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]