At what point will one wager that a phenomenon is a miracle, a privileged observation, or some yet-to-be-determined natural mechanism?
Dawkins has made it clear that nothing could count as evidence for the existence of God. He has shown himself as a closed-minded, dogmatic atheist. You can see the demonstration for yourself in the video below. It starts at 12:30 and goes to 15:30.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qNcC866sm7s
This is a video clip that should be shown in churches everywhere. Dawkins, with agreement from Boghossian, has just admitted that if God Himself were to appear to Dawkins, complete with mind-boggling displays of miraculous power, all during the second coming of Christ, he would NOT consider that evidence for God’s existence. Well, if an empirical demonstration of God and miracles would not count as evidence for God’s existence, then nothing will. And that is essentially what he confesses at the end of the clip.
For those in the world of skilled mathematical gamblers in the casinos, we realize hypothetically among a population of 1000 highly skilled mathematical gamblers, one poor chap will be the unlucky guy with a bad run of luck that will make him the 1-out-of-1000 unlucky phenomenon that is more than 3 sigma from expectation. In analogous manner there will be that one guy that is 1-out-of-1000 lucky.
For bank rolls that are exponentially grown from an initial amount of (say) 10,000 dollars according to fractional Kelly betting (see: Kelly Criterion), the difference between bad and good luck will be the difference between ending up with say 5,000 vs. millions! One can construct a simulation on Excel or write a program to demonstrate this. So the question arises, at what point is it the gambler’s skill or bad luck or good luck that is the mechanism for his success or lack thereof. This question is extensible to the question of OOL.
Even Dawkins and Koonin admit the probability of the origin of life is far from mathematical expectation. If one could hypothetically get some credible odds on the question of OOL or any miracle for that matter, at what point will one wager the Origin of Life is a miracle or just some privileged observation like that lucky 1-in-a-buzzillion gambler or some other yet-to-be-determined natural mechanism? I suppose there is no formal right or wrong answer, but personally I’ve decided I’d wager on OOL being a miracle.
PS
Ideally one tries to make wagers on uncertain phenomenon that have a high Sharpe ratio:
Sharpe Ratio
In finance, the Sharpe ratio (also known as the Sharpe index, the Sharpe measure, and the reward-to-variability ratio) is a way to examine the performance of an investment by adjusting for its risk. The ratio measures the excess return (or risk premium) per unit of deviation in an investment asset or a trading strategy, typically referred to as risk (and is a deviation risk measure), named after William F. Sharpe.[1] To this day,[when?] the Sharpe ratio is still found as a prime metric for any alternative investment.
I loved playing high sharp ratio games in casinos, but unfortunately, the few times I managed it, Casino security would swoop down on me and expel me for my thought crimes. At Hollywood casino in Tunica I was threated with jail time if I ever returned (some stupid trespassing law against people who use their minds to beat the game of blackjack). Oh well!
Yours Truly was listed in the credits of this documentary 🙂
Why is “miracle” mixed up with evidence for God? I think that the feeding of the five thousand out of five loaves and two fishes could easily count as a miracle, so long as nothing fishy seemed to be going on, but how would that show that God exists? The resurrection of Lazarus is another miracle that seems to be told expressly because it looks like it would be real, at least if one were quite sure that Lazarus were dead in the first place. But would that be evidence of God, or of something else?
Dawkins’ point seems to be, how do you know what to expect of God? Indeed. Miracles, first off, would be evidence of miracles. If a being seems to be behind them, then they may be evidence of miraculous beings. Evidence for an omnipotent and omniscient being seems a tad difficult to imagine. I don’t really think too well of Dawkins’ statements, because surely one should at least be open to the notion of a god, but I do agree that pinning down such a conclusion could be quite hard to do.
OOL seems one of the worst possibilities for indicating that a god exists, first of all because we have no actual probabilities for it, so it may be that it isn’t at all unexpected on a planet suitable for life. But also because even if it were a miracle, how could it possibly point to God? Wouldn’t a very potent God be more likely to do something like the creation told in Genesis, rather than make microorganisms? What’s the point of that? Might it be more likely that some living (evolved?) intelligence would have done it as an experiment? IOW, how would we even show that OOL was a miracle, even if it would be highly unlikely to be “natural”?
Miracles wouldn’t necessarily be evidence for god, and OOL likely could never be shown conclusively or probably to have been a miracle (think Crick) even if we had the evidence to show that “natural abiogenesis” was extremely unlikely. And we don’t have that.
Glen Davidson
Even if we lived in Harry Potter world, where miracles are an everyday occurrence (an even if to some degree controllable, they would not be evidence for the existence of a deity (any more than my cataract surgery was evidence for the existence of a deity (even though healing the blind has been taken as such evidence).
And considering the behavior of various Chosen Peoples, miracles associated with them would not be evidence for a deity worthy of respect or worship.
Presumably, Sal, you worship David Blaine?
I don’t automatically reject miracles. However, in my experience, a miracle is usually either due to a clever conjuring trick or due to somebody jumping to conclusions not warranted by the evidence.
Sal, I think you are confounding frequentist with bayesian probabilities.
As a gambler, you deal with frequentist probabilities, in other words with frequency distributions that you know, a priori. If you know the frequency distribution of a set of events, you can compute the probability of one of those events occurring on any one trial. You know that all those events are possible – some are simply rarer than others.
That is completely different from the probability implied when someone refers to their degree of certainty that some explanation is true, for instance. This is actually the fundamental problem with Dembski’s CSI – what I call the eleP(T|H)ant in the room. It tries to compute a frequentist probability where the frequency distributions are not known with any degree of certainty.
And that is Dawkins’ point, and I agree with it. Faced with an apparent one-off event, and a range of possible explanations, there is no frequentist method for determining which of those explanations is correct. All we have is our own priors for the relative likelihood of each (personal hallucination; mass hallucination; someone playing a trick; special effects, divine manifestation). And, with Dawkins, I’d consider the last the least likely.
I think the confusion is related to the confusion about what a p value means in frequentist null hypothesis testing. A low p value doesn’t tell you that your null is very unlikely, or that your hypothesis is very likely. It just tells you that your observation is rare under the null.
But rare things occur. Some diseases have fantastically low prevalence. Nonetheless “a diseases caused this” is still far more likely than “witchcraft caused this”. Not because such effects are even rarer under witchcraft than under disease, but because there’s lots of good reasons to think that witchcraft is bogus.
“Automatic” is perhaps the wrong word. After a lifetime of seeing really good stage magic, really evil hucksters, and really stupid interpretations of eyewitness accounts, not to mention, really pernicious television and movie scripts, skepticism is the default.
Not so much “skepticism” as “something perfectly in accord with our understanding of the way the world works” as the default.
Okay, but I’m willing to go with I don’t know, and it ain’t likely a miracle as the default.
This is why Dawkins tossed out the term “child abuse” in regard to teaching kids really bad probabilities. I think it’s a bad as teaching kids to play in heavy traffic.
Now, there are secular analogs. The news media teach people to be terrified of things that are no more likely than being struck by lightening.
petrushka,
I take it you’re not a “Game of Thrones” fan.
Don’t get cable TV. Haven’t read the books.
I have, however, read and seen I Claudius.
Sounds similar.
petrushka,
I’m in the sticks too, with 1Mb.
Sort of but not really. Graves based his novels on many Roman sources. His foreword to I, Claudius lists them as a refutation to accusations that he based his story just on Suetonius. Also there are no dragons or anything else that might be construed as supernatural (unless you take Herod Agrippa’s story of the Owl as literal).
From the OP:
Oh brother!
Sal, does Mike Gene venture from his blog at all. I’d invite him here myself but I’m banned at his blog. 🙂
Seems to me the blog comments have things pretty much in hand.
Miracles could demonstrate the existence of miracles, but nothing specific about the way they work or about the causative agent.
I think this demonstrates that science is not just a list of facts, but a way of knowing.
Some people just don’t don’t like it.
As far as I can tell, the religious view something as a miracle if it is staggering improbable to occur naturally. Unexplained cures of disease. Flying priests. Changing water to wine. Etcetera. But all of these are either positive events (at least to someone) or just awe inspiring. But what about spontaneous human combustion? Or orphan diseases? These are both staggeringly improbable, but I have never heard anyone use these as examples of miracles. Why not?
I agree (I wasn’t disagreeing, sorry if it sounded that way :))
The other point is philosophical I suppose. My own view is that the idea of “evidence” for “miracles” is incoherent – the whole point of a miracle (or “supernatural” ) event is that it defies explanation. When we don’t have a model for something in science, we say we “don’t know” how to explain it.
IF someone could come up with scientific evidence FOR the “supernatural” then, by definition, it wouldn’t be supernatural.
And if the evidence was merely for “an intelligent agent did this/intervened in this” then that isn’t evidence that the intelligent agent is divine, again, by definition. As Acartia points out, orphan diseases are as good a candidate for miracles, albeit malign ones, as orphan cures. If we were convinced they were the result of intelligent intervention, we wouldn’t necessarily be looking for a deity as the agent.
Ask Spinal Tap if they do.
Glen Davidson
Alternative non-supernatural version.
Wedding celebration at Cana is going well but gatecrashers have swelled the numbers. The wine is flowing like water but fast running out. Jesus, great guy that he is and self-effacing to boot, dicretely slips the help enough coin to nip next door to the wine shop for more supplies. He tells the help to keep quiet so as not to embarrass the hosts.
OK, maybe we need an explanation for where Jesus got the cash.
There I was, a pile of napkins with marks all over them next to me. I have no idea what made them think I was counting cards. I’m smarter than them all. They just got lucky. They’d never be able to prove in court that I was counting cards.
IF someone could come up with scientific evidence AGAINST the “supernatural” then, by definition, it would be “natural.”
People have been collecting miracle stories since forever. I believe Jesus even had something to say about signs.
So don’t say I don’t believe in anything.
Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear 🙁
So, to clarify: no, that makes no sense, Mung. I’m saying that there CAN BE no scientific evidence for, or against the supernatural as usually defined, because the supernatural, as usually defined, is something that cannot be explained by science.
How would you define “supernatural”, Mung?
Radios. Voices coming out of a box! Look inside, there’s no-one there. If that’s not miraculous, I don’t know what is.
I’m not sure it’s really helpful to talk about what is “natural” or “supernatural” any more. These terms came into prominence during a specific period of the history of Western science, with a specific conception of what science does, how scientific explanations work, and how to distinguish between empirical science and religious metaphysics. There’s a complicated background at work in these concepts, and that background has largely been superseded over the past 150 years (or so). I think that’s why these concepts give us so much trouble.
Perhaps both “natural” and “supernatural” ought to be retired — or at least a moratorium placed on using them until we are clear about what we want to use them for. What distinctions are worth making? What purposes are we trying to satisfy with our distinctions? I hope that some thought along those lines will illuminate whether “natural” and “supernatural” are the right concepts for serving our present and future purposes.
After all, just because these concepts have worked well-enough in the past is no reason to believe that they will continue to work in the future, if enough of the surrounding background has shifted with the ‘progress’ of inquiry!
Ah! Thanks KN for giving me the chance to promote my* alternatives of “real” and “imaginary”. Anything that impinges on our senses in some way, however indirectly or using instrumentation is real. Anything else is, for the moment at least, imaginary.
So are imaginary numbers real? Or are real numbers imaginary?
I think that “real” and “imaginary” are not in much better shape, in some respects. One might worry, for example, that works of fiction are perfectly real, as works of fiction. We can imagine all sorts of non-existent things that are still real as imagined. (An imagined thing is not a nothing, after all!)
But the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” is optional — it’s a historical accident of the 17th-century century armistice between science and religion — whereas something like the distinction between “real” and “imaginary” is crucial to any conceptual framework.
I think there are going to be deep problems with linking reality to “what impinges on our senses”, but I also think that it captures an essential point: what we need to capture is our understanding that reality is that which can make a difference in how we conceive of it. There needs to be what Peirce calls an “outward clash”, where our conceptions of reality are put to the test of reality itself.
It is, after all, crucial to our conception of reality that there is a difference between reality and our conception of it!
Ironically we agree that CSI should be dropped as a conceptual approach, but for different reasons.
For certain chemical and physical systems, the frequentist approach is a good enough approximation.
The one area we likely agree is we rarely have certainty when putting forward a hypothesis, we move forward with lots of educated guesses. That’s why personally I find the notion of “infallible” and “self-evident truths” odious. So I took your side on the A=A debate.
My approach to truth is more of an educated guess with some degree of faith.
The only one who knows the exact distribution is God!
If creationist are wrong about OOL, it will be an honest mistake, imho.
I accept that, but what is not an honest mistake is advocating ideas that cannot lead to productive research. That’s either stupid or dishonest.
As an aside (not really relevant to the OP, but since you raise the issue), that is definitely true to an extent.
In some games however the events are not conditionally independent (like Bernouli trials).
Example, if a dealer is dealing from a single deck and the blackjack player observes that 4 aces have been dealt, there is ZERO probability an ace will be dealt again (unless there is cheating). A comparable issue is raised in successfully beating video poker machines and progressive slot machines (if one can stomach the variance, OUCH!).
See:
Even more subtle is same odds, but variable conditionally dependent payoff! 🙂 Such as in progressive jackpot slots.
These guys write about it now because they’ve been expelled from playing in casinos. I don’t like playing those games because they have low Sharpe ratios.
It is still a frequentist approach from that point on, but now the “a priori” frequencies have to be recalculated on the fly for the remaining cards. There is conditionally dependent probability in card games.
The algorithm or formula for doing the calculation varies from game to game, but there is no conceptual difference. Certainly nothing that would be relevant to a discussion of miracles.
Sometimes a fifth ace does show up, with religious implications for those involved.
Elizabeth,
I appreciate the response, but a philosophical question (maybe no right or wrong answer) — would then anything count for you as evidence for a deity or a act of miraculous intelligent design? Again, I’m not saying there is necessarily a right or wrong answer.
For me, I’d err on the side of claiming a miracle if the event is far enough from my estimate of expectation. My estimate could be wrong, but if there is nothing to lose and potentially something to gain, I’d go with it.
That said, I’ve seen lots of superstitions in the casino patrons. They attribute causation to all sorts of things reducible to just plain old coincidence.
The irony then is why there is a noticeable minority of mathematically skilled gamblers who are professing Christians? The answer is likely because they play by the book, textbook mathematics.
They have to be highly legalistic in their play and shrug off the emotional and superstitious dimension — they basically have to play like robots and computers to the extent their minds can handle it. They are ritualistic in a manner of speaking. So it’s no surprise someone from a legalistic background in the way they live life could succeed in a discipline that requires that personality type.
There’s an old saying:
🙂
All this to say, I’ve certainly seen many attribute miracle or some supernatural cause to ordinary coincidence or privileged observation (like being the lucky 1 in 1000 patron).
I’ve met skilled gamblers who suffered through a bout of 2 sigma bad luck as well as skilled gamblers who flew high on a bout of 2 sigma good luck. Lots of things we view as miraculous can be explained in terms of a privileged observation (good or bad luck), but OOL seems too far from natural expectation for me, otherwise I’d be on the side of Dawkins.
petrushka,
Indeed. The odds of one or more participants meeting their maker increase dramatically.
Define “deity”. Bonus points if your definition is not so damn vague that there’s no way to tell whether or not a given entity actually does fit your definition. “deity” is your concept, not mine; if you can’t tell me how the hell to distinguish between a “deity” and a non-“deity”, why should I believe this “deity” thingie even exists?
Define “miracle”. Again, bonus points if your definition is not so damn vague that there’s no way to tell whether or not a given act/event/whatever actually does fit your definition. Again, “miracle” is your concept, not mine; if you can’t tell me how the hell to distinguish between a “miracle” and a non-“miracle”, why should I believe that acts/events/whatevers of the class “miracle” even exist?
You almost got it right.
I’m saying that there CAN BE no scientific evidence for, or against the natural as usually defined, because the natural, as usually defined, is something that cannot be explained by science.
They can be useful if one can speak of them without begging the question. But there’s the rub. 🙂
Elizabeth wants to know what my definition of “supernatural” is.
I want to know what her definition of “natural” is.
And you know, what with this being “the skeptical zone” and all, she’s obligated to support her claims or issue a retraction.
Right Patrick?
btw, I’d like to suggest an amendment to the rules. Any person to whom a demand is made to support a claim or retract it who fails to either support or retract the claim in question within 24 hours, shall be stripped of their “skeptical rights” for a period not to exceed 24 hours.
I don’t see how they can be.
Philosophers, scientists, and theologians in the 17th-century had a nice, tidy little picture of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that all turned on the concept of a “law of nature”. Nature was law-governed, and science involved discovering the laws. The supernatural was whatever violated those laws (burning bushes, divided Red Seas, the dead being raised, etc.). Miracles were defined as intentional violations of the laws of nature. (And it was part of the conception of ‘laws of nature’ that the laws depended on a law-giver; miracles and laws have the same transcendent, absolute source.)
But it didn’t take long before Hume raised quite a red flags about how exactly laws and miracles are defined in terms of each other. Despite the best efforts of Kant, Mill, Whewell, and Peirce to salvage the concept of law, it turns out that we’re not so sure what a law of nature was, or how we know that there any.
Darwin showed that biological explanations are much more like explanations in history than in physics. If there are any laws in biology, there aren’t many and they don’t play an important role in explaining biological phenomena. And now it’s not even clear if there any laws at all (see How the Laws of Physics Lie).
Can the very distinction between the natural and the supernatural can be maintained without background conception of nature as law-governed and the task of science as that of discovering those laws? Perhaps, but I don’t see how. That’s why I’m deeply suspicious of that distinction altogether — that distinction relies on a background assumption that’s been utterly contested by contemporary philosophy of science.
Mung said:
Science doesn’t explain anything. It is a system of descriptions.
Actually I think you meant “Intelligent Design” there.
ha
William J. Murray,
So when Rutherford described how radiation bounced back off gold leaf, no scientific explanation of the phenomenon has ever been forthcoming? Or are you saying that any explanation simply becomes a ‘description’ at the next level?
I’d be interested to see what system does do that which science supposedly can’t – ‘explain’ things.
Allan Miller,
Ultimately, the only possible explanation for behavior is purpose or “final cause”. Without it, the best we can do is accept that existence is inexplicable and do our best to describe what we can observe.
Physical laws are not explanations because they are descriptive models. Chance cannot be an explanation, because chance only exists within a lawful framework which begs the explanatory question.
Science describes; philosophy explains.
Well, half right.
William J. Murray,
It’s true that laws are descriptions, not explanations. So if science were exclusively in the business of furnishing laws, then science would be a wholly descriptive enterprise.
However, this is not a helpful way of understanding what scientists actually do. More generally, they do construct explanations, in the form of models that explain why the regularities described by the laws obtain, to the extent that they do. The kinetic theory of gases explains why the Boyle-Charles Law holds; general relativity explains why the inverse-square law holds.
Taking this view also changes the relation between science and metaphysics, because now the metaphysical question is “what must reality be like such that it possible for finite, sapient beings to construct empirically testable, genuinely explanatory models of reality?”
I’ve had little time just recently for commenting and not enough now but I’ve been thinking about this on and off the last couple of days.
Take a couple of books: an encyclopædia and an anthology of fairy tales. The books are real, the type is real, the authors are real, the mental efforts that produced the statements are real. The only difference is in whether the statements are correct and verified, potentially verifiable, incorrect and falsified, potentially falsifiable. I suspect the genre of writing gives a clue to what our expectations should be regarding those statements.
As to what we are capable of imagining, sure there is (going from past experience) reality that we may stumble upon in the future that no-one can imagine but I predict the properties of the Universe that we currently observe will still remain as we observe them – though we may need to update our explanations (Newton to Einstein). I don’t need to imagine a dragon; I only need to look at a “Game of Thrones” CGI rendered version. I don’t need to worry about being consumed by dragon fire, though. For a dragon to work as rendered, the properties of the universe would need to be different enough to compromise the existence of real life.
In that case we agree 🙂
William J. Murray,
I see no use for that formulation. The only explanation for gravity is purpose? The only explanation for protein folding is purpose?
Kantian Naturalist,
I very much liked also the rest of your comments (except for the stuff about Darwin).
In my view from statistics, there is not a discrete distinction between ordinary and extraordinary (dare I say natural and supernatural), but rather a continuum. Using the frequentist gambler statistics which are also utilized in scientific fields, we have the notion of expectation (like say 50% heads for 500 fair coins) and deviation from expectation (like say 60%….100% heads). There are events whether real or hypothetical that would be classified scientifically and/or mathematically as exceptional. There should not be too much of a quarrel then in certain realms as to what would be exceptional vs. inevitable or at least plausible.
Whether such events are in evidence and whether such events would merit a theological explanation (like God) is a separate question.
Personally, to me, the billiard ball or lego model of the components of life are expected to obey frequentist statistics. The components are atoms that bond or disassociate according to some probability. Just like the probability of Rube Goldberg machine arising from a tornado in a junk yard, I don’t expect life to arise from an ordinary process (ordinary meaning close to expectation).
Something dead stays dead. That is an ordinary expectation.
One might argue OOL is an exceptional event, but it still happened because of multiverses and we’re just privileged but inevitable observers (like a lucky gambler), hence no Deity need be invoked. I don’t buy that explanation, but Koonin does.
I think the question of miracles and God is formally undecidable from our vantage point. One can only move forward in faith (in God or multiverses or whatever) and hope they are right.
He did say “for behavior.” I know that he just narrowed the subject without justification, but it’s what he wrote.
Not that I agree even “for behavior,” since for animals, including humans, telos or purpose itself requires explanation (many instances of these are tolerably well explained via evolution, if without the rigor we prefer), but find discussion with Wm. to be tiresome and likely to shift to whenever he feels like it, as in this case.
Glen Davidson