Some God Talk for a Change: Part 3

Basman

I think Hume’s definition of miracles is right assuming that some other “invisible agent” is something outside the laws of nature. I also think Dawkins is right when he says, as I would put it, miracles inform the basis of religious belief—regardless which end of the miracles- religion telescope we look through—and that a belief in miracles is inconsistent with the principles of science.

I also think that it follows that if there cannot be miracles we cannot in principle have religion and that the existence of miracles is a sure step towards, a necessary condition of, the validity of religion.

A few other short "I thinks":

1. the question of testimony or a credible witness for a miracle is a “second order” problem.

2. the example of human clones as an exception to the “law of nature” that there cannot be a virgin birth, if I am understanding what HM is arguing, is patently misconceived.

3. In fact Hume does say that miracles do not occur but HM has chosen to deal with Hume’s treatment of the problem of testimony. (The presupposition of Hume's analysis of the problem of testimony is the phenomenal impossibility of miracles.)

Continuing more generally, when HM cavils that Dawkins is looking through the wrong end of the miracles-religion telescope he makes no worthy point. For Dawkins’s argument, it doesn’t matter whether people start first with miracles and then get to religion or start first with religion and then get to miracles. The point is the indissolubility of the religion-miracles connection. Religion does not, cannot, exist without miracles. And, therefore, it is incoherent to assert the truth of religion and the principles of science in the same intellectual breath.

Take HM’s example: whether Jesus had a human procreational father. If the answer is specifically no, then that destroys Christianity as a religion. If the answer is no both specifically and because the laws of nature—which include cloning, the science of which I do not understand—negate the possibility of miracles, then what religion can there be? Anything that claims to be a notion of religion, or any claim to be a particular religion, which eschews miracles, or is not dependant on miracles, fails in its claim. It’s something else which is consistent with the order of nature or a non religious understanding of reality.

To say, as does HM:

...Suppose the correct answer is: no, Jesus did not have a human father. This would no more establish the truth of religion than the opposite falsifies it. If Jesus was born of a virgin, it does not follow that a law of nature was violated. To say "if A, then B" is not to say that there will be a B only if there is an A...

is knowingly to be obscure.

HM offers cloning as a counter example to the *natural laws*—children must have human fathers, or cannot be born of virgin mothers— he seeks to invalidate. But the issue isn’t the fixity of the formulation of a natural law. The issue is natural law itself, which accommodates science expanding cloning to the point of human conception. HM’s example does no violence to Hume, nor to Dawkins. But it does HM no intellectual favor.

HM presents another case in trying to erode the wedge between science and the existence of miracles—the Azande enigma of why a man was killed by a falling branch. HM and the Azande are good with the "if A" –say termites—"then B" of the branch falling on the guy, which is really the "if A then B" of the branch falling. But religion goes to the guy being there when "if A then B" caused the branch to fall. Why was that guy at that spot?

HM says, conflating coincidence and causality:

… People might accept a scientific account of why a particular event occurred, yet ask similar sorts of questions about why there are particular juxtapositions of occurrences. Much of this speculation and theorising will be baseless, but there seems no justification for saying all such thinking is nonsensical. By analogy: most conspiracy theories are groundless, but not all of them are…

The thinking, usually baseless, the conspiracy theories, usually groundless, may have an answer. Maybe the Azande wood and termite expert knew the tree was going to shed its branch at time x and told y to be there at time x, or whatever. The point, implicit but unrecognized in HM’s reasoning, is that the answer to the baselessness and the groundlessness, if any, will be provided by natural laws—"if A then B". Otherwise, the Azande, and perhaps HM, can believe whatever they will, but their belief, if based on extra natural occurrences—say, "a violation of the laws of nature...a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent"— puts them back swimming in the same irrational, religious soup from which Hume and Dawkins, amongst others, have worked mightily and well to lift us.

In all of his arguments, as I read them, HM is nowhere near to resolving the intellectual contradiction between miracles as a necessary condition of religion for one and scientific principles for two.