Timeline for What should a rational person accept as a miracle?
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16 events
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| Dec 16, 2013 at 19:30 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @Michael - Interpolation is much safer than extrapolation. I don't think we had as keen a sense of what is interpolation and what is not before relativity and QM. It should have been obvious: scale can matter when you're taking limits of behavior. So if you go off-scale by many orders of magnitude, you may find that your form of the laws were an approximation that no longer works. But I grant that miracle is not the only possible interpretation. | |
| Dec 16, 2013 at 19:29 | history | edited | Rex Kerr | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 16, 2013 at 19:10 | comment | added | Michael | @RexKerr, special relativity is in direct and fatal contradiction with Newtonian astronomy: if one would accept Newtonian mechanics at Solar System scale, where its domain lies, and add just 1 more assertion "all signal propagate at speeds not exceeding the speed of light", then one would inevitable conclude that Earth would fall onto Sun within relatively short time. Here's why. | |
| Dec 16, 2013 at 19:06 | comment | added | Michael | One more thing: if one would take your definition of miracle one would be drawn to conclusion that scientists commit No True Scotsman when facing such miracles by redefining what "well-established theory" is. | |
| Dec 16, 2013 at 19:05 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @Michael - Observations explained by special and general relativity violate the "incredibly robust" premise. Although Newtonian mechanics did work very well in some regimes, one has to keep in mind that very different regimes may operate according to different rules (or the same rules may not reduce via the same approximations). There are usually areas where theories that are very robust elsewhere have not been tested much. It's entirely sensible to assume things will be the same, but not to conclude that there's a miracle if they are not. | |
| Dec 16, 2013 at 19:01 | comment | added | Michael | Rex, this is a very logical answer, which I mostly agree with. The only problem is that Physics has an extensive history of the "miracles" that have all 3 properties you described. Physicists of early 20th century faced several such observations that led to Special and General Relativity that contradicted well-established Newtonian Mechanics and Quantum physics that contradicted pretty much everything we thought we new about Universe. And yet you wouldn't claim that those experiments were "miracles" at the time they were observed, would you? | |
| Aug 4, 2011 at 12:27 | history | edited | Rex Kerr | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Aug 4, 2011 at 7:32 | comment | added | user179700 | ‘Law’ seems closer to me, although I realize this could cause more confusion and controversy as most people mistakenly believe laws to be higher than theories. Would something along the lines of, “contradicts well-established and objective observations of reality.” If not, or if it doesn’t inspire you, I think you’ve made your view clear and perhaps some wordsmith will be eloquent. I think I’ve hammered this into the ground. Thank you for your patience and insight. Feel free to move this to chat if you want to remove the clutter. | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 23:04 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @user179700 - Feel free to suggest something weaker that is still rationally justified. Maybe I'll agree and change the answer. I don't know how to justify anything weaker. (If I write it this way, I just say "Science works." That is, I defer to the philosophy of science to explain why it's justified.) | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 22:50 | comment | added | user179700 | Thanks for the clearification. I still think that theory is a higher standard then needed. My personal quibble is with it coupled with being a requirement. The bar seems a bit too high for me to find myself agreeing. Good luck. | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 22:37 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @user179700 - The second point was that whether a theory is implicit or explicit, it has to have very good support or else the "we have a lousy theory" explanation is more parsimonious than the "we have a miracle" explanation. In particular, although we had much experience with people dying and not coming back a thousand years ago, we didn't really know what made people alive vs. dead on a detailed level, so we did not have good justification for a "dead must stay dead" theory (implicit or explicit). | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 22:33 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @user179700 - I think I mixed two claims and thus was unclear. Here is the point about implicit theories: I was using the notion of "implicit theory" from psychology at least loosely, but the point is that such theories are based upon observation and evidence and testing and can be every bit as well grounded as a scientific study. For example, you do not need to write down a "Law of Wall Solidity" and test it by walking into walls, because as a baby you conduct all the relevant experiments. You can use the standard framework for evaluating scientific theories for evaluating these. | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 21:58 | comment | added | user179700 | a theory in science generally has a well-defined meaning. I had never heard of implicit theory and Google seeems to attribute it to Psychology. Do you have a citation in epistomology or in the hard sciences? It seems problematic to equate 'well-established theory' to "stuff we accept' or somesuch. | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 19:20 | comment | added | Rex Kerr | @user179700 - That's an implicit theory. You need some very good reason to believe that something else should have happened. Before we understood what was required for someone to be alive, it would have been hard to argue that someone coming back from the dead was a miracle. We could have argued it was rare, yes, but rare phenomena happen now and then by coincidence. | |
| Aug 3, 2011 at 17:55 | comment | added | user179700 | I don't see the third as being necessary, though it seems as if it would add weight to an argument. For instance, I don’t know there’s a ‘Can’t talk to the dead theory’ or ‘Dead must stay dead theory’ though doing either of those could be miraculous. | |
| Aug 1, 2011 at 3:08 | history | answered | Rex Kerr | CC BY-SA 3.0 |