Timotheos wrote:

Well that was Hume's position as well; he explicitly allows that there could be miracles. His argument revolves around the idea, which requires his weak conception of the laws of nature to be mere regularities to be a strong argument, that there is no way for us to have enough evidence that a punitive miracle exists to break the evidence we have for the event not happening; we see, everyday and in all circumstances we have seen, that people once dead stay dead, and hence, this is a very strong regularity; an exception to this would be fantastic.

But he does allow that there could be enough evidence to overcome this observation; it would have to be so strong however, that it would have to be a very rare state of affairs. And on Hume's view, religion always adds so much of people's irrational passions to the picture that we can basically just rule out their testimony as ever being able to provide enough evidence for their claims to miracles.

Hence, miracles are not impossible, but for us to ever have solid evidence of them, and especially religious ones, would require such a high level of evidence that we can just dismiss them as, at best, unverifiable.

Well, I'm sure you know that there are lots of interpretations of Hume on miracles. I'm not sure this is the best one, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is I don't officially endorse any conception of natural laws for any of my positions regarding 21st century atheism. Instead, it's formulated in terms of scientific theories. Moreover, I don't agree with Hume when he writes "the the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined," (Hume 1748/2000: 86–87). It isn't. I can imagine a better argument against any particular miracle than the one I give -- it would be one where the relevant scientific theories had slightly better evidence for them -- one more experiment or prediction or explanation. So my position is not Humean (at least in this sense).
 

I was being serious -- that was a nice line. You guys make it hard to give compliments around here.

Lighten up, guys! 

The distinction between natural laws and scientific theories is crucial here. I don't know what the natural laws are because I don't know what results the sciences will eventually come up with. I do know what our best scientific theories are. I don't know whether resurrection is incompatible with natural laws. I do know that resurrection is incompatible with our best scientific theories. So the distinction matters, and I was very careful about it in my presentation and the discussion.

Could you unpack your distinction between laws of nature and scientific theories a little more? It looks like a distinction between the laws of nature and our best theories of what the laws of nature are (i.e. to block arguments that if God raised Jesus, we just have the wrong laws, perhaps).

John West wrote:

Could you unpack your distinction between laws of nature and scientific theories a little more? It looks like a distinction between the laws of nature and our best theories of what the laws of nature are (i.e. to block arguments that if God raised Jesus, we just have the wrong laws, perhaps).

This is my beef. Kevin, if I am reading him correctly, is avoiding committing to a particular conception of natural laws, and he takes this move to be innocent because he is only invoking scientific theories. So he not only avoids the question of the content of a natural law (i.e. what form an equation takes) but also how they are conceived: "What matters is I don't officially endorse any conception of natural laws for any of my positions regarding 21st century atheism."

Well, okay. But our present scientific theories are either accurate (within some margin of error) or they're not. If our scientific theories are accurate, then they represent natural laws, and the theist can invoke his favored conception of natural laws to argue that not all phenomena need be in accordance with them. If our scientific theories are not entirely accurate, then I am not worried about their having an exception. Even if I admit that a miracle unpredictable by conservation of mass/energy occurred 2000 years ago, I will continue to use conservation of mass/energy today. I think that the principle, if it has any use, tells me what to predict when only natural causes are operative.

Dennis wrote:

KevinScharp wrote:

Notice that this is one place where my emphasis on scientific theories over natural laws is doing work. I couldn't make the same claim about a natural law because I'd have no justification for that claim.  But because scientific theories are human constructions that are open to inspection, we know that general relativity isn't formulated with a ceteris paribus clause

What sort of force does your argument against Craig have (other than polemic), unless you are arguing for an anti-realist position on science? 

My position here is neutral on scientific realism. All I'm assuming is that there are scientific theories (e.g., general relativity, quantum field theory, evolutionary theory, plate tectonics), and that certain ones have colossal amounts of evidence for them (enough to make me believe that I'm moving at about 700 miles per hour toward the East right now). I'm assuming nothing about natural laws -- not even that there are any. I agree that on some conceptions of natural laws, true scientific theories would be (or express?) natural laws. I have no idea whether our best scientific theories of today are true. And it doesn't matter to my case whether they are true. All that matters for my purposes is that they have tons of evidence for them. If God had performed a miracle (which I'll take to be a supernatural cause of a natural effect), resurrection for example, then that event would have been incompatible with our best scientific theories of today (e.g., conservation of mass/energy). So that would mean that conservation of mass/energy is a false scientific theory. And so it would tell us nothing about the natural laws. So I'm not committed to miracles being violations of natural laws (which I take to be a good thing).

John West wrote:

Could you unpack your distinction between laws of nature and scientific theories a little more? It looks like a distinction between the laws of nature and our best theories of what the laws of nature are (i.e. to block arguments that if God raised Jesus, we just have the wrong laws, perhaps).

Laws of nature are super controversial and there is little consensus about their nature or even their existence. I take no stance on them whatsoever as an advocate of atheism. Scientific theories are familiar things like Newton's theory of motion, the Weber-Fechner theory, and Maxell's theory of electromagnetism. I don't think we should think of scientific theories as being about natural laws. I think scientific theories are just about the relevant bits of the world (Newton's theory of motion is about material objects).