I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?
In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.
Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?
Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.
Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one
1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)
2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]
From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.
What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.
Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”
Refuting the skeptic
So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.
Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:
(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;
(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10120, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10120: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10120, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10120.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10120 to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;
(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.
I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.
Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause
(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…
Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:
There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.
In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?
And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.
Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?
As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?
(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:
Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.
Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.
To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)
Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”
The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.
[Case study: the Resurrection]
The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 1044 times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.
(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10120. Since 1044 is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10120. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)
Conclusion
Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.
I made no claims. You are unable to distinguish between claiming and reporting someone else’s claim. I reported something I learned in my Bible studies, no hint whether I believe it myself or not.
And what I said concerned only a specific section in the OP. You are not willing to engage that section. That’s about it.
You made a very specific claim:
That is a specific claim, written in the first person of something you claim to know.
If this was someone else’s claim (and you were just reporting it) you failed to make that distinction clear. You said you know of these two successful prophesies, not that someone else claimed they were successful. Making yourself clear is your job as the writer.
Ok, but you reported it without any hint that you were reporting something someone else claimed. That omission is on you.
sean s.
I said I knew two common examples. The rest is your jumping to conclusions. Irrelevant conclusions at that, because my post was in response to what I quoted. Here’s again what I quoted:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts,…
If you are taking no position on the accuracy perhaps it would be more accurate to say ” two common examples of alleged successful prophecies”
Here is a link to Greta Christina’s 2010 article. Quite nuanced!
I think Greta would accept them if they were correct prophesies. Alas, as noted, both of those alleged “prophesies” occurred after the events supposedly “prophesied”, making them rather dubious at best.
There is nothing in what you wrote that makes my reading unreasonable. Perhaps you meant not to endorse those two examples, but you did not qualify your take on them at all, you said you knew of them, and that they were examples of successful prophesies.
If you had written that you knew of two examples of SUPPOSEDLY successful prophesies, or that you knew of two prophesies OTHERS CLAIMED were successful, then no fair reading could impute those opinions on you.
But you did not qualify your comments in any way. So if there’s confusion, it’s because you didn’t write what you meant, and now you expect the rest of us to have ferreted out your unstated position.
That ain’t how it works. Own your words; you were unclear and now you wish to clear up the confusion you created.
I accept that you did not intend to endorse either “prophesy”. Got it.
sean s.
Kantian Naturalist,
I don’t quite follow this, but I may be misunderstanding. It could be the case that ‘beings’ can only exist when instantiated in the stuff of the universe, couldn’t it?
It would be good to know precisely what is meant by a “being”. A person? An inanimate object? Could the Universe as a whole be considered a “being”?
sean s.
She wrote:
So, yes, I guess!
Is this going to be an argument about what constitutes knowledge?
If so, I claim to know, that if a proposition is conceivable, it is logically possible. Because I think knowledge encompasses conclusions reached by valid use of logic.
I don’t know because I haven’t read all his posts. But I claim to know it too, and I claim to know it on the basis of abiding by a broadly accepted use of logic in determining possibility.
Not that I see the relevance of this, but I believe you are correct. As best I can make sense of things, something must have “always existed”. Always here means for all of time. That also means there was never a time at which there was not any thing (“nothing”) in existence, since that would imply there was ‘a time of nothing’, which implies a contradiction, because there can’t be nothing if there is time.
This view is compatible both with a dimension of time that only extends a finite distance of time into the past, or an infinite distance of time into the past. In both cases it would be true to say, that there was never ‘a time of nothing’.
That also means there could not have been a ‘transition from nothing to something’, since transitions are temporal concepts (there would first have to be nothing, then something, but ‘first’ implies time again), which means time would have to already exist, again in which case it wouldn’t have been ‘nothing’ if time already existed. I don’t see any way around this.
I actually don’t believe this is true. I don’t believe that it is possible that time has not always existed. The reason I say this is because of the word ‘always’. Always existed means “existed at all times”. In so far as time exists, it has always existed.
It is a common misconception to think this implies that time must stretch infinitely and without end, into the past. But that’s actually not true. It would still be true to say that time has always existed, even if time has a first moment a finite time ago.
I would modify your statement and leave out the temporal term “always”. I would agree to say it is possible that everything in your list (let’s just call it the universe), could not exist. It is logically possible that not any thing was in existence. It is logically possible that the universe was not in existence. This is not the same thing as saying it came into existence. I just means we can conceive of things being different from what they are. A state of affairs without anything existing is conceivable.
I dunno, the one in Daniel seems pretty vague, even if it had been written prior. But then they had to write metaphorically back then, no freedom of expression then.
sean s.
Inb4 Erik proceeds to complain that you now think he doesn’t endorse them because he didn’t say that. 😛
So Erik asked an absurd question? Why am I not surprised…
I think what Mung proposes is quite possible; and acceptable in modern cosmology. Our universe, its “space, matter, time, fields, energy, and anything else we conceive of as physical or material” is believed to have been created at the Big Bang [sic]. The problem being then: what existed to cause the Big Bang?
Nothing of our universe, but something for sure. This is where multiverse theories come into the picture. They provide an explanation of what might have been there before anything of our universe existed. They’re a relatively new idea, and immature, but the problem Mung asks about does exist.
sean s.
Standing by…
sean s.
If you go by Wikipedia, it says weird things concerning Daniel, such as that the book was not part of Hebrew canon. Actually, it was and is. And (irreligious) scholars natura(listica)lly date Daniel by the mentioned prophecy this way – since the prophecy is there, the text/passage must have been written after it. The problem is that the date they arrive at this way is a date after the canon was closed. But the book *is* part of Hebrew canon.
I’m sure everybody understands that if the prophecy was written after the events, then it’s not prophecy. And when it’s not prophecy while it says it is, Hebrews would not accept it as canonical. Because in the world they lived, they could not afford to shoot in their own foot or knowingly deceive themselves.
The bottom line is that whichever prophecy is taken, for atheists it’s either not correct or not a prophecy. Not even these two common obvious examples. Because for them scripture is not scripture in the first place. This is the hurdle that must be cleared first before dealing with anything else.
I apologize. The way I wrote that is misleading. The issue is that the accounts of those prophesies were written well after the supposed events. Even if you take Daniel as part of Hebrew canon (and by that, I assume you mean part of the Septuagint, which Hebrew scholars universally agree is not the case), you still have the problem of the Septuagint being laid down after the events of Daniel anyway. Clearly it had to be…how could Daniel be part of the Septuagint if it occurred after it was written?
So you’re still left with a dubious claim of “prophesy” regardless of how you slice it.
Here’s a question: what is prophesy?
I recall being taught (as a child) that prophesy was the gift of speaking truth to power; speaking messages inspired by God; speaking divine revelation.
The prophets “spoke from God as they were moved by holy spirit.” (2 Peter 1:20, 21)
A prophet is one who receives God’s message and transmits it to others. (Acts 3:18) and uses it for the edification of believers (1 Cor 14:3).
Notice none of this is about telling the future. Foretelling the future is not excluded, but that’s not what prophesy was supposed to be about. A prophet was a messenger of God. As one priest said to us, prophets give Kings dope-slaps.
That said, Erik errs when he wrote:
The prophesies in the OT were not selected by the Hebrews/Judeans because they thought they were valid predictions, they were selected because they considered them valid messages from their God. They may not have been sure what they actually meant, they were just sure they were valid. They were sure that if they preserved them and studied them and were faithful, their God would at his pleasure let them in on the secret.
So when we evaluate prophesies as “successful” predictions, I think we’re engaging in an analysis that the ancient Hebrews or Judeans would not have recognized.
sean s.
Are we clear on what the Septuagint is? It’s the pre-Christian Greek translation of Hebrew canon. So no, by Hebrew canon I don’t mean the Septuagint.
Anyway, if the Septuagint contains the book of Daniel, then Daniel pre-dates the Septuagint and insofar as the Septuagint is the translation of Hebrew canon, Daniel is part of Hebrew canon. Josephus also refers to Daniel the prophet and to his book as part of Hebrew canon. That’s as authoritative as it gets.
I agree that Hebrews accepted books as canonical because they considered them valid messages from their God, but how is this supposed to mean that the books contain no valid predictions? Are the two mutually exclusive?
sean samis,
I dont think there’s much point in using the term if it does not involve some connotation of a somewhat aware entity with some kind of power to turn intent into action. Particularly if one is expecting it to solve the riddle of how to get from nothing (else) to something!
I didn’t say God does solve that problem. I was just approaching the claim made by sean samis from a different perspective. Unless you’re willing to believe that “something” can arise from utter nothingness we all ought to be able to agree that “something’ must have been “there” all along.
That alone calls into question whether and how sean samis can KNOW that it is possible that God does not exist. By the same argument he’s made, he can likewise KNOW whatever he likes, including knowing that whatever he cares to think was the source of all that we think of as material and/or physical could possibly not have existed because it is not impossible that it did not exist.
Appealing to what is allegedly not impossible in order to establish what is possible seems questionable in the extreme, but you all take it like it’s utterly reasonable and like no one ought to question such ‘logic.”
Well, I question it.
Well, since I did not write anything about them “containing no valid predictions” you can understand why I feel no need to respond further. When you have a question about what I actually wrote, let me know.
sean s.
Agreed.
This is a complete non sequitur.
Wow. Horrible writing. I’m only guessing at what this even means. It appears that Mung thinks I could make the following argument:
P1: X is the source of all that we think of as material and/or physical
P2: It is not impossible that X does not exist. THEREFORE
C: We know that X could possibly not exist.
This is my best attempt to untangle Mung’s writing. I’d pause at the point and seek confirmation from Mung but I have no reason to think we’d ever get one.
I therefore take the above syllogism as fairly representing what Mung thinks.
It’s very, VERY wrong.
Here is my position:
P1: X is the source of all that we think of as material and/or physical
P2: If X does not exist, creation ex nihilo would be necessary.
P3: We know that creation ex nihilo is impossible. THEREFORE
C: We know that it is impossible for X to not exist. (We know X must exist.)
Mung’s confusion stems probably from the error of believing that his God is the only alternative to creation ex nihilo
You question it because you don’t understand it. Not that it has not been explained repeatedly. It is not complex or extreme, you just don’t like it.
sean s
P1. All that we think of as material and/or physical requires a source. Call this source “MAGIC.”
P2. Creation ex nihilo requires MAGIC.
Therefore, if MAGIC does not exist all that we think of as material and/or physical could not possibly exist.
All that we think of as material and/or physical does exist.
Therefore, MAGIC exists.
QED
This ranks right up there with your claim to know that it’s possible that God does not exist.
How do you know what is impossible? Did you and Patrick get together and decide what is impossible based on operational definitions and objective empirical evidence?
If not, no serious skeptic here at TSZ ought to take you seriously.
Sean, Mung. Pretty sure this is the crux of the matter
Hey! I’ve got no dog in this fight.
I know, you were just checking to see if I’m reading what you write.
Yesterday was a busy day so I didn’t visit TSZ until late; I was surprised this is still a topic. Mung just refuses to face facts.
P1: We don’t know that gods exist or not.
P2: We DO know that our complete ignorance leaves all possibilities on the table. THEREFORE:
C1: we actually know god’s existence is possible AND
C2: we actually know god’s nonexistence is possible.
C1 and C2 do not conflict, they are exclusive and exhaustive. They are both true UNTIL WE KNOW MORE. At that point we need to re-evaluate, but not until then.
Mung is hung-up on C2, but it is as true as C1. This is not argumentum ad ignorantiam, it is de ignorantia scientiae.
sean s.
That was pretty adolescent.
We could validly replace “MAGIC” with “NOTHING” or “Flying Spaghetti Monster”.
sean s.
Two comments:
1. Leave Patrick out of this. My words are mine.
2. No one here takes seriously the idea that you think creation ex nihilo is possible; this is just you objecting for the sake of objecting.
3. If you really do think creation ex nihilo is possible then I think we all are waiting for whatever tangled web of rationale you can spin-up to defend that absurd idea.
sean s.
What some theists (ontological argument supporters) claim is that God is by definition a necessary existent. Thus, they would say that P2 is false: what we know or don’t know does not determine what is possible. (As mentioned before, thinking that it does confuses epistemic with metaphysical possibility.)
And such theists would claim that if we actually knew god’s existence were possible we would therefore know that god’s nonexistence is impossible.
Now, again, I don’t believe that any ontological argument is sound. But confusing epistemic with metaphysical possibility is not a good way to attack it. Mung isn’t wrong about this stuff–although he puts it badly. You are.
FACT: sean samis doesn’t know shit about whether or not God exists. That’s a fact.
Or does sean samis claim to have actual KNOWLEDGE that God does not exist?
If so, what objective empirical evidence does sean samis offer to support his claim that God does not exist. None.
But that’s ok. Because sean samis just doesn’t know.
P1. We’re ignorant.
Any conclusion based on that premise is an argument from ignorance.
You’re hung up on P1. Your P1 is an admission of ignorance. You need to abandon P1 or admit that your argument is in fact an argument from ignorance.
You don’t KNOW either one. You may as well admit that you don’t KNOW whether or not the existence of God is possible or whether or not the existence of God is impossible. Argument from Ignorance.
Either God exists or God does not exist is a tautology, unless you are going to deny basic logic.
Thank you.
What we know or don’t know does not determine what is possible. This is true. What is or is not possible is entirely independent of what we know or don’t know. Since I make no contrary claim nor rely on a contrary idea, I don’t see how this applies in this situation. My position fully embraces that truth. We are in agreement.
Whether or not some deity exists is independent of our knowledge, but if we have no knowledge (as P1 asserts) then our manifest ignorance means we cannot exclude either alternative (as P2 asserts). Is that wrong? Can we in our complete ignorance determine which alternative is true? Wouldn’t that be an actual “argument from ignorance”?
The claim that “God is by definition a necessary existent” is a claim that cries out for justification. If what we know or don’t know does not determine what is possible then a convenient definition of god certainly cannot invoke god’s existence. In our complete ignorance, are we supposed to “choose sides”?
… and if we knew god’s nonexistence were impossible we’d know god’s existence was certain. The problem is that, because we know nothing, we know god’s nonexistence IS possible, so god’s existence is not certain. The only way out of this seeming paradox is to acknowledge how we got into it: We know nothing about god’s actuality, so we know both his existence and nonexistence are possible.
These theists you mention, they and I would disagree. If some appear here, we could have a lively discussion. Maybe they could explain why we should respond to our ignorance with selection.
I really do not intend my comments as any kind of attack. I am stating my position and I’m willing to discuss it with anyone willing to engage with it or me. From what I can see, epistemic with metaphysical modalities don’t make a significant difference in this situation. Perhaps someone could explain how they would matter in this situation.
I accept that possibility, but so far no one has shown where my error lies (if there is one).
sean s.
We know both; we have knowledge (a justified belief) that the statement “god’s existence is possible, and god’s nonexistence is also possible” is a true statement. This knowledge is justified by reason: in the complete absence of knowledge about god’s existence, we cannot rationally determine which alternative is true; we know both remain potentially true (i.e.: possible).
No. Knowledge ABOUT ignorance. Argument from ignorance would look like “x is not disproved so x is true.” My argument is more like “x is unknown so both x and not-x are possible”.
It is a tautology, and yet it is true: either God exists or God does not exist. If we have no knowledge (as P1 asserts) then our manifest ignorance means we cannot exclude either alternative (as P2 asserts). Is that wrong? Can we in our complete ignorance determine which alternative is true? Wouldn’t that be an actual “argument from ignorance”?
The fact that it IS a tautology should render this as trivial, but your pushback indicates it is not trivial.
sean s.
For all I know the metaphysical claim:
“It’s possible that God exists / doesn’t exist”
means “There’s no internal logical contradiction preventing that God exists / doesn’t exist”
So to know whether any of those propositions is true, we would need to know that there are exactly zero logical contradictions preventing the possibility that God exists or doesn’t.
It’s not true that we know that no such internal logical contradictions exist, therefore we just don’t know if it’s possible that God exists, or doesn’t exist.
If that’s right, yours is in fact an argument from ignorance
The confusion lies somewhere deeper. Creatio ex nihilo is a Christian (Catholic at least) dogma. Christian argument should be rather that matter as we know it cannot do anything ex nihilo, while God can. If it doesn’t sound to you that Mung is saying this, then you are talking miles past each other.
Why does WLC bother writing lengthy books about a logical proof of God like the Kalam if it’s all dogma anyway? One can condense the entire argument in just a couple lines:
P1: The universe began to exist ex-nihilo
P2: Only God can create stuff ex-nihilo
C: God created the universe
Dogma may mean “thou shalt believe or else…” but it does not mean that the content of it is irrational out of the blue. The job of apologetics is to show where dogmas come from and why it’s good to have them the way they are.
My personal problem with ex nihilo (both the Christian and Kraussian version) is precisely that it comes out of the blue as a brute fact and cannot be reasoned for. I hold to “ex nihilo nihil fit” on every level.
I don’t see much of a difference between this form of question begging vs just affirming it no questions asked. When your job is to find why it’s good to have them instead of whether it really is sound reasoning, no sound reasoning is to be expected from these apologists.
Interesting, seems to me what follows from that, if the universe “began to exist”, is that God created the universe out of his own “stuff”, out of himself. Sounds like pantheism. Is that right?
Actually, if they go by showing that every alternative is worse – and indeed make sure to cover every possible alternative – the result should be acceptable.
Yes. Either that or that God is not Creator. Demiurg (creator) is distinct from God.
I would say they they would need to show that every other alternative is false, not just worse. But my point is that they don’t allow themselves to be wrong before they’ve even started reasoning, and we all know anyone can craft an argument to prove anything by carefully picking the premises. And that’s what WLC and the likes do. None have shown those alternatives to be wrong, or even worse than their presuppositions.
So when you say that it doesn’t make sense to ask for evidence of God, it’s not just because everything is evidence of God’s creating power, but that everything is in fact part of God’s “nature”, part of God himself.
I know I start to sound like FMM with all the repetition, but how can a perfectly transcendent and immaterial being be also (in part?) a material universe?
I just don’t see how you can reconcile classical theism with that form of pantheism
as expected, Erik disappeared in a poof of smoke
Referring to this?
I agree that you don’t see. The reason is that you think transcendent means “far away” and immaterial means “non-existent”. And you most likely also think that the universe is three-dimensional. On classical theism, none of this applies.
Erik,
Quick google search: Transcendent = totally independent of all else
I take it immaterial means non-material. Right?
If that’s right, and the universe is part of God’s nature, how can it be transcendent or “independent of all else” if there is nothing else?
And how can God be immaterial if the material world is also part of God?