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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.
Sure.
It's not scientists and doctors I am worried about dismissing everything. Plenty of scientists and doctors believe in miracles, psychic powers, space aliens, and other woo.
My layman's understanding is that dark matter was invented to explain the otherwise unusual expansion of the universe, has never been observed, and conveniently (like miracles) is believed by its nature to be difficult to observe because of the way it does (or doesn't) interact with regular matter.
Difficult, but not impossible. The clearest candidate so far is the Bullet Cluster, where we can see the shock wave from regular matter in the galactic collision, but we can also see the lensing from a bunch of something invisible in EM (i.e. "dark") that is a major source of gravity (i.e. "matter") that managed to shoot through the collision without itself colliding so much.
We could argue about what counts as an observation (have I ever really seen my kids, or have I only seen the photons bouncing off them?), but we've observed something that looks dark and acts like matter, regardless of how precisely we can identify it in the future. There are other theories that try to explain galactic rotation curves (the original motivation for theorizing "dark matter") with e.g. changes to how gravity works at long ranges, but they have a much harder time explaining the Bullet Cluster.
This was the motivation for dark energy, not dark matter. Dark energy is a much better candidate for your metaphor here. If it's uniformly distributed in space (which it seems to be on large scales, plus or minus 10%) then the volume of the Earth would include about 6 septillion kilograms of matter and 1 milligram of dark energy. Our best candidate for dark energy right now is probably "Einstein's equations are still consistent if we add a constant, so maybe that constant is super tiny instead of zero", and even that runs into a problem where, when we try out different particle physics theories for predicting the constant, we either get "zero" or "A septillion septillion septillion septillion septillion times larger than what we see". This definitely feels more like an "invention" than a "discovery" still.
I'm not sure you want to take the "ha, scientists invent invisible things too" metaphor too far, though. The examples get cooler than the Bullet Cluster. When scientists invent such things we sometimes get discoveries like neutrinos (predicted just to try to balance particle physics equations, and nearly impossible to see because they barely interact with anything, but we can detect them now), or the planet Neptune (predicted based on irregularities in Uranus' orbit, and essentially discovered by an astronomer "with the point of his pen" before we could figure out where to point our telescopes). Even when they fail at it we still get things like General Relativity (which explains irregularities in Mercury's orbit that were once hypothesized to be due to a planet "Vulcan" even closer to the sun). Neutrino detectors are still huge and expensive, but now anyone can see Neptune with a home telescope or use the corrected-for-relativity GPS system in their phone.
Could miracles ever work the same way? You've learned about the Miracle of Calanda now; perhaps we could convince people to start praying for amputees, and we'd see claims of miraculous limb regrowth rise to match claims of e.g. miraculous cancer remission? Would you expect that to work, and start trying, and report back to us after you see it start working? I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong like that.
Sure - I mean, my understanding is that there are a few different theories that claim to explain it. The details are inside baseball to me, but it seems to me that oftentimes ambiguous evidence like this can cut more than one way (more on that in a second).
My position here, to be clear, is that people should try to match theories to observations. If you observe something miraculous, you should try to formulate a theory to explain it. "We made an observational error" should be considered (and of course as you know scientists do sometimes predict cool things like Neptune and sometimes they goof up and observe faster-than-light particles that aren't real). What makes me cranky is excluding observations because they don't fit to theories (which for all the dunking I do on DARK MATTER is what scientists would be doing if they didn't invent something like it).
Well, first off thank you for the interested response.
Secondly, let's think through this a bit. If I logged in here and reported that I had successfully regenerated a limb through prayer, would you believe me? You can investigate the Miracle of Calanda for yourself, whatever you can say about it it does seem to be better documented than "Shrike, anonymous Motte user, reports spontaneous leg regrowth." Even if I did provide documentation, would you find it easier to believe in a miracle or in a freak of nature?
If you would find it easier to believe in a miracle, then why is the Miracle of Calandra not enough for you? Is there a specific methodological flaw in the reporting that you have an issue with (which, who knows, if I looked into it I might have as well, I am very open-minded to that possibility) or do you just think that sometimes people are dumb and fooled? In which case why would I providing convincing documentation of a miracle persuade you?
Thirdly, to answer your question directly - I would expect for it to be possible to work. In my religious tradition (and indeed in most religious traditions, I imagine) God does not necessarily act as believers would wish 100% of the time. (There's an interesting question of whether or not it would be sacrilegious in some way to checks notes ask God for a miracle to win an online argument, hahahaha!)
(If your question is "why don't you run an RCT or something" then sadly the answer is that I am in the wrong field. If GPT makes billionaires of us all then I wouldn't mind joining a Motte Joint Task Force On The Investigation Of Miracles though!)
Finally- if I was to test it scientifically (that is, attempt to replicate a miracle) I would probably have to follow the procedure alleged in the miracle (which as a non-Catholic and also as a person with both of my legs, I would frankly be loathe to do).
With all this being said, if I do encounter something extraordinary* that seems to be the direct result of prayer I will certainly consider reporting it to the Motte.
*To be entirely honest I have, several times, had various events that might be described as "answers to prayer" or "synchronicity," but I do not think that people who have not experienced them will find them particularly compelling. In my own personal experience it is extremely easy to write things like that off as "happenstance" regardless of how unlikely they are, and none of my personal stories are particularly startling.
If this is actually true, I (and I am being quite serious about this) would recommend that you consider taking up prayer, understanding that God is not a magic wand. For the reasons I laid out above, I think that you would find an event that happened to you much more persuasive than an event that happened to me.
Now, maybe I misconstrued or misunderstood you, there. Happy for clarification.
We all have to do that all the time when the observations aren't replicable, though. Flying saucers, cryptids, and alien abductions are probably the big three that stuck around most in the USA in my lifetime, but they're the tip of a millennia-old folklore iceberg with a thousand different species of supernatural being at the bottom. I think what's interesting about the "supernatural observations plummeted when we invented cameras" quip is that it applies despite us inventing special effects at practically the same time. Most people who wanted to fool others could have kept doing so, and there were a few famous fakes like the Cottingley Fairies, but for the most part people making seemingly-inexplicable observations must have just been fooling themselves first. The human mind is a particularly fallible recording device.
Oh, I'm a rounding error here. I'm just one jerk on a website, but there's one or two hundred thousand amputations a year in the US. When I say "start praying for amputees", I don't mean because you want to win an online argument, I mean because if that actually works, even one percent of the time, then by spreading your knowledge of its effect you'll be improving thousands of people's lives every year. You'd have more positive impact than most medical researchers in history! You wouldn't even necessarily have to win the online argument in the process - if the mechanism was "some researcher coincidentally invents technological regeneration the next week" rather than "spontaneous regeneration spreads like a meme as people begin to have more faith" then I'd at least still allow for the possibility of coincidence - so even if God is shy, wouldn't it be worth trying? And yet either nobody's trying, or none of it is working. Either possibility has to be a little disheartening, don't you think?
I have. Only occasionally, these days, but also "Try out the Mormons' prayer" seemed like a reasonable hypothesis to test, a couple decades ago. In that case either I got a "no, that stuff's fiction" or I got no answer, but in neither case would it seem, based on the common
, that it would be treated as contrary evidence rather than an observation to exclude. If the billion Muslims praying 5 times a day aren't getting the same answers as them either, there's clearly a lot of room for "you're just not doing it right" in prayer.
I think what really got me, though, was seeing that they didn't take their "you can learn through prayer" hypothesis as seriously as I did.
One of the things that interested me about their theology was that their idea that some old scriptures hadn't been translated correctly meshes pretty well with my idea that the genocide in Numbers should be a "what kind of demon are the Abrahamic religions all worshiping" sort of moment for the reader, at least by the time Moses gets mad about his followers letting women and boys live. Indeed, a Mormon leader (I want to say elders here, but that's a different word in that hierarchy; maybe it was a former stake president?) brought up that translation point independently when I mentioned the problem. The epistemology of that seems a bit shaky, but I admit I was happy to see someone choose it over shaky morality.
What I didn't think of until later was ... why didn't it even occur to him to pray about it? Figuring out which religious texts are true was supposed to be the sine qua non of Mormon prayer, and yet it didn't even come up as a possibility worth trying? From the outside it's easy to see why "pray for an answer where there's one interpretation that doesn't detach you from the culture" might evoke a more easily-interpreted response among the believers and the hopeful than "pray for an answer where either way you're likely about to cause a huge rift", but I still wonder what the insider explanation would have been.
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Please also report extraordinary events that did not seem to be the direct result of prayers.
Because that's the thing about miracles, even if I watched you regrow a limb before my own eyes and you told me God personally spoke to you and told you it was because you prayed for it, it would move my needle on spontaneous limb regrowth a lot, but not so much on God. I've heard of many, many people praying and receiving fuck all.
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You're probably thinking of some combination of dark energy and dark matter. IIRC, dark matter was invented to explain why galaxies weren't falling apart with its stars flying away from each other despite appearing not to have enough matter to have the gravitational pull to stay together. Dark energy was invented to explain why these galaxies appeared to be flying away from each other despite the gravitational pull, i.e. the universe appeared to be expanding.
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Yes, that's how it works. When something works in a way that doesn't fit the rules we've observed so far, we can put forth new hypothetical sets of rules that would explain the observations and can also be hypothetically tested.
I bet the "invention" of gravity has attracted similar comments once upon a time. It's so convenient that gravity can make things both go down and spin around other things, isn't it?
The difference between "scientists invent things" and "priests invent things" appears to my layman's understanding to be that while scientists put forth a considerable amount of effort to hypothesize the things they invent, priests already have a ready-made Source (God) of all things that they defer to without any insight into the mechanisms.
So if something cannot be experimentally tested, is it an invalid hypothesis? What is science supposed to do for "one-offs"?
Well ~everyone agrees that "gravity" is real in the sense that if you jump off of a tall building it will be extremely painful. But the theory of gravity and actual observations of the universe are at odds. That's the reason dark matter exists (in the mind of scientists, anyway), because the theory of gravity was insufficient to explain why the observed mass of the universe behaved the way that it did.
This wasn't necessarily true historically, I don't think, but as society specialized priests deferred more and more to scientists on the mechanisms.
I'm told that's what the principle of falsefiability is, but again, I'm a layman. All hypotheses I create in daily life could be tested by attempting to write code and seeing if it works.
Shrug, say "that's very cool but can we make use of it again?" and continue on? At least we spare the energy and time of praying that way.
As for the rest, I'm not sure we even are at a disagreement, I've lost track of the argument.
Theories prove themselves insufficient and new theories are created to fill the gap. "God did it" proves itself insufficient compared to scientific (or rather, materialist) theories, and retreats to ever-shrinking gaps.
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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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