Accident?

Well, I finally did it.

I'm sixty years old, have been driving since I was 18, and never had an accident.

Until today.

5:45 AM and, for all the time I've driven with more alcohol in me than preferred by most state legislatures, more sober than I've been since high school.

Hit the curb at 40 MPH or so while southbound at Third and Wyandotte / Rte 378.

It was immediately obvious that something catastrophic had occurred so I stopped in the middle of relatively heavy traffic.

Reached in my pocket for the cell phone that I bought SPECIFICALLY TO CALL FOR HELP IN AN EMERGENCY... and there it wasn't.

Had another cell phone without service and, as I was in the middle of a very busy road, decided a call to 911 was in order.

The police came and had me pull into the parking lot of the Cathedral Church of the Nativity and called AAA for me.

I said I didn't know where I was going to have it towed as I probably can't afford to fix it until payday (Friday) and my garage has no parking capacity to leave a vehicle.

The officer said they'd probably just put on the spare.

The spare... Took a while to sink in.

The SPARE! THE SPARE TIRE!!

I don't handle emergency situations well...

At any rate, AAA arrived within the hour and I was on my way.

As no one was hurt and no other cars were involved and no damage to the City of Bethlehem occurred, and no claim to the insurance company will be made, I thought that maybe - as it was a victim-less crime, as it were, it shouldn't even count as an accident.

But the alternative would be some smart ass asking, "You mean, you did it on purpose?!"

Oh well, if I had to draw from the Car Accident deck in the Great Game of Life, I guess I got off easy.

Miracles & Other Supernatural Thingamabobs in a Naturalistic Cosmos (4 of 3) :-)

6 He left that place and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2 On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Mark 6:1-3 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

21b But whatever anyone dares to boast of—I am speaking as a fool—I also dare to boast of that. 22 Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. 23 Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. 24 Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.25 Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; 26 on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters;[a] 27 in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. 28 And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. 29 Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?

30 If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness. 31 The God and Father of the Lord Jesus (blessed be he forever!) knows that I do not lie. 32 In Damascus, the governor under King Aretas guarded the city of Damascus in order to seize me,33 but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall,[d] and escaped from his hands.
2 Corinthians 11:21b-33 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
Tacitus The Annals (written 109 Common Era)

First, however, I must deal with the matter of Jesus, the so-called savior, who not long ago taught new doctrines and was thought to be a son of God. This savior, I shall attempt to show, deceived many and caused them to accept a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable, and intelligent people who interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.
― Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians
(written, per Peter Kirby’s Early Christian Writings, between 177 & 178 Common Era)

He, the Life of all, our Lord and Saviour, did not arrange the manner of his own death lest He should seem to be afraid of some other kind. No. He accepted and bore upon the cross a death inflicted by others, and those other His special enemies, a death which to them was supremely terrible and by no means to be faced; and He did this in order that, by destroying even this death, He might Himself be believed to be the Life, and the power of death be recognised as finally annulled. A marvellous and mighty paradox has thus occurred, for the death which they thought to inflict on Him as dishonour and disgrace has become the glorious monument to death's defeat.

― Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

Miracles in Summary

1. A naturalist believes reality to be self-contained and completely comprehensible (in principle) in terms of itself.
2. A supernaturalist believes that reality is contingent on the divine and mediates that divine reality to creation as a sponge mediates water to one who is washing something.
3. Speaking from within a Christian supernaturalist worldview, miracles are perceived as extraordinary events revealing both the authority and power of God over the finite and broken character of human existence in the world and God’s intention for creation.
4. Because of incommensurability the physicist who says science disproves God or the fundamentalist who says that geological evidence shows that once upon a time there was a worldwide flood are making similar types of category error: the physicist by “concluding” something that is not even defined in physics and the fundamentalist for dressing what is basically a theological claim (which, at its root, seeks to defend the inerrancy of the Bible) as a scientific claim. They are in the position people who only know checkers arguing about whether “checkmate” is real.
5. On the face of it, the believing saying miracles are real and the physicist saying miracles are not real are at loggerheads because, generally speaking, “A” and “Not-A” cannot both be true.
6. There is, however, a case where they can both be true: the case where A is taken to mean two different realities. And if knowledge is “justified, true, belief” and if the Christian and the physicist have different models of belief, truth and justification (and, therefore, for all intents and purposes, “know” different things, even if those things go under the same name) then it is quite appropriate for the Christian physicist to say that the universe is full of miracles except when I am performing an experiment in my lab. Then the miracle becomes an anomaly that I presume can be explained - in principle if not in the current state of practise - through immanent, natural explanations without recourse to the supernatural.
7. In my opinion the Christian physicists way of looking at things passes both philosophical muster and is inline with the Christian belief that God created the world (that is, reality) as an entity dependent upon yet distinguishable from the Divine - and occasionally  transparent to both the authority and the purposes of the Divine.
8. In a way, it’s like the Oscar Wilde quote: "We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language". And that applies to Christians, physicists and the word “miracle” as well.

The Pauline / Marcan Spin on the Miraculous

32 Now as Peter went here and there among all the believers,[a] he came down also to the saints living in Lydda. 33 There he found a man named Aeneas, who had been bedridden for eight years, for he was paralyzed. 34 Peter said to him, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you; get up and make your bed!” And immediately he got up. 35 And all the residents of Lydda and Sharon saw him and turned to the Lord.
Acts 9:32-35 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

1. Compare the above quote from Acts to the initial quotes from Christians and pagans at the top.
2. To anticipate later discussions on the Bible, the author of Acts is believed - by both tradition and historical scholars - to also be the author of the Gospel of Luke. We don’t know who he or she was, but we will refer to the writer as Luke.
3. Luke, in Acts, holds Paul in high esteem. Yet Luke’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian is so at odds with Paul’s own conception that the very opponents Paul is contending with in 2 Corinthians (above, taken by historians as actually written by Paul) are, in essence, Lucan Christians!
4. Paul is writing in the early to middle 50s of the Common Era while Luke is written some forty or so years later. (The Gospel of Mark was written some twenty years after Paul and some twenty years before Luke and Luke probably had a copy of Mark when Luke / Acts was written.) In the time of Paul, what he calls “super-apostles” are spreading their gospel which they evidence through the mighty miracles they have performed. They accept the support of those Christian communities of those who take them in and actually produce “letters of commendation” from past communities attesting to the miracles they performed.
5. In Luke, as quoted immediately above, Peter performs a miracle and, as they say, “the crowd goes wild!” People see the miracle and are so impressed with the power of Peter that they say, in essence, this must be the real deal - and they all become Christians.
6. Going back twenty years to Mark, we see that Mark handles miracles in a very different way, though he/she (again, we know not the writer) has miracles sprinkled liberally throughout the gospel. But note that in the example of Mark’s gospel cited above, the people take offense at the miracle because of the nature of the miracle-worker, Jesus: who does THIS guy from our village who does such things take himself for?!
7. Throughout the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does miracles and people follow but do not necessarily believe. His disciples fail to believe and his family thinks he is mad. One steller exception is the Transfiguration where Peter sees and believes… the wrong thing. :-)
8. Paul in Corinth is contending with super-apostles who attempt to discredit Paul by saying that he works for a living (rather than taking the support from the community as any self-respecting apostle would surely do) and that he lacks “letters of commendation” regarding his miracles.
9. Losing it, Paul lets loose a thunderous barrage of sarcasm, irony and ridicule at his opponents, turning his opponents argument on its head. He boasts of his mighty miracles - sufferings, persecutions, rejection, weakness, failure, helplessness - and admits that he was too “weak” (note the word) to accept help from the Corinthians.
10. Paul is, in fact, contending with a power theology in which one follows God and is rewarded with great power to achieve great things and perform great miracles. (Remind anyone of contemporary TV preachers? :-))
11. Paul’s response is the model of Christ crucified. Crucified in weakness and raised by God in power in the resurrection, the resurrection, for Paul, does not undo the crucifixion of Jesus, it subverts it.
12. BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT :-) : Someone looking for contemporary examples of this mythology (which is not a dirty word, though we’ll return to that later) need look no farther than Lord of the Rings, where the hero goes on a quest, not to attain the Ring of Power… but to destroy it, and the Harry Potter series: where Harry must accept his own destruction to vanquish Voldemort. (Voldemort’s life ‘mission,’ if you remember, was to overcome death and achieve immortality. Rather than accepting “eternal life” in the context of one’s limitation and mortality, Voldemort sought eternal deathlessness - which is not the same thing at all.
13. The core of the supernatural and the miraculous, for the Christian, is God in Christ overcoming death for everyone, ironically, but being defeated by it. By subverting the power of death in this way, God in Christ makes every conceivable human experience, no matter how dreadful, an opportunity for new life in some way, shape or form. We may not see or understand how, just as the scientist as any given point in time cannot explain an anomaly, but Christians believe that because of God in Christ, there are no godforsaken places or experiences on earth.
14. Christians therefore do not (or, more often, should not :-), require those responses to the aggressive power of death referred to biblically as sin: aspiring to power over death a la Sauron or Voldemort, escape from the power of death a la “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,” or to negotiate a separate peace with death through some sort of immortality project.
15. Tacitus and Celsus, two pagan critics of Christianity, were - in fact - quite discerning. More discerning than today’s TV preachers. The poor, the disreputable, the sick, the dying, the deformed, the criminal, the mad, the low-life, find Christianity much more attractive than the rich, the powerful, the young, the healthy, the righteous, etc. The former lack the resources of the latter to engage in escapism, power fantasies, and monument making and serve as a living rebuke to such futility.

Miracles & Other Supernatural Thingamabobs in a Naturalistic Cosmos (Part 3 of 3)

21 When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. 22 Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet 23 and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” 24 So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. [Snipped inserted miracle story of the woman with the hemorrhage.]

35 While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” 36 But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” 37 He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. 38 When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. 39 When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” 40 And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. 41 He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” 42 And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. 43 He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
Mark 5:21-24; 35-43 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

A Polish woman who spent 11 hours in cold storage in a mortuary after being declared dead has returned to her family, complaining of feeling cold.

Officials say Janina Kolkiewicz, 91, was declared dead after an examination by the family doctor.

However, mortuary staff were astonished to notice movement in her body bag while it was in storage. The police have launched an investigation.

Back home, Ms Kolkiewicz warmed up with a bowl of soup and two pancakes.
BBC News Europe 13 November 2014

Subjectivity, Objectivity and Incommensurability

In this section I’ve shown the concentric platforms in reverse from 2 of 3.

This doesn’t really change my argument a great deal but it does serve to illuminate something: by visually moving from the subjective at the core to the objective at the periphery it shows that different people may have different understandings of core reality versus peripheral reality.

As I contended in 2 of 3, one can move from subjectivity to objectivity or vice versa, but one cannot completely cut the cord between the two without becoming either a corpse or a madman.

I suppose you can consider the diagram in 2 of 3 as the objectivist bias and the diagram in this post as showing the subjectivist bias. As a self-diagnosed INFP , who considers objective reality inconvenient at best and downright aggravating at worst, I retain my God-endowed “right” to putting my thumb on the scale of subjectivism (or, as it used to be known, idealism, just a bit. ☺

And to insist that anything of any significance can be boiled down to either divine revelation or a complex group of physics equations that can established beyond reasonable doubt - in principle if not in the current state of the art - by reason and experimental evidence is to engage in similar thumb-putting on the subjective / objective scale.

On the one hand, it commits to (what I believe to be though others may disagree) an untenable reductionism or - to put it another way - violates Einstein’s quote that things should be made as simple as possible… and no simpler.

But, whichever way one comes down on that, the problem of incommensurability remains, particularly with entities such as gods, miracles, etc. or assertions like “knowledge is justified, true, belief,” or causal explanations of events involving determinacy, indeterminacy or intentionality - or meaning and value.

When a jury determines that someone is guilty of a crime they are, in the context of the law, a criminal.

A chemist cannot speak as a chemist and say that the assertion that the person is a criminal is (or is not) a fact: those are not the facts of chemistry (though the facts of chemistry may lie within the context of law in the case of, say, forensic evidence).

As mentioned in 2 of 3, when someone says they “know” that E=MC2 and someone else says that they “know” that Jesus rose from the dead, can that possibly be that their respective  components of knowledge (belief, truth, justification) are the exact same?

Different circles all claim to explain events but they all have different definitions for the words they share in common and some circles lack the word in the first place.

This is why a physicist cannot say that there is no God or that all explanations from other arts, sciences and the humanities are just inaccurate and sloppy abstractions from the pure truth of physics and say so in their capacity as scientists. (Like the rest of us, they are entitled to their lay and hopefully more or less educated opinion - which is why colleges have us suffer through distribution courses in fields in which we have no interest. :-) )

By the same token, a theologian cannot make a scientific claim that the world - geological, biological, and human - came into being in six days, as that is actually a Trojan horse: a theological claim masquerading as a scientific theory.

Miracles & Other Supernatural Thingamabobs in a Naturalistic Cosmos (And a Discourse on Sponges)

This is what I believe… at least as of today. ☺

Simplified, a visual I find helpful in relating the natural to the supernatural is a soaked sponge floating in water.

The hardcore naturalist is primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the sponge.

The hardcore supernaturalist is primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the water.

The sponge is completely soaked in the water yet the sponge remains sponge and the water remains water.

But the sponge is a vessel or vector for the water just as the natural world is a vessel or vector for the supernatural.

And, as people - whether Jesus of Nazareth or other people - we share this sponge / water interaction.

(I’ll get into the distinction between Jesus Christ and other people in another post. And the sponge / water simile isn’t perfect - “water” and “sponge” sounds more dualistic than I intend whereas what I intend to emphasize is the supernatural being expressed via the natural rather than the water and the sponge being two completely separate things. The theological word closest to what I’m trying to express is incarnation. The philosophical word closest to what I’m trying to express is panentheism. But, for now, let’s stick to water and sponges. :-)

So, using specifically Christian rather than generic language, creation is the “sponge” immersed in the Holy Spirit of God in Christ. And it remains creation, created by yet distinguishable from God, porous to God’s revelation of transcendent meaning, value and purpose yet having its own cohesion and integrity. It is a worthy object of study in its own right by the arts, the sciences (both hard and soft), the mathematicians, and the humanities.

Returning to our watery sponge, a miracle is an extraordinary event in the water occurring in the midst of the sponge and bringing attention to itself. It says, in effect, “Hey, wake up and look over here!” It reminds us that there is water in the entire sponge all the time by drawing our attention to itself in one particular spot an extraordinary way.

Speaking of extraordinary events occurring, for me, with an uncanny sense of timing, as I was preparing this I read the BBC article cited above immediately below the biblical citation of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead: Polish woman declared dead wakes up in mortuary .

This is an excellent opportunity for another look at incommensurability.

An avowed supernaturalist would maintain that both stories “prove” that miracles occurred in biblical times and occur to this day.

An avowed naturalist would maintain that neither story supports miracles as the “chain of custody” of the alleged eyewitness testimony is tenuous at the very best and the modern story no doubt admits of a naturalistic explanation at least in principle, whether or not sufficient theories and facts are available to fully provide such an explanation. (He or she wouldn’t, presumably, attack the credibility of the source. Hey, this is the BBC we’re talking about here, the gold standard of credibility. :-))

[For the record, contrarian that I am, I would maintain that the biblical story is true whether or not it stands up to historical criticism as factual whereas the BBC story tells the story in a “just the facts, ma’am” sort of way that certainly would classify the event as “extraordinary” but says nothing about any possible divine revelation in the event. What would make it a candidate for the Miracle Hall of Fame would be some interpretation on the part of the staff or the family that God communicated something to them about life in this world via the event. (Nowhere in the story do either the staff, the police or the family describe the event as “miraculous.”)]

The fact is that both the avowed supernaturalist and the avowed naturalist are engaging in a sort of positivism or reductionism or some other “faith” stance that both precedes and prejudices their reading of the story - a stance that cannot be derived from anything other than an appeal to revelation of some sort. Drawing outside of the lines of naturalism, the naturalist makes a claim that presumes naturalism rather than demonstrating it. And the supernaturalist, more obviously, also makes a claim that presumes supernaturalism rather than demonstrating it. It’s thoroughgoing theology and, in my opinion, bad theology at that.

So I believe that miracles occur, they are real, and that God acts in real ways in this real world but claims I make whose “home base,” as it were, is biology, geology, physics, chemistry or, for that matter, the historical-critical study of the Bible must be open to, engage and ultimately accept criticism from those sources so long as they are speaking from within the confines of their disciplines and not cloaking a philosophy or theology as scientific knowledge.

Let both supernaturalists and naturalists share what they know (that is, justified, true, belief) but be clear on the context  of what they know, and aware of what they don’t know in other contexts - and admit that reality is a very big elephant to attempt to eat with a bite from a single scientific discipline or faith stance.

[Continued in 4 of 3 - sorry, I have a bit more to say on this - on the Pauline / Marcan criticism of the miracle tradition. :-) ]

Miracles & Other Supernatural Thingamabobs in a Naturalistic Cosmos (2 of 3)

2 When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. 2 So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them.3 Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. 4 And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. 5 When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” 6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” 8 At once Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves; and he said to them, “Why do you raise such questions in your hearts? 9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and take your mat and walk’? 10 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11 “I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home.”12 And he stood up, and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them; so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We have never seen anything like this!”
Mark 2:1-12 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

The modern scientific enterprise would seek to explain all events, processes and phenomena on a strictly naturalistic basis, alleging that miracles are impossible.  Any supposed supernatural occurrence, if examined carefully enough, will prove to have a purely natural explanation, at least potentially explicable in terms of scientific laws and processes.

Yet this approach is tantamount to atheism.  If God exist, He created these laws and processes and can surely intervene in them if He so choose.  The question is one of evidence, not possibility.  God’s laws are good and efficient laws, and God would intervene in them only rarely, but always with good reason and good evidence.  These two criteria (adequate reason adequate evidence) are satisfied by all the Biblical miracles.

Bible Baptist Church (Morehead, KY)

It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work. ... We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament.

Rudolf Bultmann

- German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament at the University of Marburg
New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1984) pp. 3-4

Review from 1 of 3

• Naturalism: Reality is a closed system with immanent causes, either random (in the case of the very small) or determined (in the observable and the very large).
• Supernaturalism: Natural reality is the media through which a supernatural reality transcending it reveals itself.
• Miracle: An extraordinary, powerful, event in nature or history that reveals God’s self-disclosure in, transcendence of, and authority over, Creation (as the Abrahamic faiths (Jews, Christians and Muslims) would put it): an event revealing God’s meaning, values and purpose for creation.
• Marcan/Pauline Irony Regarding Miracles of Power: Mark both inherits and criticizes the miracle tradition. Jesus performs “acts of power” but the people - including the disciples and even his family - do not believe. Paul, contesting with “super-apostles” in Corinth who bring letters of recommendation regarding the powerful miracles they performed in other Christian communities, lead Paul to list a similar list of boasts regarding his mighty acts: shipwrecks, beatings, imprisonment, weakness and failure.
• Incommensurability: Things that at first glance appear comparable that actually cannot be compared. In common usage, two people talking past each other because they are using the same word in different ways because they are playing different “language games.” For example, a hockey enthusiast and a football enthusiast arguing over whether a goal earns a team one point or six.
• The Sheldon Cooper “Move”: “I’m not saying you are not skilled at Solitaire, I’m just saying Solitaire is not worth playing.” The Sheldon Cooper “Move” cannot be made without transcending the definition of and the allowable rules in the game. To say soccer is better than football is to either express a personal opinion or claim some type of private knowledge or revelation - though some such claims are elevated to claims of assumption, self-evident or common sense.

Okay. Moving on.

Incommensurability

Consider the following figure.

What I’ve done here is created an awkward social situation. :-)

The concentric circles are large cylinders or platforms on which various groups of people (indicated by the boxes) stand.

I have arranged the platforms such the the smallest one at the top is home to the most objective groups with the larger and lower ones moving towards the bottom, largest, most subjective level: the supernatural.

(It seems to me that both objectivity and subjectivity are opposing tendencies that can never be fully separated. The only completely objective person would be a corpse, and if someone attained complete subjectivity they would no doubt be confined to a madhouse. Not that they’d know it..)

Let’s maintain The Rule from 1 of 3: a member of a group can not understand or use any vocabulary other than that of their own discipline / ideology / faith stance.

This creates three different situations of incommensurability: people on different levels cannot communicate without talking past each other and people from different disciplines on the same level cannot communicate without talking past each other.

(The “aha” moment of my college career was my senior year when I simultaneously took a Psychology of Small Groups class and a Sociology of Small Groups class. I was fascinated at studying the exact same phenomenon from two different scientific perspectives.)

The third incommensurable situation is not obvious from the figure: what happen when groups of people from the same level and in the same discipline have two very different theories? Think the Theory of Relativity on the one hand and Quantum Theory on the other. Or Freudian psychotherapy, on the one hand, and the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner on the other. People in the same discipline having very different views of the discipline will also talk past each other.

One suspects that the problem becomes more serious as one moves from the objective core to the subjective periphery. A physicist and a chemist probably have more in common than do an economist and a psychologist or an astrologer and a Buddhist.

Note that I have placed miracle stories as reports of reputed events in the supernatural level. (I have referred to the miracle genre because it turns out that reports of miracles, like jokes or poems, have a structure to them and get told in a certain way. The technique of examining a text’s form as an aid to interpreting it is used by modern biblical scholars and is called Form Criticism.)

Note also that, in all these spheres, there are different models of causation: determinism, indeterminism, and intentionality. At the objective core, the models used are determinism (relativity) and indeterminism (quantum physics) while as one moves out to the soft sciences and beyond, the intentions of human beings or groups or gods are taken into account.

Given all that, there doesn’t seem to be much to talk about if The Rule is in effect!

Breaking the Rule

The fact is that chemists and Existentialists, Humanists and Wiccans, do talk - and agree or disagree to greater or lesser degrees - with each other.

And a physicist can be a Buddhist and a political scientist can be an existentialist.

There are all kinds of philosophical complexities going on here involving the nature of reality (Read this for just a taste. :-), the nature of truth, the nature of how we know what we know, and the simple fact that people are profoundly inconsistent in their beliefs and, even when their beliefs are consistent, those beliefs are not always consistent with their actions. Someone once said “show me how someone spends their time and money and I’ll show you their god.”)

But somehow we muddle through and manage to communicate (or miscommunicate) with each other.

Now let’s reconsider our central question:

What do the extraordinary events we call miracles actually do in the natural world? Lightning does something in the natural world. An earthquake does something in the natural world. Does God do anything in the natural world? Does earnest prayer importune God to do things in the world? Or does God just cause people to see events in the natural world from a different perspective? And if the latter, is “God” anything more than shorthand for natural, human thought processes? Does anything real happen?

I believe the short answer is yes.

The long answer will have to wait until 3 of 3. :-)

But, until then, think on this…

To harken back to a thought attributed to Plato, knowledge is justified, true, belief.

If you claim to know something, you must believe it is true.

It must, in fact, be true.

And you must have justification for the belief: I may believe the E=MC2 and E may, in fact, be equal to MC2 - but if I believe it because God revealed it to me in a dream, I can’t claim to know it.

Now consider: between spheres and even within groups on the same sphere, the words “belief,” “truth” and “justified” may have incommensurable meanings.

When someone says they “know” that E=MC2 and someone else says that they “know” that Jesus rose from the dead, do they mean to imply that the components of their knowledge (belief, truth, justification) are the exact same?

Even stickier, what if one is a Christian physicist who believes both to be true?!

And lastly, what if I had the concentric circles inverted - from supernatural as the innermost ring and hard science as the outermost ring?

[to be continued]