= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gjm comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (188)
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, 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. As an example, the most recent case is of someone who had a tumour that went away after she bathed at Lourdes. (My understanding is that this is a thing that occasionally happens, miracle or no.) So, anyway, they appear to certify about one miracle per two million pilgrims, and I think pretty much all the pilgrims are there in hope of healing. One per two million! (If you think the alleged cures are so improbable that they couldn't happen naturally one time in two million, I have a bridge to sell you.)
In some situations (those in which a lot of these miraculous healings tend to occur) it really isn't difficult to get people to think more has happened than really has. Consider, for instance, the case of Peter Popoff. Lots of miraculous healings at his meetings -- but the whole thing was a fraud.
In general, unfortunately, people do lie. And make mistakes. And see what they hope or expect to see. And tales "grow in the telling", so that after a few steps of Chinese Whispers something sounds far more inexplicable and impressive than it ever really was.
You might try the following experiment: Talk to some of your Christian friends, and ask them for the most impressive examples they have personally experienced of miraculous interventions by God. If in fact there are no miracles, what you should expect is that (1) the things they cite won't, on the whole, be all that impressive; (2) the more careful and intelligent of them will have less impressive experiences; (3) the most impressive experiences will be the least verifiable.
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.
Saint inflation.
The easy out for a weakening religious authority, but soon people will have to be taking wheel barrows of saints to get their miracle of five fishes and two loaves.
But what happens if we measure saints per capita? After all, the 20th century's population explosion presumably had a radical effect on saint density.
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."
I recall reading--I forget where--that laying on of hands does have positive effects that outperform chance. (But cuddling probably does, too. Emotionally-charged human contact does tend to interact with body systems in interesting ways.)
My father (who calls himself a Buddhist) has done feats of hand-laying. Most notable was the instance when his mother was in the hospital, and the staff was convinced she was within hours of death (they put out a call to her (Christian) preacher, but he was busy). My father did his trick, and she got better enough to be discharged. (Things went back to awful not long thereafter, but this might be said to have bought her several months at least.)
I don't get the feeling that my dad really alieves in the abilities he claims to have. (For starters, he only ever tried it on me once, and was clearly non-serious about that one.) He has been serious in how he talked about using it on others, though.
I have a vague recollection of an article like this that referenced all that hand touching NBA players do with a teammate doing free throws.
The atheist/neo-pagan Eric Raymond claims to be able to do this semi-reliably.
Can you go in to more detail on the muscular condition? This might be relevant.
Regarding an increase in heart rate, that's pretty normal to experience as a result of a social situation (think public speaking, going on a date, laughing with friends, etc.) I imagine if atheism is true, the reason theists "lay hands" on one another is because it's a social situation that seems consistently provoke an interesting and intense feeling in the person who is having hands laid on them.
It wasn't actually a muscular condition. My friend is surprisingly unwilling to spread this around and only told me under the extreme circumstances of me telling her I might be about to become an atheist. I wanted to change enough that if she read this on the Internet she wouldn't know it was about her.
So there was a clear potential payoff to her desires in giving you a miracle story - keeping you in the fold.
I don't question her good will toward you, but I've found that the correspondence theory of truth is not as widely held as those who rely on it believe. One alternative is that truths are useful statements, whether or not they accurately model the state of the world.
Amusingly all the people I know who reject it are atheists (of the SJW type).
The real joke, that few have gotten the punchline for, is that SJWs aren't atheists, they're puritanical theocrats.
SJWs are special in terms of the correspondence theory of truth in that they'll explicity reject it, while many, many more of varying ideological persuasions only implicitly reject it, in failing to find it particularly motivating.
They may be special, but hardly unique -- it's not hard to find environmentalists who also reject it, for example.
What do you mean by "not atheists"?
For what it's worth, I think people can have very strong aliefs that affect their health, and powerful experiences can change the aliefs.
When it comes to established religions that might be true. On the other hand the "The Secret" style New Age ideology solves things that way. It makes it much easier for them to pick and choose from a lot of separate frameworks.
Sure. But it doesn't sound as if Aiyen is seriously considering the possibility that that sort of New Age ideology might be correct. If his/her question is about (say) evangelical Christianity versus scientific naturalism, then explanations of miracles in terms of latent psychic powers don't increase the credibility of Christianity.
I think that looking at a variety of different belief systems shows how bad Christianity actually is. It underlies that there little reason to prefer Christianity over alternative belief systems.
That was part of what I was trying to point out by observing that if the evidence for Christian miracles impresses you, you should probably be comparably impressed by the evidence for miracles from any number of other sources.
Thanks for the detailed response!
There are miracle stories in many religious traditions, proving that false claims show up in purported scriptures all the time. I haven't heard about a lot of modern accounts of non-Christian miracles though; if you have, could you send me the links? That could be substantial evidence.
Good point. Do you have any details about the "evaporation"? What actually happened in some of these cases, and how they got mistaken for miracles?
Hmm, I'm going to research Peter Popoff now...
Chinese Whispers I can believe, but many of the miracle accounts I've heard were written by the eyewitnesses. Maybe my priors for human honesty and reliability are too high?
By some estimates, replicability in scientific cancer research is about 11%. We can reasonably assume that reports of miraculous events have at least as many flaws as laboratory experiments.
Okay, that's extremely unexpected. I'm going to need to perform a major update.
I'm far from being an expert on modern miracle claims, but here are a few examples. Hindu statues drinking milk. Sundry miracles at a Buddhist stupa. Kinda-sorta-semi-miracles from a Jewish rabbi. Kinda-sorta-semi-miracles from a Muslim.
This skeptic's webpage about miraculous healings mentions a few books that give a decent idea of the sort of evaporation I mean. I think I read one of them (the one by William Nolen) years ago; the author looked into a number of cases of alleged miraculous healings, and found that in every case there was no good reason to think anything miraculous had occurred.
And yes, I think your priors for honesty and reliability may be too high. Sorry about that.
Jewish miracles aren't evidence against Christianity-the same God is hypothesized to be behind both religions. The others are very interesting though, especially the stupa.
I am, as it happens, aware that Christianity and Judaism allegedly worship the same god! (Islam, too.) But it seems to me that if Christianity is right then present-day Judaism is importantly wrong and vice versa.
Of course it's perfectly possible for one religion to be right and adherents of another religion to see miracles happen when they pray (or perform religious rituals, or whatever). Whatever god(s) exist might be broad-minded; or there might be deceitful evil spirits associated with wrong religions; or the miracles might actually be wrought by worshippers' latent psychic powers, or something.
But the idea that if Christians experience what they think are miracles, then that's good evidence for Christianity seems to me to be somewhat weakened if it turns out that miracle claims occur at comparable rates in other religions.
[EDITED to add: I see this was downvoted, and it doesn't look as if all my recent comments are being downvoted so presumably whoever did it actually meant something by it. But it still looks OK to me; if whoever downvoted me would like to explain why then I'd be grateful. Thanks!]
I suspect it was downvoted because it contains the words "it's perfectly possible for one religion to be right".
That would be sad; I think I have a higher opinion of the LW readership than that. Still, I guess anyone can have a bad day.
It's a rather small sample size, isn't it? I don't think you can draw much of a conclusion from it.
Just finished the Quackwatch article. My prior for belief is dropping substantially.