KevinScharp wrote:

Greg wrote:

By presupposition I mean "claim to which I believe you are committed"--I am not accusing you of having explicitly endorsed it.

And I maintain that you are so committed. You're right; it is obvious that a scientific theory should not have to take account of God's interventions. But if that's right, then a miracle need not be understood as showing a scientific theory that did not predict it to be bad.

No, that does not follow. Worlds with miracles are unpredictable. The more miracles, the less predictability. You're assuming that there would have to be good unrestricted scientific theories for the phenomena of some world regardless of how many miracles happen in that world. I think that's wrong.

I said "a miracle need not be understood as showing a scientific theory that did not predict it to be bad." Surely one could imagine a chaotic world with so many miracles and anomalous events that no tractable science is possible, but it need not be the case that science is intractable in every world with miracles. My claim was not about the tractability of science "regardless of how many miracles happen in that world."

But even worlds with quite a lot of miracles might still be fairly predictable--predictable to the extent that one could attain and retain very good scientific theories. (Some predictions are doomed to fail in that world, but they do not give scientists a reason to abandon their theories.) I gave an example of such a world and we haven't seen a reason to think there is anything wrong with my example.

Greg wrote:

KevinScharp wrote:

So, when I said that the realist and the antirealist should agree on the meanings of the scientific theories in question, I was taking this bit of history for granted. Good on you for pushing me on it.

I think this is a fair response. My point is not really that the theist should be an antirealist, though--merely that the meaning of scientific statements is up for grabs. It could be up for grabs in more than one way. Thoroughgoing pragmatism was one alternative to realism that I don't personally endorse.

Excellent, I'm glad we agree. Except I don't think the meaning is up for grabs. There is a received view which defers to linguistics on matters of semantics. I've adopted that view. I'm not sure whether you agree with that.

Greg wrote:

But one can qualify the meaning of scientific statements (as I said originally) more locally and less radically. And that is what I am proposing to do.

I want to develop my point from here:

Greg wrote:

Let P, Q, and R be correct scientific theories in the sense that they always yield correct predictions if no miracles occur. Perhaps God could intervene in the universe quite radically, so that the modified theories that actually describe what happens in the universe are substantially different from P, Q, and R. I think the mistake here is to think that, if God intervenes, we should replace P, Q, and R at all.

Kevin's argument has a very strong presupposition. He does not assume that theism is false. So suppose theism is true and God can intervene in the world. Kevin seems to think that in such a world that God intervenes, the "best scientific theories" would be ones that take account of God's anomalous interventions. That is just radically mistaken and cannot be the point of scientific theories. If one makes the assumption of theism per impossibile, by assuming physicalism, then this might make sense--but Kevin does not want to beg all of the important questions, so he is not going to assume physicalism in a debate against a theist.

One might say that in such a world in which God intervenes, scientific theories might be overwhelmingly well-supported, so that as long as the evidence for the miracle were not truly compulsory, one could not rationally believe in it. This is familiar Humean territory and faces the same problem as Hume's arguments against miracles.

Suppose in some world humans achieve a correct scientific theory. It is very well-supported--even better than our present scientific theories. Suddenly, though, counterexamples--or events that strongly suggest counterexamples--start showing up. It becomes apparent and indeed compulsory from the nature and frequency of these miraculous events that God exists and causes them, albeit anomalously.

What do the now-theistic scientists do in response to this change of course? Well, they might say, "Strictly speaking our scientific theory no longer generates predictions all of the time. However, we acknowledge that this might just be a problem of scope; before we did not think that God existed, but now we know better. There's no point to throw out our scientific theories, which accurately model natural phenomena, for, in any case, there is no hope of capturing God's anomalous interventions. Rather God's anomalous interventions don't constitute counterevidence to our scientific theories, which don't aim to explain such things."

I claim there's nothing wrong with the scientific practice in this imagined world. They might add a qualifier to their scientific theories after learning of God's existence, while we do not, but that is superficial--many of our scientists are atheists and naturalists. The point is that admitting a miracle with a cause beyond the natural order need not involve the rejection of any good scientific theories.

Nice point. I think this is a fruitful direction.
I'm granting that everyone could be convinced of God's existence, and I think this is easily conceivable. So it makes sense to think through what would happen to science if this were to happen. However, this is pretty speculative. Neither of us are going to be very reliable at predicting what would happen after such a massive change.

Everything would depend on the kinds of anomalous interventions -- do they affect roughly all phenomena equally? is it at all predictable when an anomaly is going to happen? And so on. I can certainly imagine scientists adopting new scientific theories that have explicit restrictions or ceteris paribus clauses. There would be no more unrestricted fundamental theories at all. Moreover, scientific practice would change -- one would never know whether the anomaly in one's results was a divine intervention or an experimental mistake. The anomalies themselves would certainly be a massive topic of inquiry -- how exactly do the theories break down there? What can we learn from the boundary at which the theory functions properly?

Would there be anything wrong with the scientific practice in this world? Well, they'd be doing the best they could do in difficult circumstances, but it would surely be inferior to our science (would their LHC physicists ever have been able to reach five sigma for the Higgs? -- Probably not). Moreover, their theories would be different from ours. We don't use those theories. They wouldn't use ours. So thinking through this example shows that your conclusion is wrong. Admitting a miracle would involve the rejection of our best scientific theories, and it might very well lead to replacing our best scientific theories with the ones in the imagined world. Moreover, it would involve serious changes to scientific methodology which would decrease the overall amount of evidence these unfortunate people would have for their sad new scientific theories.

DanielCC wrote:

In the interests of avoiding over-specification do we have any other philosophical points of Theism to debate aside from miracles?

Yes, when I get home and finish summarizing the original video, I had a few more things, but I didn't want to pursue them until I was certain that I had the whole scope of the argument correct.

Greg wrote:

As I've said, one can imagine worlds in which anomalous occurrences render science intractable, but only claim I need is that they need not. And the response of the scientists I have imagined still seems coherent to me. It might be that in such a world the laws of physics "lie" in Nancy Cartwright's sense, but just as that was no strike for her against the laws of physics, it is no strike against the laws of physics in the world that I am imagining.

Even in your imagined response, they adopt different theories.

The point of my argument is to draw out how accommodating miracles to one's scientific theory has much more to do with what one understands the point of a scientific theory to be rather than what one understands the content of a particular theory to be. Someone who thinks miracles occur can keep his theories--and continue to suppose that they accurately represent or approximate natural laws and the world's causal structure--if he changes his position about the point of a scientific theory.