Topics Religion

Question Recently someone asked a question about the existence or non existence of god and miracles. Basically they were asking how, if an event occurs in space time, could we ever consider that event a miracle, since being in space time the event would have an identifiable cause and therefore could not be considered a miracle. The answer to me seems to be readily apparent, and I wanted to see what you thought. That is, a miracle by analytic reasoning seems to me to be something that does not occur in space time. So the problem is solved simply by observing that if an event occurs in space time then analytically and a priori we know it is not a miracle, just as a married man is analytically and a priori not a bachelor. Of course a better answer would simply be to point out that the use of metaphors like "miracle" may just be a quite ineffective use of words, since it tempts us to hypothesize about objects that can never be given in experience and that, I agree with Kant, is the ultimate no-no! :)

Accepted:
September 27, 2012

Comments

An interesting question, but I'm not quite sure I can go along with your suggestion.

First, miracles. Suppose that the story of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth occurred just as described in the Gospels. (We're not inquiring here into how likely this is; just suppose for argument's sake that it happened.) By any reasonable use of the word, that would count as a miracle. (If it's not miraculous enough, add your own extra bells and whistles.) Briefly, it would be an event that wouldn't occur as the laws of nature ordinarily run, and it would have a clear religious significance. Most every user of the word "miracle" would agree that it would be a miracle, so it's hard to see how we could know otherwise analytically.

Your friend's objection is that the event, being in space and time, must have an identifiable cause, and therefore can't be a miracle. But this isn't clear either.

First, we could question the assumption that everything occurring in space and time must have an identifiable cause. For my own part, I don't know whether this is true and in fact suspect that it isn't. The fact that a radium atom decayed at a particular instant, for example, is something I suspect has no cause, even though it occurred in space and time.

However, set that aside for the moment. The more important point is this: no one I know of thinks that miracles, if such there be, have no causes. What they think, rather, is that the cause of a miracle is not some ordinary space-time event. People who believe in miracles believe that when they occur, God intervenes in the created world, suspending the usual laws of nature. In short, the cause of a miracle is a divine intervention. In fact in his essay "Of Miracles" (arguably the most important essay in the history of the debate) Hume characterizes a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity." If we take that point of view, a miracle, if there are any, has a cause; just not a natural cause.

What about space and time? On one common view, God is not in space. In fact, this is the orthodox view in Christianity, and I believe the same goes for Judaism and Islam, not to mention various others. On this understanding we can say: a miracle would be an event in space and time whose cause -- an act of divine volition -- is not in space.

At this point, your friend might say that causes are the sorts of things that have to be in space. And if we go a step further, as at least parts of many traditions do, and say that God is outside space and also outside time, then we end up even further away from what we usually mean by "cause"; a "cause" that's entirely outside space and time, the objection might go, is not recognizably a cause at all.

Suppose we agree. (Leave aside whether we really should.) Where does that leave us?

As we already pointed out, the claim that events in space and time must have causes, let alone spatio-temporal causes, is far from being a priori true, let alone analytic. That said, purely chance events (like radioactive decay) won't count as miracles. But if we insist that "cause" only applies to things in space and time, the believer in miracles still has a move. A miracle would be an event in space and time that has no "cause" in this sense, and that departs from the usual laws of nature, but whose explanation is that it is in accord with "a particular volition of the Deity." To put it another way: a miracle is an event that can't be explained by appeal to the usual laws of nature, but that happened because God willed it. [NOTE: "because" is much broader than "caused by."]

At this point, there's still a good deal to argue about. (To mention one point: some people have tried to argue that laws of nature can by definition have no exceptions. However, that's ultimately a way of begging the question in favor of naturalism.) What's important is that we're well beyond what we can settle by appeal to supposed analytic truths; we're in the realm of metaphysics and philosophical theology. Perhaps the notion of "miracle" is ultimately incoherent. But that's not something that any short, snappy argument can show.

Of course, even if there is a coherent notion of miracle, it wouldn't follow that there actually are any. Needless to say, however, that's yet another question.