I have heard Dr Ehrman say that, maybe I am dense I don’t exactly get it.
if you define miracle as ‘the most improbable explanation of how something happened’, then yes a miracle is the most improbable explanation of what happened. I have heard that a few times.
Now there are multiple definitions of ‘miracle’ in the dictionary. please produce your definition of ‘miracle’ and then from that definition explain why it logically implies ‘the most improbable explanation of some occurrence’.
is it because a miracle cant be reproduced or tested experimentally?
I grant that is true, on the other hand, take the hypothesis that some one hallucinated on such and such a date. Some people claim that hallucinations are a better explanation for this or that religious experience. Explain how you can reproduce and or test a hallucination hypothesis experimentally? Because someone was experiencing grief because their beloved teacher rabbi was recently murdered. If you produce evidence that after an innocent person is murdered there is large occurrence of visions, I will accept that as some minimal piece of evidence. But dont just say ‘so and so hallucinated cause they were grieving after their friend died’, that sounds really really lame, but i have read that many times on this site.
The burden of proof lies with the one making a claim so it’s up to the believer in miracles to define what they are and demonstrate that they exist. But they are generally considered rare and unrepeatable events. So they can’t ever be a “most probable” explanation.
People have hallucinations all the time. People have hallucinations of recently deceased loved ones all the time. There has never been even one authenticated case of someone actually rising from the dead. So which is the more probable explanation when someone claims to have seen a person after they died? So maybe this one time someone did rise from the dead. But in the face of a lack of any evidence it can’t be the most probable explanation.
The definition of “miracle” is an interesting question. Common usage seems to define it as “a highly improbable or unexplainable event that seems to be the result of supernatural intervention”. Thus if someone survives a horrific car accident that “should” have killed him, people call that a “miracle”. But by this definition many, many, many things can be called a “miracle”. If my dog comes to me on command, something she hardly every does, that would be a “miracle”. Miracles would be so common that the word really would not have much meaning. Jesus rose from the dead, a miracle. So what, thousands of miracles happen every day.
But if “miracle” were defined as “an occurrence or event that defies the laws of nature so must have had supernatural intervention”, then we are getting at something else. A person surviving a horrific car accident does not constitute a miracle, just lucky happenstance. No natural laws are broken. But if we assume God or someone can defy natural laws, then our entire understanding of the universe is in doubt. Gravity can be turned off and we all float off in space, time can be reversed, etc. There would be no natural laws that we could rely on to live our lives.
We obviously don’t live that way, as if there were no natural laws. So where do miracles fit in? Seems that many people discount the minor miracles that happen all the time, but cling to the “big miracles” such as resurrection from the dead. But is that really such a big miracle? If a body was entirely consumed by flame and then entirely reconstituted, that would defy natural laws. But someone rising from the dead can easily be explained by the simple statement “the person was not actually dead”. Think of a tree that appears dead so is cut down and burned. Then a living sprout appears at its stump. Was the tree resurrected? No, it was not really dead, some part of the root system remained alive. And what is “dead” anyway? If some living thing has no possible hope to ever be revived (as if we can know where that point is for sure), then it is dead. Otherwise, not dead. If not dead, then not “resurrected”, just survived. “Resurrection”, by definition, is impossible since it depends on the definition of “dead”.
I go by the outlook that miracles, by definition, are impossible. Something that defies natural laws cannot happen, otherwise natural laws have no meaning. So the chance of Jesus being miraculously resurrected is 0%.
re: ‘Common usage seems to define it as “a highly improbable or unexplainable event that seems to be the result of supernatural intervention” ‘.
Why exactly shouldn’t we use this common definition?
re: hallucinations vs visions.
suppose someone claims, for instance, to ‘have heard the voice of God’, and I am trying to evaluate this claim
a) the subject is 100% sure the voice he heard was really God
b) the skeptic is 100% sure the subject was hallucinating
all other possible explanations are eliminated (i.e. passing lie detector tests, recent psychological exam and no signs of schizophrenia, etc)
How do I determine which is more probable a) or b)?
What kind of tests I can set up and perform to get more evidence to help assign probabilities to these two possibilities?
And even if i do accept b) as more probable than a) must I really say the chance of a) is 0% ?
tom your questions rest on a misunderstanding.
There is no 100% surety on ANY question. We’re dealing with probabilities here, not certainties. Part of being a skeptic is realizing this.
We have NO evidence for the resurrection, only various and contradictory claims of doubtful provenance. The hallucination hypothesis is an attempt at a naturalistic explanation for the claim by the early Christians that Jesus rose from the dead. But we’ll never know what really happened. But living with not knowing and with uncertainty is part of being a real skeptic too.
Stephen said
tom your questions rest on a misunderstanding.There is no 100% surety on ANY question. We’re dealing with probabilities here, not certainties. Part of being a skeptic is realizing this.
We have NO evidence for the resurrection, only various and contradictory claims of doubtful provenance. The hallucination hypothesis is an attempt at a naturalistic explanation for the claim by the early Christians that Jesus rose from the dead. But we’ll never know what really happened. But living with not knowing and with uncertainty is part of being a real skeptic too.
My approach to this is that “probability” and miracles are non-overlapping. A miracle is not something that very seldomly occurs, with a very low probability. In mathematical probability theory, you can often compute an exact probability number for an event, given you know all the fixed properties of the system it occurs within. If this number is very small, and the event is fairly frequently observed, you start suspecting that you do not know all the properties of the system.
A miracle, on the other hand, is about temporary suspension of the fixed rules of the system, and in religious thinking, this is brought about by a godlike external agent. We can not calculate its probability in this sense. Mathematical probability is one way of giving meaning to the everyday concepts of “probable/likely”. So when talking about the probability of a miracle, one really needs some other definition of “probable”, some other type of logic. Science can explain how to deal with theoretical ditsributions versus observed distributions and offers an objective logic every scientist agrees on.
No religion has offered an objective methodology for explaining the likelyhood of a miracle.
still, my sense is that a
“hallucination hypothesis” is not comparatively any better than “miracle/vision hypothesis”
especially when we use miracle in:
Common usage seems to define it as “a highly improbable or unexplainable event that seems to be the result of supernatural intervention”.
rather than like this
A miracle, . . is about temporary suspension of the fixed rules of [physics].
or
.. . .miracles, by definition, are impossible.
or
historical reasoning rules out the “miraculous explanation” a priori.
wouldn’t you say I m crazy or t lest extremely biased if I said
hallucination explanations by definition are impossible, or
a hallucination is temporary suspension of fixed rules of a system, or
historical reasoning rules out ‘hallucination hypothesis” priori.
The problem with using the “highly improbable or unexplainable event that seems to be the result of supernatural intervention” definition of miracle (which I agree is a perfectly acceptable definition) is that it gets us nowhere toward actual understanding. The fact that wheat grows from the ground and (in some climates) rain falls in the springtime could be considered “miracles”, but that gets humans nowhere in understanding agriculture or climate and weather patterns. Thank goodness that some of our ancestors did not just accept “divine will” as an explanation of things and proceeded with investigation and testing.
Another aspect about miracles I find interesting is that it seems to exclusively apply to “good” rare events. If someone has a tree fall onto his house but barely miss him, leaving him shocked but unhurt, people will call that a “miracle”. But in the even more unlikely event of the same tree killing him, nobody calls that a “miracle”. Why is that? Probably because the idea of God going out of his way to kill someone is theologically abhorrent, but the idea of God saving someone is quite satisfying. The typical stated cause for the “killed” scenario is random chance; there is no naturalistic reason (only theological reasons) that the same cause does not fit the “saved” scenario.
So when considering the “hallucination hypothesis” verses the “miracle” hypothesis, we know plenty about hallucinations. It’s a well-studied topic. And what we know about them makes the hypothesis believable. But miracles? There are no scientific studies about miracles because there are no ways to study something that is outside of natural law. There is no way to “verify” a miracle so no way of knowing just how many occur over time. It might be a nice, simple, believable explanation but gets us nowhere, nowhere further than saying lightning and thunder come from the hammer of Thor.
Another aspect about miracles I find interesting is that it seems to exclusively apply to “good” rare events.
An excellent point. Nobody ever calls a person getting killed in a car accident on the way to their own wedding a miracle do they?
I suppose at this point we have to ask ourselves if the resurrection was a “good” rare event or a “bad” rare event? If you have Christian faith then I suppose it was very good. But for the rest of us we must consider the fact it created a movement that destroyed classical civilization and caused a dark age in the west that lasted nearly a thousand years.
Imagine a historian of antiquity trying to establish the historicity of one of the miracles of Apollonius of Tyana! They would be laughed out of the Academy. Only with Christian apologists do we see the rules of historical inquiry thrown out the window in trying to establish the historicity of a miracle story about Jesus.
One other thought on miracles. If one uses “miracle” as an explanation of something that happened (regardless of definition of miracle), then, in every case, which of the many possible miracles actually happened? In the case of Jesus’s resurrection, why not God just keeping Jesus alive through an “impossible to survive” (as some people say) situation? Or God fooling people into thinking Jesus was tortured and crucified when it was all an illusion? Or Jesus having actually died and God creating an illusion that Jesus was still alive? Any of these (and a whole bunch of other scenarios) would be much easier to pull off for God than raising someone from the dead (assuming total death where Jesus’s brain was irreparably damaged). It seems if we allow for “miracles”, then we have to allow for all sorts of possible miracles with no good way of determining which miracle is more likely, except for what is typically done, picking the best sounding story.
To put it very very briefly , I view the resurrection of Jesus is the same category as alien abduction and JFK assassination conspiracy claims.
1. All three have firsthand eyewitness accounts.
2. All three are multiply attested
You can go down the line with apologist claims, too early for legendary embellishment, people would not make bogus claims in the very city that the event occurred, real people and places are mentioned in the accounts, multi witness to the event , witness still alive to correct errors or embellishments ect………………
Use the same criteria that Christian apologist use with your favorite, bigfoot, lockness monster or whatever story to really see and expose how silly and fallacious their arguments are.
Jimmy said
To put it very very briefly , I view the resurrection of Jesus is the same category as alien abduction and JFK assassination conspiracy claims.1. All three have firsthand eyewitness accounts.
2. All three are multiply attested
You can go down the line with apologist claims, too early for legendary embellishment, people would not make bogus claims in the very city that the event occurred, real people and places are mentioned in the accounts, multi witness to the event , witness still alive to correct errors or embellishments ect………………
Use the same criteria that Christian apologist use with your favorite, bigfoot, lockness monster or whatever story to really see and expose how silly and fallacious their arguments are.
No single alien abduction claim has multiple, independent witnesses. On the other hand, some alien abduction claims have similar descriptions, which point to the objective existence of subjective (and false) experiences, honestly reported by the involved persons. Just like the existence of hallucinations. In the case of the resurrected Jesus, the criteria says nothing more than that a number of people claimed to have had visions, saying nothing about the nature of the visions.
CharlesM said
A miracle, simply put, is something you can’t explain in a world of answers. So you make one up. It, preferred to no answer and better than “I do not know”, getting a pass. Till that gap gets filled.
May be we should distinguish between phenomena that cannot be explained by current science, and phenomena that requires the suspension of natural laws. An example of the former is the rise of the first unit of life that could reproduce itself, including the reproduction ability. Examples of the latter are abundant in religious literature. The former tends to be solved by science over time. The latter tends to lose credibility.
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