Re: Matthew 14

"faithintheworld" wrote:

> 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!

Thanks :-). Feel free to return to this when you get back.
Or, if you prefer, not to...

>> 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 don't think you've *claimed* otherwise; I think everything
you've said makes sense only if that's what you *think*.
Maybe you don't actually think it: then either I'm failing
to see where you've weighed the bulk of the Christian
tradition against the other relevant factors and come
down on the other side, or I'm failing to see why you
didn't need to, or something.

> 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.

It would be strange if so, since that isn't my belief
and I've said explicitly that it's neither what I think
nor what I meant, and explained what I *did* mean in
an article I know you've read (because you replied to
other parts of it).

For what feels like about the forty-third time but
is probably only really about the fourth: I do not
think you are an atheist in Christian clothing, and
I was not trying to suggest that you are. I was
trying to provoke you into explaining *how* you
reconcile some of what you've been saying (*not*
your specific opinion about what John meant) with
being a Christian. Clearly my attempt to do so was
ill-judged, since the only way you've responded
to it is to take repeated offence; I'm sorry about
that. (Perhaps some good may be brought out of my
error of judgement if you choose to meditate on
how some people feel at some of your provocative
choices of wording...)

>>> 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)

Well, sure, he could. (Do you agree, by the way? Because
if so, I'm not sure what it does to your argument that he
wouldn't ever disrupt the "laws of nature"...)

And, likewise, we *could* all be being fooled by a Cartesian
demon, or I *could* be the only thing in the universe and be
imagining everything, and empirical induction *could* break
down tomorrow so that the past ceases to be a useful guide
to the future. Such skeptical hypotheses are always with us,
and so far as I can see there is nothing useful to be done
with them but ignore them.

> 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?

You can. I have never said that you can't.

>>> 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?"

It isn't beyond his capacity, nor did I claim that it is.

What, in fact, is your point here? That I am also not a
fundamentalist? I don't deny it. That we both believe
some things and disbelieve others? I don't deny that,
either. But neither of those seems very interesting;
probably you have a more substantial point to make than
those. What is it?

>> 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.

There's scarcely anything to respond to. Can "epi" mean
"beside" as well as "on"? Sure it can. Does it have to?
No, because the same preposition is used in Matthew and Mark
where walking *on* the water is clearly intended.

> 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.)

In Matthew 19 "epi tEs gEs" surely means "on the earth"
rather than "beside the earth". In Mark as in John we have
"epi tEs thalassEs", and for that to mean "by the sea"
the disciples would have to be rowing their boat with
difficulty through the storm ... so close in to land
that Jesus could walk to them "by the sea". And then,
with no explanation given other than that "they saw him
walking epi tEs thalassEs", the disciples take him for
a ghost and are terrified. Given that the translation
"on the sea" is possible (which it clearly is), I can't
see what other than a pre-determination to avoid a
water-walking miracle would make anyone think "by the
sea" a tenable translation here: it makes nonsense of
the story.

> 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 see me doing that, I encourage you to point it out.

> 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.

The fact that a story has theological import is no evidence
that it's factually incorrect.

>>> 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.

Almost all discussions of all things proceed without
explicitly establishing definitions of the key concepts,
and they often work out just fine. When a difference
between definitions becomes significant, one can always
point it out, as I did here.

>> 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.

Er, no, we don't. What makes someone a tyrant is oppression,
not the loopholes. When a lawmaker leaves loopholes he can
exploit, we sometimes see corruption; seldom tyranny.

I utterly fail to see how or why it would be tyrannical
if God chose to make the universe behave regularly and
somewhat comprehensively almost always, but not absolutely
always.

>>> 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".

Imagine that the "laws of nature" are statistical.
(Which, according to some contemporary understandings,
they are.) Then it is not *impossible* for someone
to walk safely on water or to disappear from one
place and reappear unharmed in another, or to do
various other startling things; it is merely very,
very, very improbable. If God, or a magician (but
not a mere wielder of sufficiently advanced technology)
were able to adjust the probabilities in a particular
case, then that wouldn't (as I'd use the words,
anyway) be a *violation* of any laws. But it would
be doing something that *went beyond* them: making
something happen that a person acting according to
those laws couldn't make happen.

> 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?

I didn't give a definition of "miracle", so no :-).
Part of the trouble is that I'm not sure an adequate
definition of "miracle" is even *possible*; every
time I try to come up with one it seems to have one
of four problems: (1) it's too vague, (2) it's too
dependent on contingent facts about what *we* happen
to be able to understand, (3) it makes everything that
happens into a miracle, or (4) it makes nothing a
miracle, not even if God writes "YHWH woz ere" in
letters of fire across the Milky Way in blatant
disregard of any known regularity in how the world
behaves.

I think the best I can come up with is this: *given*
any understanding of how the world works, we can
define ... well, let's call it a "quasimiracle"
to be anything that oughtn't to be possible, or
at least ought to be lavishly improbable, according
to that understanding. So far, so good. But my
attempts to turn this into a definition of "miracle"
per se have all crashed into one of the problems
I listed above.

But let's try this: call an understanding of how
the world works "humanly accessible" if it's
something humans (but perhaps only the very
cleverest ones, and perhaps only when they get
together) are able to understand, and call it
"predictive" if it is in principle able to answer
most questions of the form "would X really happen
in such-and-such circumstances?"; then a "miracle"
is something that is predicted not to happen by
every predictive, humanly accessible understanding
that makes any prediction about whether it happens
or not, and which could plausibly have been come up
with by people who didn't know about the specific
event in question. I think this definition is still
broken, but in subtle enough ways that it may not matter.

> 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.

I'm afraid I don't understand how. I'm not even sure
that I know what you mean by "brings us full circle".

> 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.

But we have some *unscientific* indication (or, at least,
belief) that things were not altogether normal then, if
we believe -- as you said you do -- that Jesus was "much
more than a man". Men are not usually much more than men;
that's part of what "more than" means. And this difference,
whatever exactly it was, wasn't some purely spiritual thing
with no consequences in the mundane physical world; at
the very least, it had the consequence that various people
caused words to be put on paper recording alleged miracles
performed by this man who was much more than a man.

So you already believe that in the person of Jesus
*something* was going on that had extraordinary
consequences even in the material world.

> 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,

Why can we only talk 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.

Whether it does surely depends on what the stories were
meant to do, and where their "value for faith" came from
in the first place.

It seems to me that unless all those stories of miracles
and wonders were, all along, meant to be understood as
metaphors and myths, *something* is lost if they turn
out to be untrue, and *much* is lost if they almost all
turn out to be untrue. And I see no reason to think that
those stories were always meant to be understood as
metaphors and myths, and much reason to think that they
weren't.

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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