Demolishing Triablogue: Miracles and Induction

Steve Hays points out flaws in induction his discussion of miracles, and I answer him point by point.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Posted by steve at 1:59 PM

Miracles, induction, and retrodiction

According to the principle of induction, we can retroengineer the past from the present. There's a chain of events leading up to the present. Antecedent states produce subsequent states.

The same causes produce the same effects.

Since that's repeatable, if we're familiar with the process, we can retrace an effect back through intervening stages to the originating cause.

For instance, when I see an adult human, I know how he got to that point. I can run it backwards from adulthood through adolescence, childhood, gestation, and conception.

All things being equal, that's a generally reliable inference.

Meaning those who affirm miracles must show that their hypothesis to explain the data is better than whatever naturalistic hypothesis is being used to counter the miracle-explanation.  You can argue that during your mission to Uganda, you were dead from disease for the three days that nobody could find you, and that God resurrected you in the same body, but you will have to show that your theory to explain the data is more convincing than the naturalistic theories that either you are lying, deluded, just kidding, or you weren't truly dead.

However, miracles pose an exception to induction. A classic miracle (in contrast to a coincidence miracle) is causally discontinuous with the past. A miracle isn't uncaused, but it's not the result of a causal chain. Rather, a miracle results from the introduction an anomalous cause outside the ordinary chain of events.

I deny the coherence and legitimacy of such talk.  You might as well say God lives "outside of time".  Utter nonsense. When you propose a break with the "ordinary chain of events", you carry the burden to show that your theory to explain the data is better than the naturalistic theories proposed to counter your own theory.  When you can demonstrate any such place as "outside the ordinary chain of events", let me know.

It represents a break in the causal continuum. The continuum resumes after the break, taking the miracle as a new starting-point.

For instance, suppose a person suffers from a naturally irreversible degenerative condition. Suppose he undergoes miraculous healing. That outcome can't be retrodicted from his prior condition.

In the case of miracles, induction hits a wall. When the subsequent course of events is the result of a miracle, inductive inference can't go further back than the miracle.

If what happened was a miracle, then yes.  But this sophistry does not translate into practical life.  If you claim to have been recently healed miraculously of permanent blindness since birth, the limits of induction are not going to slow me down in the least from attempting to authenticate all of your relevant medical and witness claims, should I decide to focus my investigatory curiosity on such a thing.

It can't reconstruct the past before the miracle occurred, because the post-miraculous state is not a product of the pre-miraculous state. Induction can only take you from the present to as far back in time as the precipitating miracle. It can't jump over that to the other side, because the chain of events prior to the miracle is a dead-end. The prior chain of events terminated with the miracle, which represents a new beginning.

This raises a potential problem regarding past-oriented sciences (e.g. cosmology, historical geology, paleontology, evolution). If miracles occur in the past, are they even detectable?

What's the scope of any particular miracle to reset the status quo? That limits our ability to reconstruct the past.

This thought experiment is totally worthless, because the only way you can successfully invoke the fatal limits of induction is by assuming what happened was indeed a miracle, in which case, yes, induction would not suffice to argue against it.  So I'll give Hays the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he intended only theists and other miracle-watchers to take him seriously.

What Hays needs to do is provide argument in favor of the one miracle he believes is the most compelling.