- 1 -
No clever theme this time, as I'm using the quick takes for exactly the purpose it's creator intended it for: It's been a crazy week here in DarwinLand, and I find myself at the end of the week with only one real post and an amusing video posted, and lots of fractional posts on the back burner that never got completed. The first half of the week, MrsDarwin took the kids up to visit some old friends who were spending time on a farm in Michigan. I stayed behind, which worked out well because my big project at work blew up and I found myself putting in twenty hours or so between Sunday afternoon and Monday night.
In the back half of the week, MrsD and I were both trying to catch up on rest, while the kids were responding the way kids to do indoor highs in the upper eighties (we have no A/C in the new-old house) and it not becoming fully dark until 9:30 or so.
- 2 -
Leah of Unequally Yoked, who ran the Religious Turing Test (which I still keep meaning to write about), had up a post the other day noting the spat that developed between Jennifer Fulwiler writing at National Catholic Register and PZ Myers, the atheist doyen who fills roughly the same spot in the atheist/science-blogger world as Fred Phelps does in Christianity, except that a surprising number of atheists seem to imagine he's someone worth listening to.
Leah notes that one of the primary complaints of PZ and his followers is that Jenn was clearly never a "real" atheist (and probably No True Scotsman, either) and indeed that complaints that a convert from some belief system to another "was never really a true X" are fairly common and asks, "How do you gauge the validity of someone's abandoned beliefs?"
I don't think it's possible to externally gauge the extent to which someone honestly held the beliefs that they held in the past. Even the former believer himself is usually not very good at that in retrospect. However, it is possible to gauge how well someone is able to express the beliefs which they claim to have formerly held. Thus, for example, as a Catholic if someone tells me, "I used to be a really well educated Catholic, but then I realized that if you break the Eucharist it doesn't bleed, and when you bite it it doesn't taste like flesh, so I knew that all that teaching about transubstantiation was just idiotic," I know that however sincere that person may have been in the past about his Catholic faith, he didn't have a clear understanding of what Eucharistic doctrines actually state.
- 3 -
Always eager to find another way to shape public behavior, some people are suggesting that a tax be imposed on soft drinks and other unhealthy foods, and the money used to fund a subsidy for vegetables and other healthy items. From what I know of the price elasticities involved, I'd believe that a high tax on soda (the proposal is to tax at $0.02/oz, thus adding $1.44 to the price of a six pack of 12oz cans) would drive demand down a bit -- or shift more people to diet since the proposal is to tax on the real soft drinks, not the fakes. However, I'm pretty skeptical that a subsidy on green vegetables would actually result in much higher consumption. While I'm told that the price of arugula at Whole Foods remains pretty rough, the price of romaine and spring mix at the average Kroger or Safeway is really not that bad. Living off fresh vegetables and fruits is arguably cheaper than living off potato ships and soft drinks. The difference is that people really like junk food (for a biologically explainable reason: once upon a time before we got really good at growing food sugars and fats were harder to come by, so our bodies are designed to crave them.) Plus, junk foods are highly portable in a way that most greens aren't. (A salad starts to look a little tired after a day or two, while chips and soda keep for months if not years if unopened.) Often convenience is at least as big a driver of behavior as price -- as shown by the fact that "universal health care" hasn't actually driven down the over-use of emergency rooms, despite their higher cost they're open when people are available to go to the doctor.
- 4 -
A few weeks ago, Ross Douthat cited the statistic that in the 70s barely over half of well-educated Americans agreed that adultery is always wrong. This got John Sides thinking, and pulling data from the General Social Survey. It turns out there has in fact been a steady trend of people who have completed grad school or college becoming more disapproving of adultery since the '70s. Razib looks at the same data and separates out male and female attitudes.- 5 -
I've had some back-and-forth with Alex Binder of Christian Economics about the Modern Money Theory and its implications. Hopefully more discussion on that to come in the future.- 6 -
My path in life seems to usually put me in the company of people slightly older than myself -- in great part, I imagine, because I hit a lot of life milestones (marriage, children, career, etc.) at what is considered a young age by mainstream standards. Thus, I often hear people at work talking about the creeping sense that things they had wanted to do while while young, things they'd dreamed of, may not be possible. As we settle into the new job, income, house, milieu, etc. I find myself starting to look forward to possibilities which seem, to me at least, particularly middle aged. Maybe at some point we won't have a kid nursing and we will have enough money to take a vacation together. For several days. Somewhere nice. Maybe someday we'll go back to Europe -- and have the money to stay in hotels instead of hostels and eat at restaurants instead of subsisting on bread, cheese and wine. (Though that wasn't bad...)
I recall catching up with some friends of my parents a few years ago, whose youngest kid had just moved out, and hearing about how they'd gone to stay in Paris for a week. Somehow that seemed a revelation. My idea of progressing through life had unthinkingly been: Run around and see a few things without spending any money while in college, get a job, get married, have kids, stick to that routine till you get feeble and then die. (Of course, that could happen too.)
- 7 -
It's a good thing our garden is a means of recreation rather than subsistence, because so far all we got out of it was a few rounds of salad before new rounds of lettuce refused to sprout any more. (too hot, perhaps) But soon, very soon, we should be absolutely buried in tomatoes. Big, heavy, tomatoes. Watching these monsters grow larger and larger is certainly a pleasing sight after years of trying to grow tomatoes in Texas and finding that with the heat we could only get one or two full size tomatoes off each plant (though we did get lots of cherry tomatoes.)
33 comments:
Cutting the corn subsidy could have the effect of raising prices on junk food without instituting new taxes. That's one of the reasons HFCS is in everything - not only is it sweet and people like sweet things, but the artificially low price of corn makes it really really *cheap* for the manufacturer to throw high fructose corn syrup (or 'corn sugar' as they are now calling it) into everything.
Thanks a lot for mentioning my post, Darwin. I appreciated your comments and your helpful mention of your personal experience with Jen. The internet is a weird and distancing place to talk about people sometimes, glad for your humanizing influence!
I'm mixed about some of the examples Jen picked, but, as I wrote today, I definitely think her general approach was solid.
Kate,
Being against the corn subsidy is, I guess, close enough to my economics heart (can there be such a thing) that I didn't think to bother mentioning it, but yeah. Though from little I know of commodity costs the effect on the cost of a six-pack of soda would be a lot smaller than the proposed $0.02/oz tax, which is probably why that is being mentioned rather than just eliminating the corn subsidy.
Leah,
Thanks, I've been enjoying your blog -- which somehow I'd never stumbled upon until EconLog linked to your Turing Test.
+JMJ+
Darwin, I didn't click on your links to the Religious Turing Test before this because I already had too much stuff to read at the time. (Ironically, perhaps, about 75% of that other reading was atheist blogs.)
Given the sophistication of atheist language, I don't know if I'd ever be able to pass as an atheist in such a Turing Test. But I have a sneaking suspicion I'd be called out for posting a fake Christian profile. =P
Leah is amazing. A really fascinating blogger. I have nothing of substance to contribute, except to say that I think you painted a far too generous portrait of what the average "no, really, I grew up Catholic" person claims to know.
PZ Meyers is living proof that it is possible to be obnoxious and also intelligent and thoughtful at the same time. Really, he is, and his critique of Jennifer Fulwiler is (once you get past the bile) pretty damned solid: she shows no understanding at all of how atheists think, even nicer atheists than Meyers. Her biggest gaffe is her suggestion that the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity should be perfectly reasonable to atheists. The truth is, atheists shake their heads at that suggestion, and not just atheists like Meyers. Meyers lists several other areas in which Jenn shows total ignorance of the thinking of atheists, which is where he gets the idea that she is now just pretending to have once been an atheist.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/jennifer_fulwiler_responds.php
Joel
she shows no understanding at all of how atheists think, even nicer atheists than Meyers.
This is sheer and total nonsense, and repeats what is one of Myers's stupider (and unfortunately regular) mistakes, namely, treating atheists as a monolithic belief group. Anyone who thinks that there is a unified answer to "how atheists think" simply shows that either they aren't bothering with actual facts or that they have no experience with the sheer diversity of those who consider themselves atheists. It is very close to the most incompetent mistake one can make in talking about atheism. Setting aside the provocative headlines, any close reading of Fulwiler's posts shows that her claims are always quite qualified, limited to her own experiences and the experiences of atheists in her life. PZ's responses don't even come up to the level of basic critical thinking; they're rants for an audience, regularly committing such elementary logical mistakes as attempting to contradict particular statements with particular statements, and cannot be taken seriously as arguments.
Jennifer Fulwiler wrote: "Myers and atheists like him are trapped in a prison of reason."
To which Myers responded: "The title of her post is "reasoning with atheists," but you see, the whole problem is that when you're reasoning with atheists, they expect you to use reason. The bastards!"
If Catholicism wants to debate PZ Meyers, they should find someone smarter than Jennifer Fulwiler to do it. I'm just sayin'. Meyers is hardly a shining example of atheist reasoning, but he's shredding Fulwiler to ribbons.
Joel
Joel,
If I happen to run into Catholicism, I'll make sure to pass on your advice to them. ;-)
Sharon
Joel,
If that's your example of "shredding Fulwiler to pieces", I don't you think you use the phrase the way I do.
This isn't a debate; Fulwiler put up a couple of posts that were addressed to Catholics and were not even critical of atheists, and Myers and his commenters attacked them because the atheism she discusses isn't to Myers's taste. If you aren't impressed with Fulwiler's defense, go tell Myers to find someone better to attack. It's simple nonsense to treat this as if Fulwiler herself launched some sort of debate with Myers rather than being attacked out of the blue by him.
Fulwiler wrote: "Myers and atheists like him are trapped in a prison of reason."
Nope. No attack there, no debate, nothing to see here, let's all move along . . .
Anonymous, notice that she wrote "Myers and atheists like him are trapped in a prison of reason," only after Myers's jeremiad. Notice that she first clarified her original piece and responded to his arguments; the characterization was more of a secondary commentary than part of a debate.
Several commentators took the statement as damning evidence of the unreasonableness of Christianity; this is perhaps evidence of the fundamental paradigm disjunction between atheists and believers. Her point was not that reason is unimportant, but that it is a tool for the discovery of truth, and not always the most effective or important one. To Christians, an absolute empiricist is like someone who is so fascinated with his new telescope that he forgets to look up at the stars.
"To Christians, an absolute empiricist is like someone who is so fascinated with his new telescope that he forgets to look up at the stars."
Clare, the fact that you would use that as an example is evidence that the fundamental paradigm disjunction between atheists and believers is probably unbridgeable. Everyone who loves telescopes looks up at the stars. They are plainly visible, they move in predictable ways, and if you analyze them closely you can learn a great deal about them. Everyone believes in the stars. Atheists, on the other hand, don't believe in gods. Gods aren't visible, gods don't move or do anything predictable or unpredictable, and you can't analyze gods to any degree no matter how hard you try. And, most importantly, people can be perfectly happy in life without gods.
Right. The analogy was more about conflating ends with means than suggesting that atheists or astronomers don't actually like the stars.
But I think the way you described the stars is interesting: "They are plainly visible, they move in predictable ways, and if you analyze them closely you can learn a great deal about them. Everyone believes in the stars." To me, the stars are notable for and evoke an entirely different set of characteristics and responses.
Perhaps the unbridgeable disjunction is to some extent a function of personality. It certainly involves different ways of looking at the world.
As Clare notes, Anonymous, you seem to be very confused about the timeline of the discussion; perhaps you should consider reading them in order, starting with Fulwiler's first post on atheists and Catholics a while back and Myers's response to that, then moving on to this more recent batch, which again starts with Fulwiler writing a post and Myers attacking it at some length. Finally -- and for the first time -- Fulwiler responds with a criticism of Myers, and this is what you are appealing to. Further, note that Fulwiler again is qualifying in ways that Myers is not: the claim is not about atheists generally but about atheists arguing like Myers (again, arguing like Myers in his unprovoked attacks on Fulwiler).
These are all quite elementary points; if you are incapable even of keeping track of the basic course of the argument at the coarse level of what posts are responses to what posts, perhaps you should leave the evaluation of it to people who are capable of more sophisticated rational analysis.
It's been a busy weekend, so I haven't had the chance to dip in, but I never can resist a good fight even when I'm not needed.
Joel,
Her biggest gaffe is her suggestion that the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity should be perfectly reasonable to atheists. The truth is, atheists shake their heads at that suggestion, and not just atheists like Meyers. Meyers lists several other areas in which Jenn shows total ignorance of the thinking of atheists, which is where he gets the idea that she is now just pretending to have once been an atheist.
That's an interesting assertion, because if you take a look at Fulwiler's piece, you'll find that the words "virgin" and "virginity" do not appear in the article She never says that Mary's perpetual virginity would make sense to atheists. What she does say, is:
To me, overlooking Mary was an example of intellectual inconsistency within Christianity: If you believe that there is a great Creator who, in his unfathomable power, brought forth the universe out of nothing ... and you believe that he chose his own mom ... why on earth would you not freak out about this woman? How unbelievably special would she have to be to be fit for God himself to call her “Mommy”?
If basic failure at reading comprehension is an example of the "obnoxious and also intelligent and thoughtful at the same time" oeuvre that I'm supposed to be getting from Myers, I'm seeing it. But somehow the inability to read has never struck me as intelligent or thoughtful.
That this is immediately followed up with what amounts to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, plus a lot of "I'm an atheist, and I don't think that's reasonable, thus no atheist could possibly find that reasonable" garbage is not exactly an advertisement for PZ's critical thinking abilities either. As Brandon points out, trying to refute a particular experience with a particular experience would tend to suggest that one pretty much doesn't know what reasoning is.
Joel, [continued]
Jennifer Fulwiler wrote: "Myers and atheists like him are trapped in a prison of reason."
To which Myers responded: "The title of her post is "reasoning with atheists," but you see, the whole problem is that when you're reasoning with atheists, they expect you to use reason. The bastards!"
I'm not sure if this is best attributed to the above mentioned lack of reading comprehension, or to some extreme difficulty in reading in context, but once again the coup PZ things he has scored is entirely misplaced. What Fulwiler points out (and quotes Chesterton to the effect of) is that while a set of claims that are consistent with each other may be logical that does not necessarily mean that they are true. They may, in fact, be so very untrue that they give one an excuse to ignore vast swathes of reality or experience, with the extreme example being that if someone wants to insist that he is in fact a brain in a vat and that the entire world is just an illusion being forced upon him by a mad scientist, you cannot logically disprove this belief. It is entirely, though suffocatingly, consistent and logical.
Myers and some of his more enthusiastic fellow travelers display something of this sort of problem. They are so deeply and totally invested in the idea that there cannot possibly be anything other than the material world they can see, touch, and otherwise experience and measure that they seem incapable of realizing that beliefs that are at variance with materialism can in any way be consistent with themselves. The measure of reasonableness they instead adopt is "how close is it to materialism." Thus, the response to something like the suggestion that, positing a loving and all powerful God and that we have eternal souls, that Purgatory seems a reasonable doctrine in regards to justice, we get the howling response that after having asked them to assume there is a God we are now simply asking them to assume more things rather than presenting any kind of an argument.
Indeed, if anything, Fulwiler's mistake here is in suggesting that there's any reason involved in PZ's mental imprisonment, given that he seems unable to grasp in any working fashion that one set of non-materialist beliefs can be more reasonable than another in any way other than by measuring how closely they resemble materialism.
Anon,
Clare, the fact that you would use that as an example is evidence that the fundamental paradigm disjunction between atheists and believers is probably unbridgeable. Everyone who loves telescopes looks up at the stars. They are plainly visible, they move in predictable ways, and if you analyze them closely you can learn a great deal about them.
This is perhaps a mildly fussy thing to point out, but having spent a lot of hours fooling around with a telescope I'll simply point out the obvious:
- Charting the motion of the stars in a highly predictable fashion does not require a telescope.
- Looking at starts through a telescope is not actually all that interesting, unless you're looking at a double star. Typically it's a lot more interesting looking at planets or at Messier objects, etc.
Everyone believes in the stars.
I'm not sure this is in any way a meaningful statement. I would assume you mean that anyone who sees stars could probably be convinced that he is seeing something. If so, it's a fairly unexciting statement. If you mean anything more interesting than that, then the claim the "everyone believes" in them is probably not true and certainly not provable. "Everyone" is a very large group.
Atheists, on the other hand, don't believe in gods. Gods aren't visible, gods don't move or do anything predictable or unpredictable, and you can't analyze gods to any degree no matter how hard you try.
You make a series of claims here which you can't actually support. At most, you can say that you do not see anything at the moment which you are willing to believe is a god, and that you do not accept the claims of any people who claim to have seen evidence of a god in the past. The absolute claim that "gods don't move or do anything predictable or unpredictable" is, obviously, entirely unprovable unless one uses highly restricted definitions of the terms "move" and "do anything" which amount to granting your assertion. Your claim that "you can't analyze gods" also seems to rely on an artificially restricted definition of "analyze", and even then is unprovable.
Anon, [continued]
And, most importantly, people can be perfectly happy in life without gods.
Closing with one last grand assertion... Again, at most, I think we can say that some people tell us that they are happy, and that their happiness would not be increased by believing that there are gods. It is certainly not possible to claim that all people can be "perfectly happy" without gods. Personally, I have never met anyone who is "perfectly happy". Whether this is because they were at the moment with gods and thus could have been perfectly happy had there been no gods around, I can't say. But it at least seems unlikely.
My own reaction to gods, in terms of happiness, has a great deal to do with what gods we're talking about and what relation to them I am expected to have. If the gods of Greek mythology existed, I would imagine I would be much happier being without them than with them, as bad things seemed to happen pretty predictably to people who were with them. If, however, we are talking about God as described by Catholicism, I can assure you that I am far happier believing that He does exist, and that I receive His body and blood each Sunday in the Eucharist. While I can certainly imagine that I am wrong in believing God to exist, and that the world is in fact strictly material in composition, I can assure you that if, in some way, I could be convinced of this worldview instead of my present one, it would be to the considerable detriment of my happiness.
One of the reasons why I find Christianity a compelling description of the world is because it explains "whys" larger than the billiard ball type of predictability and measure-ability you seem to be invoking. When I ask why things are or what they or for or what I should do, I am not asking a question about physical composition or the velocity of objects in motion, I'm asking a set of questions which fundamentally cannot be answered, in the way that I am asking them, by empirical analysis. And while I do not believe in the truth of Christianity simply because it makes me happy, I can certain observe that I would be less happy and fulfilled if I thought that these dimensions (if I may so use the term) to which I give such thought and energy simply do not exist, and that we are no more than the sum of our atoms.
But whether I am body and soul, or a sack of meat with the illusion of consciousness -- it is time to say goodnight. And for what it's worth: God bless.
(Alright, this 4095 character limit is really cramping my verbose style. What the heck, Blogger?)
Here's a timeline for those like Anonymous who are having difficulty with it:
(1) Fulwiler, The Catholic's Guide to Atheists (March 16, 2011) -- gives a list of five false assumptions about atheists that Catholics should avoid making
(2) Myers, A Catholic explains atheism, amusement follows (March 18, 2011) -- Myers claims that Fulwiler's list consists of (in his words) "bubble-headed delusions".
(3) Fulwiler, 5 Catholic Teachings that Make Sense to Atheists (July 25, 2011) -- gives five suggestions for a place for a Catholic to start if an atheist is curious about Catholic beliefs; this was an independent post, a sequel to (1)
(4) Myers, Jennifer Fulwiler: vacant-eyed, mindless cluelessness personified (July 25, 2011) -- pretty much what it says on the tin
(5) Fulwiler, Reasoning with Atheists (July 27, 2011) -- Fulwiler responds to Myers and his commenters, indirectly but for the first time, by considering what the response of a Catholic should be to such attacks
(6) Myers, Jennifer Fulwiler responds (July 27, 2011) -- sarcastically responds to Fulwiler's response
It is, as I said above, a very coarse-grained look at the argument, but one can learn a lot from it on its own. Likewise, even on a quick reading of the posts, one can easily see that Fulwiler wasn't attacking Myers, or any atheists, in her first two posts, and, indeed, even her response to the insults and attacks isn't an attack on Myers but an argument that a Catholic's primary response when being attacked and insulted by atheists like Myers should be to love them nonetheless.
Darwin wrote:
"The absolute claim that "gods don't move or do anything predictable or unpredictable" is, obviously, entirely unprovable unless one uses highly restricted definitions of the terms "move" and "do anything" which amount to granting your assertion. Your claim that "you can't analyze gods" also seems to rely on an artificially restricted definition of "analyze", and even then is unprovable."
It is, however, easily disprovable. If just one god, any god at all, were to reveal himself/herself/itself in some clear and verifiable way, then my entire premise would crash and burn. One god appearing in public, working a miracle, or writing something in the sky, with cameras running and plenty of witnesses present, would render the whole atheist enterprise moot.
Believers, on the other hand, literally cannot concieve of any evidence that could possibly disprove their beliefs. That's the difference between us.
Permit me to suggest that I am more confident in my beliefs than you are in yours.
Believers, on the other hand, literally cannot concieve of any evidence that could possibly disprove their beliefs. That's the difference between us.
Permit me to suggest that I am more confident in my beliefs than you are in yours.
So your confidence exceeds that of someone who literally cannot conceive of evidence that could possibly disprove their beliefs? You are more confident than someone who thinks not only that they are right but that it is literally inconceivable that anything could show that they are wrong? That's rather strong. What evidence do you have to which such an extraordinary confidence would be proportionate?
It is, however, easily disprovable. If just one god, any god at all, were to reveal himself/herself/itself in some clear and verifiable way, then my entire premise would crash and burn. One god appearing in public, working a miracle, or writing something in the sky, with cameras running and plenty of witnesses present, would render the whole atheist enterprise moot.
What you have here is an assertion, not a premise.
Actually, I must admit, that while I cannot prove that you are wrong here, I think the evidence is against you. There have, throughout history, been a number of events, some of them widely viewed, some by only a few, which would seem to indicate more things in heaven and earth than a dreamt of by your philosophy. Some of these are recorded in a book some people have heard of known as the Bible. Others are somewhat more recent. However, these things never quite fit the bill for those strongly committed to the idea that supernatural things do not exist. One can, of course, always ask for more recent and more obvious examples, but since several prominent atheists (including, as I recall, PZ Myers) have suggested that even events at the level of writing in the sky or huge stone tablets would be better explained by space aliens or collective delusion, there really seems no point in having such discussions. While perhaps I am simply more cynical than you, I don't think that there could be a miraculous event so absolutely indisputable that literally no one would deny that it was caused by anything other than divine action.
Believers, on the other hand, literally cannot concieve of any evidence that could possibly disprove their beliefs.
Aside from the obvious illogic Brandon pointed out in your pair of statements, and the fact that it is impossible for you to know with any certainty whether any given believer (much less all believers as a group) can conceive of anything that could disprove his/her beliefs. At best, you can say that you imagine that believers cannot imagine anything that would disprove their beliefs.
I, myself, can imagine things that could disprove my beliefs.
What you can and can't imagine, however, is very much beyond my control, and indeed my knowledge, so I'm not going to argue about it.
Though as an element of self defense (since I'm delighting in precision) I should note: when I say that I can imagine things that would disprove my beliefs, I mean just that: my beliefs. There are things that could occur that would, for instance, force me to conclude that either the Catholic Church is not what it claims to be, or that my understanding of what the Church is claiming to be is incorrect.
What set of beliefs this reversal would send me towards would depend on the nature of the reversal.
I cannot imagine something that would disprove all beliefs relating to non-material things, beings and qualities -- that is, proving that they do not exist -- because, of course, it is not possible to prove the non existence of things.
On the other hand, if it's merely annoying you that believers can't conceive of proving a negative, then it's logic, not believers, that you have an argument with.
darwin, miracles are not just recorded in the Bible. Buddha performed miracles, as did most of the gods in the Hindu pantheon, and also, well, pretty much every god who has ever been worshipped by anyone. That is, if we accept the ancient books as accurate. Do we? Why or why not? I generally don't accept them, because they were written by partisans who had ample motivation to puff up their cause more than what the actual events could sustain.
This includes the Virgin of
Guadalupe and Our Lady of Fatima. Guadalupe had *one* witness, and Fatima had three, all children. Clearly the only plausible explanation of these events is exactly what the witnesses said, and anyone who says otherwise is simply a materialist trying desperately to avoid confronting the truth.
Joel - by the way, I wrote the Anonymous postings above, not sure why I've been forgetting to sign.
This includes the Virgin of
Guadalupe and Our Lady of Fatima. Guadalupe had *one* witness, and Fatima had three, all children. Clearly the only plausible explanation of these events is exactly what the witnesses said, and anyone who says otherwise is simply a materialist trying desperately to avoid confronting the truth.
With Our Lady of Guadalupe, the original apparitions may have been only Juan Diego, but this was followed by his bringing the image and the roses to the bishop's palace, where they were seen by a number of people. The image, of course, is still around today.
With Fatima, the linked Wikipedia article describes the "Miracle of the Sun" as being witnessed by roughly 70,000 people, including some who were up to 11 miles away.
Now, I wouldn't say that either one of these "proves" the existence of the divine. Nor, indeed, is either one particularly central to my faith or something that I think about much. But I think it does provide an example of how the, "Gods never do anything, if only they did we atheists would all convert as a mass," line of talk is in many cases rhetorical posturing more than anything else.
This actually makes a lot of sense, in that strict materialism, if taken seriously, involves some commitments rather deeper than, "I'm fully open to believing in the divine, I just haven't seen anything lately that convinces me." If one has accepted all of the philosophical and moral implications of strict materialism, it makes sense that one would be rather hesitant to abandon that set of beliefs based on one or two odd occurrences, and would seek, instead, to come up with other explanations (or simply remain comfortable with a lack of explanation.)
From the wiki:
"As noted by Professor Auguste Meessen of the Institute of Physics, Catholic University of Leuven, looking directly at the Sun can cause phosphene visual artifacts and temporary partial blindness. He has proposed that the reported observations were optical effects caused by prolonged staring at the sun. Meessen contends that retinal after-images produced after brief periods of sun gazing are a likely cause of the observed dancing effects. Similarly Meessen states that the colour changes witnessed were most likely caused by the bleaching of photosensitive retinal cells."
If "miracle" is taken to mean "an event that has no natural cause or explanation" then this was just the Event of the Sun. And I wonder how many of those poor dupes went blind later in life.
By the way, I'm fully open to believing in the divine, I just haven't seen anything lately that convinces me. I guess that means I'm agnostic, not atheist or materialist.
Joel
Just for the logical record, there's no particular difficulty with proving the non-existence of things. The non-existence of a prime between 3 and 7, for example, is quite trivial to prove. And getting evidence for the non-existence of things is even easier.
Keep in mind that non-existence claims ("There is no A which is B") and universal claims ("Every A is a non-B") are logically equivalent. So the position that one can't prove (or get evidence for) a non-existence claim is equivalent to the claim that one can't prove (or get evidence for) a universal.* And no one seems to want that position.
(*: Assuming proof/evidential support is closed under logical equivalence. The first seems rather inevitable, and the second is going to hold under a pretty wide range of circumstances.)
If "miracle" is taken to mean "an event that has no natural cause or explanation" then this was just the Event of the Sun. And I wonder how many of those poor dupes went blind later in life.
See, I read the same "explanation" in the wikipedia article and it struck me as particularly weak. (Some of the others were even more fun: What if it was a sun dog, despite the fact that they don't move. Or what if it was a cloud of dust blowing up from the Sahara.)
I'm not necessarily deeply invested in Fatima, but the claim that 70,000 people, including skeptics who said they were there to record the fact that nothing would happen, would show up, stare at the sun, and completely forget their entire lived experience of looking at bright objects and seeing retina halos and thus conclude, all together, that they were seeing a miracle... That's just silly.
I can certainly understand someone insisting that it must have been some sort of weird and spectacular event that was nonetheless natural in some not-understood way, but claiming that it was something so utterly normal and familiar which people idiotically mistook for a miracle doesn't strike me as explaining so much as waving one's hands fast.
A Philosopher,
True.
I've always been enamored of the sweeping nature of the phrase, "You can't prove a negative," since encountering it in a critical thinking text as a high schooler -- but given that the book was put out by the Skeptics Society, it had a point of view heavily weighted towards a certain sort of empiricism. (Though it did have a very charming picture of a fellow looking for evidence to prove the non-existence of an invisible unicorn in his back yard.)
Clearly, as you say, certain mathematical "things" can be proved not to exist, and given a definitely true and falsifiable premise about some thing, we can prove it not to exist through falsifying the premise.
That said, I'm not clear that either Joel or I (despite any mutual desire to do so) could, say, prove that Anubis does not exist -- so much as get to a point where there are no positive reasons to imagine that he does.
That said, I'm not clear that either Joel or I (despite any mutual desire to do so) could, say, prove that Anubis does not exist -- so much as get to a point where there are no positive reasons to imagine that he does.
I think this is right. There are in-principle-possible conditions under which they'd be the same thing -- a survey of existing objects that is known to be exhaustive, or at least exhaustive enough to cover anything Anubis could be, to take just one example. Practically speaking, of course, negation and search-failure can come apart either because in the circumstances such methods aren't feasible or because they can't in the circumstances be known to be sufficiently exhaustive. There are lots of cases where those would be problematic (easy to prove that there is no cat on the table in front of one, but rather tricky to prove that there is no eerily tabby-looking asteroid somewhere, anywhere, in the whole wide universe).
In cases like Anubis or the miracles of other religions, though, I really wonder if it's ever very important; very few miracles in any religious lore can have the vast and significant implications of, say, the Resurrection, because very few have such a central place in any religious web of belief. Likewise, how much does it affect things whether there is or is not something out there (angelic, demonic, alien, whatever) that really is what the Egyptians called Anubis? Not much that I can see. It would be entirely possible to be a devout Catholic who thinks that Anubis probably does exist; as long as you don't try to become an Anubis-worshipper, you're fine. The problems with syncretism are practical problems dealing with worship, not theoretical problems dealing with existence beliefs.
Proving universal or non-existence mathematical statements like the non-existence of a prime between 4 and 7 presupposes a way to catalog all the "things" you are examining and rejecting. In the example, you can just list them. If they are countable, you can line them up and try using induction. ("If it's true about k, it must be true about k+1; look, it's true about this one, so it's true of all the rest...") If you can classify them all as "green things" "blue things" etc and then compare the thing you're looking for to the classification, that might work. But even in mathematics, I can think of several non-existence hypotheses that still remain to be proven....
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