Re: Matthew 14

This will, I hope, be a final reply to one or two points, since after
today I shall be afk for a couple of weeks. Maybe you can rest your
aching wrists! As someone who had carpal tunnel syndrome, I have some
idea of the pain and the difficulty!

Gareth McCaughan wrote:
> 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.

But, Gareth, I have never claimed otherwise. You just seem to think
that I have.

I could well be quite wrong in my reading of the development of the
walking on water story as I set it out in my post to Mike four days
ago. But I do think there are excellent reasons for viewing the story
in that light and I have set them out overall in various posts here,
some to you and also in replies to other posters. And I think it should
be clear that I do not stand alone or anywhere near alone in reading
the Bible in this way.

You don't accept my arguments. Fine, that's your right. Feel free to
disagree. Just don't, please, make that difference of judgement into a
suggestion that I am an atheist in Christian clothing. I know you
haven't said that explicitly, but that assertion is there in all you
have written in the last week or so.


>
> > 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.

But whatever happened to "my thoughts are not your thoughts"? Could not
God have some reason, unfathomable to our limited human minds, that
more than justifies his acts. As the Lord says to Job: "Who are you to
question my wisdom with your ignorant, empty words?" (38.2)

The fundamentalists are right - but they never follow it through
themselves - if we challenge one statement in the Bible, we challenge
them all. Non-fundamentalists claim the right to exercise our reason in
interpretation. Good. But if I can re-interpret what Genesis plainly
says, why can I not similarly re-interpret Matthew or John?

> > 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.

Not least of which would, presumably, have been the temporary loss of
gravity, yes. But after all, we are talking about God and miracle. Is
it beyond the capacity of God to arrange a temporary gravity
substitute, if he can also make the sun stand still? I hardly think so.
Gareth, or rather, Job "Have you ever in all your life commanded a day
to dawn?"

> 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.
>

But I have never said that nor implied it. I do not disregard the
synoptics. But I do seek to set all of the evidence, synoptic and
Johannine, in the frame for examination and not simply allow one or
even two accounts to automatically determine the third. You have not
responded to my argument from linguistics, from the use of "epi" - no
one has. You seem so sure of your prejudgement that you appear
unwilling to examine it. But I repeat that Matthew has a different
wording from John, sufficient to give the preposition a very different
force. (again see my post of Sep 2 to Mike for details.) Undoubtedly
the Matthew account is miraculous, and his language is different
accordingly. The stories are far from identical and the differences are
surely significant. It seems to me that it is you that is disregarding
the evidential value of the accounts as written.

You pointed out, correctly, that I had imported a ghost into John's
account. Yes, that was a mistake by me; but it is very revealing. We
are all of us so shaped by our knowledge of the Matthew account - which
has long been the preachers' favourite - that we find it very hard NOT
to import features from there into our reading of the other accounts.

If you look at commentaries on the synoptics, you will find that often
they make the suggestion that the story is, or has become, a divine
epiphany, linked with the old tradition of YHWH making a path through
the waters, and the Exodus. They may be wrong, of course, but this
background is just another pointer to the theological rather than
historical import of the story.


> > 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?

Fair enough. I am highlighting the fact that we are having a discussion
about a concept which we have not defined. That is always likely to be
fruitless.


> 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?


Tha analogy is false, I think. The law of the land is not set up by the
human who chooses to break it for compelling reasons. If someone who
has the power to make laws then breaks them when he finds it useful, or
leaves loopholes that he can exploit, why, we usually call such a
person a tyrant! I do not see God as a tyrant.


> > 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.


I apologise. My language was loose. The definition was actually:
"2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural
forces."

Thus by "extension" I meant "going beyond." But I still have no real
idea what such a phrase can mean, if it is not just some fancy way of
resaying "violate".


>
> 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.


If I can attempt to summarise the above, it seems to me as if you are
saying, essentially, that a miracle is something beyond human
understanding. Is that fair?

The problem then is the same as with any language about God. God is the
ultimate ineffable, and yet we persist in trying to talk about God. But
as a result we are back to the situation where all such talk is
imprecise, inadequate, partially false insofar as incompleteness may
lead to unintended falsehood and it is language which cannot be
scientific but must be analogy and metaphor.

Which, I would think, brings us full circle.

Qasin spoke of a miracle she had experienced, a healing beyond human
understanding. I have no difficulty believing that it happened; the
recipient of the miracle is here to tell us of it. That needn't mean
that, one day, it will not be explicable by a more knoweldgable
humanity; but we can not know if that will be the case.

The biblical miracles come with two millennia of Christian
understanding or - and I am not trying to be provocative or offensive -
Christian baggage. The original participants are not here to tell the
story - not even Jesus in any normal sense of that telling. They are
told in a setting which itself carries cultural and linguistic elements
which we can only barely begin to appreciate. We do not KNOW what their
intent was in telling the story, we can only attempt to make our own
best judgement. None of the accounts are susceptible to proof at this
distance. And they differ to a greater or lesser degree as we would
expect from witness statements, except that it is very unlikely that
any of the writers were eye witnesses themselves*, and they are
recording tales that had been told and retold for several decades. But
we do know how the world normally operates and we have no scientific
indication that that normal operation was any different two thousand
years ago.

So we have stories. Honestly written stories. Stories which may indeed
have a factual foundation. But stories nonetheless. And since we can
only talk of God - and of miracle - by analogy, they are very fine
stories indeed. And, as I see it, reviewing the witness stories and
seeking to unearth the event behind, even if successful, does not in
any way diminish the value for faith of the stories themselves.

Since I am going to be away for a while now, I think I'll leave it at
that.


* ironically, the one account that is most likely to be that of an
eye-witness, in the understanding of many Christians, is that of John!
Ahem!
.

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