RE: Miracle
June 12, 2015 at 5:00 am
(This post was last modified: June 12, 2015 at 5:04 am by bennyboy.)
Just entering this thread, so sorry if I missed anyone's killer points.
Harris, you are conflating many different definitions of "miracle." Specifically, you are confusing "miracle" with "brute fact." But a miracle isn't just something which is unexplained, or which follows rules we do not understand. It is something which goes AGAINST the rules of the universe.
For example, it is a rule that people cannot jump 100 meters up into the air. We have lots of experience jumping, and we've never jumped that high. We also understand various physical rules, and can explain WHY people can't jump that high. If someone jumped 100 meters up in the air unassisted, we would therefore call it a miracle. Someone is doing something that goes against everything we know about people and about physics.
But we don't HAVE rules about the Big Bang drawn from our experience of Big Bangs. We don't HAVE reliable rules for ways in which universes can/can't come into existence. The Big Bang doesn't violate our understanding-- it just reveals that there are things we don't understand. Unless ignorance is a miracle, then discovering our ignorance confirms our experiences about gaining and lacking knowledge, and it also conforms to our further understanding of how the brain, light, etc. work. The mystery of many things CONFORMS to our view of the universe, and so the things you have called miracles are in fact nothing of the sort.
Harris, you are conflating many different definitions of "miracle." Specifically, you are confusing "miracle" with "brute fact." But a miracle isn't just something which is unexplained, or which follows rules we do not understand. It is something which goes AGAINST the rules of the universe.
For example, it is a rule that people cannot jump 100 meters up into the air. We have lots of experience jumping, and we've never jumped that high. We also understand various physical rules, and can explain WHY people can't jump that high. If someone jumped 100 meters up in the air unassisted, we would therefore call it a miracle. Someone is doing something that goes against everything we know about people and about physics.
But we don't HAVE rules about the Big Bang drawn from our experience of Big Bangs. We don't HAVE reliable rules for ways in which universes can/can't come into existence. The Big Bang doesn't violate our understanding-- it just reveals that there are things we don't understand. Unless ignorance is a miracle, then discovering our ignorance confirms our experiences about gaining and lacking knowledge, and it also conforms to our further understanding of how the brain, light, etc. work. The mystery of many things CONFORMS to our view of the universe, and so the things you have called miracles are in fact nothing of the sort.
