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Arguing from miracles is just... painfully bad. If you have strong evidence that could be tested and perhaps replicated of supernatural phenomena occurring on Earth, that would be one thing. But this is like debating Trumpian 2020 election skeptics, where they're full of reasons to sneer and hate their outgroup, but if you ask them to make a positive case for their own arguments, they wither and try to deflect. The best evidence I can think of to dismiss these people as a group is the fact they've failed to find a single good example to rally around (be it an example of election fraud that was widespread enough to make a difference, or a miracle that genuinely occurred). They all have their own little gish gallop of bad reasons that primarily rely on the audience not being familiar with the arguments, because any evenhanded analysis would show their points are bunk.
I don't think our philosophy of science has a good way to handle non-repeatable results. If you look at something like the Oh-My-God particle detected exactly once in 1991, I'm not sure how I'd distinguish from a miracle. Sure, a scientific instrument saw it, but those aren't immune to weird things, like the faster-than-light observed neutrinos a decade ago. As a one-off observation, it's a bit more believable than, say, a coherent message, but if we instead observed the alien equivalent of the Arecibo message (sent exactly once in 1974), we'd be talking about something that would look, to me at least, rather miraculous.
I sort of agree with this at a broad level, but people claim miracles are happening quite frequently, so you'd expect at least one case to have evidence that's genuinely decent instead of just testimony.
There’s not a shortage of miracles with better than witness evidence though- the tilma of Juan Diego and the various Eucharistic miracles, for example.
I don't know about the tilma of Juan Diego, but I've looked into Eucharistic miracles a long time ago. All claims of such miracles are either 1) fringe enough that nobody cares, 2) unfalsifiable in that there's no evidence to check against, or 3) rely on witnesses.
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I think most of the miracles that people claim are happening quite frequently are things like:
I'm not really sure how to get proof that any of these things occur - most of them happen or may only happen inside the mind of the experiencer.
I could be wrong but my guess is that inexplicable healing (which would be the one pretty trivially verifiable thing, one would think) is not even particularly uncommon and that you don't hear about it because, well, does someone inexplicably healing strike you as slam-dunk proof of a miracle?
Apparently people inexplicably recovering from conditions such as dementia shortly before death is so common as to have its own name ("terminal lucidity") so it seems to me trivially easy to prove the "inexplicable healing" is real, but proving that the inexplicable healing involved supernatural powers is pretty hard and I'm not really sure how one would go about doing this.
I do think there have been experiments to see if people who were prayed over recovered at better rates than people who did not, and my recollection is that there did not seem to be a statistically significant difference. But it's been years since I read about that and I don't know any of the internals of the study, so I have no real informed opinion of its validity. At any rate, though, even an airtight study of that nature would not be able to prove that miracles were not real.
From a Bayesian perspective, I'd say that the claim that "miracles happen, but only in ways that are conveniently impossibly difficult to scientifically corroborate" is pretty good evidence that we should discount them unless we really do get some solid proof. This is especially true given humans have a known habit of attributing unexplainable phenomena on the supernatural, but which have later been conclusively proven to have mundane origins (e.g. primitive humans thinking thunder and lightning were gods fighting each other).
Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.
Well, firstly, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And as discussed, the evidence is (and your priors should be) that inexplicable things do happen, sometimes with enough frequency to be given a name. Which leads to goalpost shifting, because in the mind of many people, giving something a name explains it! But that's actually not so.
But secondly, that's very specifically not my claim. I am sure if we bothered to go around and look either of us could find instances of scientifically corroborated miracles, in the sense that
My question is – how does the CAT scan showing the person was healed prove that it was miraculous?
This all reminds me of the fact that scientists refused to accept the existence of meteorites for a very long period of time because they were one-off events.
But anyway, the claim here being made (by Voxel) is that miracles (or supernatural or if you prefer inexplicable events) aren't very uncommon or, shall you say, extraordinary.
Yes, it is.
"P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)P(¬E)" is a tautology, true for for any valid probabilities and conditional probabilities P with events E and M. Likewise for the identity "P(¬E)=1-P(E)". Combining the two gives
P(M) = P(M|E)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
To say that "E is evidence for M" is to assert "P(M|E) > P(M)", and if we use that (along with "P(E)>0") we can derive the inequality
P(M) > P(M)P(E) + P(M|¬E)(1-P(E))
Subtract "P(M)P(E)" from both sides, then divide by 1-P(E) (using "P(E)<1"), and we get
P(M) > P(M|¬E)
which is to say that "absence of E is evidence against M".
The magnitude of the evidence depends greatly on the specifics, and can be negligible, but it's never zero.
Perhaps it is more accurate to my position to say that absence of admitted evidence is not evidence of absence. Because there's "evidence" for practically every insane position in the world. This leads people to want to exclude evidence on the basis of it not being high-quality enough. Now, a certain amount of this is admirable and good, because it keeps you sane!
But some people, even subconsciously, use this to simply exclude all the evidence they like, and then having excluded all the evidence they dislike, declare there to be no evidence to the contrary position.
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It's not conclusive evidence but it should certainly raise our suspicious given that 1) humans frequently and erroneously attribute mundane phenomena to the supernatural (it's an extremely common human logical fault), 2) with so many claims, you'd assume at least a few would have clear evidence of occurring and not having ready explanations. It's similar to UFO sightings, which were quite common a few decades ago. If they were real, the proliferation of smartphones with cameras should have led to a surge in evidence of their existence. Instead, the lack of such evidence is a good indication that it was bunk all along. That's not to say we should be completely closeminded on the issue if evidence does arise, but we should wait for that compelling evidence first.
Minor or even moderate healing is a bad metric since the human body is extremely complicated, so mundane phenomena could easily be confused for the supernatural. Moreover, health is something people are very emotional about, so they pray about it frequently. But if people were e.g. regularly doing crazy things like being able to walk on water or (as Jiro mentioned) regrowing lost limbs, then that would be a better starting point.
This story should raise your opinion of science, not lower it. Rocks falling from the sky would seem like superstitions in the early enlightenment, but Jean-Baptiste Biot collected evidence it actually occurred and science was persuaded relatively quickly. Miracles should be held to the same standard.
Claims of miracles aren't uncommon, I'm sure. But that just proves that humans are fallible fools in their explanations.
I mean, my superficial understanding is that there are supposedly such instances (for instance my understanding is that the Catholic church investigates claims of miraculous healing fairly regularly, and I think that they use e.g. relevant medical professionals to investigate these claims as part of the canonization process).
Were you familiar with this? Sadly I know little about the topic specifically, so I feel under-equipped to make very specific arguments based on specific cases. If you are familiar with it, I would be very interested in your analysis. If you aren't, then perhaps we're being a bit presumptive to assume there aren't at least a few with clear evidence of occurring and no handy ready explanations?
I know more about this topic. I find that particular XKCD to be extremely facile (have you tried using a cell phone for aviation photography?), but I suppose it serves a socially useful purpose inasmuch as it prevents people from actually doing any research into the topic, which periodically ruins people's lives. I will just link to my earlier analysis of this position.
Yes, and I think healing is one of the easiest to use a scientific test on. (I think the bar the Catholic church uses for canonization is supposed to be higher for this reason).
Well, and this is part of my point, if people regularly regrew lost limbs (as they might with future technology) then it would not be considered miraculous, would it? I doubt you consider terminal lucidity miraculous, even though there apparently is clear evidence of it occurring and relatively scant evidence of good explanations. (I could be wrong about this, though, it's not my area of expertise).
This is the thing, though, is that the "humans are fallible fools" position extends to scientists and doctors. Which means that it provides a very convenient "out" for disbelieving in anything, no matter how reasonable belief in that thing is. There's no inherent limit on how many times you could say "humans are fallible fools" - if I were to bring you a hundred cases where doctors attested to a miracle, it would remain just as true the first time as the last.
And I don't even fully disagree! Humans are fallible fools! But ultimately I think that a lot of people, if they were being honest, they would refuse to believe in miracles unless they saw them personally, or, if they were particularly hardcore, even if they experienced them personally (this is the case with Michael Shermer, as I recall). The problem, though, is that if held in isolation it essentially lets people comfortably avoid updating their priors and lets them drift along with what is socially acceptable to believe instead of what is true. Anything upsetting can be dismissed as people being stupid.
Look, I apologize if I am coming across as a little testy. My very first comment on here was in response to someone saying "well if other countries had UFO programs, I would take them seriously." I provided some of the specific evidence he was ostensibly interested in, but my perception, based on his response, was that he was more interested in shifting the goalposts so that he didn't have to take UFOs seriously. (No offense to said user, and I hope I am wrong!)
Now, what I mind isn't people who are skeptical of miracles, or UFOs. I think measured skepticism is good and necessary. But I want some sort of framework to that skepticism, not merely a blank check to dismiss anything that is slightly out of step with the dogma of the day. Things that, in limited doses, might be true and helpful - things like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" or "humans are gullible fools" still have a tremendous potential to become thought-terminating cliches.
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I'm not sure what you're asking. We know that some things just don't happen. If someone regrows a limb after prayer, and there hasn't been some massive discovery about biology, then that's a miracle.
If you are asking "couldn't they have healed normally?" that's TA's point: "miracles" happen in ways that are hard to scientifically corroborate. It's always healing something that naturally heals in 10% of patients or otherwise could happen, not regrowing a limb. Then yes, the CAT scan doesn't prove it's miraculous, but that's not because it never could for any miracle, that's because the miracles are conveniently hard to corroborate.
If you are asking "how does that 100% absolutely prove a miracle, the answer is that pretty much everything science "proves" is just shown to be very very likely, and the miracle can meet that standard, even if it can't meet a standard of absolute 100% proof.
If you mean "how do we tell between a miracle and aliens shooting their heal ray at us, or some other explanation that's weird but doesn't involve God", the answer is that saying "it's either a miracle or aliens" is a really good start and drastically increases the credibility of religion, even if aliens can't be ruled out yet. Once that happens, we can proceed from there.
Except of course, it doesn't happen.
See, this is a catch-22. If things "don't just happen" then we know they aren't real. If things that shouldn't happen happen (such as dementia patients recovering their cognizance) than it's just a random mystery of the universe, but not a miracle. If someone regrew a limb after prayer, which a minute of Googling shows has in fact allegedly happened! people would be like "wow, there must be a good scientific explanation for this!" or "oh, clearly an elaborate fraud!"
Which I don't even think is necessarily a bad attitude - in my opinion there needs to be a nonzero amount of healthy skepticism in the world. I can think of plausible materialistic mechanisms for terminal lucidity. I'm sure with ten minutes of research I could do the same for the regrowth of limbs. Shoot, I can also think of plausible scientific mechanisms for pretty much any miracle you can think of, including regrown limbs, if you posit Sufficiently Advanced Science (which was Clark points out is indistinguishable from magic). If you posit a world where entities indistinguishable from angels were scientifically verified to exist, a nonzero number of people would just be like "woah its The Entities up to their advanced science again" instead of becoming religious converts (and in fact this describes a lot of the UFO community, particularly the more "out there" parts).
I'm sorry, I guess I am rambling. My point is that I don't think there's a single standard from skeptics at large here, as a general rule, just some very mobile goalposts. If you disagree, and want to post the specific evidence you'd need to believe in something miraculous, as well as what you would define "miraculous" as, maybe we could investigate whether your criteria have been fulfilled.
One obvious problem is that scientists (and doctors) are so incompetent that any attempt to prove a miracle medically or scientifically can easily be dismissed as incompetence or fraud. And in fact this is what happens, there are plenty of allegedly scientific attempts to probe paranormal topics and the accusation hurled at the experimenters is always that they are frauds or that their study designs suck. Which is probably true! Probably most study designs suck! So any time you bring up a study or a "medically verified miracle" it is very easy to dismiss it on the basis of "fraudulence and/or incompetence."
I'm not Catholic, so I don't have a good perspective on their methodology (and miracles are not really my jam anyway, so I don't good sources or really strong opinions on the famously reported ones) but my understanding is that the Catholic church actually does scientifically investigate miracles as part of their canonization process. Maybe some other Mottizens can point out some specific compelling cases. But I doubt anyone who is not already sympathetic will find them persuasive since "well they are motivated to find miracles," which again goes to a catch-22, since few people who are not so motivated bother to go looking for them.
The long and short of it is, though, as I understand it, is that there have been scientific investigations of miracles, they do convince some people, and other people remain unconvinced.
Well, actually, things impossible according to the known laws of physics do happen. And when they are proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, scientists literally invent
magican invisible practically unfalsifiable mystery substance to explain them. But I don't particularly think this increases the credibility of religion, it just decreases the credibility of scientists. Which is much the same reaction skeptics of "woo" have when research that seems to validate "woo" comes out.Saying that X counts as a miracle doesn't mean that if you claim X, it automatically counts. It means that you managed to get over one hurdle--you managed to claim something that, if it happened, would be a miracle. Getting past the "if it happened" part is a separate hurdle.
The reason such things are dismissed as incompetence or fraud is that they are incompetence or fraud.
There are plenty of cases where science has noticed a lot of incompetence and fraud in something, and yet determined that some of it is real. (High temnperature superconductors come to mind.) Miracles aren't dismissed because scientists dismiss everything, miracles are dismissed because they have particularly bad claims and evidence, just like psychic powers, space aliens, and non-Christian miracles.
No they don't. Actually, I have no idea what you're talking about, except maybe ether, which you'll notice modern scientists don't believe in.
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The claim is quite specifically that Bayesianism is incapable of handling certain truths. It is entirely possible for something to be absolutely true and immensely unlikely.
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Here's a quick look at the methodology of several studies. One of the largest studies, which famously reported a negative result, included people from many religions but barely any Protestant Christians.
Thanks, interesting!
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