So, a few observations on miracles.
There are miracle stories in every religious tradition and plenty of not-exactly-religious traditions. Unless there's some big difference in credibility -- which I'm not aware of any reason to think there is -- if you think "no smoke without fire" about one set then you should think the same about the others too. Which means you either have to believe in lots of different gods, or believe in one god and lots of evil spirits (or something) that just happen to do more or less the same sorts of miracle. (Or, I guess, believe that miraculous things happen but they're brought about by people's latent psychic powers or something, but that's pretty far from any religion's account of these things.)
When miraculous stories are investigated carefully, they consistently seem to evaporate. This happens even when the people doing the investigation belong to the religion that claims responsibility for the alleged miracle. For instance, consider something commonly cited as evidence for miracles: the shrine at Lourdes, to which pilgrims in their millions trek in the hope of miraculous healing. The Roman Catholic Church has a process -- to its credit,
The Roman Catholic Church has a process -- to its credit, not a completely ridiculous one -- by which it certifies some healings there as miraculous. Although the process isn't completely ridiculous, it's far from obviously bulletproof; the main requirement is that a bunch of Roman Catholic doctors declare that the alleged cure is inexplicable according to current medical knowledge.
I went to medical school in Ireland and briefly rotated under a neurologist there. One time he received a very nice letter from the Catholic Church, saying that one of his patients had gotten much better after praying to a certain holy figure, and the Church was trying to canonize (or beatify, or whatever) the figure, so if the doctor could just certify that the patient's recovery was medically impossible, that would be really helpful and make everyone very happy.
The neurologist wrote back that the patient had multiple sclerosis, a disease which remits for long periods on its own all the time and so there was nothing medically impossible about the incident at all.
I have only vague memories of this, but I think the Church kept pushing it, asking whether maybe it was at least a little medically impossible, because they really wanted to saint this guy.
(the neurologist was an atheist and gleefully refused as colorfully as he could)
This left me less confident in accounts of medical miracles.
I'm under the impression that the canonization process used to be more selective, until Pope John Paul II lowered the evidence bar and started mass producing saints.
I have done this. The most impressive-sounding one happened to a friend of mine who had formerly been an athlete. She had to withdraw from sports for a year because of an unexpected muscular condition. (If this is obviously medically wrong, it's probably because I changed details for privacy.) As you probably expect, that year involved plenty of spiritual growth that she attributes to having had to quit sports.
At the end of that time, a group of church people laid hands on her and prayed, she felt some extreme acceleration in her heart rate, and her endurance was back the next time she tested it. A doctor confirmed that the muscular thing was completely gone, and she's been physically active ever since.
Now obviously this isn't bulletproof. You just need her to spontaneously recover at some point before the laying on of hands. (I have no idea how likely this would be; probably not very.) The rest is exactly the sort of thing that might happen regardless of whether there's a miracle. But it still sounds really impressive. If I weren't actively trying not to spin it to sound even more miraculous, it'd sound even more impressive.
But this is just the most miraculous-sounding story I've heard from a source I trust. I only know so many people. This account is probably well within the distribution of how miraculous anecdotes can get. I'd feel weird saying "you spontaneously got better a few months earlier, and so did anyone else with a similar story."
First of all, congratulations! These kinds of questions are extremely challenging to even ask from within certain philosophical frameworks, and the fact that you're here at all means that you've accomplished something exceptional. Further, by using the question of miracles specifically, you've focused on empirical, testable claims with verifiable consequences. The epistemology that you're associating with atheism or agnosticism is fundamentally the ability to ask exactly these questions, the habit of doing so reflexively, and the willingness to follow those questions to real answers.
The basic Bayesian response to the question of miracles isn't just "are they lying, or is there a God?" Ask the question a different way: in a hypothetical universe in which Christianity is false, how many claims of miraculous events do we expect? In a hypothetical universe in which Christianity is true, how many true (and false!) claims of miraculous intervention do we expect? Do we expect a difference in the kind of miracles that are claimed to occur? For example, we experience people claiming that God cured infertility or cancer, but never people claiming that God cured their amput...
The main prediction that comes to mind is that if Christianity is true, one would expect substantially more miracle claims by Christians (legitimate claims plus false ones) than by any other religion (false claims only). If it is false, one would expect similar miracle claims by most religions that believe in them. Does anyone have data on this one way or the other?
The main prediction that comes to mind is that if Christianity is true, one would expect substantially more miracle claims by Christians (legitimate claims plus false ones) than by any other religion (false claims only).
That seems to assume an independence of the base rate of false claims, which is unlikely if the religions have different doctrine on miracles. Miracles might be a big part of one religion, and not even believed in by another. I'd expect "miracle friendly" religions to have a higher base rate.
Also, given the prevalence of miracle claims, it would take quite a high base rate of actual miracles to even be detectable among the false claims.
A miracle simply doesn't convey very much information.
It can tell you that there's something odd about the universe (assuming you're got accurate information about the miracle), but it doesn't give you details about how you should live or what (if anything) happens after you die.
You're lucky! If it's only the argument from miracle keeping you from becoming a better thinker, then that's easily solved. It's really brittle.
First, "account of a miracle" is very, very different from "evidence of a miracle". The only datum here is someone saying "A miracle has happened to me!". From a Bayesian point of view, to assign a probability you must take into account all different models that could produce that statement, including:
Having had some experience as an amateur mentalist, I'm always amazed at the degree at which people want to believe in the supernatural. Even when you tell them explicitly that it was all a trick, they still might argue you have power you don't know to have, and things like that.
Anyway, the simple fact that there are many ways to account for a witnessing of a miracle, automatically reduces the probability of such an event really happening.
Second, as others have pointed out, a miracle might point in the direction of the divine, but which divine? Islam, Indui...
Thank you for an honest assessment of your own views, and a question, instead of just laying into an attack. I'll see what I can do to respond in the same spirit.
Isn't this a well known theist apologist position, the "argument from miracles"? You actually get a whole lot of links for that, starting at La Wik.
But you have a lot of odd ducks here, so you might get something new.
when atheists make their case, they assume a universe without miracles
I'm sure some do, but it's certainly not necessary.
But let's be clear about what we're talking about when you say miracle. It seems to be events caused by the will of an agent through magic.
Quantum fluctuations, with no known hidden variable cause, presumed to be ontologically random, are not what you're after, right?
So, I try magic occasionally. I point my hand at something, concentrate, and "will it to move". Haven't gotten it to work yet. That part is the problem. It hasn't worked for me. Never has. And it doesn't seem to work for anyone else either.
HPMOR is about a hyper rationalist atheist living in a magical world. Magic works just fine for him. The important ting isn't the physics that's our current best ...
LW article Excluding the Supernatural worked for me. I didn't want it to work! I didn't read it as an attempt to change my mind. I just read it because it seemed interesting, and then realized in horror that there probably aren't any deities. Losing my belief in theism was an upsetting experience, though I can't bring myself to regret it.
Thank you for reminding me that Luke (ours, not the bible's) saw miracles when he was a Christian and then deconverted anyway.
My own atheism follows deconversion as best i can recall at about the age of 9 or 10. There was one day i was afraid for my soul having been told once again that not believing in god would put me in hell and all of the sudden it struck me that the fact that you are afraid of something does not make it more or less reliably true. So believing because i was afraid simply stopped making sense and honestly I could not think of any o...
...This isn't just idle curiosity. I am currently a Christian (or maybe an agnostic terrified of ending up on the wrong side of Pascal's Wager), and when you actually take religion seriously, it can be a HUGE drain on quality of life. I find myself being frightened of hell, feeling guilty when I do things that don't hurt anyone but are still considered sins, and feeling guilty when I try to plan out my life, wondering if I should just put my plans in God's hands. To make matters worse, I grew up in a dysfunctional, very Christian family, and my emotions seem
I don't see how a god necessarily solves the problems theists want it to solve. A logically possible god could have created human life without any meaning, purpose, moral absolutes, an afterlife or a guarantee of ultimate justice. Christians and other traditional theists just project this wish list onto a god for basically selfish reasons, when a god has no obligation to arrange the universe for its creatures' convenience.
Most people are aware of the placebo effect, but greatly underestimate how large it's power truly can be.
I have fibromyalgia. At one time I couldn't write, needed a cane to walk, had constant diarrhea, and worse. I had already tried dozens of treatments. I had grown skeptical.
Then I was given a treatment which made lots of sense. It was based off of a theory which I had my doubts about, but after learning more about it, I was 100% convinced this was it. After trying the treatment, I was immediately much better. I could run. I could shave my own beard with...
Verging a bit away from your question, but:
feeling guilty when I try to plan out my life, wondering if I should just put my plans in God's hands.
I'm not sure I understand what "putting your plans in god's hands" means specifically (I'm not very familiar with Christianity in practice, especially American protestantism which I assume is what you're talking about), does it mean not thinking of long-term consequences of things? (not saving money? Not getting an education? Not using condoms?). Is it because planning is bad (because, dunno, it sh...
Thanks for the post, that must have been hard given your beliefs.
At first, please do note that it's a long leap from believing in miracles/magic to believing in the christian god.
when atheists make their case, they assume a universe without miracles
It's not an assumption but an observation. You wouldn't call them miracles unless they were a gross deviation from your normal experience.
But there are a LOT of people out there claiming to have seen events that one would expect to never occur in a naturalistic universe.
Did you know that the lifetime pre...
Most atheists simply don't believe that miracles exist.
When it comes to near death experiences I did have an experience that could validly labeled that way after 5 days of artificial coma. To me it's not very surprising that I did saw strange things will my brain was in a strange state. While that experience did influence me I don't take it as evidence that the supernatural exists.
But that isn't everything. Even if the supernatural exists, why should I believe that the God of the bible exists. The bible at various points simply doesn't make sense. I would rather go for something like Buddhism. Buddhism is much more coherent then Christianity.
I am an atheist. However I have personally had an experience that surely seemed like my prayers being directly answered. When I was young, from about 6 to 9, I would see these weird bright lights in my field of vision. Very often when I closed my eyes and frequently in normal daylight. Think greenish orbs superimposed over my field of vision (I could still see fine).
I was very freaked out about these lights. At 9 I prayed to god something similar to "I am not sure if you are real or not. But if you are real please makes these lights go away. If you a...
Whether you say something happened because of a physical process you haven't yet come to understand or the ineffable will of god, you're basically just saying you don't know why it happened. Neither theory has any explanatory power, and random miracles aren't evidence either way. If you claim that miracles are due to the perfectly understandable will of god, and demonstrate that people that follow Christian values are consistently helped by miracles and people who do not are consistently hurt by them, that would be a different story. But since we haven't observed that, miracles aren't evidence for a god.
It is a good habit to read the the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on a subject whenever it is relevant. (/u/BenSix had mentioned it already.)
Good answers have been given by commenters already, so I'll take a second to say: this reminds me strongly of C.S. Lewis' dissertation on miracles. Titled, can you believe it, Miracles.
I don't remember the entire discussion, but his opening expressed an idea of priors similar to what you've outlined here: those who review history looking for miracles will find evidence for them. Those who review history looking for evidence against miracles will find it. His idea was, simplified, "If a miracle occured, a person who does not believe in miracles would a...
Miracle claims are on shaky epistemic grounds. How do you confirm it was a miracle and not someone being mistaken about some phenomenon? Or more likely, that they don't have enough knowledge of the physical or cognitive sciences to know whether some phenomenon is possible or miraculous?
The proper use of humility is to take into account that we are human beings and we make mistakes and we have insufficient information, so we should try to anticipate our mistakes or lack of info and correct for them in advance. Meaning that one should have the prior for &qu...
I recently listened to a defense attorney making claims about how personal experience and eye-witness testimony are the best kind of evidence you can possibly have, in defense of Christianity.
If your religion dictates that you must believe in miracles being real, you will have to break yourself in colorful ways in order to do so.
Aiyen:
I think the place I would start -- and did start -- is with the question, "Have I ever personally experienced a miracle?" I quickly discarded most possibilities and came down to just a few, all of which were fundamentally a strong of events, each of which was individually highly unlikely. But unlikely things happen every day, so that's not enough to say it is a miracle.
Next, I would ask if people I personally know and trust have experienced miracles. I'd ask them about their experiences. For me, I knew no one who had experienced anything th...
There is no logical argument against miracles. They could exist.
But there really is no reliable evidence for them. If there was, I would also think this is a supernatural universe. But as it stands I'm pretty sure this is a natural universe, without souls and without praying superpowers.
I mean have you heard about the beatification of Pope John Paul II? A nun with symptoms similar to Parkinson's was healed after she prayed to John Paul. She even had a relapse but they went with it anyway.
The Christian philosopher Timothy McGrew ends his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the subject by saying...
......one's considered rational judgment regarding the existence and nature of God must take into account far more than the evidence for miracle claims. That is not to say that they could not be an important or even, under certain circumstances, a decisive piece of evidence; it is simply that neither a positive nor a negative claim regarding the existence of God can be established on the basis of evidence for a miracle claim alone, withou
As some others have said, others on LW (like myself) were not always non-theists. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss or need/want support. Thinking these thoughts and living as a heavily-doubting theist is extremely challenging and draining, from my experience. I was consumed during my initial questioning and ultimate de-conversion. I read and thought day and night, felt sick, alienated, lonely, etc. I wrote some posts here if you'd like to take a look:
...Speaking of miracles, I've never gotten a good explanation from a christian about what happened to this Lazarus person Jesus raised from the dead, especially in the context of the often-quoted verse Hebrews 9:27, " And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
Assuming this resurrection happened historically, then what happened to Lazarus afterwards? He just disappears from the story like a character in a play who has one thing to do in the plot and then he walks off the stage.
So either Lazarus died again later, but w...
Hey, it's been a while since I've looked over this thread. A lot of the answers have been very helpful; thanks! Another question-if I decide that I want to let go of my faith, do you have any advice for overcoming indoctrination and not being constantly afraid that I'm headed straight to hell? A few times I've decided that it made sense to let go, but while my beliefs are starting to tend more towards naturalism, my aliefs are still firmly Christian, and the fear keeps pushing me back. As a number of people have pointed out, religious memes are very resistant to purely reason-based attack. Thoughts?
commands given by God that seem horrifyingly immoral
Just out of curiosity, what moral system are you using to make this judgement?
I can relate to your doubt. Maybe you can see some of the same doubt in my summary of my theism opinion. Feel free to send me a private message if you want to discuss this with an irenic (always wanted to use that word) long time agnostic.
Well, theism ≠ supernatural.
Even materialist universe where consciousness arises as an emergent phenomenon of interacting neurons is not incompatible with theism - why wouldn't [gG]od create such a universe? He can.
Personal second hand (i.e. I know the family, but did not meet the guy himself) miracle experience: There was a guy who has been diagnosed with cancer, operated (not very successfully) and released with the prognosis of one year of life maximum. He took to (very) heavy drinking (much to dismay of his family) and lived for 35 years, dying in the ripe age of eighty-something (also much to dismay of his family, because they'd preferred him dead much sooner I guess).
"I'd like to know how atheists respond to the evidence of miracles."
In an infinite universe all probabilities are 1, over time. Everything can can be observed to happen no matter how apparently miraculous. This is one way any interpretation of any evidence for anything could be true. But as you can readily conclude, this raises as many questions as it resolves.
Long time lurker, but I've barely posted anything. I'd like to ask Less Wrong for help.
Reading various articles by the Rationalist Community over the years, here, on Slate Star Codex and a few other websites, I have found that nearly all of it makes sense. Wonderful sense, in fact, the kind of sense you only really find when the author is actually thinking through the implications of what they're saying, and it's been a breath of fresh air. I generally agree, and when I don't it's clear why we're differing, typically due to a dispute in priors.
Except in theism/atheism.
In my experience, when atheists make their case, they assume a universe without miracles, i.e. a universe that looks like one would expect if there was no God. Given this assumption, atheism is obviously the rational and correct stance to take. And generally, Christian apologists make the same assumption! They assert miracles in the Bible, but do not point to any accounts of contemporary supernatural activity. And given such assumptions, the only way one can make a case for Christianity is with logical fallacies, which is exactly what most apologists do. The thing is though, there are plenty of contemporary miracle accounts.
Near death experiences. Answers to prayer that seem to violate the laws of physics. I'm comfortable with dismissing Christian claims that an event was "more than coincidence", because given how many people are praying and looking for God's hand in events, and the fact that an unanswered prayer will generally be forgotten while a seemingly-answered one will be remembered, one would expect to see "more than coincidence" in any universe with believers, whether or not there was a God. But there are a LOT of people out there claiming to have seen events that one would expect to never occur in a naturalistic universe. I even recall reading an atheist's account of his deconversion (I believe it was Luke Muehlhauser; apologies if I'm misremembering) in which he states that as a Christian, he witnessed healings he could not explain. Now, one could say that these accounts are the result of people lying, but I expect people to be rather more honest than that, and Luke is hardly going to make up evidence for the Christian God in an article promoting unbelief! One could say that "miracles" are misunderstood natural events, but there are plenty of accounts that seem pretty unlikely without Divine intervention-I've even read claims by Christians that they had seen people raised from the dead by prayer. And so I'd like to know how atheists respond to the evidence of miracles.
This isn't just idle curiosity. I am currently a Christian (or maybe an agnostic terrified of ending up on the wrong side of Pascal's Wager), and when you actually take religion seriously, it can be a HUGE drain on quality of life. I find myself being frightened of hell, feeling guilty when I do things that don't hurt anyone but are still considered sins, and feeling guilty when I try to plan out my life, wondering if I should just put my plans in God's hands. To make matters worse, I grew up in a dysfunctional, very Christian family, and my emotions seem to be convinced that being a true Christian means acting like my parents (who were terrible role models; emulating them means losing at life).
I'm aware of plenty of arguments for non-belief: Occam's Razor giving atheism as one's starting prior in the absence of strong evidence for God, the existence of many contradictory religions proving that humanity tends to generate false gods, claims in Genesis that are simply false (Man created from mud, woman from a rib, etc. have been conclusively debunked by science), commands given by God that seem horrifyingly immoral, no known reason why Christ's death would be needed for human redemption (many apologists try to explain this, but their reasoning never makes sense), no known reason why if belief in Jesus is so important why God wouldn't make himself blatantly obvious, hell seeming like an infinite injustice, the Bible claiming that any prayer prayed in faith will be answered contrasted with the real world where this isn't the case, a study I read about in which praying for the sick didn't improve results at all (and the group that was told they were being prayed for actually had worse results!), etc. All of this, plus the fact that it seems that nearly everyone who's put real effort into their epistemology doesn't believe and moreover is very confident in their nonbelief (I am reminded of Eliezer's comment that he would be less worried about a machine that destroys the universe if the Christian God exists than one that has a one in a trillion chance of destroying us) makes me wonder if there really isn't a God, and in so realizing this, I can put down burdens that have been hurting for nearly my entire life. But the argument from miracles keeps me in faith, keeps me frightened. If there is a good argument against miracles, learning it could be life changing.
Thank you very much. I do not have words to describe how much this means to me.