Infidels on the run

Misotheist Chris Hallquist has “reviewed” Keener’s monograph on miracles. I’ll review his review:

http://www.uncrediblehallq.net/2012/01/05/review-of-craig-keeners-miracles/

The book’s primary thesis is simply that eyewitnesses do offer miracle claims, a thesis simple enough but one sometimes neglected when some scholars approach accounts in the Gospels. The secondary thesis is that supernatural explanations, while not suitable in every case, should be welcome on the scholarly table along with other explanations often discussed (p. 1)

This is what I call a weaselly thesis statement because it clearly says much less than what Keener wants to say. It lets him that hint at some very controversial claims, but because he’s officially only defending these seemingly banal claims, it gets him off the hook from really having to defend his views.

Hallquist’s conspiratorial interpretation notwithstanding, there’s nothing sneaky about Keener’s thesis. Keener is a NT scholar. Liberal NT scholars typically relegate miracles to legendary embellishment by redactors who didn’t observe the events they report. So that’s what Keener is responding to.

Now based on what I know about the history of paranormal investigation and some of the adventures of the Society for Psychical Research, I’d quite confidently predict that if Christians ever did that kind of investigation, they’d eventually realize that they’re not going to find good evidence for supernatural phenomenon with those kinds of stories.

One wonders who he’s actually studied on the subject. Has he read Stephen Braude or Rupert Sheldrake, for instance?

So for example, let’s look at the issue of claims of regrown limbs. There’s a website called WhyWon’tGodHealAmputees.com, (formerly known as WhyDoesGodHateAmputees.com) that makes an argument:

For this experiment, we need to find a deserving person who has had both of his legs amputated. For example, find a sincere, devout veteran of the Iraqi war, or a person who was involved in a tragic automobile accident…

If possible, get millions of people all over the planet to join the prayer circle and pray their most fervent prayers. Get millions of people praying in unison for a single miracle for this one deserving amputee. Then stand back and watch.

What is going to happen? Jesus clearly says that if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. He does not say it once — he says it many times in many ways in the Bible.

And yet, even with millions of people praying, nothing will happen…

What are we seeing here? It is not that God sometimes answers the prayers of amputees, and sometimes does not. Instead, in this situation there is a very clear line. God never answers the prayers of amputees. It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.(LINK)

What’s the point of this thought experiment?

How do we know, for sure, that God does not answer prayers?… we simply pray and watch what happens. What we find is that nothing happens. No matter how many people pray, no matter how often they pray, no matter how sincerely they pray, no matter how worthy the prayer, nothing ever happens. If we pray for anything that is impossible — for example, regenerating an amputated limb or moving Mt. Everest to Newark, NJ — it never happens. We all know that. If we pray for anything that is possible, the results of the prayer will unfold in exact accord with the normal laws of probability. In every situation where we statistically analyze the effects of prayers, looking at both the success AND the failure of prayer, we find that prayer has zero effect. Prayers for amputees never work. Medical prayers never work. Prayers for “good people” never work. Battlefield prayers never work. That happens, always, because God is imaginary. Every time a Christian says, “The Lord answered my prayer,” what we are seeing instead is a simple coincidence or the natural effects of self-talk.(LINK)

There’s a slew of problems here. To name a few:

i) Even if the amputee is “deserving,” answered prayers have a ripple effect. Changing one variable in the present changes many variables in the future. A human being is not an isolated system. Men interact with their environment. So that has to be taken into account.

ii) The very fact that he was injured in the first place has a purpose in the plan of God.

iii) To multiply the same prayer by millions of petitioners misconceives the nature of prayer. It’s not like upping the odds that you will win the lottery if you buy up thousands of tickets.

God will answer a prayer if it’s wise to do so, and not because millions of people asked him to. One wise prayer is better than a million foolish prayers.

iv) Of course God doesn’t answer a prayer to relocate Mt. Everest. That’s a stunt.

v) Marshall Brain fails to appreciate the use of hyperbole in Scripture. The promise to receive “whatever” you ask is obviously hyperbolic. It’s understood that that’s not a blank check. For instance, it doesn’t mean God will annihilate himself upon request.

vi) Marshall Brain issues a series of question-begging denials about the alleged inefficacy of prayer. But that’s not an argument. That assumes what he needs to prove. And it disregards countless testimonies to the contrary.

vii) Indeed, he tries to preempt the counterevidence by asserting that apparent answers to prayer are sheer coincidence. Statistically equivalent to nonanswers. But that’s special pleading.

On the one hand he says there’s no evidence. On the other hand he tries to discredit evidence in advance of the fact.

The fact that the only prayers God “answers” are prayers for things that have a chance of happening anyway is powerful evidence that God never actually answers prayers...Deep down, most of them have to know that prayer doesn’t really ever work, which is why they only pray for things that have a chance of happening anyway.

This is armchair psychoanalysis. Attribute a defensive motive to Christians.

i) By definition, it would be futile to ask for something if you think there’s no chance of getting what you receive.

ii) At the same time, the word “chance” is misleading. Hallquist is using the word in a naturalistic sense, but the point of prayer is to ask for things you don’t expect to happen by chance. Yes, it’s possible that it would happen even if you didn’t pray, but that’s true of many things.

It’s possible that I will get a job offer out of the blue. Does this mean I should never apply for a job? Just wait by the phone?

iii) Christians frequently pray about mundane, bread-and-butter issues, not because they believe these things have a chance of happening anyway, but because these are things they need. They pray about things that affect their daily lives–and the lives of those they love. Urgent concerns. A medical crisis.

They don’t begin with a mental list of naturally occurring events, see if what they want is on the list, then check the matching box. Prayer isn’t that premeditated.

I pray for certain things because they are important to me. Important to those I care about. They reflect my needs or the needs of others close to me. They reflect my priorities. My ultimate concerns.

For instance, I pray for the salvation of the lost. I don’t do that because I think there’s a chance of that happening anyway.

Now Keener is completely missing the point here. The significance of the regrown limb issue is that if regrown limbs happened, they’d avoid a lot of problems you get with other kinds of healing claims. You eliminate the possibility that it could be a coincidence you, elliminate the possibility that maybe the doctors made a mistake. If someone’s leg really regrew it’d be pretty easy to document conclusively, if it happened under the right circumstances. If the limb regrows almost instantaneously, it’s going be hard to be mistaken about witnessing that.

i) Notice Hallquist’s bias. Why is it necessary to eliminate the “possibility” of coincidence? Why must prayer meet such an artificially high threshold?

Hallquist takes for granted a massive presumption against miracles or efficacious prayer. Therefore, you can’t justifiably believe that God answered a prayer unless you can eliminate the “possibility” of coincidence or the “possibility” of misdiagnosis.

Yet it’s reasonable to accept many things for which we never set a very high standard of proof. Hallquist relies on medical science, even though many things can go awry at any stage of the process. He can be misdiagnosed. His medical records can be inaccurate. The pharmacist can make a mistake.

ii) Notice how “weaselly” his own procedure is. He’s looking for loopholes to evade evidence for miracles or efficacious prayers. 

iii) Suppose I misidentify an answered prayer? So what? Why should that be in a class by itself? We make mistakes in other walks of life. Misperceive or misremember what happened. Rely on faulty sources. But Hallquist doesn’t think we have to eliminate all possibility of error in other walks of life to be warranted in what we believed.

iv) If there is a prayer-answering God, why assume the world would look any different than it does? Why assume God would go out of his way, every time he answers our prayers, to eliminate the appearance of a happy coincidence? How is that germane to the purpose of prayer?

There’s a difference between asking God for a job, and asking God for a sign. Notice how Hallquist has tacitly shifted the issue from the efficacy to evidence. He’s stipulating that if God answers prayers, he must not only give the petitioner what he asked for, but make it unmistakably clear that God did it. It’s not enough to answer the prayer. God must sign his name to the answer. But these are separate issues.

v) Only if Hallquist already knows what the world is like, knows ahead of time that there is no God, is he entitled to treat as ipso facto suspect an answer to prayer that might seem to be coincidental. For if a prayer-answering God exists, there is no reason he’d go out of his way to sidestep second causes. God created the system of second causes. That’s how he normally governs the world. It’s not like oil and water, where an answer to prayer must never be confused with ordinary providence.

vi) Of course, the evidentiary value of miracles does depend on our ability to detect superhuman personal agency. There is, however, no expectation that if a prayer-answering God exists, his agency will be detectable. If divine agency happens to be indetectible in any given case, that doesn’t create a negative presumption.

So we shouldn’t expect false reports of regrowing limbs to happen very often. It’s going be hard to get away with making up a story like that, and we should expect that to deter people from making up stories about regrowing limbs. However, people do sometimes tell outrageous lies. So the fact that there is a story of a regrowing limb in a book by Pat Robertson doesn’t prove anything. It doesn’t change the fact that the lack of evidence of regrowing limbs is suspicious, and the fact that skeptics aren’t impressed by such stories isn’t evidence of closed-mindedness.

Notice the tension in his statement. He begins by saying it’s hard to fake a regenerated limb. But then he mentions the fact that people tell outrageous lies. Once again, he’s leaving himself an out.

By definition, for every 100 times someone is faced with 100 to 1 odds, one person will beat the odds. In more religious parts of the world, including the United States, I’m sure that most people, maybe an overwhelming majority of people, pray when they or their children are faced with a serious illness. In that case, most odds-beating recoveries will happen after prayer.

In the nature of the case, most odds-beating recoveries will also happen after medical treatment. Is it just coincidental that the cure follows the treatment?

This is why science is neat. At the most basic level, when we’re talking about the scientific study of prayer, we’re talking about checking to see if prayer leads to beating the odds more often than not praying. We’re also checking for things like bias among people recording the data and the placebo effect.

i) Suppose a prayer-answering God exists. Is beating the odds the objective of prayer?

Suppose your best friend is diagnosed with cancer. Suppose there’s a 70% success rate with this type of cancer. He doesn’t need to beat the odds to be cured. More often than not, patients with his type of cancer are cured.

Does that mean you won’t pray for him? No. What if he’s in the 30% risk group?

ii) The function of petitionary prayer is not to beat the odds, but to meet a need. God answers the prayer by meeting the need. Whether or not that beats the odds is beside the point. That’s not what prayer is for.

ii) In addition, statistics are pretty irrelevant to personal experience. As Richard Feynman once said:

“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!”

If God answers your prayer, if you witness a miracle, statistics don’t matter.

This is something that’s actually not all that surprising, once you think about what randomness means. Random doesn’t mean being distributed evenly. There’s nothing about randomness that prevents events of a certain kind from clumping together just by chance, so it’s going to happen some of the time. Yes in some cases it’s going to be tempting to say “this clump is just too improbable to have happened by chance,” but except in the very most extreme of cases it’s just not something you can say without careful statistical analysis.

i) That’s a truism, but in real life we don’t insist on “careful statistical analysis” to legitimate most of our beliefs or decisions. Suppose I find out that a married couple attended the same junior high and high school at the same time.

That could be a coincidence, but it’s more likely than not that they paired off because they knew each other in junior high and high school. Is that a rigorous inference from the data? No. Just a commonsense inference.

Do you have to eliminate the possibility that it’s coincidental to be reasonably believe it’s not coincidental? No.

ii) In addition, Hallquist’s appeal to the odds is simplistic. Real life isn’t like throwing dice, where each throw is causally unrelated to the other.

iii) Notice, once again, that Hallquist is always on the look out for an excuse to disbelieve in miracles. He demands evidence, but always comes up with some escape clause to discount the evidence.

Furthermore, even in cases that seem extreme, what might be happening is that inaccurate reporting is taking events that were only somewhat improbable and blowing them up into something extremely improbable. There are a number of reasons that could happen.

Of course, that cuts both ways. Inaccurate reporting can also underreport miracles.

Well maybe not. But you could also ask similar questions about prayer in general—why an omnipotent, omniscient God would need our input on how to run the universe.

i) That’s a caricature of the rationale for prayer. Is Hallquist just demagoguing the issue, or is he really that ignorant?

ii) Moreover, there’s nothing implausible about a theistic universe in which inanimate processes are the default setting, but allowance is made for “manual override”; a universe open to dynamic interaction between God and man. On the one hand it’s generally convenient to have cyclical processes in place. That makes life stable and predictable. Enables us to make plans.

On the other hand, that leaves room for us to bypass the machinery by going directly to God. That strikes a reasonable balance.

We ourselves do that. We invent machines that do things automatically. But we also reserve the right to intervene, to break the cycle, to exercise rational discretion.

iii) Furthermore, I’d also expect God, especially in a fallen world, to foster a piety of patience. Learning how to wait. Learning how to trust. Learning to cope with disappointment and deal with frustration. Not instant gratification.

Even in the life of someone like Abraham, miracles weren’t a regular occurrence. Decades passed without anything extraordinary happening to him. And he’s exceptional.

Keener does at one point given very brief argument for why we can’t study the supernatural scientifically:

Since science depends on observation and experimentation, and since a “miracle is by definition an irreproducible” experience, even documented miracle cures by definition cannot fit precisely the expectations of science as it has been most narrowly defined. While affirming miracles, one scholar warns that “miracles cannot be investigated by the usual scientific methods since we cannot control the variables and perform experiments” (p. 608).

This is pretty clearly wrong. If God gave one man the power to work a certain limited kind of miracles at will, that would be reproducible, and subject to scientific experimentation. In particular, he could submit to a test under conditions designed to rule out fraud and delusion, and then we could see if he could still produce the apparent effects under those conditions. There are many people who would be happy to arrange such a test, including the James Randi Educational Foundation, which offers a $1,000,000 prize to anyone who can demonstrate paranormal abilities under controlled test conditions.

i) Actually, secular scientists typically incorporate methodological naturalism into their definition of science. So Keener is merely answering them on their own terms.

ii) If Hallquist rejects methodological naturalism, then he has no right to tilt the board against miracles. In that event there’s no antecedent presumption to the contrary which the evidence must overcome. 

iii) Moreover, OT prophets and NT apostles aren’t sorcerers. They have no inherent paranormal abilities. They can’t make extraordinary things happen at will. They can only act as God empowers them, when God empowers them, at God’s bidding.

iv) It’s striking how much faith “sceptics” place in a washed-up stage magician like James Randi.

For example, you can say that the reason people who claim to be psychic are never able to demonstrate under controlled test conditions that are designed to rule out cheating is that the presence of skeptics somehow disrupts psychic powers, but I think the more plausible explanation is that nobody really has psychic powers and precautions against cheating are doing exactly what they’re supposed.

i) That begs the question of whether telepathy is fraudulent.

ii) Moreover, it gratuitously assumes that experimental evidence is superior to anecdotal evidence. But experimental evidence is suited to inanimate processes rather than personal agency.

iii) Furthermore, Hallquist ignores statistical and experimental evidence that runs counter to his naturalism. Cf. R. Sheldrake, The Science Delusion, chap. 9.

So it can’t be disputed that the evidence for miracles is less than perfect. That’s enough to disprove Keener’s insinuation that skeptics of miracles wouldn’t be persuaded by any evidence. The vast majority of skeptics would have no trouble believing in the power of prayer if there were as much evidence for it as there is for the power of penicillin. But there isn’t.

i) That’s not true. There are unbelievers who say, as a matter of principle, that a miraculous explanation is, by definition, the least likely explanation. Therefore, any naturalistic explanation, however, improbable, is preferable to a miraculous explanation.

ii) Moreover, we wouldn’t expect personal agency to operate with the mechanical uniformity of chemical reactions.

The issue is not whether skeptics are closed-minded, the issue is that if the case is going to be touted as powerful evidence of miraculous healing, it needs to be possible to show with some degree of certainty that the doctors didn’t make a mistake. Keener claims that misdiagnosis can sometimes be ruled out, but he supports this claim with just a footnote.

i) Misdiagnosis cuts both ways. A doctor might automatically attribute a cure to medical treatment rather than prayer. Or he might automatically attribute an illness to natural causes rather than supernatural causes (e.g. possession, hexing).

ii) Likewise, why must a miraculous explanation achieve some degree of certainty, but a naturalistic explanation must not?

I don’t know if you’re getting sick of this post by now, but I am, so one last point: Keener tries to explain the lack of medical documentation for alleged miraculous healings by proposing that God has seen fit to mainly work healing miracles in the context of missionary efforts in the Third World, and that makes them difficult to document (see i.e. p. 662-704-705). Again, while this is a possible explanation, I don’t think it’s the best explanation. Alleged miracles not happening under circumstances where they can be well documented is just what we would expect if no miracles were happening all.

i) It’s not implausible that God performs miracles of healing (to take one example) more often among those who lack our medical resources.

ii) Likewise, It’s not implausible that God performs miracles more often in areas dominated by the occult.