The Atheist Reformation: Arguments 9 & 10

Now for the latest update to the refutations of Twenty Arguments for the Existence of God.

THE ARGUMENT FROM MIRACLES

1. A miracle is an event whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and direct intervention of God.

2. There are numerous well-attested miracles.

3. Therefore, there are numerous events whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and direct intervention of God.

4. Therefore God exists.

Obviously if you believe that some extraordinary event is a miracle, then you believe in divine agency, and you believe that such agency was at work in this event. But the question is: Was this event a miracle? If miracles exist, then God must exist. But do miracles exist?

Which events do we choose? In the first place, the event must be extraordinary. But there are many extraordinary happenings (e.g., numerous stones dropping from the sky in Texas) that do not qualify as miracles. Why not? First, because they could be caused by something in nature, and second, because the context in which they occur is not religious. They qualify as mere oddities, as "strange happenings"; the sort of thing you might expect to read in Believe It or Not, but never hear about from the pulpit. Therefore the meaning of the event must also be religious to qualify as a miracle.

Suppose that a holy man had stood in the center of Houston and said: "My dear brothers and sisters! You are leading sinful lives! Look at yourselves - drunken! dissolute! God wants you to repent! And as a sign of his displeasure he's going to shower stones upon you!" Then, moments later - thunk! thunk! thunk! - the stones began to fall. The word "miracle" might very well spring to mind.

Not that we would have to believe in God after witnessing this event. But still, if that man in Texas seemed utterly genuine, and if his accusations hit home, made us think "He's right," then it would be very hard to consider what happened a deception or even an extraordinary coincidence.

This means that the setting of a supposed miracle is crucially important. Not just the physical setting, and not just the timing, but the personal setting is vital as well - the character and the message of the person to whom this event is specially tied. Take for example, four or five miracles from the New Testament. Remove them completely from their context, from the teaching and character of Christ. Would it be wrong to see their religious significance as thereby greatly diminished? After all, to call some happening a miracle is to interpret it religiously. But to interpret it that way demands a context or setting which invites such interpretation. And part of this setting usually, though not always, involves a person whose moral authority is first recognized, and whose religious authority, which the miracle seems to confirm, is then acknowledged.

Abstract discussions of probability usually miss this factor. But setting does play a decisive role. Many years ago, at an otherwise dull convention, a distinguished philosopher explained why he had become a Christian. He said: "I picked up the New Testament with a view to judging it, to weighing its pros and cons. But as I began to read, I realized that I was the one being judged." Certainly he came to believe in the miracle-stories. But it was the character and teaching of Christ that led him to accept the things recounted there as genuine acts of God.

So there is not really a proof from miracles. If you see some event as a miracle, then the activity of God is seen in this event. There is a movement of the mind from this event to its proper interpretation as miraculous. And what gives impetus to that movement is not just the event by itself, but the many factors surrounding it which invite - or seem to demand - such interpretation.

But miraculous events exist. Indeed, there is massive, reliable testimony to them across many times, places and cultures.

Therefore their cause exists.

And their only adequate cause is God.

Therefore God exists.

The argument is not a proof, but a very powerful clue or sign."

REBUTTAL

I almost didn't include this argument, as the author flatly states the argument isn't a proof. However, it was included because it wouldn't have been twenty without it, and I didn't want to come across as disingenuous for not including it, since I am refuting each of them. On to the argument. No "miracle" has ever been verified that could not immediately or soon after be fully explained and understood via natural explanation and the scientific method. As far as logical fallacies go, the only one that's glaringly obvious is the anecdotal story about the philosopher. Note how the personal anecdote does not mention said philosopher by name (nor do virtually any of the other "miraculous conversion" stories for that matter, you will see those a lot) and is also a fallacy in and of itself, as an appeal to authority to pretend to justify this non-argument.

THE ARGUMENT FROM CONSCIOUSNESS

"When we experience the tremendous order and intelligibility in the universe, we are experiencing something intelligence can grasp. Intelligence is part of what we find in the world. But this universe is not itself intellectually aware. As great as the forces of nature are, they do not know themselves. Yet we know them and ourselves. These remarkable facts - the presence of intelligence amidst unconscious material processes, and the conformity of those processes to the structure of conscious intelligence - have given rise to a variation on the first argument for design.

1. We experience the universe as intelligible. This intelligibility means that the universe is graspable by intelligence.

2. Either this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence, or both intelligibility and intelligence are the products of blind chance.

3. Not blind chance.

4. Therefore this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp it are the products of intelligence.

There are obvious similarities here to the design argument, and many of the things we said to defend that argument could be used to defend this one too. For now we want to focus our attention on step 3.

Readers familiar with C.S. Lewis's Miracles will remember the powerful argument he made in chapter three against what he called "naturalism": the view that everything - including our thinking and judging - belongs to one vast interlocking system of physical causes and effects. If naturalism is true, Lewis argued, then it seems to leave us with no reason for believing it to be true; for all judgments would equally and ultimately be the result of nonrational forces.

Now this line of reflection has an obvious bearing on step 3. What we mean by "blind chance" is the way physical nature must ultimately operate if "naturalism" is true - void of any rational plan or guiding purpose. So if Lewis's argument is a good one, the step 3 stands: blind chance cannot be the source of our intelligence.

We were tempted, when preparing this section, to quote the entire third chapter of Miracles. This sort of argument is not original to Lewis, but we have never read a better statement of it than his, and we urge you to consult it. But we have found a compelling, and admirably succinct version (written almost twenty years before Miracles) in H.W.B. Joseph's Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1931). Joseph was an Oxford don, senior to Lewis, with whose writings Lewis was certainly familiar. And undoubtedly this statement of the argument influenced Lewis's later, more elaborate version.

"If thought is laryngeal in motion, how should any one think more truly than the wind blows? All movements of bodies are equally necessary, but they cannot be discriminated as true and false. It seems as nonsensical to call a movement true as a flavour purple or a sound avaricious. But what is obvious when thought is said to be a certain bodily movement seems equally to follow from its being the effect of one. Thought called knowledge and thought called error are both necessary results of states of brain. These states are necessary results of other bodily states. All the bodily states are equally real, and so are the different thoughts; but by what right can I hold that my thought is knowledge of what is real in bodies? For to hold so is but another thought, an effect of real bodily movements like the rest... These arguments, however, of mine, if the principles of scientific [naturalism]... are to stand unchallenged, are themselves no more than happenings in a mind, results of bodily movements; that you or I think them sound, or think them unsound, is but another such happening; that we think them no more than another such happening is itself but yet another such. And it may be said of any ground on which we may attempt to stand as true, Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum ["It flows and will flow swirling on forever" (Horace, Epistles, I, 2, 43)]. (Some Problems in Ethics, pp. 14-15).""

REBUTTAL

The quoted statement from Mr. Joseph's book is a verbose telling of the argument in its syllogistic state, so I will just address the syllogism at this point. If someone becomes really interested in the quote from Mr. Joseph, I may end up writing an article either just on that or possibly Lewis's chapter three from Miracles. On to the rebuttal.

There aren't just similarities, this is the exact same as the design argument, and blindly asserts that chance couldn't have been an option at any point in time, usually because the odds are just too astronomical to even consider. However, this is a fallacy we may not have touched on yet, called the argument from personal incredulity. It goes a little like this: "I don't understand this, or it doesn't make any sense to me, or it's just too ludicrous to be true! Therefore, it must not be correct!" That's usually the set up you see. William Lane Craig used to use this tactic several years ago, where he'd trot out the statistical improbability of the universe and use that as "evidence" that the universe had to have been designed by some sort of intelligence. The heart of the matter is anything becomes statistically impossible if you roll the clock far enough back. To illustrate how intellectually dishonest this tactic is, I will calculate the statistical probability of a reader knowing when I'm going to type the word "the." There are 26 letters in the alphabet, each just as likely to be chosen, and each letter could be used more than once to produce letters on this page, and the word is 3 letters long. Since the word we want to make is 3 letters long, and each letter is just as likely to be chosen, given the knowledge that you don't know the next word being typed. Therefore, the chances of it being "the" are 26x26x26, or 26^3, or 1 in 17,575. While that isn't statistically impossible, it's highly improbable, but, other inferences can be made, such as what word or words were typed before the unknown future 3 letter word? Or what percentage of the document contains "the?" All of these things alter the outcome based on inferential knowledge. So just trotting out raw statistics is relatively meaningless.