Toggle comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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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 amputation. It's an interesting discrepancy, and which universe is that most consistent with? Etc. Don't think about it in terms of picking apart each individual claim. Just ask yourself about an interventionist God in terms of your honest expectations for such a God, and consider the world-as-it-is in comparison. Use the miraculous as a prediction that can succeed or fail, rather than simply as an explanation that is immune to correction.
...but never people claiming that God cured their amputation.
Just did a google search on this; pulled up some Christians trying to explain why (didn't find anything convincing), some atheists claiming that this is a knockdown argument against God (to be fair, if true it seems pretty decisive) and a case of a Christian reporting that he saw an amputated ear regrown (they said it wasn't a a full ear that came back, but a small thing that looked somewhat like an ear, and hearing was restored).
Are you going to claim that they were lying/deceived? On the one hand, it would certainly explain why a full ear didn't come back. On the other hand, they claimed to have seen the patient's skin break, blood come out, and an "small, ear-like thing" grow out of the gap. I cannot imagine someone decieving themselves about that!
Interesting example! Is a link readily available?
I'm not going to claim they were lying or deceived as such (although documentation of the event would of course help with my confidence), mostly to approach this conversation in the spirit of skeptical inquiry. If there are miracles, I want to believe that there are miracles. If there are not, I want to believe that there are not. So I think there are a number of things that this might be, one of which is a miracle, most of which are not.
But if it is a miracle, I would say it's a particularly confusing one. Take a step back for a moment and ask: if the God of your understanding were to interfere with natural law in such a way as to heal someone, would you expect that ear to be like a normal ear, i.e. full healing? Or would you expect it to be a partial fix? I don't mean 'could God do the partial fix thing', since the answer is obviously yes per the definition of God. I mean, "does this match your prior expectations of God's behavior, as a prediction?"
On the other hand, we could take an even bigger step back, and assign this account equal validity with other miracle claims, conservatively saying that this description is parsimonious with God as presently understood. Since you only described one example, can I assume you found very few examples of somebody claiming that miracles restored a limb- and none fully functioning or articulated. So let's just think about it statistically. Why almost never, even compared to other miracle claims? Why should we expect a massive bias in miracle claims away from amputation-related healing?