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Bugmaster comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong Discussion
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CCC and I were talking on another thread, and I responded to his comment, on the topic of religion. Rather than derail the original conversation, we decided to continue it here.
Here's the main point of my response, just for reference (original here):
So, CCC, here are a couple things that I'm curious about:
I started with merely a reasonably strong prior (above 50%), and found some non-massive amount of evidence to reinforce it.
However, should I find evidence that contradicts my position, there will be a number of possible explanations. First is that the evidence is a true sign that my position is incorrect; second is that the evidence has been presented in such a way as to be more convincing than it really is; third is that the evidence has been faked, by a particularly aggressive militant atheist. (There may be further possibilities as well, but let us consider these three for the moment).
Now, this is a subject of great importance. One of the reasons why it is of great importance is the question of the afterlife (specifically, whether it exists or not). Since it is a subject of such great importance, it is of equal importance that I take caution when updating. Specifically, I must take particular care to avoid deliberate attempts at deception. In order to do this, I must first evaluate any evidence I recieve to see what the odds are that it could have been produced, or selected, in a deliberate effort to pull the wool over my eyes.
I know that aggressive militant athiests exist. I know that there are people out there, convinced that God does not exist, who will go to great effort - including subterfuge and deliberate deception - to convince others of this view. Such people have a clear motive for elaborate deceptions.
In order to pass the bar for being considered 'massively convincing' evidence, the evidence must pass the following test: it must be more likely that the evidence is a true sign that God does not exist, than it is that the evidence has been either faked or cherry-picked in order to support the atheist hypothesis.
It is the same process as I use to determine whether a given piece of writing is fiction or non-fiction. I consider, given what little I know of history, and what I know of fiction, and what I know of human nature, and come to a decision on whether it is more probable that a given incident happened as described, or whether it is more likely that a given incident originated in someone's imagination.
Consider, for example, the book of Job. This is a clear example of something not intended to be taken literally.
To summarise; a righteous and holy man (Job) has vast amounts of wealth. The Devil proposes that he is only righteous and holy because this give him vast material wealth, and God permits the Devil to test this hypothesis. Job promptly loses his wealth, his children, his health. Three of his friends turn up and make long, wordy speeches about how Job must have sinned, in order to attract such disaster; Job himself maintains his innocence. Finally, God himself turns up and makes a long, wordy speech about his great power; Job more-or-less throws himself on God's mercy, and then God chastises Job's friends; Job ends up with more wealth than ever before.
There are several indications throughout the Book of Job that it is intended as a work of fiction. First of all, there are the long, wordy speeches; far longer and wordier than anyone would normally use when conversing among friends, but very appropriate to (say) a stage production in front of an audience. Secondly, there are many references to Jewish legends of the time (which have to be explained in footnotes in modern bibles). Thirdly, the means by which Job discovers his original loss of wealth - three servants arrive, each explaining how some disaster overtook some part of Job's property and only he survived to come and tell Job - is eminently suitable for a low-budget stage production (one merely needs three actors to arrive and say their lines). Fourthly, aside from a bit of narration at the start and finish, everything happens in one location, and it's a location easily reproducible on stage (outside, sitting in the dirt). Fifthly, despite the complexity of the speeches, the moral is very simple ('bad things can happen to good people').
So, for these reasons and others, I consider it more likely that Job was not meant to be taken literally than it is that the incidents described in Job happened as described. Despite that, the moral of Job - that bad things can happen to good people, and thus that people with bad luck are not necessarily evil - is important.
Why is your prior so strong ? Is this due to the usual somewhat arbitrary combination of your genetics and upbringing -- which, IMO, is where most of our priors come from -- or is there some other reason ?
Hmm, well, I hope you don't see me as one of those people.
That said, once again, both of us take a similar line of reasoning to arrive at opposite conclusions. All of the evidence for the existence of gods (of any kind) that I have ever seen was either faked for a profit (weeping statues, faith healing, etc.), hearsay (friend of a friend of a cousin who heard about this one time...), or unfalsifiable ("god acts in mysterious ways"). What's worse, many phenomena that have been historically attributed to direct intervention by gods -- such as thunder, lightning, living tissue, formation of planets, rainbows, volcanic eruptions, disease, etc. -- have since then been explained in terms of purely natural mechanisms. This leads me to believe that future acts of god(s) would likewise be reduced.
That said, I am not sure I understand this part correctly:
Isn't this a little like trying to prove a negative ? If you posit the existence of an incredibly powerful and mysterious entity -- be it a god, or an AI, or a Matrix Lord, or whatever -- then how can I prove to you that any given phenomenon was not caused by him (it/them/etc.) ? What criteria do you use to judge whether any given event was caused by the god, or by some perfectly natural mechanism (the exact nature of which may or may not be known to you).
Hmm, I think I do disagree with you on something (other than our conclusions, that is). When I consider a piece of writing, I consider all the things that you mention, but I also compare the setting and the events in the book to those in the real world.
Thus, for example, if I were to read a story that is written in the style of a news report, about perfectly ordinary people who live in modern-day San Francisco, behave in ways consistent with human nature, and fight vampires -- then I would still discount the story as fiction, because I am quite certain that vampires don't exist (given the total lack of evidence for them). The same applies to elves, magic users, alien visitors, etc.
That said, I am still not clear about your own approach. From my perspective, the vast majority of the Old and New testaments is written in the same way as the Book of Job, with the possible exception of commandments ("thou shalt not do X" / "thou must do Y") and the infamous "begats" in Chronicles.
Presumably, you would disagree, so could you perhaps contrast Job with some other passage, which you do take to be literal ?
Virtually entirely due to my upbringing.
No, I don't see you as one of those people. Such people are to atheism as militant fundamentalists are to any religion; they're there, they're outspoken, they won't listen to anyone who disagrees with them, and they're fortunately very rare.
I've given a bit of thought to the idea of proving the existence of miracles in a laboratory setting. It runs into a few problems.
For a start, let's divide miracles into two types; the once-off miracle, which happens only once and cannot be reproduced under laboratory conditions, and the repeatable miracle, which happens every time the right conditions are in place.
For obvious reasons, the once-off miracle is not suitable; since it cannot be reproduced, it cannot be used in a scientific context to show more than coincidence.
So let us then consider the repeatable miracle. For the purposes of discussion, I will pick out one potential example; let us say that all fires refuse to burn any orphan. This would be reproducible in a laboratory, and it would be clearly miraculous, by our current understanding of science.
Now, let us consider a world where no fire had ever burnt an orphan. How would it differ from our world? Well, there are a few obvious ways - almost all firemen would be orphans, it would be possible to prove a parent's death by checking if their children are burnt by a candle flame, and some psychopaths would kill their own parents to become fireproof.
And scientists would struggle to find a mechanism for the fireproofness of orphans. Sooner or later, someone would suggest something that sounded vaguely believable... and it would be tested. If it fails the test, then someone else will suggest something else, and so on. The history of science is full of theories that later turned out to be false - phlogiston, luminiferous aether - and were replaced by better theories. In this case, the theory would be wrong (since it's direct divine influence saving all the orphans) - but unless it could be disproved, it would be accepted (and if it could be disproved, it would be replaced).
Either way, the laboratory tests wouldn't say 'miracle'.
Quite honestly, I haven't the faintest idea. Trying to prove the non-existence of God is exactly like proving a negative, because it is a negative.
All perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God as well.
The infamous 'begats' in Chronicles have a problem, in that they assume that Adam and Eve were real (that's where the biblical literalists get their 'the Earth is six thousand years old' from; counting generations and making some assumptions about how long people live).
As for literal; that's a very high bar to meet. I often hear (and even make) statements which are intended to communicate a true fact, but which are not literally true; and even in court, eye-witness statements may and often do conflict on minor details.
So, given that I hold it to the bar of 'eye-witness statement' or, in parts, 'hearsay' rather than to the higher bar of 'every last literal word perfectly true', I shall present to you the four Gospels as an example
I can see a couple of issues with this formulation, defining a miracle for the moment as a suspension of natural law by divine fiat. First, while a one-time miracle presumably wouldn't be reproducible under laboratory conditions, most miracles that I can think of would leave an inconsistency with known physical law and could be analyzed by working backwards from the available evidence. Some would be more obvious or easier to evaluate than others; if the face of the Virgin Mary appeared in my cornflakes one morning, I'd have only until they got soggy to publicize the event, but if a volcanic eruption in Luzon generated a pyroclastic cloud that scoured the rest of a town down to bedrock but left every board of a flimsy wooden church unharmed, there's still plenty of lahar sediments to analyze. You don't need to grow evidence in a Petri dish for it to be real science.
(Though it's worth mentioning here that lots of religions, plus Charles Fort, allege odd phenomena. Incorrupt corpses are alleged for a number of Catholic saints, for example, and the corpses in question certainly look less corrupt than I'd expect them to be, but they also show up among Buddhist monks.)
Then there's the idea that miracles might show signs of agency, i.e. be directed at some goal; God's motives in the context of Christianity are of course famously ineffable, but the miracles alleged in the Bible do show certain patterns (protection of the innocent or of a chosen people; glorification of God; etc.) and we might reasonably expect these to continue. We can pick these out with statistical methods: if preachers of one particular sect are indistinguishable from those of another in terms of habits and demographics and there's enough of both to make a good sample, but the rate of lethal accidents for one is zero, that's certainly suggestive.
Finally, many alleged miracles are persistent in time but limited in space: Lourdes water, weeping statues. These leave an inconsistency that's laboratory testable (many have been tested, generally with negative results) but wouldn't be factored into models of physical law, or which at least would lead to much less elegant physics than we observe.
That is an excellent point, and some analyses of the sort have been done. The Shroud of Turin being a famous example (conclusion: radiocarbon dating suggests it was likely from a thousand years or so too late, but it's not yet quite clear how it was made; lots of argument and disagreement). Another, perhaps a little less well-known, would be the Miracle of Lanciano
It's not impossible that God might respond equally to anyone who fulfills a certain list of criteria, regardless of what religion the person follows. A devout Buddhist may have as much chance of leaving an incorrupt corpse as a devout Catholic.
...which leads, of course, to the immediate question of what the relevant criteria are. I don't know. I have a few guesses, but they're speculative.
This is an excellent point. However; in order to detect the agency, it would be necessary to have some idea of the goal. Considering that omniscience and omnipotence are often considered divine attributes, the best idea that we can have for the goal is to consider that what is happening is what was intended; but that quickly becomes a circular argument, because it is trivially clear that if what is happening is what was intended, then it was successful.
It would be very suggestive and, quite honestly, a little worrying. It would imply that there was nothing worthwhile in the preachers of one sect, and at the same time, that none of the preachers of the the sect joined for selfish motives (such as, for example, immunity to fatal accidents) and don't really care about doing their duties correctly.
That is true. I guess that would fall under laboratory-testable. I imagine a number of them would be faked, or turn out to be a one-in-a-billion statistical fluke - the genuine ones may get lost in the noise.
On the other hand, it's also quite possible that the phenomenon of incorrupt corpses occurs regardless of the virtues of the individuals in question, but then corpses of the particularly virtuous are held up as examples of divine grace, while the incorrupt corpses of ordinary people, not being seen as evidence of anything in particular, are ignored.
You mentioned before the possibility of militant atheists cherrypicking evidence to support their position. This is certainly a consideration that has to be accounted for, but so is the possibility that the evidence favoring religion only appears compelling because it is cherrypicked. This also occurs to a considerable extent with nigh-certainty. Consider, for example, the healing miracles of Lourdes, which Nornagest mentioned above, which have made it an international pilgrimage destination, despite the fact that statistical analyses of the recovery rates of pilgrims do not suggest that the location has any particular healing power. Counting every unexplained recovery, while not counting the nonrecoveries, can create the appearance of persistent miracles.
Hard-to-explain things happen all the time, and we're much more likely to notice them if they seem indicative of something important to us than if they don't.
That is also a possibility. And it can be tested for; if it is true, then the percentage of incorrupt corpses should be constant whether the people were virtuous before dying or whether they were legally executed for crimes committed (and not later exonerated by, say, DNA evidence).
...I have no idea what the results of actually checking that would be, but it would certainly be interesting.
That is a very strong possibility that must be borne in mind, yes.
From the Wikipedia article on Lourdes:
Both references were retrieved on 5 May 2009, though the second was dated 21 October 2003. There we have a rate; 69 miraculous cures, out of 200 million people (and any number of non-miraculous cures as well, of course).
If there is nothing to Lourdes, then this should be similar to the number of miraculous cures among a random sampling of 200 million people with various illnesses.
(Sixty-nine out of two hundred million is low enough to give the appearance of statistical noise; that's odds of close to one in three milllion)
Makes sense. This may not be a fair question to ask, but do you believe that, given all available evidence, you'd still be a theist if your prior was a bit lower -- say, about 50% ?
Regarding miracles, I think you and I mean different things by the term.
Both of the kinds of miracles you described sound fairly mundane to me. The first kind is basically a rare unexplained occurrence; these happen every day, and, given what we now know of statistics, it would in fact be quite odd if they did not occur. For example, last week I was filling up my car and saw that my odometer read "123455"; that was neat, but I wouldn't call it miraculous.
The second kind of miracle sounds like a natural law to me, just like gravity or heat transfer or something. You say that "all perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God as well"; does this mean that pretty much everything that happens is a miracle ? Doesn't that rather dilute the word "miracle" to the point where it just means, "stuff that happens" ?
Huh, that's odd. When I read the Gospels, I get the same exact impression as the one you described regarding the book of Job. The Gospels basically consist of a thin plot that serves to hold together several tangentially related morality tales, as well as monologues by the main character which are explicitly meant to be metaphorical (involving olive trees, donkeys, and such, borrowing some tropes from Aesop's fables). Jesus does some fantastical things in the book, but these always serve to illustrate some moral lesson or another; in this, he is pretty similar to other characters in the Bible who summon bears, survive inside whales, etc.
So, could you contrast the two stories (the Gospels, or perhaps some specific passage from the New Testament, vs. Job), to illustrate why you believe that one is mostly fiction, and the other mostly fact ?
I cannot say for sure. I'd like to say 'yes'... but too much of my history would need to change for that to be true. I can't say anything for certain about that counterfactual me.
Yes, but some are mere coincidences, like your odometer; while others appear to subvert the natural order, like the Sun doing a dance.
Yes, that was more-or-less my point.
I'd say that any kind of natural law is exactly as miraculous as a permanently-repeatable miracle. I don't really think that dilutes the work 'miracle' all that much; after all, some pretty amazing stuff happens on a continual basis. (It may inflate the phrase 'stuff that happens' somewhat; but when one considers all that goes into stuff happening, it can be pretty impressive in any case).
Hmmm.
For Job, I shall pick out Job chapters 4 and 5; a very long, wordy speech by one speaker. Note that this is framed as being one of Job's friends, taking to Job after Job has lost everything and moaned about it a bit. Completely overblown. I can't imagine anyone speaking like that in a conversation.
Compare this passage from the Gospel of John (specifically, John 18:28-19:16); wherein Jesus is taken before Pilate by a mob who want to have him killed; what people say here is a lot shorter and more to-the-point. It's easier to see Pilate as a civil servant who just really doesn't want anything to do with this mess that's been thrown on his lap; his reactions seem far more plausible than Job's friends' speeches.
Jesus has a similar overblown speech spanning multiple chapters in John (14-18)
Just FYI, Pilate's behavior in the Gospels is almost completely at odds with how he's described in literature that's actually contemporary with when Pilate lived. Pilate in the Gospels is depicted as a patient, if not a slightly annoyed, judge of character. Only succumbing to executing Jesus because he doesn't want a riot to start. Pilate depicted by Philo (who was writing when Pilate was still alive) describes Pilate as stubborn, inflexible, greedy, impatient, executing multiple people without trials, and has no qualms about ignoring the will of Jewish mobs. Pilate is actually relieved of his duty because he was such a corrupt prefect.
Also, Barabbas, the character that the Jews want released in Jesus' stead: His name "Barabbas" literally means "son of the father" which just so happens to be Jesus' identity. Not only would Pilate not have acquiesced to releasing a (presumably) convicted criminal to appease a Jewish crowd, but there was no tradition of letting a prisoner go during Passover.
The whole trial scene with Pilate is exceedingly improbable if one knows the history of the time period, even if Pilate uses more to the point wording; that is easily fabricated.
It's a long speech, yes, and spans multiple chapters; but it's not the sort of overblown verbiage one finds in Job. The speeches in Job are long not because they have a lot to say, but because they insist on saying everything in the most drawn-out and overdone way possible; each entire speech could probably be replaced by two or three sentences easily. It would be a lot harder to replace Jesus' speech in John 14-17 with a similarly few short phrases.
Okay, I've followed up your link, and I don't think it backs up your claim as completely as you seem to assume it does. (That's aside from the fact that people are complex beings, and often do unexpected things.) I hadn't really looked into other sources on Pilate before reading your comment, so this is just sortof off the top of my head.
So, the picture I get of Pilate from your link is of someone who really doesn't like the Jews, and is quite willing to set his soldiers on them - even to the point of enticing a Jewish crowd to form in a place where he can arrange disguised soldiers in its midst, so that his disguised troops can cut up the nearby protestors. He has no qualms about sentencing people to death and really, really doesn't like to change his mind.
So. Imagine a person like that, and then imagine that this Jewish mob turns up on his doorstep, all unexpected, clamouring to have this man put to death. Pilate may not have qualms about sentencing a man to death; but a stubborn and inflexible man who doesn't like the Jewish mob isn't going to want to give them what they want. No, he's going to want to deny them out of sheer contrariness; he's going to look for a way to get this guy out of his hair, alive, so that he can go back and bother the Jews more.
And then, of course, there's the data point that he often turns against the mob. But he's human; one man against a mob tends to go really badly for the one man, and he knows that. He doesn't turn against the mob on his own - he turns against the mob when he's backed up by enough soldiers. As in the example where he had the soldiers disguise themselves to join the mob, this takes planning. This takes forethought. This takes knowing that the mob is going to be there. In advance. A mob that turns up entirely unannounced, while Pilate's busy with other stuff and perhaps some of his soldiers are on leave, is another matter entirely; that calls for defusing them now, and punishing them later, when there's been time to plan it out. And hey, this mob gets defused by simply having this one Jewish guy killed. Not optimal, but better than a riot that the troops aren't quite ready to deal with...
Given the picture you've painted, as a corrupt prefect, he might well release some minor brigand who'd only preyed on the peasants and left anyone with soldiers alone.
Yeah, that's probably what I'd say, too.
How do you know which is which; and how do you know when the natural order has truly been subverted ? For example, I personally don't know much about that dancing sun event, but the fact that (according to Wikipedia, at least) it has not been recorded by any cameras or other instruments leads me to believe that human psychology, rather than divine intervention, was responsible.
That said, in your estimation, approximately how many miracles of that kind are occurring on Earth per year ?
Agreed. So, when we talk about miracles, let's stick to unusual acts of divine intervention.
In addition to what JQuinton said, I'd like to add that, while the New Testament definitely contains more action than Job, it's still pretty much full of parables, sermons, and long-winded speeches; for example, such as the one directly preceeding the passage you quoted -- and that's not even the longest one. I agree that the supporting characters are a bit more lifelike in the New Testament -- but then, it's also a much longer book, so there are more pages available to flesh them out.
Furthermore, there are many other works of literature with even better writing; for example, the Odyssey, Moby Dick, or, more recently, Harry Potter. Presumably, you don't believe that these works describe real events; but if so, why not ?
Well, first you have to know what the natural order is. And that requires the help of the physicists and other scientists.
What a scientist cannot explain may or may not be a subversion of the natural order. (What a scientist can explain may or may not also be a subversion of the natural order - some scientists can be trapped into providing justifications for incorrect versions of events - but it's still a useful filtering tool) Or it may be a thing that the physicist will have to update his model of physics to explain.
...it's not an easy question.
That's not impossible. (I don't know much about it either; it was linked from the wikipedia article on 'miracle').
Ummm... if I had to guess... I'd guess less than one. I wouldn't venture a guess as to how much less than one, though.
Defining whether a given event is or is not an unusual act of divine intervention may be tricky; but fair enough, let's go with that definition for the moment.
You're right; nothing that's written in the Gospels can raise it to a status of higher than 'plausible'. Many clear works of fiction also reach the status of 'plausible'; in order to reach the higher status of 'probably true', one needs a certain amount of external verification.
I find a good deal of that external verification in the fact that a number of people, in whom I place a great deal of trust, and at least some of whom are known to be better at identifying truth than I am, have told me that it is true.
Ok, I admit that science is hard. But about you ? How do you, personally, know what's a subversion of the natural order and what isn't ?
Which possibility do you think is more likely in this case: genuine miracle, or mass confirmation bias ? That's why I'd like you to clarify this:
Well, can you put a ballpark figure on it ? Do miracles happen (on average) once a year ? Once a century ? Once a millennium ? Once per the lifetime of our Universe ?
I think this is another difference between our methods; and I must confess that I find your approach quite weird. This doesn't automatically mean that it's wrong, of course; in fact, many theists (including C.S.Lewis) advocate it, so there might be something to it. I just don't see what.
The big difference between your approach and mine is that you seem to be entirely discounting empirical evidence; or, if not discounting it, then trivializing it at the very least. So, for example, if a trusted friend told you that he was fishing in the pond behind his house and caught a Great White shark; and if all of your friends confirmed this; then you'd accept that as true. I, on the other hand, would ask to see the shark.
The reason for this is not that I'm some sort of a hateful, un-trusting person (or rather, that's not the only reason, heh); but because we have mountains and mountains of data on sharks, and all of it tells us that they are incredibly unlikely to show up in ponds, and are also quite strong and thus nearly impossible to catch using an ordinary fishing line. Compared to this overwhelming pile of evidence, the testimony of a few people does not suffice to turn the tide of my belief.
So, is there a reason why you value empirical evidence as little as you do ? Alternatively, did I completely misunderstand your position ?
I have at least as much difficulty as the hypothetical scientist. Possibly slightly more difficulty, because the hypothetical scientist will know more science than I do.
Insufficient data for a firm conclusion.
Opposing the mass confirmation bias hypothesis, are the claims that the water on the ground and on people's clothing was dried during the time; also apparently people 'miles away' (and thus unlikely to have been caught up in mass hysteria at the time) also reported having seen it.
Having said that, there is another explanation that occurs to me; the scene was described as the dancing sun appearing after a rainstorm, bursting through the clouds:
If the clouds were thick enough, it may be hard to see the Sun; the bright light could have been... something else sufficiently hot and bright. (I do not know what, but there's room for a number of other hypotheses there).
I am very poorly calibrated on such low frequencies, so take what I say here is highly speculative. (Also, the rate seems very variable, with several a year in the time of the Gospels, for example).
At a rough guess, I'd say possibly somewhere between once a year and once a century. Might be more, might be less.
Let me explain further, then, by means of an analogy. Consider the example you provide, of a trustworthy friend claiming to have found a great white shark in a nearby pond. For the sake of argument, I shall assume a rather large pond, in which a Great White could plausibly survive a day or two, but fed and drained by rivers too small for a Great White to swim along.
I shall further assume that you are aware that all your friends were on the fishing trip together (which you were unable to join due to a prior appointment).
Now, catching a Great White is a noteworthy accomplishment. If your friend were to accomplish this, it is reasonable to assign a high probability that he would tell you. Therefore, I assign the following:
P (Being told | Great White caught) = 0.95
It is also possible that your friends are collaborating on a prank, giving you an implausible story to see if they can convince you. If this is the case, they could have decided to do so while on the fishing trip, and laid out the necessary plans then. Exactly what probability you assign to this depends a lot on your friends; however, for the sake of argument, I shall assume that there's a 20% chance of this scenario.
P (Being told | No great white caught) = 0.2
Now, furthermore, there is no plausible way for a Great White to have ended up in the pond; and no plausible way to catch one with a simple fishing line. There are a variety of implausible but physically possible ways to accomplish both actions, though. So the prior probability of a Great White being caught is very low:
P (Great White caught) = 0.05
(possibly less than that, but let's go with that for the moment).
Thus, P(Being told) = P (Being told | Great White caught) * P(Great White caught) + P (Being told | No great white caught) * P(No great white caught) = (0.95 * 0.05) + (0.2 * 0.95) = 0.2375
Plugging this into Bayes, P(Great White caught | Being told) = P (Being told | Great White caught) * P(Great White caught)/P(Being told) = (0.95 * 0.05)/0.2375 = 0.2
So, given certain assumptions about how trustworthy your friends are, etc., I find that the probability that they have indeed captured a Great White is higher if they tell you that they have than if they do not. Mind you, the prior probability for capturing a Great White is very low to begin with; the end result is still that it is more probable that they are lying than that they have captured a Great White, and you would be perfectly sensible to request further proof, in the form of the shark in question, before believing their claims.
It's not that I completely discard empirical evidence; it's just that empirical evidence, one way or another, is somewhat rare in the case of this particular question, and thus I am forced to rely on what evidence I can find.
I have, on at least one occasion, observed some evidence; but it's the sort of evidence that doesn't communicate well and is rather unconvincing at one remove (I know it happened, because I remember it, but I have no proof other than my unsupported word).
If fires didn't burn orphans, it may be technically true that science couldn't prove it was caused by a God, but that's because science can't prove anything. Science certainly could rule out other explanations to the extent that a godlike being is pretty much the only reasonable possibility left. Science could discover that fires not burning orphans seemed to be a fundamental law of the universe that can't be explained in terms of other laws. And a fundamental law of the universe that operates in terms of complicated human conceptual categories like "orphan" is a miracle.
You seem to think that science could never prove this is a miracle because science would just keep coming up with other theories (that would eventually be disproven). If that was actually true, no scientist would be able to conclude that anything is a fundamental law of the universe at all, whether miraculous or non-miraculous, since the scientist would keep coming up with theories that explain the law in terms of something else. In fact, at some point the scientist will run out of likely theories and will only be able to come up with theories so unlikely that "this is not based on some other law" is more reasonable.
They might not eventually be disproven, or they might take a very long time to disprove. Consider; we know that both general relativity and quantum mechanics are very, very, very good at predicting the universe as we know it. We also know that they are mutually incompatible in certain very hard-to-test situations; they cannot both be true (and it is quite possible that neither, in their current form, is completely true). Yet neither has, to the best of my knowledge, been disproven.
Well, we don't actually have the fundamental laws of the universe yet. Once quantum gravity's been sorted out, then we might be there.
I'm not sure that I can expect anyone in my example counterfactual universe to have done any better than we've done in the real historical universe.
We have laws that are relatively more fundamental than others, and my argument doesn't require that the law be fundamental in an absolute sense. If scientists discovered that orphans are fireproof, and ran out of explanations for why the category "orphans" is part of the rule, they would essentially have proven it's supernatural, even if, oh, they don't rule out the possibility that both orphans and priests are fireproof.
Why would they run out of explanations? All that leads to is "we don't know why yet, but we'll think of something".
And maybe trying to get funding for a bigger particle accelerator.
Proving things to 100% certainty requires running out of explanations. Proving things to reasonable certainty only requires running out of reasonable explanations, and that's certainly possible. And the latter is all that people mean when they speak of science proving something--science never proves anything to 100% certainty anyway.
We have the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. We have time and space twisting around in order to preserve the constancy of the speed of light. We have subatomic particles whose position is an approximation if their velocity is known.
The bar for 'reasonable' in scientific endeavours is 'it led to a number of predictions and, when we did the experiments, the predictions turned out to be all correct'.
The disadvantage, from a scientific point of view, of the 'it was all a miracle' explanation is that it doesn't lead to much in the way of useful predictions which can be checked. This makes experimental verification somewhat tricky. I don't think a scientific theory can be considered reasonably certain without at least a little experimental verification (and simply repeating the observation that led to the development of the theory doesn't count, because any theory that attempts to explain that observation will explain it).
And the evidence for this is ... ?
Very similar to the evidence for the existence of God in the first place. (In fact, it starts with that).
Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean... what starts with what ?
Maybe I should have expanded on that a little.
The evidence that all perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God relies on the existence of God in the first place. Should an omnipotent and omniscient being exist, it's trivial to show that the current universe must have at least avoided the disapproval of such a being; and it is quite possible that the universe was constructed or altered into its current form.
That sounds less like evidence and more like an assumption. You say:
I completely agree; however, I am not sure how you could get from "our Universe exists" to "an omni-being exists and takes notice of our Universe". I do agree that going the other way is pretty easy; but we are not omniscient, so we don't have that option.
I'm not going from "our Universe exists" to "an omni-being exists and takes notice of our Universe". I'm going from "an omni-being exists and takes notice of our Universe" to "said being controls the universe".
I may not have been perfectly clear upthread, so let me try rephrasing and explicitly stating what I had been taking implicitly: If God exists, then all perfectly natural mechanisms were set in place by God.
Insofar as scientists have disproved dozens of theories for why certain things happen, I don't see a reason why scientists wouldn't be able to conclude that god was doing the orphan thing. I don't think science in general is as die-hard atheist as you'd like to portray it. Remember that the many of the natural philosophers historically were in fact looking FOR evidence of god.
Plus it'd probably be a big tip-off that the only holy book with no factual errors also mentioned the orphans being fireproof thing.
In the same way as scientists could conclude that God is directly responsible for the strong nuclear force?
While I don't deny that it could be advanced as a theory, I don't see how it could be tested. And I don't see a theory gaining much traction unless it can make falsifiable predictions.
If orphans really were fireproof, I'd expect it to be mentioned, at least in passing, in most holy books. Mainly because orphans being fireproof is something that people will tend to notice.
If your hypothesis cannot be tested, then why does it even matter whether it's true or false ? Since you cannot -- by definition -- ever find out whether it is true, what's the point in believing or disbelieving in it ?
To put it another way, what's the difference between believing in a god who is so subtle that all of his actions are completely indistinguishable from inaction; and in not believing in any gods at all ?
There's a difference between finding out whether something is true, and finding enough evidence to prove to my neighbour that that thing is true. Fishermen are notorious for exaggerated descriptions of the fish that got away; should I go fishing, and a fish get away, I have no doubt that few of my neighbours would believe my assertions with regard to the fish's size (even if I somehow managed to measure it before it escaped)
Well, for one thing, it affects my actions in non-trivial ways. My actions affect other people, and they then affect other people... and so on, rippling out.
One difference, for example, is the fact that we are having this conversation in the first place.
What's the difference ? I mean, obviously your neighbour could be entirely irrational and refuse to listen to anything you say. However, let's pretend instead that your neighbour is a rational, intelligent, and patient person... who also happens to be from Mars. He speaks English, but he doesn't really know all that much about our human culture. He does know about physics, though, since physics is the same on any planet.
So, you tell your Martian neighbour, "I believe that God is directly responsible for the strong nuclear force". Naturally, he asks you, "who is this God guy ?"; after you've explained that, he asks you, "ok, and why do you believe that ?". What's your answer ?
How so ? Let's say there exist two parallel worlds. In one world, a perfectly unfalsifiable god exists; all of his actions are indistinguishable from chance. This is our world; let's call it Alpha. The other world is called Beta, and it contains no gods at all. The two worlds are completely identical; except that, whenever something happens in Alpha, sometimes the god is responsible, and sometimes it just happens for mundane natural causes. When the same thing also happens in Beta, it's always due to mundane natural causes.
If you were somehow transported in your sleep from Alpha to Beta, how could you tell that this had occurred ? If you could tell, what would you do differently ?
Let us say that I have gone fishing. I return from my fishing trip, and describe to my neighbour how I hooked a six-foot-long great white shark, but my fishing line snapped and it got away. Unfortunately, I failed to get a photograph or any other piece of hard evidence.
Assume that my neighbour is rational, intelligent, and patient. Would he be convinced by my account?
Short version; I started with a high prior, and certain experiences in my life have caused me to update that original prior in an upward direction.
...hold on a minute. You are postulating that there is some way to set up the natural laws of a universe such that everything that God would want to do in Alpha happens anyway, even without direct involvement. Should that be the case, an omniscient being would know how to set up the physical laws in such a way; and an omnipotent being would be able to do that, and it would probably be much less effort than having to go back and fiddle with the universe every now and then.
Piping in a month later: originally, this is what the Talmud was for. It contains very precise and detailed debates on exactly what's literal, what's allegorical, and what's probably just metaphor for something that wasn't quite so miraculous when it really happened.