I hold (and sometimes teach) that a law is a fixed principle of operation.
Describing this principle is not describing, detecting, nor ascribing, the cause of the operation nor of its regularity. That looks like a rather severe (not to overlook retarded) category error to me.
Further, the logic of science is that it traffics in dis-proofs and not proofs. That we have observed sunrises and sunsets for many years of human history is not any kind of proof that the sun will rise tomorrow (and if it doesn't then there is no tomorrow). We may very well consider it *probable* that the sun will rise tomorrow. Almost certain, but not quite. Our prior observations, no matter how numerous, do not prove the future case. Can not prove it, as a matter of logic and philosophy and plain old southern common sense.
I can forgive Hume; I never met the man and he never did anything for me.
I struggle with charitable intentions towards the modern mathematicians and computer modelers determined to abuse us all on the basis of their "proofs" ... and call it "helping". Saving the world, even.
We used to lock people up for messianic delusions, but now we give them a Nobel prize.
I believe miracles happen all the time. A trivial example: how do minerals grow in the way they grow, repeating the spatial pattern from very small up to forming large and very large cubic bodies, spheres prisms, rhombi, and whatnot?
Stones do not have a cell and a nucleus and a set of instructions and proteins to actualize the instructions. I think this is a miracle. God causes these "unimportant" things to happen. Rupert Sheldrake wrote and spoke about a morpho-genetic field. The information for minerals to grow is in the "field."
Now, I don't like to reduce the will of God to a metaphorical field. But I think humans have enough God-given liberty to invent any tentative explanation of how God sustains the creation. I think the simplicity of saying "it's a miracle" is correct. It doesn't provide details, but stones are boring anyway. I once tried to tell jokes to a stone, and it remained unchanged, completely rigid and stoic, as if it was unconscious. A tough audience. I then started to insult the stone, and I called it a Pinko Democrat and anti-stalagmite. Not a peep. Some of my most courageous jokes died trying to take that stone. SAD!
The physical world is tangible and governed by natural laws. The spiritual world (and herein lie miracles) is intangible and governed by spiritual laws (ie: faith). One cannot measure such intangibles by natural laws as they do not exist within the same realm. It is akin to trying to take the measure of eternity with a watch.
Uh oh, I'm a fan of both yours and Hume's! Since he has no substack, and I'm probably his only fan here, I'll offer my quick take on the essence of his message. He's simply saying to believe the most likely thing, which is the most probable thing, which will correspond to the strongest pattern with the fewest exceptions. He has an intuitive pattern / correlation based approach to probability. We believe A leads to B when that is usually how it goes. The stronger the pattern the better. So on the one hand you have the strongest possible pattern in the form of natural law without exceptions that can be verified by anyone at any time. It just never fails. On the other hand you have a weak pattern (human testimony) that often fails, and even the weakest possible pattern, if you define miracle as a truly one off God intervening (vs 'normal') event. Given a conflict in patterns, choose the stronger, as that is the more likely explanation. You are correct of course in that the more formal way to do all this would be to use Bayes theorem and explicitly define all assumptions. And you could totally get miracles if you tweak all that the right way. That moves the question to which assumptions better fit the world. But I think Hume paints an intuitive picture that fits quite well with how some of us think about it, and would map to what we'd plug into the more formal discussion.
Since you have studied Hume more carefully than I have, I wonder if you could answer a question I have long had about Hume.
Am I missing something, or did Hume say that miracles were impossible because they violated natural laws, while at the same time asserting that we could never be certain of natural laws because of his denial of causality?
And, if I do understand that rightly, does it mean that Hume was an idiot?
It means that he didn't like the idea of miracles, and started an essay about it, but wasn't careful.
It's hilarious when you think of the time he spent denying the uniformity of nature could be known, but he is here insisting the uniformity of nature is known and, even stronger, unbreakable.
I think if he had more time, or tried to write this in the modern era, he'd simply emphasize human weakness in reporting extraordinary events, and leave it at that.
That's certainly a more balanced way of putting it. I have no doubt if someone had pointed that discrepancy out to him he could have found some sort of lofty philosophical loophole.
I don't even bother with people like Hume, having had an experience that can't be explained by science, which I have mentioned on these pages...and the same people claim there are no aliens, when we have innumerable reports of contact with them and their technology, a lot of it from military or photographic evidence...As an attorney, I believe the weight of the evidence is going to be true 99% of the time....
As a natural-science based, supernatural-skeptic, I would have no problem with aliens. The ones I would have to exclude short of dropping my fundamental metaphysical conception of the world would be gods, ghosts, demons, an afterlife, shapeshifting, genuine magic, etc., because these are things that should be impossible under what I would call the 'closure' of physics. Alien visitors here are no more problematic in principle than that we ourselves could ever master space travel to the extent of visiting other planets with intelligent life, something many of us once thought inevitable.
I recommend a book by Walter Lippman, published way, way back in 1929, titled A PREFACE TO MORALS. It´s still one of the best explanations has to what struck the mortal blow against FAITH, and it wasn´t philosophy. It was radio, railroads, telephone, modern war.
Miracle, law, supernatural, proof, evidence, etc, etc. Just words - instruments of convenience used to facilitate communication and thought. Nothing more. It's best not to get too hung up on the limited worlds constructed from particular words. It's a bit like using a lego set to create a model of the universe.
An event is miraculous if it is outside what we expect to be within the usual range of possibility for a given situation. Something that happens 1 time in 100 is not miraculous just because you happen to be the one - but if you attribute it to divine favour or answered prayer then it could be viewed as a unique blessing
An event is a sign if it corresponds to or reinforces some other claim. Signs are not necessarily miraculous, except in the sense that there is no usual mechanism for the declaration and event to correspond
The Hume-or was free this mornimg and we give thanks for our day jobs.
A great essay to kick off Lent.
I hold (and sometimes teach) that a law is a fixed principle of operation.
Describing this principle is not describing, detecting, nor ascribing, the cause of the operation nor of its regularity. That looks like a rather severe (not to overlook retarded) category error to me.
Further, the logic of science is that it traffics in dis-proofs and not proofs. That we have observed sunrises and sunsets for many years of human history is not any kind of proof that the sun will rise tomorrow (and if it doesn't then there is no tomorrow). We may very well consider it *probable* that the sun will rise tomorrow. Almost certain, but not quite. Our prior observations, no matter how numerous, do not prove the future case. Can not prove it, as a matter of logic and philosophy and plain old southern common sense.
I can forgive Hume; I never met the man and he never did anything for me.
I struggle with charitable intentions towards the modern mathematicians and computer modelers determined to abuse us all on the basis of their "proofs" ... and call it "helping". Saving the world, even.
We used to lock people up for messianic delusions, but now we give them a Nobel prize.
Very interesting, Professor Briggs.
I believe miracles happen all the time. A trivial example: how do minerals grow in the way they grow, repeating the spatial pattern from very small up to forming large and very large cubic bodies, spheres prisms, rhombi, and whatnot?
Stones do not have a cell and a nucleus and a set of instructions and proteins to actualize the instructions. I think this is a miracle. God causes these "unimportant" things to happen. Rupert Sheldrake wrote and spoke about a morpho-genetic field. The information for minerals to grow is in the "field."
Now, I don't like to reduce the will of God to a metaphorical field. But I think humans have enough God-given liberty to invent any tentative explanation of how God sustains the creation. I think the simplicity of saying "it's a miracle" is correct. It doesn't provide details, but stones are boring anyway. I once tried to tell jokes to a stone, and it remained unchanged, completely rigid and stoic, as if it was unconscious. A tough audience. I then started to insult the stone, and I called it a Pinko Democrat and anti-stalagmite. Not a peep. Some of my most courageous jokes died trying to take that stone. SAD!
The physical world is tangible and governed by natural laws. The spiritual world (and herein lie miracles) is intangible and governed by spiritual laws (ie: faith). One cannot measure such intangibles by natural laws as they do not exist within the same realm. It is akin to trying to take the measure of eternity with a watch.
Uh oh, I'm a fan of both yours and Hume's! Since he has no substack, and I'm probably his only fan here, I'll offer my quick take on the essence of his message. He's simply saying to believe the most likely thing, which is the most probable thing, which will correspond to the strongest pattern with the fewest exceptions. He has an intuitive pattern / correlation based approach to probability. We believe A leads to B when that is usually how it goes. The stronger the pattern the better. So on the one hand you have the strongest possible pattern in the form of natural law without exceptions that can be verified by anyone at any time. It just never fails. On the other hand you have a weak pattern (human testimony) that often fails, and even the weakest possible pattern, if you define miracle as a truly one off God intervening (vs 'normal') event. Given a conflict in patterns, choose the stronger, as that is the more likely explanation. You are correct of course in that the more formal way to do all this would be to use Bayes theorem and explicitly define all assumptions. And you could totally get miracles if you tweak all that the right way. That moves the question to which assumptions better fit the world. But I think Hume paints an intuitive picture that fits quite well with how some of us think about it, and would map to what we'd plug into the more formal discussion.
David Hume: Gamma
Since you have studied Hume more carefully than I have, I wonder if you could answer a question I have long had about Hume.
Am I missing something, or did Hume say that miracles were impossible because they violated natural laws, while at the same time asserting that we could never be certain of natural laws because of his denial of causality?
And, if I do understand that rightly, does it mean that Hume was an idiot?
It means that he didn't like the idea of miracles, and started an essay about it, but wasn't careful.
It's hilarious when you think of the time he spent denying the uniformity of nature could be known, but he is here insisting the uniformity of nature is known and, even stronger, unbreakable.
I think if he had more time, or tried to write this in the modern era, he'd simply emphasize human weakness in reporting extraordinary events, and leave it at that.
That's certainly a more balanced way of putting it. I have no doubt if someone had pointed that discrepancy out to him he could have found some sort of lofty philosophical loophole.
I don't even bother with people like Hume, having had an experience that can't be explained by science, which I have mentioned on these pages...and the same people claim there are no aliens, when we have innumerable reports of contact with them and their technology, a lot of it from military or photographic evidence...As an attorney, I believe the weight of the evidence is going to be true 99% of the time....
As a natural-science based, supernatural-skeptic, I would have no problem with aliens. The ones I would have to exclude short of dropping my fundamental metaphysical conception of the world would be gods, ghosts, demons, an afterlife, shapeshifting, genuine magic, etc., because these are things that should be impossible under what I would call the 'closure' of physics. Alien visitors here are no more problematic in principle than that we ourselves could ever master space travel to the extent of visiting other planets with intelligent life, something many of us once thought inevitable.
I recommend a book by Walter Lippman, published way, way back in 1929, titled A PREFACE TO MORALS. It´s still one of the best explanations has to what struck the mortal blow against FAITH, and it wasn´t philosophy. It was radio, railroads, telephone, modern war.
Miracle, law, supernatural, proof, evidence, etc, etc. Just words - instruments of convenience used to facilitate communication and thought. Nothing more. It's best not to get too hung up on the limited worlds constructed from particular words. It's a bit like using a lego set to create a model of the universe.
I make a distinction between “miracles” & “signs”
An event is miraculous if it is outside what we expect to be within the usual range of possibility for a given situation. Something that happens 1 time in 100 is not miraculous just because you happen to be the one - but if you attribute it to divine favour or answered prayer then it could be viewed as a unique blessing
An event is a sign if it corresponds to or reinforces some other claim. Signs are not necessarily miraculous, except in the sense that there is no usual mechanism for the declaration and event to correspond