Re: Matthew 14

Eric Potts wrote:

> Gareth McCaughan wrote:
>> But I think it is reasonable, when there is no indication whatever
>> that something is not intended plainly, to take it plainly.
>
> To the best of my knowledge there is no indication that Genesis 2 to 11
> is not intended plainly. Yet very many people interpret it as story,
> with no-one but fundamentalists thinking that raises questions about
> whether or why they are Christian.

Sure. If you think that contradicts anything I've said,
then there's been a failure of communication on at least
two counts.

>> Can you offer any reason at all why I should believe that any
>> substantial part of the Christian tradition between, say,
>> 200AD and 1800AD did not accept that "God himself acts, or
>> permits others to act, in a way that violates natural forces"?
>
> Can you offer any reason at all why I should believe that any
> substantial part of the Christian tradition between, say 200 CE and
> 1800 CE did not accept that God created a man from the dust of the
> earth, and a woman from the man's rib, and that in the garden there was
> a talking serpent? Or did not accept that God created the world in six
> days; or that (for most of that period) the sun circled the earth so
> that on one occasion it actually stood still.

Offhand, I'm not sure. The answer may well be no; in which
case, my opinion is that the bulk of the Christian tradition
was wrong about those things. I am not, and have not at any
point been, arguing that if the bulk of the Christian tradition
is in favour of something then it must be right.

What I *am* arguing is that if the bulk of the Christian
tradition is in favour of something then that is *a reason*
to think it's right, albeit a reason that may be outweighed
by other more compelling reasons that go the other way.

> You may say that now there is evidence against such beliefs but, if God
> himself acts in a way that violates natural forces, why do you not
> believe (and I assume you don't believe) that God for his own purposes
> created in six days a world that actually looked as if it were millions
> of years old rather than being made in 4004 BCE;

Because I don't think God is in the business of grossly
misleading us, and doing that would have been grossly
misleading.

> or that God arranged
> things so that the sun stood still?

Because I'd expect there to be a great deal of other
contemporary evidence of such an extraordinary disturbance
in the usual order of things. It would have had worldwide
consequences.

> That we are not creationists does not mean that we disregard the
> evidence of the Bible or of Christian tradition. It means that we take
> that evidence very seriously but that we also weigh it carefully in the
> light of contemporary understanding and often decide that it is the
> inner, spiritual meaning of a story that matters and not its scientific
> or historical accuracy.

Which seems to me a far cry from what you have been doing
with those stories in the gospels; that's all.

> And if we can do that for Adam and Eve, why
> does it seem so wrong to do it for the picture of a man, Peter as well
> as the "divine" man, walking on water?

I've tried, several times, to make clear that I am *not*
objecting on principle to all reinterpretations of, or
disagreements with, stories in the gospels. What I have
taken issue with is your apparent belief that, in order
to understand what John[1] meant and what (if anything)
actually happened, the synoptics' accounts can be disregarded.

[1] i.e., the author of the gospel that bears that
name, whether that was one person or many and
whether or not any of the people concerned was
called "John".

> I do not ask anyone to come to
> the same conclusion as I do; merely to accept that it is a valid
> conclusion in terms of one's faith and a possible conclusion in the
> light of the evidence.

I'm not sure what "valid" means. I think the arguments
you've given for it have much force only when combined
with a presumption that miracles never happen.

>> (In fact, walking on water wouldn't necessarily require a
>> violation of "natural forces", whatever exactly that means;
>> if we take the other half of that clause in the definition
>> you cited, which was something like "going beyond what
>> natural forces can do", then I think we get a more appropriate
>> definition. So, bonus points if you can show me that an
>> appreciable part of the Christian tradition denied that
>> God can do, or enable others to do, things that go beyond
>> what natural forces could.)
>
> I said that we needed an agreed definition. Now you are switching
> definitions.

I'm not, for two reasons.

1. The definition you were using was never an "agreed
definition". You picked it out of a list of clauses from
a few dictionaries, that's all. Even if I were saying
"no, use this other definition instead", I wouldn't
be "switching"; how could I switch from a definition
I never chose nor used?

2. In any case, I *wasn't* saying "no, use this other
definition instead". Hence "bonus points if you can
show ..." rather than, say, "you need to show ...".

> The fact is that some who believe in miracles do believe
> in the violation of the laws of nature. Qasin has said as much. And you
> used that phrase in your assertion that most of Christianity believed
> in it for most of the faith's history.

I did not in the least mean to deny that some who believe
in miracles do believe in the violation of the laws of
nature. I expect most who believe in miracles do so. I
was just pointing out that *this* particular alleged
miracle might perhaps have been do-able with something
praeternatural but not contranatural.

> In my view such violation would suggest an inconsistent God, and why
> should anyone want to trust such a God? How could I feel sure that,
> unexpectedly, the dry land in front of me might not suddenly fail to
> hold me just because God decided otherwise for some purpose of his own?

Why "inconsistent"? If God occasionally violates natural laws,
what that means (put in different words, no more) is simply
that God has made the universe so that it almost always, but
not absolutely always, behaves in certain regular ways. I don't
see any reason why that should indicate inconsistency or
untrustworthiness. Would you feel the same way about a human
who almost always keeps the law of the land, but who in
exceptional circumstances (say, to save a life or to protest
a grave injustice) occasionally breaks it, usually in minor
ways?

> And what exactly does "an extension" mean? If it means no more than
> "could be explicable by the laws of nature if only we understood them
> better" then it is not supernatural anyway.

I must be missing something here. So far as I can see,
the word "extension" has not previously occurred anywhere
in this thread, so I'm not sure why you're seeking
clarification of its meaning.

Be that as it may, you're right to want to be careful
about what's meant when we speak or think about possibly
unknown natural laws.

Consider any possible complete history of the universe
from its beginning (if any) to its end (if any). There
will be a (possibly excessively complicated, possibly
infinite, possibly uncountably infinite) set of "laws"
that describe everything in that universe. Therefore,
*anything* -- divine interventions, infinite improbability
drives, anything at all -- is in theory explicable in
terms of "natural laws" if we don't restrict what is
allowed to count as a set of natural laws.

So, when you say that nothing beyond the scope of
possibly-yet-unknown natural laws happens, I'm guessing
that you have in view some particular notion of what
"the laws of nature" are allowed to look like (on pain
of not deserving to be called "laws of nature"). Could
you say what that notion is?

If I were to do the same, I'd probably come up with
something like "a set of laws, which as an aggregate
are within or at least not ludicrously beyond the
ability of the cleverest humans to understand". But
with any definition along those lines, I can't see
how any argument of the form "God mustn't go beyond
the laws of nature; that would be inconsistent" (or
untrustworthy, or whatever) could possibly work --
it would amount to saying "God mustn't do things that
go much beyond our understanding", which seems pretty
unresaonable.

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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