LCLawrence Crocker wrote:How do you know that? Has every miracle claim been empirically falsified?Greylorn Ell wrote: There is only one real miracle, namely that anything whatsoever exists. Greylorn
The confusion here is my fault. I should have defined and used the term "Absolute Miracle" in that statement. By Absolute Miracle I mean either a state of being or an event that cannot possibly be explained, not by any God or all the king's cosmologists. I believe that this definition of Miracle can only apply to uncaused states or events.
I recall coming across that logical positivist doctrine several decades ago in my Intro. to Philosophy class, taken while my first philosophy book was in the publication process, and thought that it was false, meaningless, and irrelevant to reality. It made no sense in the context of scientific and engineering methods and ways of thinking. Calling it a doctrine was a good name. I have learned to distrust all doctrines. They are invented by people who do not do imaginative things in the real world.Lawrence Crocker wrote:Beware of verificationism. The following positivist doctrine did not survive criticism: All meaningful statements can be proved or disproved, or at least in principle confirmed or disconfirmed. There is a mathematical proof that not all true propositions of mathematics are provable. With respect to the physical world, here is a meaningful claim, and one that is true or its negation is, but as to which we will never have any decent evidence: “The last dinosaur of weight greater than 10 tons to dies was female.”Greylorn Ell wrote: It makes neither logical nor philosophical sense to make statements about something defined as a "spirit," "supernatural entity," or anything defined to be somehow outside the purview of physics, because any pinhead can make up whatever he wants to say about them and no one can prove or disprove his, her, or its silly opinion. Greylorn
A thought experiment on which there would be very strong evidence of a miracle and pretty fair evidence of aspects of the nature of the supernatural:
Everyone in the world wakes up one morning remembering a dream in which a burning bush said in his or her native language "At a prominent spot in each national capital there is a book containing all and only what is true in all of the scriptures that have ever been regarded as sacred." Startled by the fact that friends and family report the same dream, those in a position to check quickly find, often in secure locations in the capital with no indications of a security breach, a very thin volume printed on a material and with an ink hitherto unknown to science. An appendix to the volume proves the double prime hypothesis and Goldbach's conjecture, gives a translation manual for Linear A, and sets out a physics that resolves, as leading experts agree, the conflict between general relativity and quantum theory.
This example is a slight updating and elaboration of Hume’s. Like Hume, I anticipate that, unless and until we came up with a better answer, I, and most unbelievers, would tend to accept that something supernatural had gone on. Moreover, if what is in the thin volume makes coherent claims as to the nature of the supernatural and its prior effects on physical reality, we would tend tentatively to accept these as well.
Admittedly, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural can become difficult when we push beyond the roughest formulation. (The problem is in distinguishing the supernatural from the unexpected-natural.) The claim that there is no supernatural is, nonetheless, a factual claim, and one subject to empirical methods.
Your proposed thought experiment falls well short not only of my personal standards for such things, but Einstein's. (He was a true artist when it came to thought experiments.) The scenario you propose would make a brilliant plot basis for a sci-fi story, but does not make your point. For example,
The "supernatural" consists of phenomena for which conventional science and philosophy lack a theoretical paradigm and therefore either are not real, or are at least inexplicable. Much of modern technology would have fit into the supernatural category for people living in medieval times. I've had a bit of personal experience with a variety of psychic phenomena. Such things are regarded by many as supernatural, but since I can occasionally manifest them and am not a god of any sort, I must regard them as perfectly natural phenomena.
I persist in my suggestion that you are a non-believer only because you've chosen poor ideas in which not to believe.
What does "natural" mean, anyway? Suppose that God does exist pretty much as described by Christianity. Their God the Father has always existed, and during that state created the universe. That makes God the only genuinely natural phenomenon.
Everything else is just something he put together. The universe is entirely an unnatural and artificial construct. Should your thought experiment come to fruition I would say its interpretation is entirely dependent upon what the mystery book says about the supernatural, and to make your experiment meaningful you must fill in that blank.
Shared dreams are not supernatural. I once got 8 hypnotized people to believe that every one of them was a reincarnated member of a 19th century pirate ship crew. They even reconstructed and "remembered" fictitious experiences that I put into their pea brains, telepathically, without voicing a word. Nothing supernatural involved, and I was not even their hypnotist, who was completely sucked into their bogus stories.
Let's put the considerable reports about UFOs, aliens from distant planets, and human abductions to work in your experiment. I'm inclined to accept the validity of many such reports without attributing supernatural powers. I'm sure that if I can put telepathic fictions into a room full of people, ET can do the same on a larger scale. Squirreling books in unexpected places could be accomplished by any good spy with the right resources, or ET if you prefer.
The content of the books is easily attributed to a crackpot with a remarkable new Theory of Everything who could not get any of the world's scientific and philosophical pedants to peruse his book and consider his ideas, someone much like myself, but who had the resources to hire an expensive and imaginative marketing company.
I hope nothing, since the concept you describe is but a slight variation of the creator described in my book.Lawrence Crocker wrote:What is logically inconsistent in the concept of a being with consciousness like ours, or more so, who used its considerable power and wisdom to create at least this part of the universe, and who has done and will do more good than evil?Greylorn Ell wrote: I propose that the God in whom you do not believe cannot be accepted by a logical mind, because he cannot possibly exist. Greylorn
Greylorn