Hugo Meynell On Miracles

Posted in Quickies on  | 1 minute | 6 Comments →

From Victor Reppert’s Miracles and the Case for Theism:

According to Hugo Meynell, if evidence for an event stands up to impartial scrutiny, if it continues to resist explanation in terms of the ordinary laws of nature, and if it coheres with a religious system’s claims about the activities and promises of God, then it can reasonable be called miraculous, and can form part of a case for theism. [p.14]

This is exactly what I see happening on multiple fronts, e.g. the growing body of literature on NDE’s, to name just one line of evidence that anybody with access to research tools can investigate for themselves. Along similar lines, while it doesn’t directly cohere with any religious claim about the activities and promises of God that I’m aware of, the Hyman-Honorton Joint Communiqué affirms phenomena that resist explanation in terms of ordinary laws of nature. The evidence is all around us–for those who haven’t closed their minds, that is.

MiracleQuest Continues: Another Response To jim

Posted in Atheism, Blogosphere, Epistemology, Faith, MiracleQuest, Religion, Responses, Science, Skepticism on  | 3 minutes | No Comments →

While doing some "fall cleaning" around here, I found today's post in the "drafts" folder.

Although the original exchange occurred over a month ago, and I'm unsure why I'm responding to a guy who banned me from his blog for an unspecified "breach of honesty" while he apparently has no problem calling me names like "mealy-mouthed prick" all over the internet, but dedication to the arguments must overlook the uglier sides of debate. Granted, I know what one or two of you might be thinking: "Ah cl, we hate it when you rehash these 'he said this, I said that' arguments. Why burden us with your own online social difficulties??" It's not that. Rather, I feel there are some cogent rebuttals here on my part, and I thought it would be a waste to just trash the post.

So, let's get to it. Comments welcomed.

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MiracleQuest Continues, This Time It’s Limb Regeneration: Response To John Evo

Posted in Blogosphere, Logic, MiracleQuest, Religion, Science, Skepticism, Thinking Critically on  | 6 minutes | 6 Comments →

So, we were discussing the hypothetical scenario of a limb generation, and how much supernatural credence we could assign to such a thing. The blog owner, jim, banned me, because his blog is, in his own words, "not a free-speech zone." He claimed I committed an "egregious breach of honesty above" and demanded that I apologize for it, yet 40 comments preceded his, and he refused to be any more specific than that. I felt such a demand was a bit strange coming from somebody who apparently has no problem calling others things like "mealy-mouthed prick" and "disputational pissant." Further out of line for a rationalist was that jim didn't even offer a testable claim: he never even said where this "egregious breach of honesty" occurred, that I could challenge it. He just deleted my next comment.

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How Would You Define A Miracle, Redux

Posted in Faith, MiracleQuest, Religion, Skepticism on  | 5 minutes | 25 Comments →

What in the world do people mean when they use the word miracle

The answer is essentially something out of this world

The problem is, how in this world do we test for that?

Over at SI's, Modusoperandi recently described a miracle as "something that doesn't happen." Okay, well… I had to assume he meant something that rarely happens, but is that really any more helpful as a parameter? I'm no probability whiz, but it seems to me that given enough rolls of the dice, any combination can eventually result.

Another problem with this view is that it just simply assumes miracles rarely happen. Granted, nobody I know has been resurrected, but who's to say any of the countless everyday occurrences where lives are being saved weren't miraculous? Who's to say any of the countless everyday occurrences where lives are being lost weren't malevolent expressions of the phenomenon? Who's to say there's not a supernatural or spiritual component to things like UFO phenomena, astral projection, clairsentience or any of the other strange phenomena human beings experience? If we have no idea what miracles are, how can we move forward and say they happen rarely?

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The Perfect Analogy For MiracleQuest?

Posted in Logic, MiracleQuest, Quickies, Religion, Skepticism, Thinking Critically on  | 1 minute | 3 Comments →

So, I'm running a bit late on the next installment of the Atheist Universe series, but I happened to have an experience this morning that was quite an epiphany. The experience itself was nothing uncommon, grandiose or mystical, and it was something I'm willing to bet most all non-indigenous people experience quite frequently.

The weather is great today, which always makes the 5-mile skate to the warehouse that much more enjoyable. After I'd entered the front door, and as I was walking upstairs, I heard a very loud and unmistakable THUD coming from an adjacent room. Always naturally curious, I wondered what may have caused this noise, and no sooner than I'd finished wondering, the epiphany came on with such strong force that I subsequently wondered if somebody had slipped me a hit of ecstasy or something.

Can we deduce the specific attributes of a rock lobbed into a pond based solely on the ripples produced? Similarly, seeking to affirm or deny acts of supernatural beings puts one on the same epistemologically untenable level as seeking to affirm or deny the specific cause of the THUD one hears in an adjacent room.

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. 

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MiracleQuest Continues: Retracing Our Steps At DD’s

Posted in Atheism, Blogosphere, MiracleQuest, Religion, Science, Skepticism, Thinking Critically on  | 5 minutes | 5 Comments →

So I'm part of the lovely little soiree about miracles that's been going on over at DD's for months. The purpose of today's post is to strain some of my points from that debate, and eventually I hope to distill them into one concise listing.

When I entered the discussion over at DD's, I just happened to be fresh off the heels of a similar argument, and my first comment criticized attempts to verify miracles without agreed-upon definitions and criteria. More specifically, in the context of allegedly miraculous healing, I asked how we might eliminate confounders such as spontaneous remission and the placebo effect. Commenters John Morales and jim both chimed in at this point.

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MiracleQuest Continues: On Post Hoc Reasoning & The Re-Captitated Man

Posted in Atheism, Blogosphere, Logic, MiracleQuest, Religion, Responses, Skepticism, Thinking Critically on  | 8 minutes | 26 Comments →

So it appears Deacon Duncan has accused me of post hoc reasoning regarding an objection I made to his elaboration on my re-capitation example. I'd like to take a moment to discuss why I feel his complaints are based on an overly-charitable interpretation of my objection, and I'm curious to hear what you think. The linked post is part of a lengthy ongoing discussion, so a little backstory might be helpful.

For the past month or so at EvangelicalRealism, we've been discussing the amount of credibility we can reasonably assign to miracle stories. Now, everyone has different definitions of a miracle and different thresholds of skepticism through which they filter observed events. Phenomena like the Marian apparitions at Zeitoun are obviously sufficient to convince some people, yet others remain skeptical. So how might we define a miracle objectively, in a manner that anyone can apply to any observed event?

I entered the discussion attempting to establish a rigorous set of criteria one could apply to determine whether or not any event might be considered a miracle. That didn't work out very well, so in further attempts to determine the 'miracle switch' in everybody's brains, I introduced the re-capitated man as a hypothetical example, asking skeptics how they would parse such an event. That is, if we observed a man get decapitated, then an hour later we observe the man's head re-attach after which he goes into the bar for a drink, would we have grounds to say something "miraculous" had occurred? 

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Trilobytes Don’t Deny Evolution Because Humans Weren’t Around In The Cambrian

Posted in Blogosphere, Logic, Religion, Responses, Skepticism, Thinking Critically on  | 14 minutes | 2 Comments →

The title will make sense later and this post has nothing to do with evolution.

Last month I got involved in a thread which has turned out to be quite productive in my opinion. Although I can't speak for the others involved, I've gained considerable insights into a variety of epistemological arguments and ideas. Miracles have been the topic that have underscored our debate, and we've bantered about the amount of credibility one can reasonably assign to episodes like Zeitoun and Bernadette McKenzie for example. The blog's host, Deacon Duncan (DD), also made a claim he calls the Undeniable Fact, and commenters both here and there have agreed and disagreed with that.

DD devotes considerable thought to the comments which keeps the discussion going and for that he gets good mention. It also helps that he's a good writer. If you have good logic, you don't get good writing for free, so people that have both are fortunate. This related post of DD's is among the better I've read in terms of writing that succinctly and persuasively portrays the inherent dilemmas in miracle claims and the amount of credibility we can assign to them.

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How Would You Define A Miracle?

Posted in Atheism, Blogosphere, Faith, MiracleQuest, Religion, Skepticism on  | 5 minutes | 5 Comments →

In the past few months, via several discussions with a variety of learned skeptics and religious people, I've come to better understand the disparities in our concepts of miracles, and specifically, I've been thinking about how falsifiability and confounders diminish the extent to which an alleged miracle can be considered authentic. It may very well be that proving a miracle is impossible, and on this matter I haven't quite decided yet, but I've certainly concluded that there is a wide range of skeptical positions one might take concerning the concept of miracles, and what we can justifiedly say about them, if and when they do occur.

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome regarding alleged healing miracles is developing a reliable method for excluding confounders of spontaneous remission and the placebo effect. Hitherto unexplained, either of these mysterious phenomena would provide good confounding cover for a genuine miracle, and that's not to say that all instances of spontaneous remission and placebo effect are intrinsically miraculous, either. Some skeptics are fond of claiming that only repeatable, observable, systematic instances of miracles would be sufficient to convince them that they were unjustified in their skepticism. This is sounds more like magic than miracle.

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