This is a well written article and pretty much puts into clear language what I, a Christian, had kind of thought about miracle claims from a young age. I do think that one collorary which could bring down the temperature is pointing out that a skeptic refusing to believe in a miracle claim is not necessarily a claim of fraud or superstition (though there's plenty of that going around, most of it even justified) but just, like, an inevitable baseline. Though most of the instigation on miracle claims these days is from apologists, and it does call into question that whole line of argument, so I think the theist side of things has to put more work into remembering that
"In my experience, miracle proponents almost always lack high quality evidence or tools of measurement, and are generally unconvincing when eliminating naturalistic explanations."
And it's not just religious miracles . . .alien visitations, cryptids, panpsychism etc. You see the proponents make shockingly similar logical errors/circular arguments. Really diving deep into Bigfoot in my early 20s was actually kind of the entryway into biblical criticism/skepticism of religious miracles and evolving from someone who had previously believed all of the NT miracles were true into what Arthur T would call a "very liberal loosey goosy Christian."
Another point is that the very concept of "supernatural" doesn't arise until medieval times and then not fully developed until the Enlightenment. For people in the 1st century, there was no dividing line between God/the divine working in the world and what was natural. If something happened "naturally" it was often retroactively interpreted to be caused by God for XYZ reason. So a "miracle" was less a breaking of natural barriers than a consequence of God simply acting in the world for a purpose. Thus why you see "miracles" as practically commonplace in literature of the time (both Christian and non) and a steep drop-off into modern times. Also why you'd see things we now know are mental conditions that were coined at the time as demon possession.
Interesting post; I'll be interested to see if any of the miracle testifiers respond. I do have one thought that I'm interested to see what you think. So, basically, Hume's thought is that natural laws are just events that have never been reliably reported to deviate. Now, for the sake of the thought, let's presume a group of witnesses did reliably report a deviation in the natural law (they all caught the event on separate cameras or something without collaboration). Wouldn't a reliable deviation from the natural law make it likely that something supernatural happened? After all, if what is natural is what has always happened, then would it not be the case that an observation consistent with the data would very likely be natural, whereas an observation that deviates from the data would very likely be something not natural?
In other words, it's not just the effect that has never deviated but also the cause, so if the effect is something that deviates, the cause is something that deviates, and because what is natural has always acted the same way, when something acts differently it suggests that the cause is different, and this is unlikely to be in a natural manner because all our evidence of natural causes act a certain way, so by virtue of the event having an unlikely effect its improbable that its cause would be natural since natural causes have never acted this way before.
I could not figure out how to say what I was trying to say, so I hope that makes sense.
As I said in the piece, we don't actually have a reliable account of supernatural causes. To the extent that people atest to seeing the supernatural, they're really attesting to observing something spectacular.
We observe novel spectacular events all the time throughout history, and they're natural in origin, especially after sufficient observation.
You can't say "well we know it's not natural" and then also, it's definitely supernatural. We don't know what supernatural looks like! This is the vagueness I describe, the "win by default without even trying" approach to supernaturalism.
Right, but I'm not trying to jump to supernatural per se. Instead, I'm trying to say that if we did have a reliable account of a spectacular event, it's unlikely that the cause is natural because natural causes do act in certain consistent ways, so it's unlikely that the cause of an event that deviates is natural. Hume's point is that a miracle, by virtue of being a miracle, is the most unlikely thing; I'm trying to say, similarly, since natural causes and effects have always acted a certain way, a deviation, by virtue of being a deviation, is unlikely to have a natural cause. In other words, if the cause was natural, we'd expect it to have effects consistent with the current natural laws. I guess part of my point is that we call things natural because they're normal, so a truly uncanny event is unlikely to have a natural cause because the cause will be abnormal.
I'm not trying to be annoying. I just don't know why you think that's wrong.
I tried to explain in another comment replying to Spencer. I guess why I think that’s the case, is, in short, if we ask why ‘X’ deviation happened, a naturalist explanation is insufficient. It would tell us that ‘X’ happened, and it could tell us how ‘X’ happened, but it could not explain why the normal course of nature did not continue as it had. If that doesn’t make sense, maybe my other comment will flesh it out more. Happy to hear your thoughts.
You're assuming, of course, that the normal course of nature was violated. I wouldn't make that assumption. Sorry if this isn't helpful I'm looking at this comment while at whole foods with my wife and I don't think this text is the best way to decipher the misunderstanding.
All good. I don’t think Im assuming and there’s two (I think) separate but related reasons why:
1. I think a reliable deviation just makes contingency much more pressing. Why wouldn’t things be as they always have been?
2. A reliable deviation would mean the cause is deviant in an equally improbable manner, which I think makes it unlikely to be natural, if we take natural to be what has always happened. It’s not that the deviant cause couldn’t be put in naturalist terms, in principle; it’s that the cause deviating is abnormal.
I understand what you're saying: say we can establish the spectacular event that Jesus rose from the dead. Should then conclude that it is likely that *God* caused Jesus to rise from the dead (as opposed to some unknown natural cause)? Is this what you're getting at?
I’m not saying God caused it, yet. I am saying if we had a reliable deviation, it is unlikely that the cause is natural, since natural causes result in the natural effects, which are not deviations.
I would question the inference from "we had a reliable deviation" to "it is unlikely that the cause is natural," unless "natural" simply means "our current understanding of natural laws." The cause may be consistent with our future understandings of natural laws.
Miracles aren’t the types of things that can be studied because, by virtue of being miraculous, they don’t happen over and over again. After all, if they did, we wouldn’t consider them miraculous, but normal or natural. However, imagine if we could go back in time (over and over again) and study the moment of the resurrection (presuming it happened); we could study exactly what happened to Jesus’s body and explain it in natural terms. We could then make a new law of nature, something like: every time someone dies, ‘X’ happens, unless whatever happened to Jesus's body happens. Nevertheless, the mere fact that we could explain it in natural terms would not mean the cause is thereby natural, and the fact that something unlike everything else happened should make us think the cause was unlike natural causes, since natural causes are those which have been consistent. A natural description of the deviation could tell us how/that it happened, but not why it happened instead of the alternative every other death has followed. So, an agnostic viewer could reasonably conclude the deviation is of miraculous cause.
Yeah the browser behaved. Great article! I remember slogging through the Fatima article and being honestly confused that anyone was taking child psychology in defense of children’s testimony as anything like convincing. Section on simplicity between theistic and naturalistic explanations pretty closely mirrors my thoughts on conciousness too.
>I will not be addressing anything else Schmid-related. I’m happy for him so long as he’s happy. At the risk of sounding like a hippy dippy liberal, I don’t care what he believes so long as he’s kind to other people.
Yup, exactly the same here, as I've said repeatedly I'll be saying nothing more about Schmid himself.
And it's just as well, because your general arguments are great. That said, a few comments:
>Testimonial evidence is by its nature inferior evidence to non-testimonial evidence because testimonial evidence requires additional inferences about witnesses on top of the data they report.
I guarantee Thomoids will tell you this isn't true, because even the "data" needs to be interpreted according to one's metaphysical framework and all that hoohaw. The problem is that even if this is true, testimonial evidence just adds another layer of interpretation on top of that: Not only do you have to look at the basic facts through a scientific framework or a Catholic framework or whatever, you now have to look at whether the witnesses should be interpreted through a skeptical or Catholic or whatever framework.
>Let’s explain this with an illustration. Think of two people performing a spectacular event: a real miracle worker (Jesus Christ himself perhaps) and the world’s best magician. If both of them performed a feat where they similarly appeared to walk on water and you didn’t know which person was which, both of their walks would look identical. You couldn’t tell them apart!
Lmfao I've been having this exact debate with a...uh, debate partner, you could say, for a while. If you don't mind a humongous amount of tl;dr you might find this comment thread interesting: https://substack.com/@gunlord500/note/c-315081053
Though keep in mind that while my interlocutor (not Skeptasmic, who was my host, the commenter) was and is quite kind to me, I, uh, am not sure he's as generous with other people, so you probably won't want to provoke him lol. I also don't know if I was irritating Skeptasmic or not with my long comment thread, so I would appreciate it if you or anyone reading this didnt engage over there ;_;
The other guys thesis was in response to this:
"Naturalistic explanations are held to higher standards, while supernatural explanations seem to have no standards."
He'd claim that supernatural explanations have holistic, qualitative standards than quantitative ones, and those Very High Standards are what Catholics use to discern the miracles of Christ from those of demons or magicians. According to the theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, in my conversation with the commenter for argument's sake we just covered three criteria: whether or not the miracle is accompanied by a revelation that A: accords with previously-revealed dogma, B: accords with Aristotelian metaphysics, and C: accords with basic human morality that should be obvious to all human beings, according to Lagrange's "Thomistic Common Sense" book, just as much as Aristotelian metaphysics is.
Me, I dunno about that--as I mentioned to him at the tail end of our conversation, the hypostatic union seems flatly contradictory to the Aristotelian doctrine of divine simplicity even if you might have been able to sway some Jews away from pure unitarianism, but the response is that it perhaps really wasn't, we just didn't know how to accord it with the doctrine. But in that case, perhaps, say, Buddhist miracles were true, and we just haven't figured out how to accord those with Aristotelian dogma. That stuff's certainly beyond my pay grade.
So for the first part, The Humean is agnostic on metaphysics. We’re just making epistemic arguments based on the frequency of observed events. This sounds like a cop out, but it’s legitimate. People who bring in metaphysics are extenuating the cope that they can’t make a good natural argument for miracles that doesn’t rely on presupposing the truth of religion.
As for the rest of this, I haven’t checked out the thread yet, but I will say their definition of high quality explanation is not the same as what normal people say they are. Like, not going to lie, I didn’t read the last paragraph or two here in depth because it’s just a bunch of words that have a lot of assumptions and implications that non-Thomists wouldn’t agree with, and we would likely find incompatible with normal definitions of the term explanation. Which vaguely include a narrative how a causal relationship functions in a greater physical system, that provide quantifiable predictions/inferences, etc etc.
Whenever I read Thomists or their copatriots try to say explanations are more than this, they write these long ass comments which remind me of Ayn Rand fans writing endless words that say altruism is bad. In my eyes, it’s pseudo-profoundity
And that's not because "the universe exists" is necessarily any better explained by theism than naturalism, not that there's anything logical or rational about it, but simply that there's an emotional argument here: Thinking about the weirdness of the universe and the arbitrariness of its existence leaves a hole which demands being filled. Someone more inclined towards God will fill that hole with Him; someone more inclined towards naturalism might try to fill that hole by saying, "reality is just the instantiation of all mathematical possibilities, and we're just living one of those" (but that leads to the circular question "why am I experiencing **this** right now?" where as theism... doesn't really answer it either and that's what makes it such a good mystery... but I think people are more easily satisfied by the God answer at this point, even if it doesn't really make sense).
“In all, this means that a wise person is always justified in rejecting that a miracle happened when only presented with eye-witness testimony.”
I think you clarify this later, but you would not hold that it’s always justified in rejecting that a *spectacular* event happened (e.g., someone levitating unaided) when only presented with eye-witness testimony. Right?
To take a more concrete example relevant to Christianity, would you agree that testimony alone can establish that someone rose from the dead -- just not establish that God rose someone from the dead?
I understand why you would hold that testimony alone would be insufficient to establish that the cause of someone rising from the dead is supernatural.
But I guess I don’t understand why you would hold that testimony alone would be insufficient to establish that someone rose from the dead, unless you think someone rising from the idea can only have a supernatural cause.
This is a well written article and pretty much puts into clear language what I, a Christian, had kind of thought about miracle claims from a young age. I do think that one collorary which could bring down the temperature is pointing out that a skeptic refusing to believe in a miracle claim is not necessarily a claim of fraud or superstition (though there's plenty of that going around, most of it even justified) but just, like, an inevitable baseline. Though most of the instigation on miracle claims these days is from apologists, and it does call into question that whole line of argument, so I think the theist side of things has to put more work into remembering that
Humans hallucinate far more than LLMs. We just call it "belief" or "faith."
"In my experience, miracle proponents almost always lack high quality evidence or tools of measurement, and are generally unconvincing when eliminating naturalistic explanations."
And it's not just religious miracles . . .alien visitations, cryptids, panpsychism etc. You see the proponents make shockingly similar logical errors/circular arguments. Really diving deep into Bigfoot in my early 20s was actually kind of the entryway into biblical criticism/skepticism of religious miracles and evolving from someone who had previously believed all of the NT miracles were true into what Arthur T would call a "very liberal loosey goosy Christian."
Another point is that the very concept of "supernatural" doesn't arise until medieval times and then not fully developed until the Enlightenment. For people in the 1st century, there was no dividing line between God/the divine working in the world and what was natural. If something happened "naturally" it was often retroactively interpreted to be caused by God for XYZ reason. So a "miracle" was less a breaking of natural barriers than a consequence of God simply acting in the world for a purpose. Thus why you see "miracles" as practically commonplace in literature of the time (both Christian and non) and a steep drop-off into modern times. Also why you'd see things we now know are mental conditions that were coined at the time as demon possession.
Interesting post; I'll be interested to see if any of the miracle testifiers respond. I do have one thought that I'm interested to see what you think. So, basically, Hume's thought is that natural laws are just events that have never been reliably reported to deviate. Now, for the sake of the thought, let's presume a group of witnesses did reliably report a deviation in the natural law (they all caught the event on separate cameras or something without collaboration). Wouldn't a reliable deviation from the natural law make it likely that something supernatural happened? After all, if what is natural is what has always happened, then would it not be the case that an observation consistent with the data would very likely be natural, whereas an observation that deviates from the data would very likely be something not natural?
In other words, it's not just the effect that has never deviated but also the cause, so if the effect is something that deviates, the cause is something that deviates, and because what is natural has always acted the same way, when something acts differently it suggests that the cause is different, and this is unlikely to be in a natural manner because all our evidence of natural causes act a certain way, so by virtue of the event having an unlikely effect its improbable that its cause would be natural since natural causes have never acted this way before.
I could not figure out how to say what I was trying to say, so I hope that makes sense.
As I said in the piece, we don't actually have a reliable account of supernatural causes. To the extent that people atest to seeing the supernatural, they're really attesting to observing something spectacular.
We observe novel spectacular events all the time throughout history, and they're natural in origin, especially after sufficient observation.
You can't say "well we know it's not natural" and then also, it's definitely supernatural. We don't know what supernatural looks like! This is the vagueness I describe, the "win by default without even trying" approach to supernaturalism.
Right, but I'm not trying to jump to supernatural per se. Instead, I'm trying to say that if we did have a reliable account of a spectacular event, it's unlikely that the cause is natural because natural causes do act in certain consistent ways, so it's unlikely that the cause of an event that deviates is natural. Hume's point is that a miracle, by virtue of being a miracle, is the most unlikely thing; I'm trying to say, similarly, since natural causes and effects have always acted a certain way, a deviation, by virtue of being a deviation, is unlikely to have a natural cause. In other words, if the cause was natural, we'd expect it to have effects consistent with the current natural laws. I guess part of my point is that we call things natural because they're normal, so a truly uncanny event is unlikely to have a natural cause because the cause will be abnormal.
I'm not trying to be annoying. I just don't know why you think that's wrong.
I think the error you're committing here is that you're conflating "natural" with presently known.
I tried to explain in another comment replying to Spencer. I guess why I think that’s the case, is, in short, if we ask why ‘X’ deviation happened, a naturalist explanation is insufficient. It would tell us that ‘X’ happened, and it could tell us how ‘X’ happened, but it could not explain why the normal course of nature did not continue as it had. If that doesn’t make sense, maybe my other comment will flesh it out more. Happy to hear your thoughts.
You're assuming, of course, that the normal course of nature was violated. I wouldn't make that assumption. Sorry if this isn't helpful I'm looking at this comment while at whole foods with my wife and I don't think this text is the best way to decipher the misunderstanding.
All good. I don’t think Im assuming and there’s two (I think) separate but related reasons why:
1. I think a reliable deviation just makes contingency much more pressing. Why wouldn’t things be as they always have been?
2. A reliable deviation would mean the cause is deviant in an equally improbable manner, which I think makes it unlikely to be natural, if we take natural to be what has always happened. It’s not that the deviant cause couldn’t be put in naturalist terms, in principle; it’s that the cause deviating is abnormal.
I understand what you're saying: say we can establish the spectacular event that Jesus rose from the dead. Should then conclude that it is likely that *God* caused Jesus to rise from the dead (as opposed to some unknown natural cause)? Is this what you're getting at?
I’m not saying God caused it, yet. I am saying if we had a reliable deviation, it is unlikely that the cause is natural, since natural causes result in the natural effects, which are not deviations.
I would question the inference from "we had a reliable deviation" to "it is unlikely that the cause is natural," unless "natural" simply means "our current understanding of natural laws." The cause may be consistent with our future understandings of natural laws.
Miracles aren’t the types of things that can be studied because, by virtue of being miraculous, they don’t happen over and over again. After all, if they did, we wouldn’t consider them miraculous, but normal or natural. However, imagine if we could go back in time (over and over again) and study the moment of the resurrection (presuming it happened); we could study exactly what happened to Jesus’s body and explain it in natural terms. We could then make a new law of nature, something like: every time someone dies, ‘X’ happens, unless whatever happened to Jesus's body happens. Nevertheless, the mere fact that we could explain it in natural terms would not mean the cause is thereby natural, and the fact that something unlike everything else happened should make us think the cause was unlike natural causes, since natural causes are those which have been consistent. A natural description of the deviation could tell us how/that it happened, but not why it happened instead of the alternative every other death has followed. So, an agnostic viewer could reasonably conclude the deviation is of miraculous cause.
Great post!! A great explanation of the skeptical stance!
This essay is so powerful it crashes my substack app everytime i try to open it!
try opening in browser i guess haha
Yeah the browser behaved. Great article! I remember slogging through the Fatima article and being honestly confused that anyone was taking child psychology in defense of children’s testimony as anything like convincing. Section on simplicity between theistic and naturalistic explanations pretty closely mirrors my thoughts on conciousness too.
>I will not be addressing anything else Schmid-related. I’m happy for him so long as he’s happy. At the risk of sounding like a hippy dippy liberal, I don’t care what he believes so long as he’s kind to other people.
Yup, exactly the same here, as I've said repeatedly I'll be saying nothing more about Schmid himself.
And it's just as well, because your general arguments are great. That said, a few comments:
>Testimonial evidence is by its nature inferior evidence to non-testimonial evidence because testimonial evidence requires additional inferences about witnesses on top of the data they report.
I guarantee Thomoids will tell you this isn't true, because even the "data" needs to be interpreted according to one's metaphysical framework and all that hoohaw. The problem is that even if this is true, testimonial evidence just adds another layer of interpretation on top of that: Not only do you have to look at the basic facts through a scientific framework or a Catholic framework or whatever, you now have to look at whether the witnesses should be interpreted through a skeptical or Catholic or whatever framework.
>Let’s explain this with an illustration. Think of two people performing a spectacular event: a real miracle worker (Jesus Christ himself perhaps) and the world’s best magician. If both of them performed a feat where they similarly appeared to walk on water and you didn’t know which person was which, both of their walks would look identical. You couldn’t tell them apart!
Lmfao I've been having this exact debate with a...uh, debate partner, you could say, for a while. If you don't mind a humongous amount of tl;dr you might find this comment thread interesting: https://substack.com/@gunlord500/note/c-315081053
Though keep in mind that while my interlocutor (not Skeptasmic, who was my host, the commenter) was and is quite kind to me, I, uh, am not sure he's as generous with other people, so you probably won't want to provoke him lol. I also don't know if I was irritating Skeptasmic or not with my long comment thread, so I would appreciate it if you or anyone reading this didnt engage over there ;_;
The other guys thesis was in response to this:
"Naturalistic explanations are held to higher standards, while supernatural explanations seem to have no standards."
He'd claim that supernatural explanations have holistic, qualitative standards than quantitative ones, and those Very High Standards are what Catholics use to discern the miracles of Christ from those of demons or magicians. According to the theologian Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, in my conversation with the commenter for argument's sake we just covered three criteria: whether or not the miracle is accompanied by a revelation that A: accords with previously-revealed dogma, B: accords with Aristotelian metaphysics, and C: accords with basic human morality that should be obvious to all human beings, according to Lagrange's "Thomistic Common Sense" book, just as much as Aristotelian metaphysics is.
Me, I dunno about that--as I mentioned to him at the tail end of our conversation, the hypostatic union seems flatly contradictory to the Aristotelian doctrine of divine simplicity even if you might have been able to sway some Jews away from pure unitarianism, but the response is that it perhaps really wasn't, we just didn't know how to accord it with the doctrine. But in that case, perhaps, say, Buddhist miracles were true, and we just haven't figured out how to accord those with Aristotelian dogma. That stuff's certainly beyond my pay grade.
So for the first part, The Humean is agnostic on metaphysics. We’re just making epistemic arguments based on the frequency of observed events. This sounds like a cop out, but it’s legitimate. People who bring in metaphysics are extenuating the cope that they can’t make a good natural argument for miracles that doesn’t rely on presupposing the truth of religion.
As for the rest of this, I haven’t checked out the thread yet, but I will say their definition of high quality explanation is not the same as what normal people say they are. Like, not going to lie, I didn’t read the last paragraph or two here in depth because it’s just a bunch of words that have a lot of assumptions and implications that non-Thomists wouldn’t agree with, and we would likely find incompatible with normal definitions of the term explanation. Which vaguely include a narrative how a causal relationship functions in a greater physical system, that provide quantifiable predictions/inferences, etc etc.
Whenever I read Thomists or their copatriots try to say explanations are more than this, they write these long ass comments which remind me of Ayn Rand fans writing endless words that say altruism is bad. In my eyes, it’s pseudo-profoundity
I'd say there's only one miracle that should have any ability to persuade someone towards theism and that's the miracle of existence itself.
https://ramblingafter.substack.com/p/existence-is-a-miracle
And that's not because "the universe exists" is necessarily any better explained by theism than naturalism, not that there's anything logical or rational about it, but simply that there's an emotional argument here: Thinking about the weirdness of the universe and the arbitrariness of its existence leaves a hole which demands being filled. Someone more inclined towards God will fill that hole with Him; someone more inclined towards naturalism might try to fill that hole by saying, "reality is just the instantiation of all mathematical possibilities, and we're just living one of those" (but that leads to the circular question "why am I experiencing **this** right now?" where as theism... doesn't really answer it either and that's what makes it such a good mystery... but I think people are more easily satisfied by the God answer at this point, even if it doesn't really make sense).
“In all, this means that a wise person is always justified in rejecting that a miracle happened when only presented with eye-witness testimony.”
I think you clarify this later, but you would not hold that it’s always justified in rejecting that a *spectacular* event happened (e.g., someone levitating unaided) when only presented with eye-witness testimony. Right?
Good post!
No, and I explain why!
To take a more concrete example relevant to Christianity, would you agree that testimony alone can establish that someone rose from the dead -- just not establish that God rose someone from the dead?
No
I understand why you would hold that testimony alone would be insufficient to establish that the cause of someone rising from the dead is supernatural.
But I guess I don’t understand why you would hold that testimony alone would be insufficient to establish that someone rose from the dead, unless you think someone rising from the idea can only have a supernatural cause.
Bro give yourself a pat on the back, you caught a typo that Claude missed! Thank you!
no. haha.
can t delete right now. will do when i wake up
No need, it's a badge of honor in your part!
I thought deleting the original comment would delete the thread... now it s just headless and weird...