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CCC comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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That is indeed a third possibility, but I think it can be safely ruled out. If there were a shred of actual evidence that spiritual experience was anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon then I'm pretty sure the rational community would welcome religious people with open arms. The problem is, there is no such evidence, so there's a limit to how welcoming rationalists can be to someone who insists that God is an actual deity.
There have been a few shreds, here and there. Few, far between, and next to impossible to repeat.
That's one of the many things that theists seem to have a hard time explaining: why is God so fleepin' cagey?
Let's consider briefly the opposite case. Let's assume that there's some miracle that can be called up on demand. It's simple, straightforward, and experimentally verifiable.
In fact, drawing inspiration from the Miracle of Lanciano, let's say that bread and wine turn to flesh and blood every time the priest consecrates it. Every time. It always has the same DNA, which matches what one might expect of a Nazerene aroundabout 10A.D. Repeatedly. Assume that this has always been the case, as long as anyone can tell, ever since the early years A.D. (and, as far as anyone knows, nobody tried it before then).
What happens? Well, presumably, a group of scientists investigate the phenomenon. They take measurements. They show how momentum and energy are conserved in the process. They check very thoroughly for any form of trickery, and find none.
Eventually, one of them comes up with some long, complicated, barely plausible theory involving spontaneous chemical reactions in organic substances, suggests that this is the same process by which the bread you eat turns into part of you, and concludes that bread is an excellent food for growing children as it is easily converted to human muscles.
In short, because it is a repeatable miracle, someone tries to fit it into the realm of things that are explainable without postulating the existence of God. If he is successful, then it looks like God is being cagey, and if he is not, then it looks like we are merely awaiting someone able to figure out a successful explanation (and God is being cagey).
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps:
First, everyone would strongly suspect fraud of some kind. So there'd be a lot of attempts to check this -- from scientists and from Randi-type debunkers. Ex hypothesi these would not in fact detect fraud.
At this point we would have a very well verified phenomenon that's fabulously difficult to fit into the standard naturalist/reductionist framework -- the only way we know of for whether someone has been validly ordained as a priest to influence what happens is via some kind of mind that's able to work with concepts like "priest", "ordained", and "valid". So somewhere around here I would expect the great majority of scientific skeptical types to conclude that something is paying attention to human religious rituals. Might be God, might be aliens with eccentric interests, might be some sort of superpowered AI whose existence we never noticed, etc., etc., etc., but it seems like it has to be something with a mind and with abilities that go way beyond ours.
It would be worth checking a few more-reductionist things. For instance: just what changes to the process of priest-making suffice to make transubstantiation not work? (In many traditions, and in particular in those traditions that believe in transubstantiation in our world, priests have to be ordained by bishops, and bishops have to be ordained by other bishops, and the process involves a ceremonial laying on of hands. Is it possible that there's some thing that gets transferred when that happens? That would be interesting, and might make some of the more-natural options look a bit more plausible. On the other hand, does success depend essentially on intent everywhere down the line? That seems to require non-human minds watching.)
If someone comes up with an actually-working theory about chemical reactions, that would be very interesting indeed -- but it would need to be a theory that explains why the process only works for priests, and only when they are performing a eucharistic ceremony. Otherwise, it's going to be much less plausible even to the most thoroughgoing skeptic than "a god did it" or "superpowered aliens did it".
Distinguishing between the various kinds of superpowered nonhuman intelligence that might have done this thing would be tricky. It seems like it would need to be either something rather like the god of Christianity, or else something deliberately masquerading as the god of Christianity. That might already be enough to justify adopting Christianity as at least a working hypothesis.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I'll just add that you don't have to get anywhere near this level of improbability (converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry) to get convincing evidence of the existence of a deity. It would be enough to show that people who prayed to a particular deity could produce any measurable effect that could not be accounted for by a placebo effect with statistically higher probability of success than those who prayed to some other deity. It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something -- anything -- but have it be the same thing in both cases. The two believers write down what God tells them without communicating with each other, and then you check to see if they match. If people who prayed to Jesus matched more often than people who prayed to Allah under otherwise identical circumstances, that would really get my attention.
When I suggest things like this to believers, the response is invariably a citation of Matthew 4:7 or some variation on that theme.
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
I think you are making an elementary error: from "the Bible says not-X", inferring "the Bible doesn't say X".
Deuteronomy 6:16 says "You shall not put YHWH your god to the test as you did at Massah". That's a reference to the events described in Exodus 17:7: "[Moses] named the place Massah and Meribah, because the children of Israel quarrelled and tested YHWH, saying 'Is YHWH among us or not?'." That's the bit where they get all grumpy at Moses because they have nothing to drink, and he strikes a rock with his staff and produces water.
So it's all a bit flaky, but I don't think Jesus is wrong here. The Israelites get grumpy and accuse Moses of bringing them all this way out into the desert to let them die of thirst; Moses performs a miracle to give them some water and reassure them; God, as purportedly quoted by the author of Deuteronomy, interprets this as putting God to the test (this, if anything, is the dubious bit; the story in Exodus sounds as if their problem was thirst more than it was doubt) and tells them not to do it again; Jesus appeals to this when challenged to demonstrate that he, like Moses, has God on his side. (Digression: It seems to me that his response here would have been better as a response to the previous temptation -- to make rocks into food -- which is awfully reminiscent of what the Israelites had had Moses do. I wonder, and this is pure baseless speculation, whether at one point there were two temptation narratives going around, both involving the stones-into-food challenge, with Jesus giving the "man does not live by bread alone" answer in one version and the "do not put God to the test" answer in the other -- and then Mark or Q or whoever wanted to include both stories but needed a second temptation, and therefore made one up. This would also explain why the second temptation is such a silly one.)
Heh, you're right. I missed this because in the KJV Deu6:16 is translated as "shall not" rather than "shalt not" so my text search didn't find it. I stand corrected. Sorry, Jesus.
They doubted God's ability to provide them with water.
Now I'm imagining it a bit like a long journey in a car, with Israel the nation being like a very whiny child:
"Are we there yet?"
"We'll get there when we get there."
...
"Are we THERE yet?"
"No."
...
"Are we there yet?"
"No, we didn't get there in the last ten seconds."
...
"I'm thirsty."
"Here, have some water, and if you can't sit quietly for a few minutes, I'll have you wandering the desert for forty years, okay?"
Okay, I haven't looked into this in any detail, but I must say this comes as a surprise. What elements are in meat that aren't in bread, or vice versa? (I had expected that they were both, pretty near entirely, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which is why the human body can digest bread and use it to grow - which is really a long-term way of transforming it into human flesh).
Now, that would be interesting. It does require God's deliberate participation - in fact, all experiments to prove His existence do - so it's not going to work if He doesn't play ball. (Which brings us right back to the question of why He is so cagey about the whole existence thing at all...)
There's a list of places where the new testament quotes or refers to the old over here. I see gjm's already found this quote, but it might save you some future searches in similar circumstances.
OK, I was wrong about this. I thought that wine didn't contain iron, but it does. (I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus's alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)
But it doesn't matter. My whole point was that you wouldn't have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I'll believe.
Or instantaneous transportation over perhaps large distances.
Fair enough. Let me take a stab at it, then.
Free will.
We know that matter is deterministic; electrons, protons, neutrons all follow pretty well-understood laws. We know that the human body is made of electrons, protons and neutrons; perfectly normal matter. Therefore, human behaviour should also follow from those same laws; it's merely a massive amount of work to follow the reactions of such a vast amount of electrons, protons and neutrons, which is why no-one has done the calculation yet. This implies that human behaviour should be deterministic.
Yet people continually insist that they have free will. That they have choices. That they can choose to get up in the morning, or to sleep late.
Can you explain the phenomenon of free will without the existence of a deity?
It seems to me like souls that somehow affect the brain would completely suffice. Why do you think an all-powerful and all-knowing god is needed?
No, we don't.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/Determinism.pdf
Some people think so:
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html
Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man's first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God's orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve's rebellion can look back with our 20/20 hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there's this big booming voice on her left saying, "Don't eat this fruit" and a snake on her right saying, "Don't listen to that clown, he's lying to you. Go ahead and eat it." How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
So I don't see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don't see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven't heard?
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don't have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it's a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I'm a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I'm "really" a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn't have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can't escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it's not.
There is no phenomenon of free will. There's no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will. What there is, is the phenomenon of people believing they have free will. And that has various explanations.
However, it's no different from other popular beliefs with no empiric evidence. People naturally ("by default") believe in souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye, and a hundred other things for which the existence of belief isn't strong evidence. Since free will, like souls, is pretty much by definition empirically unobservable, people's belief in it (that doesn't come with a concrete argument) in it isn't evidence for it, since the belief couldn't have been caused by observation.
I would expect there to be much more protein in meat than in bread, and therefore much more nitrogen.
Hmmmmm. I didn't think of ratios, but this transsubstantiation would take place in the atmosphere - perhaps atmospheric nitrogen could be pulled in to make up the difference. Or some of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen could be released into the atmosphere as gasses (carbon dioxide in the case of the oxygen). Or both.
At the very least, a chemical transmutation theory would need to consider that possibility.
Perhaps you are right. It's not easy to be certain of this sort of hypothetical - I have a lot of confidence that there will be some people who react as per my prediction, and that there will be some people who react as per your prediction, but which group (if either) will gain enough backing to be considered the mainstream opinion is difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell.