Aren’t Miracles Scientifically Impossible?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Exactly correct. Which is why I feel that scientists should all be persons of faith (as indeed so many are). After all, dont we all pretend that we know something we really arent sure about? The last scientist who claimed to know anything absolutely died in the early part of the last century. This is well known in physics, after quantum mechanics, but its no less true in biology. I was sure I knew that humans must have about 100,000 genes. Oops, I guess my faith that I (and all the other geneticists) knew how genes and their products worked was misplaced on that one. I used to take it as an article of faith that all mutations were random. Looks like another mistake.

Now, you will say that that is the beauty of science, it corrects itself with new data, while religious folks never do that. That’s what I thought during all my atheist years, but guess what? That faith
based belief is also wrong. I find that religions and principles of religious faith are about as mutable (maybe more so) than scientific dogmas. Witness the resistance to the heresy of neutral drift and punctuated equilibrium.

So yes, faith is believing something you arent sure is true, because we arent sure anything is true other than some fairly trivial stuff. When it comes to big questions, faith and science are not only on an equal footing, they are generally pretty well in line with each other. Halleluljah.

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To be successful in science, you have to go beyond faith and beyond pretending. You have to gather empirical evidence for your ideas, test them and be ready for them to be falsified by anybody. There are no popes in science. Your latest paper can rejected no matter who you are.

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Patrick,

I happen to know quite a few folks who are very successful scientists, and who are faithful Christians, so your first point is easily refuted. Some have won Noble Prizes, others have made major reputations, and Im sure you can think of a few as well. Your second sentence is indeed true for scientific knowledge, but I dont know any scientist who ever tried to advance scientific understanding by using non scientific methodology such as faith based beliefs. Faith is not falsifiable and is not part of science. If you believe (a matter of faith) that only scientific methodology can lead to truth (scientism) than we have a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality. Scientism is in fact a religious view that is basically anti scientific. This was always clear to me as a young atheist scientist, and was clear to all the secular humanists of the past. The modern version of this myth is quite disturbing and should be rejected by all thinking individuals, no matter what their religious views might be.

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You know scientists? What’s their names and let’s all look at their papers and their results.
Their faith is completely irrelevant to any of their results.

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Hi Sy

The older I get, the more brain-simplifying rewiring is going on, and not towards optimality! Though it’s renewing the diversion, let me briefly link to a paper on optimization suggesting that the brain, in particular, is subject to evolutionary optimization, invoking the energy costs of simplifying the connections. It all just shows how little we know.

On miracles, you’re right that we’re dependent on plausible testimony for far more than miracles (as even the disturbing non-reproducibility of much scientific research is showing). Science, even in principle, is only capable of investigating the order within an abstraction of small, selected, segments of reality. Where we can somehow simplify the system enough to find order, we can seek to account for it.

Chaos theory, like probability theory, can show the range of possible outcomes, but not explain any individual outcome nor enable us to predict it accurately. That limits to an extent the actual value of knowing the laws “behind”, say, chaotic events. As far as we’re concerned, they may as well be miracles.

That could be analogous to the existence of a spiritual “law” - certainly an orthodox truth - that God always does what is righteous and good. In experience, that principle doesn’t explain why he does a miracle here, or refrains there - or even why the mix of “natural” events results in the particular providence we see. But the principle is true, even as the laws behind chaotic events are true.

Both, it seems to me, can only be finally left to the wisdom and understanding of God - which is maybe why the excellent David L Wilcox regards chance as God’s signature in nature. Chance, pragmatically speaking, is indistinguishable from miracle except in terms of spiritual significance.

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PS

I wonder if I’m alone in noticing the sociological dimension here. When I was a young adult, many if not most Christian scientists would have had at least some reservations about the possibility of miracles, biblical or otherwise. It was common to suppose that there must be “some rational explanation” compatible with immutable scientific laws. “Modern man” had “outgrown” belief in miracles - hence the plausibility of Rudolph Bultmann or J A T Robinson. Only the lunatic Fundie fringe took biblical miracles at face value, and no doubt were sniggered at in the lab and missed promotion.

Now I find that, one way or another, scientific training seems no barrier to belief in, at least, biblical miracles, if not occasional miracles in the here and now. Is it because C S Lewis’s arguments slowly seeped through? Is it because of treatments like those of Alvin Plantinga showing that “inviolable science” had always been a myth? Or is it because the charismatic renewal affected most churches one way or another?

One thing is sure - miracles are no more or less true than 50 years ago, people are no more or less rational and science has no more or less to say on the matter. It would seem that we’re just persuaded by different testimony according to the evanescent spirit of the times.

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Absolutely perfect. If this comment represents your brain at suboptimal, I can only image what it was like earlier. See you soon on hump.

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Ha ha. As for your last sentence, that is exactly what I said, though perhaps not clearly enough. In my own 200 + papers I never once used any part of my faith in getting, analyzing, or reporting results. Neither did Francis Collins, Ian Hutchinson, Jennifer Wiseman, Stephen Freeland, Deb Haarsma, Jeff Hardin, Simon Conway Morris, or any other scientist of Christian faith who I have met. The same being true for the scores I havent met.
(note: if you want to look me up on Medline, you will need to use my legal first name, Seymour. But please dont address me with it. I wont answer)

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Yes, these scientists and others have been involved in scientific endeavors that have produced significant understanding about what is accepted as true in many scientific disciplines. Does their faith impact the validity of their results? I don’t think so. Their results are quickly reproduced, verified, extended, or falsified by others independent of their faith or the faith of those doing the testing.

So what is important to you - what really is the truth or constant reassurance that what you believe is the truth?

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If science is like a journey of discovery, it might be compared to driving on a highway, where the facts discovered by scientific activity are like the corrections in steering made along the highway, the application to the brakes, the use of fuel, the activity of the wipers, the honking of the horn, the different vehicles, and the different speeds travelled. All effects are applicable to all drivers, as drivers respond to one another, to the weather, and to road conditions. But one driver is going home to kiss his wife, another is going to the bar to get drunk, another goes home to play video games and the fourth goes home to murder his children and commit suicide. The drive on the road looks much the same, but the truth, security, reassurance, and the endpoint is different, and will result in vastly different results.

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@Jon @sygar
Some years ago I was witness to an event (actually took a part in it) the odds against which were at least a million to one. It was witnessed by three other skeptical scientists besides myself. Why is this pertinent to this present discussion? i.e., so what? Perhaps it was an effect of chaos theory, like the unknown butterfly who flapped its wings and began hurricane Katrina. For the significance of the event I am referring to, we must look into what effect it had. And that effect depended a great deal on the Faith present in each of the four observers.

One of my colleagues, whom I assume to be agnostic, blurted out: “How in Hell did you manage that, Al?” But, in all probability, it had no lasting effect on him or his seat mate. However my seat mate, Prof. Eric Lien, was having a family problem directly involved with Christian Faith. He said the event changed his life for the good. I am fortunate in having been raised in, and still maintaing, a Christian faith, and so it just reinforced my belief that our God is ever present, ever ready to help, even sometimes when we don’t ask for it.

So I am a firm believer in miracles–I just have not witnessed any that break Natural Law.
Al Leo

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I got the book, Sapiens, yesterday, and already (on p. 9) I find that Harari thinks (as I do) that the enlargement of the human brain was an ***ex***aptation, not an ***ad***aptation. Most of the participants in these discussions seem reluctant to accept that as fact. It wasn’t until brain was ‘rewired’ to become Mind that its present utility was realized. Harari refers to this as the Cognitive Revolution and places it at about 70,000 yrs. BP, which may be a bit early.
Al Leo

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Brain enlargement happen much further back as Neanderthals have larger brains than h. sapian. Both have had more than enough brain power to do all of modern function of abstract thought for as much as the past 300,000 years. But I agree that it wasn’t until the already common large brain was rewired that it became its present utility. But this Cognitive Revolution came much earlier than 70,000 yrs BP and perhaps is spread amount many species of homo perhaps up to 8 different species around Africa and Eurasia. Harari picks the 70,000 yrs BP point as the time of the successful homo sapiens migration out of Africa to Asia via the Sinai. It wasn’t the first try for h. sapians but it was the one that lead to world dominance and the demise of all other human species. The h. sapians that remained in Africa plus the Neanderthals, Denosivans, the archiac h. that populated the world at that time were certainly as advanced as the small band coming into the Levant. So yes, Cognitive Revolution happened, in more than one species of humans and well prior to 70,000 BP.

Fascinating book, isn’t it? And it gets better as you get into it.

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In the main body of the article the author references the Enlightenment and how it has contributed to the skepticism of post moderns with regard to miracles and the supernatural. To me it’s ironic that two of the intellectual Titans of the Enlightenment, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, had no problem with the supernatural agency of the Almighty and even extolled it in their writings.

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Tim Keller, like many other apologists, quotes and agrees with the claim that

…when studying a phenomenon, the scientist must always assume there is a natural cause.

But this claim is false, unless one decides to make it true by definition (by playing with the definition of “natural”). It’s unfortunate that so many writers here keep repeating it.

Science is perfectly capable of investigating and discovering evidence of the supernatural, and scientists have in fact often performed such investigations. Science can investigate the efficacy of the prayers of a particular religion, for example, and could in principle provide strong evidence for certain religions, if prayers to their gods were efficacious and prayers to other gods were not (if the religion was one which claimed that at least some prayers would in fact be efficacious). Science can test evidence for miracles. Science could in principle discover evidence of drowned Egyptian soldiers and chariots in the middle of the Red Sea, or could in principle discover evidence for the special creation of man. Scientists could in principle discover that hurricanes and earthquakes preferentially befell cities whose women wear miniskirts (this was actually a real claim made by some Muslim clerics, and some well-known Christian fundamentalists have made similar claims about natural disasters).

It is true that science currently tends to be silent about supernatural causation (in which the universe acts as if it has “personality”, or as if it were directed by a power with “personality”). However, we don’t eliminate this kind of causation because of a priori assumptions. We eliminate it (provisionally) because evidence for such causation is practically nonexistent. The evidence could have gone the other way, and could have been unequivocal in support of the supernatural.

People who believe in gods have to explain why the universe appears to operate exactly as if there were no supernatural entities.

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The author claims that “the existence of God can be neither demonstrably proven or disproven”. This is certainly not the position of most Christians when they accept the incarnation of Jesus Christ as a historic fact, a core tenet of Christian belief. If this miraculous intervention of God in the material world is correctly reported in the bible, then this should be sufficient proof for the existence of God.

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Though Albert and I come at this from opposite ends of the belief spectrum, I agree with him that the Christian religion makes many explicit fact-claims, which are open to the same kind of scientific examination as any other empirical claims. This includes claims about historical events.Of course, I think the premise of Albert’s if-then statement is false, so I don’t reach his conclusion that a god exists. But his if-then statement as it stands is correct, I think.

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