"Magic" versus "miracle" -- was Re: Evidence for Christianity?

Dirk Hartog wrote:

A 1) the notions are rationally indistinguishable. (They are of course
distinguishable" in the arena of irrational myth. In myth, nothing is
impossible.)

I'm not sure what you mean. If you just mean "one is as nonexistent
as the other" then: sure, I agree, but that doesn't make the *notions*
indistinguishable in any useful sense. Unicorns don't exist either,
but if you used the word "unicorns" to refer to what some people
refer to as miracles then you'd cause nothing but confusion. One
can make rational distinctions between things it's unreasonable to
believe in.

Right. Like unicorns, magic and miracle are unreal. But my reasoning
is not that magic and miracle are irrational because they unreal. My
reasoning is that they are irrational because _they explicitly abandon
cause and effect._ And rational/ scientific depend on the assumption
that cause and effect explain events.

I disagree with you on only two points: magic and miracle needn't
involve abandoning cause and effect, and rational thought doesn't
depend on cause and effect.

[The illustrative analogy would be, say, with an imaginary
"unigriffin." Unigriffins are invisible. Since they are invisible, you
can't then discuss which color they are.]

What I mean is this. We believe the world proceeds according to
natural laws. Events have causes. Yesterday's events caused today's,
which will cause tomorrows. Our rational/scientific ideas about what
is and isn't possible - about how the world works - depend on our
assumption that cause and effect control events.

Quantum mechanics, at least in some versions, shows us a universe
full of things that "just happen", at random, with no cause or
effect involved. Have all physicists since circa 1900 been
irrationalists? Modern science, generally, has little truck
with cause and effect as such; there are constraints linking
past to future, and (basically on account of the low-entropy
state of the present universe) we find them easier to think
about in past-therefore-future terms. Is it anti-rational and
anti-scientific to point that out?

But, leaving aside such esoterica, I don't see how magic involves
any more violation of cause and effect than anything else involving
people does. Miracle does, sort of, in that we have even less access
to gods than to other people's minds, making it harder to track
whatever causation there might be there, but believers in miracles
would still say things like "such-and-such happened because God
made it happen; God made it happen because he wanted it to; he
wanted it to because he wanted to free the Israelites from their
slavery in Egypt", each stage of which is an assertion of cause
and effect -- again, to at least the extent that everyday
folk-psychological explanations of human actions are.

Just as you can't reasonably - coherently -- say, "Uniagriffins are
invisible, and the ones God rides are red, the ones people ride are
blue," neither can your fantasy abandon cause and effect, and then
pretend to reason about who caused a miracle and who caused a magic.

But the only person claiming that miracle and magic abandon cause
and effect is you.

"Miracles happen by Gods special God-Power; magic happens by Peoples
People-power." There is NO WAY TO TEST how the non-cause-and-effect
event happened, since all tests are cause and effect based - and magic
and miracle explicitly abandon cause and effect. There is therefore in
principal no test to tell the two apart. There is therefore in
principal no way to tell the two apart.

They do not explicitly abandon cause and effect.

(Bertrand.) There's nothing wrong with making things different by
definition. That's what words are *for*. (And it's not what Russell
was referring to, not unless someone then goes on to assume the
reality of miracles or magic or both.) But it's certainly possible
that my proposed distinction is a bad one, perhaps because there's
no purpose for which it might be useful or because it isn't clearly
enough specified to be applied. Let's see.

Yes. But one must not be seduced into believing that a definition
carries any factual, or reasonable, content.

A definition carries factual content *about how one is proposing
to use a word*. If it's a definition distilled from actual usage,
then it carries (purportedly) factual content about how people in
general use the word. It seems to me that that's the only sort of
content you have any grounds for asking for in this case, since
you don't believe that there's any factual content to be had about
actual miracle and magic other than "there is none". And, since
I agree with you there, I'm not going to try :-).

In fact this definition fails to specify any identifying features of
either magic or miracle - other than that God does one and not the
other.

That seems to me like saying "In fact your definition of piano music
fails to specify any identifying features -- other than that it's
played, or intended to be played, on the piano."

Yes, but we all know what a piano is. We don't know what a miracle/
magic is.

You're applying the analogy wrongly. What corresponds to knowing what
a piano is is knowing what a human being is, or what a god is. I think
we can reasonably take the former as read. The latter is more problematic,
because there have been so many different beliefs about gods, but if we
stick with one particular variety of god-belief (Christianity would
be the obvious candidate here) I don't see why there's any more
difficulty understanding what "the Christian god" means than there
is understanding what "a unicorn" or "Harry Potter" means.

The purpose is to field test the logic. Advocates put forward the best
argument they have. If believers could define magic and miracle in
some non- tautological way, and still get the answer they want, they
would. The fact they don't tells you they can't. It gives you real
world field information about the internal-logic of the question.

I remain confused. Sure, the answer they want is that the two are
different. That's because they happen to care about the difference
between wonder-working that's done by humans and wonder-working
that's done by gods. Evidently you think there's something dishonest
about defining words so as to make a distinction you find useful,
but I really don't see why.

I can't judge the accuracy of your categorization, because you have
failed to be precise about what you think a "wonder" is.

I haven't failed; I haven't *tried*. (See below for an attempt
and some caveats.)

I can't agree with your categorization. Your example is basically of
observed correlations suggesting cause and effect, but with so far no
scientifically identifiable mechanism. Science if full of those. For
example: the brain makes you conscious, no one knows how. Neural
networks code complex non-linear relationships, no one knows how.
Light is sometimes a particle, sometimes a wave, no one knows how.
Gravity works across empty space, no one knows how. Aussies eat
Vegemite, no one knows why. Etc.

I'm not sure what your point is here. Science is full of such things,
so isn't it odd to say that they're irrational and unscientific?

(Incidentally, I don't think it's at all true that "no one knows
how" neural networks code complex non-linear relationships. It's
quite well understood how they do. And I think enough is understood
about QM to make it pretty strange to say that "no one knows how"
light sometimes behaves a bit like a classical particle and sometimes
a bit like a classical wave. Of course there's still plenty of
mystery.)

Further, you miss the point. The point is it is IN PRINCIPAL
impossible to use science/ reason to identify circumstances in which
science/ reason do not work. To be clear, not circumstances in which
they fail to identify inscrutable scientific mechanisms, but rather
circumstances in which the assumptions on which science/reason are
based do not operate.

But you have given no reason -- merely repeated assertions -- for
your claim that magic and miracle *as such* are incompatible with
"cause and effect".

I have failed to get across my point. Let me try again. Reason and
science assume cause and effect work. The standard idea of magic/
miracle is that they come from some sort of supernatural realm outside
the one in which rational, scientific cause and effect operate.

I agree that magic and miracle, more or less by definition, would
have to operate in ways quite different from currently-known science.
I see absolutely no reason to think that they would have to abandon
cause and effect altogether.

My point is that reason/ science / cause and effect can not access
that other realm. It's a definitional thing. If there was cause and
effect there and they COULD access it, then it would no longer be
outside their realm.

I think that if magic and miracle were real then they would have
to be somewhat amenable to scientific investigation, though the
results might be as unsatisfactory as (e.g.) those of scientific
investigation of consciousness to date. More below.

read more »
Google cut of the end of your post.

See those words "read more"? That was a link. You could have clicked
on it to read the rest.

I suggest this exercise as a way to definitively prove my theory
wrong:

1. List the criteria you use to identify an event as a "wonder."
IOW Give the NECESSARY and SUFFICIENT conditions for "miracle"
and
the NECESSARY and SUFFICIENT conditions for "magic".

2. Identify how you derived those criteria.

I'll have a go, but first of all let me note that scarcely any
word can really be defined in that sort of way. "Game", "number",
"animal", "box", "letter", "religion", whatever; any nice clear
definition you give is going to have exceptions, or at best things
that it fails to classify clearly. However, I'll have a go, and
I'll try to "show my working" as I go.

0. Just to be clear: This is an investigation into human ideas,
not into how magic and miracle "actually" work. So far as I can
tell, they don't actually work; but people have ideas about them,
and the question (roughly) is how coherent those ideas are.

1. I think that when people talk about magic or miracle (I'll
say "wonders" from now on to mean both of these, though of course
most people don't use that word) the basic idea is of something
outside the normal run of events. Of course unusual things happen
all the time that aren't "wonders", and I think there are three
different more specific ideas at work.

2. The first is roughly as follows: the universe generally follows
rules, but sometimes those rules might be broken. (Of course another
way to look at that would be to say that the rules are more complicated
than we thought they were.) An occasion on which what happens doesn't
conform to the usual rules would be a "wonder", at least if there
were large enough visible consequences.

3. The second is more modest: that there are rules, but some of them
aren't reducible to the sort of purely algorithmic ones scientists
like best. This could be true without any "wonders"; for instance,
some people have believed in some sort of law of "progress" whereby
life *inevitably* gets more complex, more advanced, etc., and if
any such thing were true it would (I think) have to be a rule of
this sort. But there might be rules along the lines of "if a person
wants something and imagines it very clearly, it becomes more likely
to happen", and I think it would be reasonable to describe the
working of such rules as "magic" or "wonders", especially if some
people were much better than others at exploiting them.

4. The third is more modest still: there might be rules, and nice
simple algorithmic rules of the sort that scientists like best,
but they might have the consequence that some people can (maybe
by virtue of some special structure in their brains) make things
happen that currently look to us like violations of the usual
rules. I think that if something along these lines turned out
to be the case then it would be reasonable to call those things
"wonders" *if* they were enough like the (purported) things that
people call "magic" and/or "miracle" today. So, for instance,
suppose it turned out that some (currently quite unimaginable,
of course) set of corrections to quantum electrodynamics happened
to have the consequence that some people are able to do exactly
the sort of things described as magic in J K Rowling's books, and
by similar means (in so far as one can tell; she's very vague about
how it's supposed to work). Then I'd be happy to call it "magic"
even if after the physicists and engineers were finished with it
we could all buy little magic-generating devices working entirely
according to known physical principles.

5. So, let me summarize with a tentative definition of "wonders":
something is a "wonder" if it's something that superficially seems
impressively out of the ordinary, and it meets any of three criteria:
(a) it involves a violation of natural law in the sense that the
best description we can find of how the world works lists it as an
exception rather than as a consequence of general, widely applicable
rules; or (b) bringing it into the framework of natural law involves
laws that lack the reductive character of today's physics, and that
appeal to "high-level" notions like "mind" or "person"; or (c) regardless
of what relation it bears to whatever natural laws there may be,
it resembles the happenings in stories of "magic" and "miracle"
very closely. The word "wonder" probably wouldn't get applied to
an event that met criterion (a), (b) or (c) but wasn't superficially
impressive, but I think "magic" and "miracle" could reasonably be
extended to cover events meeting those criteria if there were some
clear connection (e.g., being brought about in a similar way) with
events that meet the criterion and *are* superficially impressive.

6. This doubtless all seems a bit ad hoc. Well, it is, and it has
to be. That's what happens when you try to define words that have
been in use for ages and acquired a wide range of meaning.

7. I derived these criteria (so far, criteria for "wonders" rather
than for "magic" and "miracle" separately) by reflecting on how
terms like "magic" are used, and trying to think what characteristics
some event or set of events would have to have in order to make me
(and, so far as I can judge, others) willing to apply such terms
to it. Again, I suspect that this isn't the sort of answer you're
looking for; again, I think it's the only kind of answer one *can*
give to such a question, and the same would apply to all sorts of
words I bet you don't regard as problematic.

8. What about "magic" versus "miracle"? Well, I already gave my
criteria for using those words: a "miracle" is a wonder brought
about by a god, and "magic" is a wonder or wonders brought about
by a human being. (If wonders actually happened, and if they were
sometimes brought about by agents other than gods and humans,
we'd need to decide what to call those. I have some ideas about
how that decision would probably be made; perhaps "miracle" would
be reserved for wonders brought about by gods and "magic" would
be extended to angels, djinn, etc.)

9. Of course that means we need a definition of "god". That's tricky,
not least because there are any number of different cultures and
subcultures with different definitions. I'd say that the meaning
of "miracle" varies by culture, according to the prevailing ideas
about gods -- just as the meaning of "polite" or "child" varies
by culture. Here's a definition that will do well enough for our
present purposes: a god is a being not composed entirely of physical
matter and able to do things that no group of 1000 human beings,
working together with all the technology presently at our disposal,
can do.

10. You don't need to tell me that I haven't given perfectly precise
necessary and sufficient conditions. Of course I haven't. If you
think those are necessary for a word to be usable, then I invite
you to give me precise necessary and sufficient conditions for something
to be (1) a game; (2) a number; (3) a letter. (For #3, I have in mind
the sense in which this --> a <-- is a letter.) I'll be impressed
and surprised, but not quite astonished, if you can do #2 or #3 in
a way that's clearly satisfactory. I think I'll be astonished if you
can do #1.

--
Gareth McCaughan
..sig under construc
.

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