rather than natural.

“I couldn't disagree more. If they don't obey the same rules, if physical evidence does not in some way constrain the plausibility of the stories we tell about the world, then each man, or at least each philosophical school, is indeed an island, shouting out to the inhabitants of other islands but with no way to convince the other that theirs is better.”

i) Now you’re confusing the interpretation of a story with the plausibility of a story. But those are hardly equivalent. The correct interpretation of Dante or Alice in Wonderland doesn’t turn on the plausibility of their fantasy worlds.

ii) Moreover, I didn’t refer to stories “we” tell about the world, but a story which the Creator of the world told us.

“I've noted that some times you appear perilously close to a sort of postmodernism, Steve, when you've exonerated various kinds of idealism, for example, by assuring commentators that they have indeed taken all the physical evidence into account. Well if that's where epistemic duties stop with respect to worldviews, simply to tell a story that takes all the physical evidence into account, then absent internal contradictions there is no way to adjudicate between them.”

I didn’t say that’s where epistemic duties stop. Rather, I made the obvious statement that Berkeleyan idealism, like brain-in-vat scenarios, is highly resistant to direct refutation. If you have an argument to the contrary, be my guest.

“I hope you're including general revelation in there, but in this case we DO know, from the Bible, the Christian theological tradition, and from science at what point in the cycle it started: at the absolute beginning, with the primordial raw material. God didn't start any cycle in the middle, with past histories, developed structures, and organisms who had already lived and died already in place. He started from scratch.”

General revelation can’t tell us at what point in the cycle God instantiated the world, for general revelation presupposes the existence of the world as its reference point. Appearances can’t tell you at what point in the cycle the cycle was instantiated, for if the cycle was instantiated at a later point in the cycle, the early phase would be folded into the appearance of the later phase.

If my battery dies, and I reset my watch, I set my watch for the current time. Does that mean you can look at my watch and then extrapolate back in time from the current time on the readout to minutes and hours before I reset my watch? No. Once I set my watch you can’t tell when I set it. You could try to extrapolate backwards for however many minutes or hours or days or years. But that would be inaccurate. It didn’t have to be ticking off the minutes and hours for all those years to reach the current readout.

“Again, keep in mind the totality of the physical evidence.”

The totality of the physical evidence is irrelevant. An angel or demon is not a physical agent. An angelic/demonic cause is not a physical cause. It can have physical effects, but you can’t trace the effect back to the cause by physical evidence alone.

It’s not like reconstructing an accident from a hanger with shrapnel from an airplane, plus the flight recorder. Based on physical evidence, you may be able to piece together the cause because the cause is physical (e.g. mechanical error, pilot error, a bomb). But in the case of supernatural causes, the ultimate cause falls outside the scope of empirical investigation.

“Angels and demons make contributions to this world. They do not go around rewriting history and seamlessly transforming vast sections of the natural world.”

No one said they rewrite history, but you also need to explain how you can quantify their contribution to events.

“The principle of these miracles is 'change to a course of nature already established.'”

Actually, the course of nature begins with a miracle (e.g. Fiat lux!).

“Again, you're not looking at the totality of empirical evidence. Looking at a teenager would not be gathering all the empirical evidence relevant to determining whether that birth was going to happen anyway or whether he is an answer to prayer. One would have to ask the parents, consult their medical histories, etc.”

How would their medical histories tell you that he owed his birth to answered prayer? Is that on the medical chart?

You could ask his parents of their still alive. But what about a 100 years later?

“And absent the rest of that evidence, it is a perfectly proper conclusion that the teenager is naturally born.”

Why? Why should we presume that answered prayer, or miraculous timing, is not a factor in many outcomes? Why should we presume one way or the other? Answered prayer has a chain-effect. He may have been “naturally born” because his mother owns her own birth to answered prayer.

“I can't live my life attempting to constantly hold in my mind the awareness that anyone around me could have been born as an answer to prayer.”

Why not? If you know that may be true in some instances, but not others, why affix a presumption in either direction? Why do you feel so threatened by the idea that any particular event may own its occurrence to at least one supernatural factor further upstream? It would be ignorant to either rule that out or rule that in. It’s just something that every Christian should make allowance for. And thankfully so.

“There proper presumption is that natural processes are at work.”

One of your problems is a false dichotomy. In my example, we’re not talking about a Virgin Birth. And even the Virgin Birth included some natural processes. Gestation in the womb. Natural birth.

Jesus didn’t pop into existence as an adult male. So you can also have a confluence of natural and supernatural factors.

“And I'm puzzled by your fanatical need to give an ad hoc, 'hey, anything goes when God's involved, right?' desperate defense of a view (mature creationism) that only developed in response to accumulating scientific evidence against YEC, and which is rejected by most Christian scientists and theologians.”

Actually, I haven’t been defending mature creation. Rather, I’ve been responding to a stock objection to mature creation. Indeed, your objections cut far deeper than mature creation. And that’s a problem in its own right.

My bigger problem is your insistent need to draw a bright line between natural and supernatural causes, create a general presumption against miracles, and make as little allowance for miracles as you can get away with while maintaining a pious veneer of orthodoxy. Why should we be so hell-bent (pun intended) on demarcating just where supernatural causes leave off and natural causes take over?

“But that distinction IS important to science, and to everyday life. Like I said, we go about our daily lives with a very proper presumption that things will unfold according to natural processes.”

We do? Speak for yourself. To recur to an earlier illustration of mine, if I have a sick friend, I pray for him and I take him to the doctor. I don’t presume that medicine will do the trick, and I don’t presume that prayer will do the trick. I do both because I don’t know how God plans to handle the situation, but I know that God may either employ natural means or bypass natural means. I don’t second-guess God’s methods in any given case.

Do you think I should take my friend to the doctor rather than pray for him? Are those mutually exclusive responses?

“Similarly, I can't perform an experiment to verify a theory unless I assume that God won't intervene at just that moment to throw my results off.”

If God miraculously healed a friend who was suffering from terminal cancer, would that “throw your results off?” And which would you rather have: a dead friend, but save your results, or save your friend even it interfered with your controlled experiment?

“How many miracles do you know of that took place in the laboratory and resulted in a different statement of a general regularity of nature as a result?”

It doesn’t have to be a miracle that took place in the lab to be a miracle that impacted the experimental results. There could be a miracle a 100 years before, like an answer to prayer, which through a convoluted chain of events is a necessary precondition for the success of the experiment.

Take forensics. Maybe the criminologist needs an adequate sample. And maybe, due to a complex chain of events, that sample would not be available if something else hadn’t happened, or happened a little differently–years before.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

“Augustine, Calvin and many others understood this.”

I don’t turn to them for exegesis.

“God said, 'let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years.'" (Genesis 1:14)”

Cute, but disingenuous:

i) You reject the literal interpretation of Gen 1:14. So was this merely a tu quoque?

ii) From your scientific perspective, moreover, you don’t think our sun exists merely to make ancient Jewish calendars possible. Presumably, you think it exists to make life possible on earth, viz. heat, photosynthesis.

iii) Furthermore, ancient Jews were certainly aware of other solar properties. A source of warmth. Agricultural cycles. And so on.

iv) Finally, Gen 1:14 is not a measurement of absolute chronology, but relative chronology (i.e. setting dates for Jewish festivals).

“The real issue is how revelation and reason intersect.”

Revelation is the revelation of divine reason.

“And to say baldly that I 'side with Troeltsch' without including the very important qualification that I gave in the last post is disingenuous. My principle of analogy and Troeltsch's are quite different, because mine includes the possibility of miracles in the present, and by extension also the past.”

Your acceptance of miracles is so token, grudging, and minimalistic that I don’t see much difference.

“We're not talking about physics here. We're talking about history.”

And historical causation includes supernatural agents, miraculous factors, &c.

“Well by your own admission God works in different ways at different times. Some miracles are miracles of timing and coincidence, in which case a scientist could follow the chain of events from some previous configuration to the point where it constitutes the answer to your prayer.”

He doesn’t have access to my silent prayer. And he lacks direct access to the mind of God.

“The scientist will still be able to say that nature went one way for a while, and then due to an external influence went another way.”

Miraculous effects can be imperceptible in relation to natural effects. The nail looks the same on either explanation. You have to know how the outcome was initiated.

“Nice. Tell that to the Egyptian priests, who when God performed a sign they were unable to perform, they told Pharaoh, ‘It is the finger of God!’ Precisely because it was something they couldn't do on their own.”

It would facilitate discussion of you could refrain from demagoguery. In context, I used the example of a miracle from the past in relation to a present event, 100 years later. That’s hardly comparable to living witnesses, or a written, interpretive record of the event.

“Again, I think by 'physically untraceable' you have in mind a very small subset of the relevant evidence.”

I have in mind the key factors which elude physical evidence. But you’re also skewing the issue:

i) The question at issue is not whether the affected parties can rightly infer a miracle. The question at issue is also not whether a later investigator may sometimes have sufficient evidence to rightly infer a miracle.

ii) Rather, the question is your general presumption that in the absence of fortuitously preserved evidence, we should default to a naturalistic explanation.

iii) In addition, there’s a difference between evidence to rule out a miracle and evidence to rule in a miracle. There can often be evidence to infer a miracle. But I don’t see how you can ever exclude miraculous factors when these factors could be located anywhere up the chain of events.

6 comments:

  1. "We do? Speak for yourself. To recur to an earlier illustration of mine, if I have a sick friend, I pray for him and I take him to the doctor. I don’t presume that medicine will do the trick, and I don’t presume that prayer will do the trick. I do both because I don’t know how God plans to handle the situation, but I know that God may either employ natural means or bypass natural means. I don’t second-guess God’s methods in any given case.

    Do you think I should take my friend to the doctor rather than pray for him? Are those mutually exclusive responses?"


    Steve! I really like this illustration. Thanks!

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  2. Steve, we naturally misperceive reality in certain ways due to the kind of creature we are. The limitations and artificiality of our perception are trade-offs that apparently God was willing to countenance in exchange for having a bipedal, intelligent species made in his image. There is nothing whatsoever sinister about God designing us that way. For every limitation or misperception that is inherent in our constitution, we have an advantage that allows us to overcome them. The fact that scientists now know why we see bands in the rainbow instead of a continuous spectrum is testimony to the triumph of our abstract reasoning skills over the limitations of our eyesight.

    There IS something sinister about leaving traces through the world and the universe of natural events that never happened. If you don't see something wrong with Dick Whitman (from Mad Men) passing himself off to everyone else as Don Draper, complete with a purple heart from service in the Korean war (in which he never fought), a forged employment history, personal belongings carefully chosen to fit the new persona and insincere relationships, then I can't help you. You must have some different definition of deception than I do.

    "Now you’re confusing the interpretation of a story with the plausibility of a story."

    No, you're confusing what I said. My objection was to the idea that there are different rules for evaluating physical evidence than there are for evaluating worldviews. My point was that there is always a dialectic between worldview and evidence: the physical evidence should constrain which worldviews we find plausible. To use the literature analogy, there are obviously better and worse interpretations of Dante, and the criterion for deciding between them is which one deals most naturally with the linguistic evidence. An interpretation that tries to save face by suggesting that Dante really means something completely different from what he appears to be saying is not equivalent to one which takes the 'plain sense' more seriously, even if both interpretations can account, somehow, for the same linguistic evidence.

    "I didn’t say that’s where epistemic duties stop. Rather, I made the obvious statement that Berkeleyan idealism, like brain-in-vat scenarios, is highly resistant to direct refutation."

    So how and for what reasons would you reject those views?

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  3. "General revelation can’t tell us at what point in the cycle God instantiated the world, for general revelation presupposes the existence of the world as its reference point. Appearances can’t tell you at what point in the cycle the cycle was instantiated, for if the cycle was instantiated at a later point in the cycle, the early phase would be folded into the appearance of the later phase."

    That's why I said, all three things, the Bible, Christian theological reflection, and science point to creation ex nihilo starting at the absolute beginning of the cycle. There is no indication from any of those sources that the world sprang into existence mature and fully formed. God started with some formless raw material, which he then progressively differentiated and developed into what we see today.

    "If my battery dies, and I reset my watch, I set my watch for the current time. Does that mean you can look at my watch and then extrapolate back in time from the current time on the readout to minutes and hours before I reset my watch? No. Once I set my watch you can’t tell when I set it."

    I don't see what the big deal is. Who ever thought that because my watch shows 2010 as the current year means the watch has actually been ticking for that long? We get our actual yardsticks for the passage of time from elsewhere. But the fact that I just set the year setting on my watch to 2010 A.D. five minutes ago doesn't mean 2010 years haven't elapsed since the time of Jesus, anymore than all the clocks in a city suddenly stopping for an hour and then starting again simultaneously means that an hour hadn't elapsed.

    I don't think the watch reading is a very good analogy to a universe created in medias res, precisely because we never use the watch reading to find out when it was set.

    "Actually, the course of nature begins with a miracle (e.g. Fiat lux!)."

    Not on my definition. Before there is a regular course of nature with which we can contrast miracles, there is just an act of God.

    "How would their medical histories tell you that he owed his birth to answered prayer? Is that on the medical chart?"

    In the example you gave, the parents were infertile. That would be reflected in their medical histories, and the fact that the mother had a baby anyway would be evidence that a miracle had occurred, just like in the case of Sarah in the OT.

    "Why? Why should we presume that answered prayer, or miraculous timing, is not a factor in many outcomes? Why should we presume one way or the other?"

    There's no problem with the admission that many outcomes involve supernatural influences, but in particular cases we should start with the presumption of natural causes because human beings are remarkably prone to false positives when it comes to the supernatural. Take a case for example when loved ones pray for someone's recovery from cancer, but it is not God's will to heal that person. A completely natural remission may then be interpreted as God's answering their prayers, only for the loved ones' joy to come crashing down when the remission is followed by a relapse and then death.

    Finding the truth involves the twin tasks of being open to possible truth, but also avoiding error. The presumption of natural causes is a method that contributes to the latter task.

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  4. "Why do you feel so threatened by the idea that any particular event may own its occurrence to at least one supernatural factor further upstream?"

    I'm not at all threatened by that idea. A presumption of natural causes does not mean that I will always conclude that an event had natural causes (that would be naturalism). The presumption is the starting point, not the ending point.

    Is there the danger that that presumption, which is designed to protect against false positives, will also result in some false negatives? Sure. But that's the balancing act we all have to perform in our efforts to find the truth and avoid error.

    "Actually, I haven’t been defending mature creation. Rather, I’ve been responding to a stock objection to mature creation."

    Semantics. Maybe you are not positively advocating for it, but removing certain objections to a view certainly qualifies as defending it. Take for example "An Atheist Defends Religion" by Bruce Sheiman. His choice of verb is perfectly accurate, even though he is only responding to certain stock objections to religion and is not trying to convince anyone to actually become religious, and is obviously not religious himself.

    "My bigger problem is your insistent need to draw a bright line between natural and supernatural causes, create a general presumption against miracles, and make as little allowance for miracles as you can get away with while maintaining a pious veneer of orthodoxy."

    Quoting yourself just a few lines up: "Jesus didn’t pop into existence as an adult male. So you can also have a confluence of natural and supernatural factors."

    Which implies that you do think there is a meaningful distinction between the two.

    Again, the problem is not with living in a world where its current state is explained as a confluence of both natural and supernatural factors. The problem is with God creating a world with lots of evidence of events that never happened. Let's keep our eyes on the target here.

    This is not about some physical effects being due to natural and some to supernatural causes. This is about part of the road we can see going off into the horizon being real, and the rest being merely an illusion on a convincing matte painting.

    I don't have a general presumption against miracles. As I said, the presumption in favor of natural causes is the starting point, not the ending point. And I find it hard to deny that it does help weed out false positives. There is already enough of that in the form of belief in astrology, homeopathy, astral projection, fake mediums, etc. which I'm sure you reject at least prima facie as well.

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  5. And I am certainly not trying to minimize the role of miracles in shaping world history, or only accepting as few as I can get away with.

    I will accept as many miracles as there is good evidence for. No more, no less.

    Like I've said, there are two dangers in our search for truth: false positives and false negatives. We should try to avoid both errors equally.

    "To recur to an earlier illustration of mine, if I have a sick friend, I pray for him and I take him to the doctor. I don’t presume that medicine will do the trick, and I don’t presume that prayer will do the trick. I do both because I don’t know how God plans to handle the situation, but I know that God may either employ natural means or bypass natural means. I don’t second-guess God’s methods in any given case."

    And all these actions presuppose the stable operation of natural processes. Do you hoist yourself from a rope when you go down the stairs on the way to the hospital because you don't know whether God plans to keep the stairs in existence or make them disappear into nothing? Is that not second-guessing God's methods in this given case?

    There are cases where it is reasonable to focus on wondering just how God intends to work, usually salient events like a sickness, or perhaps a missionary in jail for distributing Bibles. But by and large we all take for granted the stable operation of natural processes.

    And speaking of quantification, I think most people can attest to the fact that in most cases of illness God does not supernaturally heal. Such miracles are comparatively rare. That is certainly not grounds for excluding the possibility that in any given case God will work a miracle, but it does properly provide a clue of God's normal mode of operation.

    "If God miraculously healed a friend who was suffering from terminal cancer, would that “throw your results off?”"

    No, because presumably there have been enough cases of terminal cancer that have been allowed to run their course for doctors to have a good understanding of its evolution.

    If God's supernatural healing is comparatively rare, and if by implication God intends most healing to be natural with the aid of doctors, then it would be churlish of God not to provide medical researchers with a sufficient number of cases in which the diseases are allowed to take their course in order for researchers to develop effective medicines and treatments.

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  6. "It doesn’t have to be a miracle that took place in the lab to be a miracle that impacted the experimental results. There could be a miracle a 100 years before, like an answer to prayer, which through a convoluted chain of events is a necessary precondition for the success of the experiment."

    Except most physical laws are based on the results of thousands of controlled experiments, in which researchers were able to exactly duplicate the experimental setup of other researchers and get exactly the same results (or, at least within a certain margin of error).

    What matters are not the events leading up to the experiment, but whether, under the same initial conditions, we get the same outcomes.

    The worry is whether the same initial conditions will lead to different outcomes in a substantial majority of cases due to supernatural influence. In which case, there are no regularities of nature to speak of, and there is no science to be learned.

    Of course, we should distinguish between operational science, which aims to discover natural regularities, and origin or reconstructive science, which aims to reconstruct past events from present evidence. The legitimacy of both is threatened if natural regularities are interrupted too frequently and too arbitrarily, but the danger is somewhat different in each case.

    My citing of Genesis 1:14 was not disingenuous. Remember, even though I don't read these chapters as history, I still aim to derive theological truth from it. I think it's clear that one of the truths the author meant to convey with that verse is that God was concerned that certain natural processes would allow people to keep time.

    The sun certainly serves all those other purposes as well, but it seems clear that the time-keeping significance of those lights in the sky was important to God. Otherwise, Genesis 1:14 would have read something like "let those lights be a sign for seasons and years, and to give warmth that causes plants to grow, etc."

    "Your acceptance of miracles is so token, grudging, and minimalistic that I don’t see much difference."

    I don't see how you can infer that from my rejection of mature creation due to its being deceptive.

    My acceptance of miracles is not a token one: I fully affirm the reality of the resurrection, Jesus' Gospel miracles, the miracles of the apostles, the gifts of the spirit, current missionary miracles, and at least a few cases of mediumship, possession, and other paranormal activities for which there is strong evidence.

    My acceptance of miracles is not grudging: I am glad to live in a world where Jesus conquered the grave, and in which God cares for his children in surprising and supernatural ways. It gives me hope and comfort.

    On the other hand, I do think we live in a world in which natural processes for the most part can be relied upon. This is what makes science possible. The world is not like a 24-hour play festival, with the backdrop and scenery changing every 15 minutes for some new play to start. The world's drama takes place against the stable backdrop of the natural processes God set up at the beginning. While the world endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and warm, day and night do not cease.

    "Rather, the question is your general presumption that in the absence of fortuitously preserved evidence, we should default to a naturalistic explanation."

    Nope. The issue is that there is abundant evidence for the naturalistic development of the Earth, which the mature creationist would have us disregard as illusory.

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