Comment on Something's Wrong

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:13:11 GMT

I thought that it didn't quite make sense to speak of non-naturalistic events at all. What would a non-naturalistic event look like?

It's not so much that we take it "on faith." It's that, in a certain type of thinking (the kind of thinking where sentences represent claims about the world, claims must be backed by evidence, inferences must follow from premises) the very notion of a miracle is incoherent.

I was trying to help a friend write a role-playing game -- yes, I'm a geek -- and build in some kind of rigorous quantitative model of magic. It's surprisingly frustrating. I invite anyone to try the exercise. You wind up with all kinds of tricky internal contradictions as soon as you start letting players break the laws of physics. I appreciate physics much more, having seen how incredibly irritating it is to try to give the appearance of structure and sense where there is none.

Of course, in a different mode of thinking -- poetic thinking, or transcendent thinking -- you can talk about miracles. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands" is good strong poetry and (to me) has a ring of truth. But it isn't a proposition at all!

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