Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum » William Lane Craig and Kevin Scharp

KevinScharp · 4/17/2016 2:44 pm

Dennis wrote:
KevinScharp wrote:
(iii) these scientific theories and that ancient testimony being incompatible
The contention here is simply that given a concurrentist ontology, there is no contradiction. I fail to see a contradiction here.

Let's look at the claim: if concurrentism, then both scientific theories and ancient testimony could be true. I'll explain why there's a contradiction and then you explain exactly where I've assumed non-concurrentism. Sound good?

Use resurrection as an example. Part of our best scientific theories is the conservation of mass/energy. Given the distribution of mass/energy just before the purported resurrection, the conservation of mass/energy predicts what the distribution of mass/energy just after the purported resurrection will be. If the ancient testimony regarding the resurrection is true, then the prediction made by conservation of mass/energy will be false. Thus, if the ancient testimony regarding the resurrection is true, the conservation of mass/energy is false. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with the conservation of mass/energy. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with our best scientific theories.

KevinScharp · 4/17/2016 2:51 pm

iwpoe wrote:
You are aware "the received view" is, especially in philosophy, nothing but a rule of play, not an argument. What's philosophical consensus good for? 30-60 years in a single country in a signle sub-discipline? And it's amazing that in some fields it looks liberal, American, secular, and permissive when the culture is liberal, American, secular, and permissive. I'll defer to it if I'm ever trying to get tenure.

Everyone here is at least a philosophical theist with sympathies to classical metaphysics- needless to say, the recieved view is different here. An argument can be mounted generally for the competing positions, of course, but their being "recieved" will have no bearing on the matter.

That said, Greg is covering this line of argument better than I am, and I see no reason to rehash in different words his chain of argument.

However, I am a Platonist, not a Christian. I am inclined to think that either the Christian miracles didn't occur or they don't entail what Christians think they do. What I'm interested in is whether, in principle, a miracle could occur and what that would look like. I'm personally inclined to think that they either would not happen or that they would not occur in the usual 'will of god' manner, but this has absolutely nothing to do with my confidence in our best scientific theories. That is a matter on such a high level that I hardly see its bearing.

I'm saying of the received view that there are lots of good reasons for it and lots of costs come with rejecting it. It isn't arbitrary. Science changes too. It isn't arbitrary either. Simply dismissing the received view in either shows a lack of appreciation for those good reasons and those costs. For example, I don't simply dismiss anything Christians hold as the received view. Lots of atheists do that, but I've treated Craig in particular and Christianity and theism in general as worthy of engagement. That means I don't just dismiss the received views on those topics.

KevinScharp · 4/17/2016 2:54 pm

iwpoe wrote:
KevinScharp wrote:
That's dead wrong. Scientists would be all over the anomaly. They'd want to know exactly how -- in excruciating detail -- the theories broke down and what the boundary conditions are like.
Really? The unrepeatable rising of a dead God-man in the Levant (or whatever your favorite miracle is)?

Maybe if Christ died and rose in a laboratory with sensors of all sorts.

How would they be "all over it"?

You yourself maintain that miracles lack predictability (which I think is too strong a thesis, but I'll cede it to you), so what exactly would they investigate? Testimony? Quality testimony is well known for the provision of highly quantifiable data.

For lack of anything to do, it's fairly obvious not only from all the din we've personally experienced from the scientific community, but also from the history of long standing and much more investigable intractable anomalies in the history of science, that they would at best ignore it insofar as it conflicted with the scientific edifice, and at worst assert its non-existence.

I was going along with the example he gave in which new miracles started happening and scientists could potentially study them.

KevinScharp · 4/17/2016 3:05 pm

Greg wrote:
This is what really gets me and why my hunch (as I've argued) is that Kevin's argument implies a rather strong presupposition. Anomalous events with causes outside the universe just needn't be reasons to reject scientific theories.

That's exactly what I've argued at length and you've failed to refute. Didn't we agree to disagree?

Greg wrote:
There's a methodological problem here too. A non-repeating miracle will not become a Kuhnian anomaly because it won't recur. And Popper requires the tests that corroborate theories to be repeatable, so if you tried to replace our scientific theories in light of a miracle, you wouldn't be able to do it--any theory you generate would immediately be falsified, and you'd figure that the old theory is actually better. I suspect the same is true of just about any account of theory change. A single apparent counterexample won't be a reason to reject the theory.

Non-repeatability of phenomena is not relevant in any way. I've already responded to this confusion in another post. Scientific experiments need to be repeatable, not the phenomena scientists investigate, explain, and predict.

Greg wrote:
Then you might be faced with the question of whether or not you accurately remember the event that seemed to require a miracle. But what's the significance of this dilemma? I could see it posing a problem with theism if one brought in some metaphysical thesis about causal closure or the regularity of nature, or else if one tried to mount a Humean argument. But neither of these show that the miracle is a reason for rejecting a scientific theory.

Right, that's what I don't want to do.

Greg wrote:
I think Kevin's argument is interesting because it attempts to avoid going in these directions. But admitting that a few miracles have occurred on its own just does not require abandoning any scientific theory.

Thanks, but there you go again!

Greg · 4/17/2016 3:22 pm

KevinScharp wrote:
Greg wrote:
This is what really gets me and why my hunch (as I've argued) is that Kevin's argument implies a rather strong presupposition. Anomalous events with causes outside the universe just needn't be reasons to reject scientific theories.
That's exactly what I've argued at length and you've failed to refute. Didn't we agree to disagree?

KevinScharp wrote:
Greg wrote:
I think Kevin's argument is interesting because it attempts to avoid going in these directions. But admitting that a few miracles have occurred on its own just does not require abandoning any scientific theory.
Thanks, but there you go again!

We did agree to disagree, and I was restating the claim rather than redefending it. But now I am puzzled; perhaps what I just said was ambiguous, because I took you to be rejecting it. For instance, you said earlier, "Even in your imagined response, they adopt different theories." But my claim has been that such anomalous events need not be reasons to reject scientific theories, that is, to adopt new theories. But you now say I am agreeing with you.

Perhaps the ambiguity is my saying "reject scientific theories" and "abandoning any scientific theory," which might be taken to mean that someone can continue doing science even if one thinks a miracle has occurred, that science need not undermine the whole theory-building enterprise--an exceedingly weak claim. What I mean is rather that accepting as fact the occurrence of a miracle unpredictable by theory T does not require abandoning T, and this I took you to be denying.

John West · 4/17/2016 3:34 pm

It's a necessary truth that “If concurrentism, God exists”. Suppose concurrentism:

KevinScharp wrote:
Given the distribution of mass/energy just before the purported resurrection, the conservation of mass/energy predicts what the distribution of mass/energy just after the purported resurrection will be. If the ancient testimony regarding the resurrection is true, then the prediction made by conservation of mass/energy will be false. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with the conservation of mass/energy. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with our best scientific theories.

Here's a quick omnipotence argument. God can do everything logically possible and not against his nature. It's not logically impossible for the distribution of mass/energy to be what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if Jesus rises from the dead. (It may be nomically or physically impossible, but it doesn't seem to be logically impossible unless we assume an energy transfer theory of causation.) It's also not against God's nature for him to make the distribution of mass/energy what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if he resurrects Jesus. Hence, God can make the distribution of mass/energy what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if Jesus rises from the dead. Hence, it's not necessarily true that if God raised Jesus from the dead, conservation of mass/energy's prediction is false.

Jeremy Taylor · 4/17/2016 3:52 pm

KevinScharp wrote:
Let's look at the claim: if concurrentism, then both scientific theories and ancient testimony could be true. I'll explain why there's a contradiction and then you explain exactly where I've assumed non-concurrentism. Sound good?

Use resurrection as an example. Part of our best scientific theories is the conservation of mass/energy. Given the distribution of mass/energy just before the purported resurrection, the conservation of mass/energy predicts what the distribution of mass/energy just after the purported resurrection will be. If the ancient testimony regarding the resurrection is true, then the prediction made by conservation of mass/energy will be false. Thus, if the ancient testimony regarding the resurrection is true, the conservation of mass/energy is false. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with the conservation of mass/energy. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with our best scientific theories.

This has been gone through ad infinitum, but all science shows us is how nature usually works. Indeed, in this instance it doesn't even do this: the conservation of mass/energy is a heuristic device, though it seemingly is supporrted by some scientific discoveries and theories (but in no sense has been universally shown to hold). If you are claiming that the received view of scientific theories is they always hold, then this is just false, as far as I know. I am aware of no significant philosophical understanding of scientific theories or scientific laws that, absent broader metaphysical commitments, claims this. Do you have support for this claim (and I mean philosophical, not what some scientists may think)?

As for the related claim that the possibility of miracles would radically change science, I don't think this is correct. Take two worlds: one in which what science can discover always holds and the second in which it almost always holds but there are very occasionally miracles. Could not both worlds be our world as we normally experience it? Would not the methodology of science in both world, so far as discovering nature's normal course is concerned be identical? As far as I can see, the answer is yes to both questions.

Of course, it is true that in the world where there are miracles a proper and full understanding of it would acknowledge them. But this doesn't seem to affect science as it investigates the non-miraculous. It may be contrary to how many contemporary scientists see their discipline, but I don't see why that matters for our purposes.

Jeremy Taylor · 4/17/2016 4:08 pm

There also seems to be a view of nature here that sees the world as if it were a mechanical clock in which science has discovered all about how the mechanism works and can work: if there is even a small change in the mechanism, if one gear or cog is changed, the whole thing grinds to a halt. I see no reason to view either nature or science in this way, not at this time at least.

KevinScharp · 4/17/2016 4:22 pm

John West wrote:
It's a necessary truth that “If concurrentism, God exists”. Suppose concurrentism:
KevinScharp wrote:
Given the distribution of mass/energy just before the purported resurrection, the conservation of mass/energy predicts what the distribution of mass/energy just after the purported resurrection will be. If the ancient testimony regarding the resurrection is true, then the prediction made by conservation of mass/energy will be false. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with the conservation of mass/energy. Therefore, the ancient testimony is inconsistent with our best scientific theories.
Here's a quick omnipotence argument. God can do everything logically possible and not against his nature. It's not logically impossible for the distribution of mass/energy to be what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if Jesus rises from the dead. (It may be nomically or physically impossible, but it doesn't seem to be logically impossible unless we assume an energy transfer theory of causation.) It's also not against God's nature for him to make the distribution of mass/energy what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if he resurrects Jesus. Hence, God can make the distribution of mass/energy what conservation of mass/energy predicts it should be even if Jesus rises from the dead. Hence, it's not necessarily true that if God raised Jesus from the dead, conservation of mass/energy's prediction is false.

Ah, so there would have to be the second miracle -- resetting the mass/energy distribution. If that's true, then it doesn't help you.

John West · 4/17/2016 4:24 pm

KevinScharp wrote:
Ah, so there would have to be the second miracle -- resetting the mass/energy distribution. If that's true, then it doesn't help you.

Not resetting. Seeing to it that it continues on as it otherwise would in the first place. The only way it doesn't help is if you're assuming an energy transfer theory of causation again.