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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.
This I tend to agree with. It just has a sort of different effect on me when people say "UFOs and other things that are retarded to believe in" since I've actually looked into UFOs and I think it's very clear there's something there if you take the time to look through original sources in aggregate. (It's particularly amusing since the most mundane interpretations for UFOs involve a tight-lipped conspiracy kept up for decades - a hypothesis which I don't rule out, but which is far more convoluted a conspiracy theory than most respectable people are willing to take seriously. "The CIA creating AIDS" or whatever would be trivially easy next to "UFO psyop for 80 years.")
Now, with that being said, I think "UFOs are credible therefore the other stuff is too" is an equal-and-opposite mistake I would not recommend making.
I think what's interesting about it is that it is ~false. There are various UFO reporting data collectors out there and from what I understand that's not the case, UFO reports have steadily continued despite cell phones proliferating.
Of course the XKCD argument isn't that there have been fewer reports, it is that "cell phones would have recorded undeniable proof of UFOs by now," despite the fact that cell phones are not good for detecting or photographing airplanes. (And of course it's well-documented by now that the one organization in the world with the best aircraft detection capability allegedly encounters UFOs regularly and seems to have been encountering them for decades.)
I mean, I've heard of a technique for healing cancer that purports to be basically just what you are describing, and...I don't think things would play out the way you think. I tend to think that if an alternative healing method existed, most people would not have heard of it, and of the people that heard of it most people would not take the time to investigate its veracity (hello, it's me!) and thus would either disbelieve in it reflexively or make no use of it. Perhaps I am wrong.
I guess regenerating limbs is flashier (although much less valuable) than healing cancer, so maybe Team Miracle needs to rethink their comms strategy?
Sure, I think everyone who prays actually agrees on this. At least in the Christian faith, God is described as our Father, and, well - I find that I often don't give my children what they ask for. (Particularly not in the timeframe they ask for it in). You deserve kudos for being open-minded about it, though.
I am not LDS (or Muslim) so I don't particularly have any thoughts on their theology (besides, I suppose, thinking it is wrong).
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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.
Right! If you're really determined not to believe, there's really no evidence that will change your mind.
Except perhaps a personal encounter (which is what often moves the needle on people's belief, be it UFOs, or religion, or what have you).
And of course those personal encounters are considered the least reliable form of proof. So the wheel turns!
I do not think I am determined not to believe. I think there is simply more evidence and more reliable evidence, on the level of "gravity can kill you", in favor of a world that has no God.
I do think I am somewhat determined to not be faithful, even (especially?) if I was convinced by some arrangement of miracles that (a) God existed.
Just setting aside a lot of potential objections, it seems to me that what you describe is at best evidence against a God that shares your personal values.
How so? It seems to work pretty well against a wide variety of Gods that purportedly intervene in notable and noticeable ways into human life.
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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.
Hmm. I think this is a very inhuman response. Humans are curious, we want to discover things. Want to discover the truth. I think we're interested in more than just utility.
I tend to think this is a simplistic view of history (and, perhaps ironically – a sort of reverse-polarity fundamentalist-Christian view of the world) but I understand where you are coming from.
So am I, yet religions are notoriously opaque to truth-discovery. "The ways of God are inscrutable" and all that. If you are saying they are inscrutable, why would I bother searching for the truth the way you told me, rather than my way (which tells me you are likely to just be a meme carrier)? It appears to me that for most people religion's function is to stop curiosity at certain points where it can't actually explain things further, not foster it. Meanwhile the "religious scientists", the way I see it, just do science the regular materialist way and resort to God when outside of their sphere of knowledge.
I mean, a lot of searching for truth had been prompted by one-off events. But searching for truth doesn't mean one must accept the religious premise ("it was a divine miracle") on face when one begins.
My understanding is that historically religions were actually great drivers of truth-discovery, particularly in pragmatic matters such as due process – but this also had spillover upstream of science itself, for [at least in the Western tradition of Christianity] the attitude towards God was that "it is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a matter" and of course "God is a God of order" which gave Western scientists the theological justification for inquiry.
To use just one example (contrary to popular wisdom – although it's been a bit since I read up on it, so I might be a bit off on the specifics myself, apologies) Galileo was given the opportunity to prove his theory of heliocentrism in his trials, and his theory was rejected because it was shown to be more likely to be untrue – the science of the day just wasn't up to snuff, and so when actually tested the science leaned against Galileo, (whose research had I think been actually encouraged by part of the Church until he seemed to go out of his way to ridicule the Pope, not exactly a winning move in Italy in the 1600s).
Now, I am not saying I agree with everything that happened to Galileo. But I am saying that if Catholic Christianity had been closed-minded to the truth in the 1600s, Galileo wouldn't have been allowed to make a scientific defense of his theories, or permitted to pursue his research in the first place. Instead, the religious authorities at the time, however imperfectly, showed that they were interested in truth, and pursued it through science, due process, and adversarial justice. Those are not the values of a society that is opaque to truth-discovery, but rather a society that values truth discovery.
And that value was so good and effective that as society secularized it was retained, and in some sense its origins have been forgotten.
(Of course this is necessarily simplistic, as any grand sweeping narrative of history is, but I think it's closer to the mark than "religion stifles truth" – the truth is more complicated than that).
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