MiracleQuest Continues: My Response To The Ultimate Superstition
Posted in Astronomy, Blogosphere, Books, Logic, MiracleQuest, Religion, Responses, Science, Skepticism on | 4 minutes | 13 Comments →
In X-Files Friday: The Ultimate Superstition, DD cites Geisler and Turek,
David Hume argued that miracles cannot affirm any one religion because miracles are based on poor testimony and all religions have them. In other words, miracle claims are self canceling. Unfortunately for Hume, his objection does not describe the actual state of affairs. First, Hume makes a hasty generalization by saying that alleged miracles from all religions are alike. As we’ve seen since chapter 9, the miracles associated with Christianity are not based on poor testimony. They are based on early, eyewitness, multiple-source testimony that is unrivaled in any other world religion. That is, no other world religion has verified miracles like those in the New Testament. (G&T)
…then says,
What we have in the New Testament is a well-documented, well-preserved record of people making claims. This does not constitute a body of verified miracles. (DD)
I agree. I've certainly not been afraid to criticize some of G&T's strategies elsewhere, and I agree that in this citation, G&T conflate claims with verification – and that's wrong. To me, it appears G&T simply presume the correctness of that which they are trying to prove, by alluding to it as verified. However, G&T's criticisms of Hume happen to be spot-on, and quite pertinent to our ongoing miracle discussion. That being said, I've also complimented DD's logical prowess elsewhere, but this time he did not address G&T's citation squarely at all – just flanked them with Benny Hinn before proceeding on to their "One Solitary Man" ideas.
G&T are correct in that different religions interpret miracles differently. Some religions don't account for them at all, and of those that do, some interpretations are more amenable to empirical testing and proving than others – hands down. For example, although superfluous and unscientific, intercessory prayer studies assume a naively plausible hypothetical framework we might be able to work in – could we only relinquish the foolish idea that we can systematically test the actions of whimsical deities.
Alas, DD's descent into Benny Hinn was really disappointing and a total red herring. Mentioning well-dressed charlatans only serves to sidestep G&T's valid concerns and further discredit the genuinely miraculous – should it exist. DD's strategy here was not unlike denigrating macroevolution with Piltdown Man – persuasion not by evidence leading to a reasoned inductive conclusion, but by rhetorical victory. He didn't need to mention Benny Hinn to make the cogent point that claims don't entail authenticity, or to successfully address G&T's pertinent rebuttal to Hume.
It’s ironic, because I really doubt that David Hume would find himself at all discomfited by the latter day superstitions that try to make the Big Bang an argument for a Creator, when in fact it eliminates the possibility of a Creator. (DD)
I have no care to surmise how Hume might react today, but my jaw almost dropped when I read that statement, the last seven words in particular. Although I'll certainly wait to hear any case, don't be surprised if "Big Bang eliminates the possibility of a Creator" makes its way into the False Arguments series. By all means, DD or anyone, show me your reasoned arguments demonstrating how the Big Bang "eliminates the possibility of a Creator." I find that a very disturbing argument, one that bastardizes science to bolster skepticism, as equally disturbing as any argument that bastardizes science to bolster religion.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but most skeptics do not accept the First Cause argument. If we can't say the Big Bang proves a Creator, how can we say it eliminates the possibility of a Creator?
nal
says...I’ll take a stab at it. It may not be the same argument that DD would give, but since I can’t post comments over there anymore, I’ll do it here.
Creation is a cause-and-effect process. Creation of spacetime would necessitate a condition of no spacetime. Without time, cause and effect are simultaneous, and hence, lose any meaning. Therefore creation without time is meaningless.
nal
says...I’ll take a stab at it. It may not be the same argument that DD would give, but since I can’t post comments over there anymore, I’ll do it here.
Creation is a cause-and-effect process. Creation of spacetime would necessitate a condition of no spacetime. Without time, cause and effect are simultaneous, and hence, lose any meaning. Therefore creation without time is meaningless.
cl
says...nal,
Good to have you stop by, you’re welcomed anytime. You said,
I have no problem with that.
That may or may not be so. I would clarify that “no spacetime” doesn’t mean there cannot be a “meta spacetime,” a larger “something” in which our “something” exists. As an analogy, say you live in a house that you built, and inside that house you built a fishbowl. “Meta spacetime” did not begin when you built the fishbowl, but when you built the house. We don’t know if our universe exists in a “meta spacetime” or not, so I think more caution is needed there.
I don’t think cause and effect can ever be simultaneous, but maybe I’m giving the idea short thrift. Isn’t time just a euphemism for human observation? Seriously. The word time just refers to the gap between two events. The gap between two events is entirely categorical and needs an observer to exist. Even without “time” – i.e. whether humans are present to observe the gaps between events or not – cause and effect still retain meaning in my opinion. If there were no conscious life on our planet, asteroid impact would constitute causes that still had effects in the real world, right?
Honestly, I think the argument is more rhetorical than anything. First you have to accept that without time, cause and effect are simultaneous, which I do not – and even if I did, that they would lose meaning is not a guaranteed conclusion, either. I’m still hung up on the second sentence.
And, I can’t help but to be curious, perhaps even nosy – why can’t you post comments over at DD’s anymore? Surely, you weren’t banned or anything like that, right?
nal
says...It would have to be more complicated than the fishbowl analogy. The fishbowl and the house share the same three dimensional space and hence, the house would be detectable from the fishbowl. The meta spacetime could not occupy the same dimensional space as our spacetime or we would be able to detect it. It could not occupy four dimensions since we could detect its three dimensional projection in our spacetime. Could another dimensional universe exist “outside” our universe? Does an “outside” even exist?
If one assumes some kind of meta spacetime, doesn’t an infinite regress of creation then rear its ugly head?
I agree. It was an argument that WLC used in one of his debates. Without time even the word simultaneous has no meaning.
To a certain extent it is, especially if logic is included in the rhetoric. I would argue that our concept of creation is so tied to cause and effect, and therefore time, that creation of time is meaningless.
I tried to post a comment (at several different times) from Larry Moran on micro/macro evolution, and they never showed up. I thought the comment germane but it did contradict some of the other commenters. When I clicked “Post” everything happened like it should, but the comment never showed up. I still enjoy reading DD’s posts.
Freidenker
says...Sure, you can say that time did not exist but something “like time” existed. I imagine that this is what ultimately any counter-argument against DD in this respect would amount.
See, theoretically, anything is possible. I don’t know how DD could make the claim he did without elucidating, and since I don’t know nearly enough about the big bang to give the answer myself, I can’t say what the big bang says or doesn’t say about the creator.
HOWEVER
If the big bang clearly states that time did not exist before the big bang, (big “if” there. I don’t know if that’s what the BB does or if something like that can even be accounted for with evidence)
— it is logically impossible for the universe to have a reason, as far as we are concerned, as human beings who are only aware of reasons following causes in time.
Saying that there might have been a special kind of time before time began is the same as saying that the entire universe was created last Thursday, evidence that it looks 14 billion years old included.
It’s not wrong. It’s just useless.
You know, what I found much more annoying about G&T’s claim is that they probably made it without going too deep into other religions. As an atheist raised Jewish in the Jewish state (Israel), boy, I tell ya – miracle claims are ABUNDANT, and our beardheads are just as sure of their validity as our robed counterparts.
cl
says...Hey who knows… maybe DD will “show up in real life” and let us know how he’d respond.. :)
nal,
I don’t mean to be cantankerous on such a beautiful Saturday morning, but I’ve got a few gripes with some of those responses. You said, “Creation of spacetime would necessitate a condition of no spacetime.” That statement is debatable. Creation itself seems to require spacetime, no? If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?
I can easily agree that the house and the fishbowl would share the same three-dimensional space, and I think that actually refutes the conclusion you draw, that, “The meta spacetime could not occupy the same dimensional space as our spacetime or we would be able to detect it.” The way I see it, the metaspacetime would have to occupy the same dimensional space – to clarify, it seems reasonable that metaspacetime and our spacetime would share overlapping dimensional space. Incidentally, who’s to say in all the current monitoring of our universe that we’re not detecting such overlapping dimensional space? We would never notice, much like a fish swimming through the water of his bowl also happens to be swimming through our house but never notices? Sure, the fish thinks all there is in his universe is water, and beyond the edge of his universe things look blurry at best, but the water itself that is the fish’s universe is also both enveloped by the house and shares dimensional space with the house.
I don’t believe there’s a discussion about God and creation that doesn’t lead to an infinite regress. Either way, it appears we must say that something was always here, right? We have no point of reference for something that can exist eternally and uncaused. Some say God caused the universe and God always was. If this isn’t true, then the universe itself must have always existed – granted, not necessarily in its current form. Both statements are problematic. The former seems outside the purview of science, and the latter cannot be justified with what we know about the laws of physics. The oscillating universe theory is simply unfeasible according to everything we’ve learned in the past 100 years.
I don’t see how the conclusion flows from the premise. I don’t see anything in the fact of the universe inflating from a singularity that entails the claim “creation of time is meaningless,” but perhaps you can explain. The value of time varies with the value of whatever space it occurs in. Time itself is a very flexible concept. If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?
And, your Moran citations came through just fine. It was the same one three times in a row, correct? I saw it right when you posted. I don’t know why nobody else noticed them.
Freidenker,
Problem is, that’s not what I mean to say. What I intend to say is that creation cannot occur in a vacuum. If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?
But we can’t even say “before the Big Bang” if that’s the case though, which to me illustrates the folly of the argument. Even so, let’s grant that time as we know and refer to it stops at the singularity, and let’s call the existence of the universe E. They say that for the past 14 billion years or so, E. Yet, there would still be some point ~E, whether humans were around to cogitate it or not.
cl
says...Hey who knows… maybe DD will “show up in real life” and let us know how he’d respond.. :)
nal,
I don’t mean to be cantankerous on such a beautiful Saturday morning, but I’ve got a few gripes with some of those responses. You said, “Creation of spacetime would necessitate a condition of no spacetime.” That statement is debatable. Creation itself seems to require spacetime, no? If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?
I can easily agree that the house and the fishbowl would share the same three-dimensional space, and I think that actually refutes the conclusion you draw, that, “The meta spacetime could not occupy the same dimensional space as our spacetime or we would be able to detect it.” The way I see it, the metaspacetime would have to occupy the same dimensional space – to clarify, it seems reasonable that metaspacetime and our spacetime would share overlapping dimensional space. Incidentally, who’s to say in all the current monitoring of our universe that we’re not detecting such overlapping dimensional space? We would never notice, much like a fish swimming through the water of his bowl also happens to be swimming through our house but never notices? Sure, the fish thinks all there is in his universe is water, and beyond the edge of his universe things look blurry at best, but the water itself that is the fish’s universe is also both enveloped by the house and shares dimensional space with the house.
I don’t believe there’s a discussion about God and creation that doesn’t lead to an infinite regress. Either way, it appears we must say that something was always here, right? We have no point of reference for something that can exist eternally and uncaused. Some say God caused the universe and God always was. If this isn’t true, then the universe itself must have always existed – granted, not necessarily in its current form. Both statements are problematic. The former seems outside the purview of science, and the latter cannot be justified with what we know about the laws of physics. The oscillating universe theory is simply unfeasible according to everything we’ve learned in the past 100 years.
I don’t see how the conclusion flows from the premise. I don’t see anything in the fact of the universe inflating from a singularity that entails the claim “creation of time is meaningless,” but perhaps you can explain. The value of time varies with the value of whatever space it occurs in. Time itself is a very flexible concept. If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?
And, your Moran citations came through just fine. It was the same one three times in a row, correct? I saw it right when you posted. I don’t know why nobody else noticed them.
Freidenker,
Problem is, that’s not what I mean to say. What I intend to say is that creation cannot occur in a vacuum. If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?
But we can’t even say “before the Big Bang” if that’s the case though, which to me illustrates the folly of the argument. Even so, let’s grant that time as we know and refer to it stops at the singularity, and let’s call the existence of the universe E. They say that for the past 14 billion years or so, E. Yet, there would still be some point ~E, whether humans were around to cogitate it or not.
nal
says...Would events in the house affect the fishbowl? Would events in metaspacetime affect our spacetime?
How about: “Creation of our spacetime would necessitate a condition of no our spacetime.”
While I cannot disprove a metaspacetime, I don’t see any indication of it either.
Freidenker
says...” If any Creator exists that can cause something like our universe to begin to exist, it is reasonable that such a Creator already exists in some sort of metaspacetime of its own, thus cause and effect retain all significance. Do you see a way that could not be so?”
Again, that’s a HUGE if. In fact, it plays as nothing more than an excuse to make the creator possible. Of course he’s possible, there’s just no way to discern whether he exists or not. None of what you said changes the fact that if time as we know it did not exist, than causes, as we know it, did not exist. Perhaps a “different kind of causes” existed (a la your metaspacetime or whatnot) – but that’s pure conjecture.
If such a framework existed, then of course the universe could have had a “cause” (or a “metacause”, if we stick to your terminology)
Karla
says...Wow I just followed the link to DD’s post and that’s really messed up. For one, that’s not a good review of Frank Turek and Norman Geisler’s book.
Also his referral to Hank Hanegraaf question to Benny Hinn is crazy, because Benny Hinn isn’t going to have interviewed each person who comes to his meetings and get medical documentation. There is no need for someone to go to a doctor to find out the pain they had in their shoulder for ten years is gone. You go to a doctor when your sick not when your healed. Now if someone had cancer they would need to go have that checked out. But Benny Hinn can’t possibly keep track of all that.
I have seen healings up close and have experienced them but I haven’t got any medical records. I’ve prayed for people and seen them healed, but I didn’t do a medical background check on them. Why in the world would I need to? They know if they have been healed and I know when I saw an arm grow out before my eyes I didn’t need to have them go to a doctor to prove what I and others saw.
Karla
says...Actually I think most of the people who don’t believe the supernatural is possible wouldn’t believe a doctor’s report either. It would have to happen to them to get their attention.
cl
says...I’m not sure what’s up with TypePad, guys. Sorry about the HTML problems, I’ve noticed them too. Bear with us!
nal,
I’d would imagine they would have to.
That works for me. I don’t think a condition of “no our spacetime” entails a condition of “no time, hence no cause and effect or beginning to the universe.
I can’t say whether we see any indication of it or not. What are we looking for? Perhaps we already see it.
Freidenker,
I disagree that “time as we know it” can “not exist.” Wherever you have an observer, you have time. All I’m saying is, I don’t think a condition of “no our spacetime” entails a condition of “no time, hence no cause and effect or beginning to the universe. Even if I granted that it did, thus would still only refute the First Cause argument, and DD’s claim was that the Big Bang eliminates the possibility of a Creator. I have not seen that claim justified, neither here nor there, and in my opinion, it’s an inflated claim.
Karla,
Hey, thanks for stoppin’ by. All in all, I think much of what DD says regarding G&T is correct. I wish he wouldn’t have mentioned Benny Hinn at all.
I completely agree with you, and I’m going to prove this, soon.
cl
says...I’m not sure what’s up with TypePad, guys. Sorry about the HTML problems, I’ve noticed them too. Bear with us!
nal,
I’d would imagine they would have to.
That works for me. I don’t think a condition of “no our spacetime” entails a condition of “no time, hence no cause and effect or beginning to the universe.
I can’t say whether we see any indication of it or not. What are we looking for? Perhaps we already see it.
Freidenker,
I disagree that “time as we know it” can “not exist.” Wherever you have an observer, you have time. All I’m saying is, I don’t think a condition of “no our spacetime” entails a condition of “no time, hence no cause and effect or beginning to the universe. Even if I granted that it did, thus would still only refute the First Cause argument, and DD’s claim was that the Big Bang eliminates the possibility of a Creator. I have not seen that claim justified, neither here nor there, and in my opinion, it’s an inflated claim.
Karla,
Hey, thanks for stoppin’ by. All in all, I think much of what DD says regarding G&T is correct. I wish he wouldn’t have mentioned Benny Hinn at all.
I completely agree with you, and I’m going to prove this, soon.