On Miracles

C. S. Lewis’ slim volume Miracles (1947, 1960) is a superbly-written, clear-headed piece of argumentative philosophy.   I’ll not rehearse his arguments, but simply urge you to buy the book.  Or if you like, I transposed his central argument into the key of Penguin, which you can read here.

For those who have consumed the main meal, here are some bits and snips  for dessert.

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In the first paragraph of the chapter “Of Miracles”, in the celebrated Enquiry of Hume, we meet an argument ascribed to Anglican Archbishop Tillotson, which Hume summarizes thus:

Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion, is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses;  because, (1) even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater;  and (2) it is evident  it must diminish in passing from them  to their disciples.

To this we reply with remarks, not theological, but purely logical.

(1)  Whether the evidence of the Apostles for all that they saw and sensed and heard, was indeed no greater than that whereby we announce, “Hullo!  A penny-bun upon the table.” -- the testimony of the senses, the notoriously wayward senses -- I cannot say.   Wasn’t there; only read the book.  Certainly there are other means to knowledge than mere gross perceptions and “feels”, of the sort beloved of the Materialists -- witness the sterling and immutable truth of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, for which sensory evidence is absolutely nil.  So:  Not Proved;  I have nothing to add.

(2) Here Hume presents a peculiarly degraded picture of the epistemological-scientific enterprise over the span of unfurling centuries, as though it were simply a game of Chinese whispers, in which information can only deteriorate.

Consider the “evidence” for atoms, of the earliest atomists.  They had none -- certainly no sensory evidence.   And the nineteenth-century physicists who did bring forward evidence -- though evidence at a remove or two, again not directly sensory -- so little carried the day that, on into the twentieth century, physicists like Mach could profess themselves unconvinced.  And yet -- experience and analysis, coherence and consilience, have so developed, that today these still-unseen creatures are an article of faith.

Whether the many who have claimed that, as they lived their lives, the truths of the Christian religion became eventually apparent, even overcoming original atheism, so claim aright, we ourselves obviously cannot settle.  But they do not rely on a sort of game-of-Telephone Islamic isnâd (chain of traditionaries), Abu-X heard it from Ibn-Y who … who heard the Prophet say, “Eat no beans.”

Lest you imagine that Hume’s argument, which now stands threadbare in a winter wind, be a mere straw-man, know that I did not dig it out of some dusty volume, but met it re-presented in a popular pamphlet by Edward Craig (Philosophy: A very short introduction, 2002, cannily marketed by Oxford University Press); a writer who, moreover, professes deep admiration for Hume.  -- Craig (p. 27)  also usefully alludes to the marketing value of the “Tillotson connection”:

Hume’s public, most of them in varying degrees hostile to Catholicism, would feel a comfortable warm glow…and read on.

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Edward Craig, now arguing in his own person (Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (2002), p. 34):

We can, and do, demand that scientific results be replicable;  we can’t demand a rerun of a miracle.

A surprisingly lax use of “scientific”, coming from a philosopher.  We all know that there is more to science than laboratory physics, and more to physics than what the positivists once thought.

There is very little in science that can be “rerun”.  In geology, cosmology, astronomy, evolutionary biology -- almost nothing.  And even in physics:  If they ever do, after many years of patient watching, finally spot a Higgs boson or a magnetic monopole, they won’t be able to re-run that result.  Unless someone thinks of a new technique (in which case it wouldn’t be a rerun, but a qualitatively new experiment), they’ll just have to sit and watch and wait all over again.  Maybe they get lucky this time, maybe they don’t.

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The term miracles is sometimes used in philosophical polemics against the far-fetched explanations of secularists  for whom the very idea of miracles would be a scandal:

The Blank Slate has become the secular religion of modern intellectual life.  It is seen as a source of values, so the fact that it is based on a miracle -- a complex mind arising out of nothing -- is not held against it.

-- Steven Pinker,  The Blank Slate (2002), p.  3

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Miscellaneous epigrams:

Oliver St. John Gogarty, I Follow Saint Patrick (1938), p. 165: “I believe in miracles because I am a miracle.”

Oliver St. John Gogarty, I Follow Saint Patrick (1938), p. 255: “As for smiths, they controlled fire and bent the stubborn metal to their will.  It was miracle enough in those days;  to me it is a miracle still.”

On the Existence of Penguins

             We know, on scientific grounds, that penguins cannot exist.  How, then, to explain the persistence, among the unlettered, of a belief in these fanciful creatures?

            "Belief" is perhaps too strong a term;  surely no one of any sense, when pressed, would avow credence in these postulated entities  comparable to what we accord to objects for which we may rely on the evidence of our senses.  The vague report of these vertical beings, in a far-off land of eternal ice, popularly styled "Antarctica", smacks too strongly of the nursery.   Yet one cannot deny that, in unguarded discourse and casual daily life, a large proportion of the populace behave as though they did believe.  Again, how to explain it?

            For those who, having long outgrown such fancies, may have forgotten the details of the legend, we here briefly resume its outlines.   According to the "Penguin Myth" (Stith-Thompson taletype M-32-b), there lies at the very deepest reaches of the earth, far beyond the inhabited portion of the planet, a magical land called Antarctica, eternally frozen, impervious to the rays of the sun.  Some indeed maintain it is not land at all, but consists purely and simply of never-melting ice, somehow rooted to the bottom of the sea.  So austere is this region that, far from being populated by the expected races of trolls and goblins, there is to be found but a single species, called the "penguin", which, reigning in lonely splendor, has been fancifully dubbed the "Emperor": for indeed (one detects the rustic wit at work) it is sovereign of all it surveys.  The folktale is further atypical in that, so far from positing a panoply of colors such as characterizes the dragon, the griffon, and so forth, the creature is depicted as being entirely black and white.  Since the land, or rather the glacier, of its habitat, is likewise purely white, this motif is held by scholars to be an attempt to depict a purely abstract and Platonic paradise, prior to the fall of our own world into the riot of prism and spectrum.

            Thus far the myth is not too different from those with which we are familiar from the stores of Sumer and of Babel.   The penguin is, like the roc or phoenix, held to be a bird; and it will come as no surprise to students of the subject, that the simple tellers add: a giant bird, standing almost as high as a man.  Indeed, the creature is so curiously constituted that it is often compared, in its aspect, to that of an actual man in evening dress!  Such humorous touches are characteristic of the folk mind at its best.

            At this point, however, the penguin myth parts company with the sort of quasi-rationality or mock-realism that informs most legends and märchen.  Believers are unanimous in insisting that the "penguin", though definitely and undeniably a bird (the grounds for this assertion being unspecified), does not fly!  Here the investigator drops his lens in astonishment.  Are the "believers" slyly having him on?  Can they really be ignorant of the fact, or pretend to forget the fact, that  birds,  fly??  Flying is what birds do! Fish – swim;   birds – fly.  Is there someone at the back of the class who does not grasp this?  -- Really,  one cannot reason with such people; we scarcely seem to share a common language.  As were one to meet a man who claimed to have seen a four-sided triangle, and moreover, a friend of a friend of his sister-in-law is said to have one at home.

            As though in unconscious compensation for this denial of the bird's defining ability, the myth-makers endow the creature with an opposite ability: the penguin, if you please, swims.  We might smile at this simple credulity, reminiscent of the straightforward inversions whereby the inhabitants of the Antipodes are held to walk on their hands, wear coats in summer and go naked in winter, et cetera.  Yet there remains something deeply disturbing, and contrary to nature, in this congeries of conflicting traits.  It is only too reminiscent of the long-exploded "platypus" hoax, attested here and there in the last century.

            So much for the content of these beliefs.  What of their purported grounds?

            Not, as in the case of supernatural beings, personal acquaintance.  We have all met someone who will claim to have seen a ghost, may even ourselves briefly have suffered such an hallucination.  But none of us pretends, or has ever met anyone who pretends, personally to have journeyed to this frozen floating wonder-world, this subaustral Shangri-La, and seen these beings, these "penguins", limned against the sky.  As to the creatures sometimes jocularly so labeled in our zoological gardens, whatever they may be, they are not "penguins", those emperors of the eternal ice, for whatever else our zoos may be, they are not glaciers the size of continents, hanging suspended at the bottom of the world.

            No, it is not by querying the credulous and confused, that one may hope to throw any light upon the matter, for that were merely to compound confusion.  As to the etiology of their alleged belief, science has identified four factors, acting severally or in concert:

            (1) They're lying.

            (2) It's a conspiracy.

            (3) Somebody paid someone.

            (4) They are all  stark,    staring,          mad……………..

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[Update Oct 2014]  Cf. this:
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Wild-Animals-705/2012/12/penguins-exist.htm