An Argument against the Argument against Miracles

[Don Mc]

According to Hume's famous "general maxim" against the confirmation of miracles in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, "no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." The basic idea is that the laws of nature being what they are, and human nature being what it is, the probability of a miracle is always lower than the probability that the testimony given for it is simply false. In this Hume seems to have anticipated the logic of Carl Sagan, who popularized the idea that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

While this principle appears rational enough at first blush, there are reasons to think it's not sound. First, it was Hume himself who spelled out the problem of induction – that there is no logical basis for inferring future outcomes from past experiences. Assuming there exists a set of well-defined "laws of nature," those regularities would seem to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. But if the laws of nature are descriptive, there is no reason to think miracles cannot or should not occur. Second, the argument against miracles is essentially circular. Hume asserts that there is "uniform experience" against the resurrection, for example, adding that a man risen from the dead "has never been observed, in any age or country." The question of the resurrection, however, is precisely whether or not Jesus was observed by his disciples to have risen from the dead. To say that a resurrection event was never observed because there is "uniform experience" against it is to beg that question (and we should bear in mind that there is equally uniform experience that life does not arise from nonliving elements – yet here we are). Finally, while it's true that human nature has the potential to corrupt the testimony of eyewitnesses and the writings of biographers and historians, it also has the potential to corrupt the field reports, lab results, journal articles, textbooks, etc., that lead us to accept the same scientific theories thought to render miracle reports implausible or even impossible. The problem of "confirmation bias" among humans, and scientists in particular, is well documented.

Evidently underlying popular skepticism of miracles is a belief that miracles are inherently, extremely improbable. But that seems to hold only if a miracle is defined in naturalistic terms. After all, the proposition "A man rose from the dead by natural processes" appears considerably less probable on its face than the proposition "Jesus Christ rose from the dead by the power of God." As Paul put it, "Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?" (Acts 26:8)

Questions for debate:
Are miracles improbable? If so, how improbable are they and why?
Could historical evidence for a miracle give us good evidence for theism?

[brunumb]

Consider the origin of life. Here is an event not only completely at odds with our knowledge of how the world actually works, but specified as one of the central miracles of God in the major theistic traditions. Yet naturalists have no problem believing life somehow originated by undirected natural processes.

The origin of life is not an event completely at odds with our knowledge of how the world actually works. It is unknown as yet so we cannot make any such claim. Life is essentially chemistry and the world works on chemistry, therefore it is not unreasonable to consider the origin of life as resulting from natural processes. The problem with miracles is that we have no verified accounts of any. All we have are unsubstantiated stories that could very well be contrived or simply embellished accounts of natural events.

[Don Mc]

As for historical evidence, it is impossible to reliably demonstrate that a miracle previously occurred. This is because the historical method only applies to the elements of claims that have an implicit empirical basis which are reproducible. In other words, the elements of a historical claim that can be empirically reproduced for us to know it is describing something with an empirical possibility are accepted as evidence because they permit historians to calculate the probability of the claim being true.

It's not clear that the concept of an "implicitly empirical" reality is even coherent, given that by definition something implicit is implied rather than observed while something empirical is observed rather than implied. It's a bit like saying "unverifiably verifiable." Besides, there is no reason to think that miracles don't have an empirical basis; the events themselves are empirical in principle (assuming that's what you mean by implicit), regardless of whether their cause was natural or not. In other words it's not necessary to understand exactly what one is seeing to witness the healing of a blind man, or an angelic visitation.

Conversely, the elements of a historical claim that cannot be reproduced for us to know it is describing something with an empirical possibility are not accepted as evidence because they do not permit historians to calculate the probability of the claim being true. Miracles, be definition, cannot be reliably reproduced in reality to demonstrate they are empirically possible despite being conceptually possible.

History is not reproducible precisely because historical events are trapped in the past. But it would take quite a leap to conclude from the irretrievability of the past that only presently verifiable realities are empirically possible.

Also, to my understanding the historical method doesn't require a lot of probability calculation. If it did, historians would not have much to say, because every event is highly improbable in its particulars. I could not "reproduce" so much as my drive to work this morning in much detail (switching lanes at the same time and place, surrounded by the same set of vehicles, all of us driving at the same speeds as previously, etc). Much less could I reproduce, say, the Battle of Stalingrad or the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia.

As for the question of possibility generally, I can answer you no better than Mithrae has answered you already.

Now I just have to figure out how to answer Mithrae…

[Tcg]

[Replying to Don Mc in post #1]

The only "Argument against the Argument against Miracles" would be verifiable evidence of miracles.

Disagree. An argument against the argument against miracles need only demonstrate that the argument against miracles is not sound.

The only way to accomplish that is to provide verifiable evidence FOR miracles.

Okay, but to be fair the evidentialist objection applies just as well to arguments against miracles. Given that a believable claim requires verifiable evidence, and given that it's virtually impossible to verify that miracles don't happen, the claim that miracles don't happen is not believable.

You'll need to address this to someone who has claimed such.


Tcg

[bluegreenearth]

There seem to be at least four main problems with a 'presumption of impossibility' argument, the first and most obvious being that it implies absurdities flying in the face of common sense in a scenario such as above.

There was no presumption of impossibility in my explanation. You are incorrectly inferring the presumption of impossibility from your misunderstanding. The explanation I gave is from an agnostic position. Unlike the characters of that fictional example, I have not been provided with a demonstration to know the claim is empirically possible and cannot know it is empirically impossible either because it is at least logically possible. If the claim described a logical impossibility, then that would be the only way I could know if it were empirically impossible. Therefore, I do not know if the claim is either empirically possible or empirically impossible.

[bluegreenearth]

It's not clear that the concept of an "implicitly empirical" reality is even coherent, given that by definition something implicit is implied rather than observed while something empirical is observed rather than implied. It's a bit like saying "unverifiably verifiable." Besides, there is no reason to think that miracles don't have an empirical basis; the events themselves are empirical in principle (assuming that's what you mean by implicit), regardless of whether their cause was natural or not. In other words it's not necessary to understand exactly what one is seeing to witness the healing of a blind man, or an angelic visitation.

It is not necessary to take a literal interpretation of the term "implicit empirical basis." A historical claim has an implicit empirical basis when the things and events it describes are known to be empirically possible (i.e. have been reliably demonstrated to exist or occur). For instance, the claim that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic preacher in Jerusalem has an implicit empirical basis because all its components describe empirically possible things. We know it is empirically possible for other people to exist (i.e. Jesus), for other people to be theists (i.e. apocalyptic preacher), and for ancient cities to have existed (i.e. archaeology of Jerusalem). This is all I mean by the term "implicit empirical basis."

Now, while the ancient eyewitness of a miracle might feel justified in claiming to have empirical evidence, anyone else who did not directly observe the miraculous event must rely only on that eyewitness testimony and would not be justified in claiming this second-hand information is empirical evidence from their perspective. At best, the eyewitness testimony would qualify as conceptual evidence. However, just because a claim could potentially be conceptually true, it doesn't demonstrate that the claim was empirically possible. It would merely mean the claim was logically possible.

Also, to my understanding the historical method doesn't require a lot of probability calculation. If it did, historians would not have much to say, because every event is highly improbable in its particulars. I could not "reproduce" so much as my drive to work this morning in much detail (switching lanes at the same time and place, surrounded by the same set of vehicles, all of us driving at the same speeds as previously, etc). Much less could I reproduce, say, the Battle of Stalingrad or the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia.

That is not what the explanation intended to convey. Obviously, Historians don't calculate probabilities to that level of granularity. However, a historical claim must describe something that is at least demonstrably possible before Historians can responsibly endorse it. Otherwise, we would have Historians declaring all sorts of incompatible supernatural claims from ancient texts written by anonymous authors as historically reliable. Seriously, have you ever considered what the results would be if Historians were to operate in accordance with the methods prescribed by Christian apologists? It would be unmanageable chaos trying to reconcile all the contradictory miracle claims from ancient history that would now have to be accepted as historically plausible.

[Mithrae]

Consider the origin of life. Here is an event not only completely at odds with our knowledge of how the world actually works, but specified as one of the central miracles of God in the major theistic traditions. Yet naturalists have no problem believing life somehow originated by undirected natural processes.

The origin of life is not an event completely at odds with our knowledge of how the world actually works. It is unknown as yet so we cannot make any such claim. Life is essentially chemistry and the world works on chemistry, therefore it is not unreasonable to consider the origin of life as resulting from natural processes. The problem with miracles is that we have no verified accounts of any. All we have are unsubstantiated stories that could very well be contrived or simply embellished accounts of natural events.

You've quoted me there, but the original comment was Don's. I certainly wouldn't say that about the origin of life which, as you say, may very probably be simply a chemical/mechanical problem.

Interestingly though in my March thread I did make quite a similar argument about the supposed development of consciousness:

But for a more specific, slightly different angle, consider the following claims as examples:
- a man walked on water
- a feather dropped as fast as a lead ball
- most of the volume of a solid chair is empty space
- an incurable disease was suddenly healed, contrary to the known normal course of events
- a man bought some paper for $10, then exchanged it a week later for $100,000,000
- a man regrew an amputated leg overnight, on a local holyday as a result of much prayer
- complex human consciousness developed gradually from non-conscious matter

Which if any of these are claims which a person might reasonably accept as plausible on the basis of a few credible/expert reports (books, documentaries, news reports etc.) unless contrary information becomes available, and which if any are 'extraordinary' claims requiring some unspecified/arbitrary level of 'extraordinary evidence'? And how do you tell the difference?

We have evidence of this, so this claim is not extraordinary or a 'miracle'. Is it a miracle that my fingernails grow?

Here's a touch of irony: I put that one in last, almost as an afterthought, because of all those on the list it is the only one for which there is absolutely zero evidence (it is impossible to observe the absence of consciousness, and its presence is inferred only by analogy which would be obviously fallacious to reverse and infer absence), and arguably the most absurd too (in the other cases we can at least easily imagine ways in which they might mechanically come about, but I cannot even conceive and across dozens of threads have never seen coherently described how the generation of consciousness from non-conscious matter might come about).

[Mithrae]

There seem to be at least four main problems with a 'presumption of impossibility' argument, the first and most obvious being that it implies absurdities flying in the face of common sense in a scenario such as above.

There was no presumption of impossibility in my explanation. You are incorrectly inferring the presumption of impossibility from your misunderstanding. The explanation I gave is from an agnostic position.

Okay but even so, disagreeing with my initial characterization doesn't refute any of my critiques, except (perhaps) the fourth

In your second and third paragraphs, your comments on historical methodology, you said that "any other possible explanation that has an implicit empirical basis will always have a higher probability of being true than the miracle explanation with no implicit empirical basis." That's obviously assigning a ~0% probability to the miraculous, at least in terms of historical methodology, not an agnostic position. I'm not sure whether those latter two paragraphs are supposed to be related to your first paragraph or not, because that would obviously contradict your opening sentence that "The probability of a claim cannot be accurately calculated if what it describes is not known to be possible or impossible." But even if they're not related I don't think that what you're describing is an agnostic position. The starting point of an agnostic position would be best described by the principle of indifference:

• The principle of indifference (also called principle of insufficient reason) is a rule for assigning epistemic probabilities. The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or 'degrees of belief') equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration.

From a position of ignorance/agnosticism, if we had two mutually exclusive, exhaustive and interchangeable types of explanations for an otherwise unexplained event - for example that it was caused by 'natural' processes or that it was caused by 'supernatural' processes - the principle of indifference would, at least as a starting point, have us assign a 50% probability to each type of explanation. We could then argue from there that one type of explanation is more likely than another, sure, but we don't need some kind of proof of possibility to even get the 'supernatural' on the table! (That's accepting your premise that miracles are a significantly different kind of explanation; I myself consider a natural/supernatural distinction specious to begin with.)

Unlike the characters of that fictional example, I have not been provided with a demonstration to know the claim is empirically possible and cannot know it is empirically impossible either because it is at least logically possible.

No you haven't been provided with such a clear demonstration, but as I pointed out there's very much the same sort of thing to be found in religious (and non-religious) reports. If witnessing with your own eyes the Prophet pray and regrow a limb were to count as say 99% proof of reality of miracles, then reports of what John supposedly witnessed or what Mark supposedly heard that Peter witnessed would surely warrant a meagre 1 or 2% rating. More credibly, reports such as those from several doctors' sworn testimony in Calanda (~20-60%) or the well-documented modern medical committee of Lourdes (~70-90%) or the majority of American physicians (~99%*) would seemingly make it essentially certain that miracles do in fact occur... unless you begin with a presumption of impossibility and first demand independent(?) proof that miracles are even 'possible.'


* For each of those >500,000 American physicians who according to survey results report personally observing cures which they consider miraculous, there is a non-zero chance that they were wrong (eg. lying or ignorant of a real natural healing process) and, without a presumption of impossibility, a non-zero chance that they are correct in their assessment of a miracle. As intelligent and credible experts in their field, trained to objectively seek out natural causes and cures, their reports cannot be dismissed out of hand by any rational person. But even if there were only a 1% chance in each individual case that their 'miracle' diagnosis was correct, that would mean that in the first five hundred reports we'd have a 99.34% probability that at least one genuine miracle had occurred; and by implication, essentially proof of thousands of miracles occurring in the USA over the past few decades.

[bluegreenearth]

In your second and third paragraphs, your comments on historical methodology, you said that "any other possible explanation that has an implicit empirical basis will always have a higher probability of being true than the miracle explanation with no implicit empirical basis." That's obviously assigning a ~0% probability to the miraculous, at least in terms of historical methodology, not an agnostic position.

I see where my use of language there was unintentionally misleading. What I should have indicated was that, because its probability of being true can be calculated, any other possible explanation that has an implicit empirical basis will always be more rationally justifiable than the miracle explanation with no implicit empirical basis. How could a Historian justify endorsing the miracle explanation when its probability of being true cannot even be reliably estimated?

I'm not sure whether those latter two paragraphs are supposed to be related to your first paragraph or not, because that would obviously contradict your opening sentence that "The probability of a claim cannot be accurately calculated if what it describes is not known to be possible or impossible." But even if they're not related I don't think that what you're describing is an agnostic position. The starting point of an agnostic position would be best described by the principle of indifference:

• The principle of indifference (also called principle of insufficient reason) is a rule for assigning epistemic probabilities. The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or 'degrees of belief') equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration.

From a position of ignorance/agnosticism, if we had two mutually exclusive, exhaustive and interchangeable types of explanations for an otherwise unexplained event - for example that it was caused by 'natural' processes or that it was caused by 'supernatural' processes - the principle of indifference would, at least as a starting point, have us assign a 50% probability to each type of explanation. We could then argue from there that one type of explanation is more likely than another, sure, but we don't need some kind of proof of possibility to even get the 'supernatural' on the table! (That's accepting your premise that miracles are a significantly different kind of explanation; I myself consider a natural/supernatural distinction specious to begin with.)

To further clarify, here again, it is not necessary to take a literal interpretation of the term "agnosticism" in the context of my explanation. Since I can't reliably estimate the probability of the miracle explanation being true, how would I justify assigning it a 50% probability compared to the 50% probability assigned to the natural explanation? What I meant by assuming an "agnostic" position is that I can nether rule-out nor rule-in the miracle explanation as an empirical possibility. Because I cannot know if the miracle explanation is an empirical possibility or not, I have no logical justification for comparing it against the probability of a natural explanation.

No you haven't been provided with such a clear demonstration, but as I pointed out there's very much the same sort of thing to be found in religious (and non-religious) reports. If witnessing with your own eyes the Prophet pray and regrow a limb were to count as say 99% proof of reality of miracles, then reports of what John supposedly witnessed or what Mark supposedly heard that Peter witnessed would surely warrant a meagre 1 or 2% rating. More credibly, reports such as those from several doctors' sworn testimony in Calanda (~20-60%) or the well-documented modern medical committee of Lourdes (~70-90%) or the majority of American physicians (~99%*) would seemingly make it essentially certain that miracles do in fact occur... unless you begin with a presumption of impossibility and first demand independent(?) proof that miracles are even 'possible.'


* For each of those >500,000 American physicians who according to survey results report personally observing cures which they consider miraculous, there is a non-zero chance that they were wrong (eg. lying or ignorant of a real natural healing process) and, without a presumption of impossibility, a non-zero chance that they are correct in their assessment of a miracle. As intelligent and credible experts in their field, trained to objectively seek out natural causes and cures, their reports cannot be dismissed out of hand by any rational person. But even if there were only a 1% chance in each individual case that their 'miracle' diagnosis was correct, that would mean that in the first five hundred reports we'd have a 99.34% probability that at least one genuine miracle had occurred; and by implication, essentially proof of thousands of miracles occurring in the USA over the past few decades.

Seriously, has no one ever demonstrated to you where those types of manipulative statistical analyses are notoriously unreliable and misleading? All of that is a moot point anyway because, regardless of how many people claim to have personally witnessed a miracle, every single one of those miracle accounts is still just another unfalsifiable claim. Lumping all those unfalsifiable claims into one big pile doesn't "miraculously" allow someone to calculate the probability that any one of them is true. Confirmation bias, on the other hand, thrives on that type of fallacious reasoning.

[Mithrae]

In your second and third paragraphs, your comments on historical methodology, you said that "any other possible explanation that has an implicit empirical basis will always have a higher probability of being true than the miracle explanation with no implicit empirical basis." That's obviously assigning a ~0% probability to the miraculous, at least in terms of historical methodology, not an agnostic position.

I see where my use of language there was unintentionally misleading. What I should have indicated was that, because its probability of being true can be calculated, any other possible explanation that has an implicit empirical basis will always be more rationally justifiable than the miracle explanation with no implicit empirical basis. How could a Historian justify endorsing the miracle explanation when its probability of being true cannot even be reliably estimated?

I'm not sure whether those latter two paragraphs are supposed to be related to your first paragraph or not, because that would obviously contradict your opening sentence that "The probability of a claim cannot be accurately calculated if what it describes is not known to be possible or impossible." But even if they're not related I don't think that what you're describing is an agnostic position. The starting point of an agnostic position would be best described by the principle of indifference:

• The principle of indifference (also called principle of insufficient reason) is a rule for assigning epistemic probabilities. The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or 'degrees of belief') equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration.

From a position of ignorance/agnosticism, if we had two mutually exclusive, exhaustive and interchangeable types of explanations for an otherwise unexplained event - for example that it was caused by 'natural' processes or that it was caused by 'supernatural' processes - the principle of indifference would, at least as a starting point, have us assign a 50% probability to each type of explanation. We could then argue from there that one type of explanation is more likely than another, sure, but we don't need some kind of proof of possibility to even get the 'supernatural' on the table! (That's accepting your premise that miracles are a significantly different kind of explanation; I myself consider a natural/supernatural distinction specious to begin with.)

To further clarify, here again, it is not necessary to take a literal interpretation of the term "agnosticism" in the context of my explanation. Since I can't reliably estimate the probability of the miracle explanation being true, how would I justify assigning it a 50% probability compared to the 50% probability assigned to the natural explanation? What I meant by assuming an "agnostic" position is that I can nether rule-out nor rule-in the miracle explanation as an empirical possibility. Because I cannot know if the miracle explanation is an empirical possibility or not, I have no logical justification for comparing it against the probability of a natural explanation.

Setting aside for now my initial description and whether or not your argument implies a presumption of impossibility, could you address the four critiques that I raised? If those critiques refute your position then this more or less semantic discussion would simply be a diversion.

- Firstly, that it implies absurdities flying in the face of common sense in any scenario where a miracle obviously occurs such as my parable of the Prophet. If the logic doesn't hold true in such a circumstance (or when allowing for the possibility of truth in various religious reports etc.) then there's obviously something wrong with the logic.

- Secondly, it's arbitrary; if the possibility of the existence of God were proven, the next questioner could then demand proof that it's 'possible' for God to intervene in the natural order, the next could demand proof that it's 'possible' for God to hear and answer prayers so rapidly etc.; there'll always be some part of a theory or proposed sequence of events where one so inclined can arbitrarily say "But is that even proven to be possible?"

- Hence the third problem, that such an approach rules out all explanations equally. How would you go about demonstrating that it is "empirically possible" for all the stuff in existence to be governed by the same 'laws,' for example? How can it be proven that one bit of stuff which is not identical to another bit of stuff (eg. a hydrogen atom separated by centimeters or seconds from another hydrogen atom) is nevertheless capable of having perpetually identical behaviour and interactions with all other stuff? The fleeting patterns which we observe in an infinitesimally small fraction of space and time obviously don't prove any such thing; as far as I'm aware it cannot be proven, so your argument would necessarily throw the science out with the holy water.

- And that's closely related to the fourth problem, that proving something to be 'possible' prior to admitting its explanatory utility for observed phenomena seems impossible; observational data about the age of the universe might be interpreted very differently, for example, if we first had to prove independently of that data that it is even 'possible' for a universe to be more than 6,000 years old! Exactly how would you go about proving that God or miracles are "empirically possible" in the first place, if the apparent occurrence of miracles were ruled out as evidence for their possibility on the basis that more commonly observed types of things are always necessarily more rationally justifiable causes?

No you haven't been provided with such a clear demonstration, but as I pointed out there's very much the same sort of thing to be found in religious (and non-religious) reports. If witnessing with your own eyes the Prophet pray and regrow a limb were to count as say 99% proof of reality of miracles, then reports of what John supposedly witnessed or what Mark supposedly heard that Peter witnessed would surely warrant a meagre 1 or 2% rating. More credibly, reports such as those from several doctors' sworn testimony in Calanda (~20-60%) or the well-documented modern medical committee of Lourdes (~70-90%) or the majority of American physicians (~99%*) would seemingly make it essentially certain that miracles do in fact occur... unless you begin with a presumption of impossibility and first demand independent(?) proof that miracles are even 'possible.'


* For each of those >500,000 American physicians who according to survey results report personally observing cures which they consider miraculous, there is a non-zero chance that they were wrong (eg. lying or ignorant of a real natural healing process) and, without a presumption of impossibility, a non-zero chance that they are correct in their assessment of a miracle. As intelligent and credible experts in their field, trained to objectively seek out natural causes and cures, their reports cannot be dismissed out of hand by any rational person. But even if there were only a 1% chance in each individual case that their 'miracle' diagnosis was correct, that would mean that in the first five hundred reports we'd have a 99.34% probability that at least one genuine miracle had occurred; and by implication, essentially proof of thousands of miracles occurring in the USA over the past few decades.

Seriously, has no one ever demonstrated to you where those types of manipulative statistical analyses are notoriously unreliable and misleading? All of that is a moot point anyway because, regardless of how many people claim to have personally witnessed a miracle, every single one of those miracle accounts is still just another unfalsifiable claim. Lumping all those unfalsifiable claims into one big pile doesn't "miraculously" allow someone to calculate the probability that any one of them is true. Confirmation bias, on the other hand, thrives on that type of fallacious reasoning.

No-one has ever demonstrated this argument to be fallacious, no; merely making that assertion is not an argument or demonstration of any kind. Citing and noting that the conclusions of intelligent, educated experts in their field not only support a given conclusion, but do so at an even higher rate than for the general population is obviously not comparable to the likes of ghost or alien sightings, if that's what you were thinking.

And as I believe I've pointed out to you before, A) essentially no claim is truly falsifiable since they can always be saved by ad hoc revisions - for example a geocentric model of the universe can still be constructed, it's just exceptionally complex - but what we can and do aim for is the possibility of finding more plausible, parsimonious or comprehensive explanations; and B) the fact that something has not been falsified or superseded by a better explanation obviously isn't the same thing as not being falsifiable in principle. We readily imagine (for example) each doctor picking up a medical journal and learning about the not widely known but already-understood mechanisms behind cures that they had thought to be miraculous, such that a survey next year has doctors reporting significantly lower levels of observation and belief in miracles than the general population; or researchers tomorrow discovering some previously-unknown bodily mechanism capable of producing a wide range of seemingly 'miraculous' healing processes; or researchers over time discovering more specific mechanisms for many of the most common types of 'miracle' healing reports; or indeed journalists uncovering some vast international conspiracy among doctors to promote belief in miracles. The fact that none of these has happened in the past obviously doesn't mean that the evidence currently available is "unfalsifiable" - that is an obviously fallacious argument (one which I've also seen from climate contrarians).

[bluegreenearth]

- Firstly, that it implies absurdities flying in the face of common sense in any scenario where a miracle obviously occurs such as my parable of the Prophet. If the logic doesn't hold true in such a circumstance (or when allowing for the possibility of truth in various religious reports etc.) then there's obviously something wrong with the logic.

The presumption you are making is that a miracle "obviously" occurs. What actually occurred was an event that cannot be currently explained. How can you have an unexplained event that you explain by labeling it as a miracle?

- Secondly, it's arbitrary; if the possibility of the existence of God were proven, the next questioner could then demand proof that it's 'possible' for God to intervene in the natural order, the next could demand proof that it's 'possible' for God to hear and answer prayers so rapidly etc.; there'll always be some part of a theory or proposed sequence of events where one so inclined can arbitrarily say "But is that even proven to be possible?"

I don't understand how that is arbitrary. Also, it is not about "proving" a claim but trying to disprove a falsifiable claim. Maybe try revising the hypothetical so that it describes a situation where people are attempting to disprove falsifiable claims instead of trying to "prove" unfalsifiable claims.

- Hence the third problem, that such an approach rules out all explanations equally. How would you go about demonstrating that it is "empirically possible" for all the stuff in existence to be governed by the same 'laws,' for example? How can it be proven that one bit of stuff which is not identical to another bit of stuff (eg. a hydrogen atom separated by centimeters or seconds from another hydrogen atom) is nevertheless capable of having perpetually identical behaviour and interactions with all other stuff? The fleeting patterns which we observe in an infinitesimally small fraction of space and time obviously don't prove any such thing; as far as I'm aware it cannot be proven, so your argument would necessarily throw the science out with the holy water.

Once again, science is not in the business of "proving" unfalsifiable claims. The scientific method functions to disprove falsifiable claims.

- And that's closely related to the fourth problem, that proving something to be 'possible' prior to admitting its explanatory utility for observed phenomena seems impossible; observational data about the age of the universe might be interpreted very differently, for example, if we first had to prove independently of that data that it is even 'possible' for a universe to be more than 6,000 years old! Exactly how would you go about proving that God or miracles are "empirically possible" in the first place, if the apparent occurrence of miracles were ruled out as evidence for their possibility on the basis that more commonly observed types of things are always necessarily more rationally justifiable causes?

Hence, this is the problem with trying to prove unfalsifiable claims instead of trying to disprove falsifiable claims.

No-one has ever demonstrated this argument to be fallacious, no; merely making that assertion is not an argument or demonstration of any kind. Citing and noting that the conclusions of intelligent, educated experts in their field not only support a given conclusion, but do so at an even higher rate than for the general population is obviously not comparable to the likes of ghost or alien sightings, if that's what you were thinking.

And as I believe I've pointed out to you before, A) essentially no claim is truly falsifiable since they can always be saved by ad hoc revisions - for example a geocentric model of the universe can still be constructed, it's just exceptionally complex - but what we can and do aim for is the possibility of finding more plausible, parsimonious or comprehensive explanations; and B) the fact that something has not been falsified or superseded by a better explanation obviously isn't the same thing as not being falsifiable in principle. We readily imagine (for example) each doctor picking up a medical journal and learning about the not widely known but already-understood mechanisms behind cures that they had thought to be miraculous, such that a survey next year has doctors reporting significantly lower levels of observation and belief in miracles than the general population; or researchers tomorrow discovering some previously-unknown bodily mechanism capable of producing a wide range of seemingly 'miraculous' healing processes; or researchers over time discovering more specific mechanisms for many of the most common types of 'miracle' healing reports; or indeed journalists uncovering some vast international conspiracy among doctors to promote belief in miracles. The fact that none of these has happened in the past obviously doesn't mean that the evidence currently available is "unfalsifiable" - that is an obviously fallacious argument (one which I've also seen from climate contrarians).

Your failure to mitigate for confirmation bias in your argument doesn't make it logically fallacious. There are many logically sound arguments that don't map onto reality. I'll take your argument more seriously once you've demonstrated where the miracle explanation maps onto reality. Until then, the miracle explanation is no better or worse than any other imagined unfalsifiable explanation.