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

On Aug 17, 5:19 pm, Gareth McCaughan <Gareth.McCaug...@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Dirk Hartog wrote:

You make many good observations. I hope you don't mind me trimming
down to the key points:

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.

You done fine.


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.

We define the terms differently.

YOUR CRITERIA start with the event itself, and assess it's degree of
unusualness. This approach as a fundamental difficulty being precise.
That difficulty arises from

1) the difficulty of quantifying unusualness and

2) the necessary arbitrariness involved in converting a continuous
variable (unusualness) into a binary variable ( + or - a wonder ).

I OBSERVE
1. These definitions assure that "magic" and "miracle" are the same -
except for the arbitrary definition that God does one and people do
the other. The fact of their sameness is demonstrated by the fact the
definitions are invariant to the term (or extended definition of)
"wonder." IOWs, put the facts of a magic event into a miraculous
event, and the event is still a miracle. And vice versa. According to
this definition, the one and only criteria that distinguishes magic
and miracle is who does them.

Fine. I acknowledge it is possible to DEFINE magic and miracle as
different. We knew that from the start.

2. These definitions seem to me to miss the point of magic and
miracle, as commonly understood. That commonly understood point is not
that the event was unusual, but that there is a QUALITATIVE difference
between magic/miracle and other events. People in the NT asked Jesus
to show "signs" - to do things that couldn't happen in the normal
course of events. So that when Jesus did those things, they were
evidence of His special power. The point of the question is not that a
really really unusual event happened. The point is that Jesus had a
power QUALITATIVELY different from the powers and abilities of mortal
men. Again, your definition fails to capture this idea.


MY CRITERIA were:
Miracle/magic ("a wonder") happens when an event is brought about in
some way other than natural cause-and-effect.

"Brought about" is apparently unclear. Make it "caused." The clarified
criteria are then:

Miracle/magic ("a wonder") happens when an event is caused in some way
other than natural cause-and-effect.

This, it seems to me, entirely captures the commonly understood point
that miracles/ magic are brought about (_caused_) by some force or
power that is qualitatively different from the forces/ powers that
otherwise cause events.

[Other elements of Dirk's insightful demonstration are incorporated
here by reference.]

QED


Dirk Hartog
---------------------
This is the view I have held up to now, though I can modify it if you
disagree; only please give me your reasons if you do. I know I should
bow to your authority, but on an important question like this I would
rather yield to a reasoned argument than to authority alone.
[Pliny the Younger, Letters, 1.20 ]
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Evidence for Christianity?
    ... And you imagine "inexplicable by the laws of ... Please identify the criteria you use to distinguish between ... or method, then yes, the NT is evidence for that in the life of Jesus. ... that an impossible miracle happened, as opposed to, say, some ...
    (uk.religion.christian)
  • "Magic" versus "miracle" -- was Re: Evidence for Christianity?
    ... magic and miracle are unreal. ... Miracle does, sort of, in that we have even less access ... would still say things like "such-and-such happened because God ... pretend to reason about who caused a miracle and who caused a magic. ...
    (uk.religion.christian)
  • Re: Sorting / Grouping and sorting in the stored procedure
    ... Up to this point I have allowed Access to sort the returned record set ... upon Sorting and Grouping criteria. ... My questions is if the retuned record set is presorted, does this help, ... When you use "Sorting and Grouping" feature, ...
    (microsoft.public.access.adp.sqlserver)
  • Re: Sorting Records
    ... You can sort the records in the form by setting its OrderBy property, ... If a user enters data in the Number field I would like to sort by number, however, if the user enter criteria in the lock field I would like the records sorted by the lock field. ...
    (microsoft.public.access.formscoding)
  • Re: Sent Items show in search but not in Sent folder
    ... filters messages with the criteria selected. ... I use Groups to help sort my messages. ... I use this arrangement for reading the Entourage newsgroup messages. ... Group items by: Subject ...
    (microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage)